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the highly arched nose, and eyelids and lips are full. The bodies are con­ventionally thick-set, the arms and legs heavily muscled. The artists of Babylon and Nineveh were anthropologists at heart, for they chose a truth­ful rather than an imaginary ideal. Their kings and soldiers and slaves could step down from the walls and mingle with the crowds today.

Although Mesopotamia was one of the great centers of Old World civilization, and although its emissaries travelled hundreds of miles, and its cultural influences were so far-reaching that we may feel them even today, we must not attempt to link it directly with the Neolithic invasions which entered Europe. The farmers who sought rich fields and grassy meadows to the west of the Euxine and the Bosporus were not Sumerians or Babylonians, but peoples who had started their wanderings before the development of a metal age civilization, and who were affected only in­directly by cultural emanations from its center. Nevertheless, this somato- logical survey of early Iran and Iraq is of value in the larger problem of the white race, for it enables us to define clearly the physical charac­teristics of the Mediterranean types of man which were responsible for what may have been the world’s earliest civilization, and of the surround­ing regions from which it was fed, just as one could tell the physical types of France from a study of Paris or of Europe from a study of New York.

2. Civilized men in egypt

Certainly the most satisfactory area in the whole world for the racial study of a people of antiquity is the valley of the Nile. Over four thousand Egyptian skeletons, covering a period of some seven thousand years, have received anthropometric attention. One Egyptian series, consisting of nine hundred males, is the most extensive group of crania of a single sex and from a single place ever assembled. It is possible, therefore, to study varia­bility and change in this isolated valley with delicate precision, for in one district, the region of Upper Egypt about Abydos and Thebes, the cranial material is more abundant than that of any age from any other region of the same size in the world.¹¹

Furthermore, from the beginning of dynastic times until the arrival of Islam, Egyptian painters and sculptors recorded faithfully, often in colors, the physical appearance of their living countrymen, as well as of many different kinds of foreigners. At the same time, the climate of the Nile Valley, and the skill of embalmers, have preserved intact the hair, skin, and dried muscles of both natural and artificial mummies, from the pre­dynastic period onward. With this abundance of evidence, we should be nearly as familiar with the racial characteristics of the ancient Egyptians as with those of the people of our own day.

11 Morant, g. M., Biometrika, 1925, p. 4.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

Geographically, Egypt is not unified. In the first place, the Delta, which resembles early Sumeria in its climatic conditions, is a marshy series of water ways, continuous with the coasts of Palestine and Lybia, and easily attainable from both directions, as well as from the sea. It, and to a lesser extent, Lower Egypt, as well, forms an easy route of passage from Asia to North Africa without touching most of Egypt proper. It is possible, there­fore, that even in dynastic times movements of racial importance passed from western Asia to North Africa over this coastal route, without affecting the population of Egypt in any notable way. Upper Egypt, on the other hand, is a narrow valley hemmed in by cliffs on either side. Beyond these cliffs lie plateaux, which during the pluvial periods were well-watered and covered with grass and game. There was only one gateway to Egypt from the south—down the Nile—and during the dynastic period the Egyptian kings kept garrisons on their southern boundaries to prevent immigration from this quarter.

The cyclonic rain belt which moved northward from the Saharan and Arabian deserts in the general post-glacial readjustment of climate also took a westward direction.¹² For this reason, a climate favorable for hunt­ers and gatherers persisted longer in Egypt than in Mesopotamia. At the same time, this movement may have had much to do with the migra­tion of peoples crossing North Africa from east to west, keeping ahead of the zone of serious desiccation. Morocco was the last of North Africa to dry, and in parts of that country cedar forests and grassy uplands still remain.

The archaeological sequence in Egypt, which has been well worked out, begins with the lowest Palaeolithic and continues without a gap until his­torical times. During the pluvial and early post-pluvial periods, however, the swampy tree-fringed valley was not the most favorable hunting ground, and Palaeolithic and Mesolithic food-gatherers ranged by preference over the open grasslands to either side, making only occasional visits to the river banks. As the plateaux grew increasingly arid, many of the hunters who did not migrate westward moved into the still moist valley, toward which the game upon which they lived must have been converging. One such concentration of food-gatherers is seen in the Sebilian culture of Up­per Egypt.¹³ The skeletal remains from this culture, which have not yet been published, are said to anticipate in physical type the predynastic, placing a fine Mediterranean type in pre-Neolithic times.¹⁴

In another part of Upper Egypt, the earliest known of the sporadic agriculturalists, who at the same time or soon afterward, began to exploit

12 This summary of climatic changes in Egypt is based on Childe, V. G., New Light

on the Most Ancient East, pp. 49-51.

18 Childe, op. Cit.Y p. 35. 14 Leakey, l. S. B., Stone Age Africa, pp. 177-178.