What long periods it must have required
for such a development every scholar in philology can imagine.
As regards medical science, we have the Berlin papyrus, which,
although of a later period, refers with careful specification to
a medical literature of the first dynasty.
As regards archaeology, the earliest known inscriptions point to
still earlier events and buildings, indicating a long sequence
in previous history.
As to all that pertains to the history of civilization, no man
of fair and open mind can go into the museums of Cairo or the
Louvre or the British Museum and look at the monuments of those
earlier dynasties without seeing in them the results of a
development in art, science, laws, customs, and language, which
must have required a vast period before the time of Mena. And
this conclusion is forced upon us all the more invincibly when
we consider the slow growth of ideas in the earlier stages of
civilization as compared with the later--a slowness of growth
which has kept the natives of many parts of the world in that
earliest civilization to this hour.
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