27/31 The people who fought against Cambyses were not the race that marched into Egypt five thousand years before--the dynastic people whose portraits we see on the early monuments. In those fifty centuries the blood of Hyksos and Syrians and Ethiopians and Hittites, and who can say how many more races, must have mingled with that of the old Egyptians. But still the national life went on without a break; the old culture leavened the new peoples, and the immigrant strangers ended by becoming Egyptians. Looking back on it from our own time, it seems more like a geological period than the life-history of a single nation. |