4 THE PRE-ISLAMIC ARABIAN ELEMENT 1. 1. iii
Nile. Of the Wadi Hamdmat route that runs east and west between
the Red Sea and the Thebaid Professor Elliot Smith says
:
From the records inscribed upon the rocks along this route we know
that there was some traffic along it in the times of the fifth dynasty : but
it is such an obvious means of access from the Nile to the sea that we can be sure it must have been a trade route even in predynastic times, or at any rate a highway where the Arab and the Proto-Egyptian met and inter- mingled. The widespread occurrence of marine shells, presumably from
the shores of the Red Sea, in the predynastic graves of Upper Egypt and Nubia is positive evidence of the reality of such intercourse^.
IV Some again have held that the conquering dynastic Egyptians who worshipped Horus were in fact Arabians who entered Africa by way of Massowa, and in the course of developing this theory Professor
Navile^ quotes the saying of Juba, recorded by Pliny, that the
Egyptians were of Arabian origin, and "as for the neighbours of the
Nile from Syene to Meroe, they are not Ethiopian nations but Arabs. Even the temple of the Sun, not far distant from Memphis, is said
to have been founded by the Arabs ^." Without going so far as this, one would allow that in early dynastic days Arabians did enter Egypt
in large numbers by way of the Eritrean coast and settle there ; and
in that case far more of them are likely to have settled nearer home and south of the Egyptian frontier, in the Sudan.
V Some such movements are probably reflected in the ever recur-
rent tradition that the early dynasties of Egypt were of Ethiopian
origin. It is perhaps too often assumed that "Ethiopian" is neces-
sarily the equivalent of " negro." Certainly in the second millennium
B.C. south-west Arabia was beginning to colonize the highlands of
Abyssinia, and those cross-currents of migration had begun to flow which reached their height during the hegemony of Ma'in and Saba
(c. 1500-300 B.C.)*.
Throughout the whole of this period a large proportion of the
world's commerce passed by way of Abyssinia and the coast of the Red Sea to the Nile^, and the populations on either side of the straits
of Bab el Mandeb became more and more assimilated to one another^.
^ Elliot Smith, loc. cit. p. 88.
- Navile, Origin of Egyptian Civilization, Smithsonian Rep. 1907, pp. 549-564.
3 Pliny, Bk. vi, 34.
* See Sir H. Johnston mjourn. R. A. I. xlhi, 1913, p. 385; Winckler, in World's History, p. 249, etc.
^ See Schurtz in World's History, p. 433.
* Cp. Palgrave, C. and E. Arabia, 11, 240 ff. ; and Ludolphus: the latter says of the Ethiopians of Abyssinia, "They are not natives of the land but came out of
that part of Arabia which is called the Happy, which adjoins to the Red Sea"
{ap. Bent, p. 175).