684 RENAISSANCES

chronological horizon to 'the Predynastic Age' and our geographical
horizon to the Lower Nile Valley, we could have made our point no less
effectively by citing the contrast, in the archaeologist's historically mis-
leading inventory, between the preservative powers of a dry-as-dust
Sa'id and the destructive powers of a water-logged Delta; and, had we
clinched our argument by adducing this illustration as well, we might
have saved ourselves from what may prove to have been an hallucination
in our subsequent interpretation of Egyptiac history.

The premiss of this interpretation was an assumption that the emer-
gence of the Egyptiac Civilization could be equated, for practical pur-
poses, with the conquest of Lower Egypt by the Upper Egyptian
militarist empire-builder Narmer; and this assumption was based on the
fact that in our Modern Western archaeologists' Upper Egyptian
'natural museum' the earliest extant monuments of the apparatus of the
Egyptiac culture—and, in particular, the earliest specimens of its script
—are attributable to this epoch. The weak point in this chain of reason-
ing is its unspoken and uncriticized prior assumption that an array of
evidence derived almost exclusively from Upper Egypt can be treated
with assurance as if it were good evidence, not merely for the local his-
tory of Upper Egypt itself, but also for the oecumenical history of the
Egyptiac World as a whole. This prior assumption ignores the possibility
that a relatively mature Egyptiac culture which, in our Upper Egyptian
'natural museum', has left no evidence of its existence dating back
appreciably earlier than Narmer's day, may have had a previous history
—and this perhaps a long one—in a Lower Egyptian 'natural destructor*
of the debris of human activities.1 And this possibility opens up the
further one that the sudden appearance of, for example, an already
mature Egyptiac script2 in the Sa'id at the transition from 'the Pre-
dynastic Age' to Narmer's new era may be evidence, not- that the
Egyptiac culture suddenly came to birth in Narmer's day, but that a
more advanced form of the Egyptiac culture was suddenly introduced
into Upper Egypt from Lower Egypt as a consequence of Narmer's
sudden forcible political unification of the two lands.

The magnitude of the possible error to which we expose ourselves in
ignoring these considerations can be gauged by imagining, for the sake
of the argument, that the unknown historical relation between the Sa'id
and the Delta in the Egyptiac World may have been analogous to the
known historical relation, in the Andean World, between the Plateau
and the Coast.

In the history of an Andean World that consisted, like the Egyptiac
World, of two physiographically diverse cultural provinces,3 we happen
to know that the Andean culture originated in the coastal province and

1 See Wilson, J. A.: The Burden of Egypt (Chicago 1951, University Press), p. 16.

2 In the earliest specimens of the Egyptiac script that had been discovered by Modern
"Western archaeologists down to the time of writing, the characters were already being
used, not as 'pictograms' giving a visual representation of objects or ideas, but as
^phonemes', in which the sound of the spoken Egyptian word corresponding to the
original visual meaning of the character was associated with the character for the con-
veyance of this sound in other contexts. *At the very beginning of history, Egyptian
hieroglyphic writing appeared on stone and clay with this rebus-principle already
accepted* (Wilson, op. cit., p. 38). 3 See II. i. 3*2-3.