privileges. It cannot afford, in very many directions, to go on without their active coöperation. Indeed, the state must come to demand, in the not remote future, that women shall lay aside their prejudices and their restricted interests to share in making it correspond to the needs of all who come under its control. The objections to these broader activities on the part of women are based almost wholly on tradition. They do not grow out of the actual needs of men and women at the present day. When war was the universal occupation of socially superior men the objection that women are unfitted for the soldier's life was a valid one. Such an objection today has no meaning whatever for the men who recognize the larger social demand, that the state shall become the expression of the will of all the people. The claim that the exercise of the suffrage, and the advising as to what is best for the state as the organ of the people's needs, will unfit women for motherhood and home-making has been amply proved to be without any just grounds for reiteration, in the experiences of such communities as have already given women these privileges. We may be sure that in time these and all other objections will be seen to have no validity, and women will take their places in helping forward the world's larger social interests, with happy results to the family, and with a fitting enlargement of the personal and social opportunities of womankind.

BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Woman's Share in Primitive Culture, by Otis T. Mason. The Evolution of Woman: An Inquiry into the Dogma of her Inferority to Man, by Eliza Burt Gamble. The Evolution of Sex, by Patrick Geddes and J. A. Thomson. Sex and Society: Studies in the Social Psychology of Sex, by William I. Thomas. Sex Equality: A Solution of the Woman Problem, by Emmet Densmore. Man and Woman: A Study of Human Secondary Sexual Characters, by Havelock Ellis, in Contemporary Science Series. Primitive Civilizations; or, Outlines of the History of Ownership in Archaic Communities, by E. J. Simcox. Woman through the Ages, by Emil Reich. Woman-Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome, and among the Early Christians, by James Donaldson. Women under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent Life between A. D 500 and A. D. 1500, by Lina Eckenstein. The Emancipation of Women, by Adele Crepaz. The Rights of Women, by M. Ostrogorski. Women in Industry, by Edith Abbott. The Status of Women under the English Law, by A. B. W. and M. W. Chapman.

Professor of Egyptology and Oriental History, and Director Haskell Oriental Museum, University of Chicago.

VER on the Island of Elephantine the natives speak

on

Their language is the ancient Nubian, a tongue related to dialects of inner Africa extending as far as Kordofan. In the days of the Pharaohs it was the language of the cataract region and it still survives there. Strategically considered the Nubian Nile is the road into the Sudan. With its thousand miles of cataract-bound country it has been a historical link uniting inner Africa with the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean region. In spite of the difficult cataracts, it has been for over five thousand years the commercial highway along which the gold and ivory, the ebony, panther skins and ostrich feathers of the Sudan passed northward to Thebes, Memphis and the Mediterranean. We recall that from before 3000 B. C. it was the path of the Pharaoh's frontiersmen as they pushed up the Nile in the slow process of absorbing the cataract region. We are now to follow Harkhuf who brought back the pygmy, and Mekhu, who was slain by the barbarians, and Sebni his son,

*Copyright, 1910, by James Henry Breasted.

Earlier articles of this series were: I. "The Nile Dwellers and Their Land," September; II. "Alexandria and Cairo," October; III. "The Pyramids and Sphinx-Memphis and Heliopolis," November; IV. "The Voyage of the Nile-Abydos and Denderah," December; V. "Thebes: Karnak and Luxor," January; VI. "Temples and Tombs of Western Thebes," February; VII. "Esneh, El Kab and Edfu," March; VIII. "The First Cataract: Aswan and Philae," April.

who rescued his father's body. We are to see how the great river became the artery along which pulsed the influence of Egyptian civilization till it penetrated to the Fourth Cataract and beyond. We shall follow the march of the Pharaoh's army as it carried his power southward and made the country an Egyptian province as far as the foot of the Fourth Cataract. We shall see how the country took on a veneer of Egyptian civilization, as orderly towns administered as in Egypt became centers of traffic from the south. Those towns though now vanished, are still marked by stately temples of the Pharaohs, rising with surprising frequency along the shores of the river. We shall find there, too, the strange hybrid monuments of the post-Egyptian Nubians. For by the middle of the eighth century B. C. the decline of the Pharaohs was such that Nubia established itself as an independent kingdom, and even for a brief period absorbed Egypt and ruled the land of its ancient suzerain. These are the Ethiopian Pharaohs against whom the prophet Isaiah thundered in the streets of Jerusalem, and two of their names are mentioned in the Old Testament. They had their capital at Napata, called Noph in the Old Testament, at the foot of the Fourth Cataract. Driven from Egypt by the invading Assyrians, the Nubians finally retired to this capital, and later even farther south to their final residence at Meroe. Separated by vast distance and almost impenetrable deserts from the north, Meroe now became the seat of that remote and mysterious Ethiopian kingdom, known to the Greeks and Romans as the source of civilization on the Nile, a reputation which it maintained until two generations ago. As a matter of fact the Egyptian veneer slowly wore off as the country was more and more isolated from the civilization of the north, and it was thus thrown back upon the barbarism of inner Africa. It was a treasury official of this distant kingdom "a eunuch of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians," who was converted by the apostle Philip in the New Testament story (Acts viii, 25-40). For some centuries after the separa

tion of Egypt these "Ethiopians," or as we now call them Nubians, continued to use Egyptian writing and language in state documents and on their monuments. By the third century B. C., however, they had developed a system of writing of their own; but in Christian times they began to use Greek letters for writing Nubian. Recently fragments of the New Testament in ancient Nubian written thus in Greek letters have been discovered, and on the basis of these materials the decipherment of the still undeciphered ancient Nubian is proceeding.

From the middle of the sixth century A. D., beginning at Philae, Nubia was rapidly Christianized, and the process continued till it included the kingdom of Aloa, a fragment of old Meroitic Nubia, with its capital at Soba on the Blue Nile, which survived far down into the Middle Ages. As Abyssinia at the sources of the Blue Nile had already long been Christianized from Arabia, there was an unin terrupted series of Christian powers from Abyssinia and the source of the Blue Nile northward to the Mediter

It was the southermost reach of Christianity in early Christian history. It was by this means that Abyssinia inherited the title "Ethiopia," to which it has no proper claim; and it was in this age that Abyssinia first emerged into history, in spite of the vast antiquity which it boasts, boasts, even claiming to reach back to the patriarchs of the Old Testament. After its introduction into Egypt Mohammedanism pushed up the Nile and rapidly displaced Christianity throughout the south except in Abyssinia. Not a Christian was finally left on the Nubian Nile, and the churches fell into ruin, and the people into barbarism, till they were again made tributary to Egypt a century ago by Mohammed Ali, viceroy of Egypt. How they were again detached from the north and drawn into the maelstrom of religious fanatics under Mohammedan leaders in inner Africa a generation ago doubtless all are familiar.

While the north wind struggles with the current of the

lower cataract to carry us slowly past the palms of Elephantine, our dahabiyeh enters the wilderness of granite rocks and hills, as we begin the passage of the oldest frontier in the world. Those who wish may escape the tedious waiting at the great locks which lift our boat to the level of the lake above the dam, by spending the night at the hotel on Elephantine and rejoining the party at Shellal; but whoever does will lose one of the most interesting experiences of the Nile voyage, with which we would gladly tarry longer. As we issue from the uppermost of the four locks which have raised us sixty-five feet, we have before us the wide surface of the lake, dotted with granite islands, the peaks of former hills. The palms on these islands have almost all disappeared, but here and there, their fronded crowns just rise above the surface of the water like some strange and unknown aquatic plant. Otherwise the bare bleak rocks descend to the water without a trace of vegetation to relieve the desolate wilderness as far as the eye can discern the barren hills rolling to the horizon.

There is now no opposing current. The waters are quiet for sixty miles above the dam, and a day's sail of fifty or sixty miles is not uncommon. As the outlook up the lake opens southward the wide prospect is picturesque in the extreme. A few squalid villages displaced by the rising flood have found new lodgment on the bare rocks above. How they live is a mystery, as the scanty margin of soil which they formerly cultivated has now been submerged to a great depth. Headland after headland of granite rocks projects into the lake and between these open deep vistas of water extending far into the rocky desert. All the ancient remains have been covered or will be when the dam is raised. The government has appropriated funds and an archaeological survey of the cemeteries and temples affected by the lake is now being made. At intervals the colonnades of a ruined temple are discernible against the dark rocks. We leave the granite and the sandstone which we met above Edfu reappears. In the afternoon, if the wind hold, we