The Greatest Story in the World, Period 1 by Horace G. Hutchinson

I told you that one of the ways by which man, at different ages of / the world, has been described is to speak of him in the Hunting / stage, the Pastoral, and the Agricultural. Although these people / along the great rivers probably settled down into the agricultural / stage earlier than others, still, that did not prevent them from / keeping cattle and hunting wild creatures. The older the / inscriptions and records, the more we see of the hunting, so that we / may imagine, as we should expect, that the quieter business of / farming gradually came to occupy more of their lives as time went on, / and that the hunting occupied them less. The wild beasts would no / doubt get hunted farther and farther back from the country that man / had settled in. An interesting fact is that one of the very oldest / of all the Egyptian engravings portrays ostriches, showing that these / great birds were inhabitants of Egypt at that time, though they do / not appear in any later engravings and are, of course, not living in / any part of Egypt now. These ostriches are carved on the face of a / sandstone rock, standing as nature placed it, and not worked into any / building. It is near a place which in the old days was called / Silsilla, and it was nearly at the southern end of the Egypt of those / times. For that Egypt did not extend nearly as far {12} south as the / country which we call by that name now. It ended at the first / cataract, where is now the town called Assouan. In ancient times / this Assouan was called Syene. Farther south than this, the country / was no longer called Egypt, but Nubia, though some Egyptians / inhabited the region a little south of the cataract. Look at your / map and you will very likely see that region still written down as / the "Nubian Desert. " Look to the west of the line of the Nile and / you may read "Libyan Desert. " Look to the right, again, and there is / "Arabian Desert."

[Sidenote: The Nile]