For the same reasons the flax cultivated by the ancient Egyptians must have been an annual. Hitherto neither entire plants nor a great number of capsules have been found in the catacombs of a nature to furnish direct and incontestable proof. Unger[613] alone was able to examine a capsule taken from the bricks of a monument, which Leipsius attributes to the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ, and he found it more like those of _L. usitatissimum_ than of _L. angustifolium_. Out of three seeds which Braun[614] saw in the Berlin Museum, mixed with those of other cultivated plants, one appeared to him to belong to _L. angustifolium_, and the other to _L. humile_; but it must be owned that a single seed without plant or capsule is not sufficient proof. Ancient Egyptian paintings show that flax was not reaped with a sickle like cereals, but uprooted.[615] In Egypt flax is cultivated in the winter, for the summer drought would no more allow of a perennial variety, than the cold of northern countries, where it is sown in spring, to be gathered in summer. It may be added that the annual flax of the variety called _humile_ is the only one now grown in Abyssinia, and also the only one that modern collectors have seen in Egypt.[616]
Heer suggests that the ancient Egyptians may have cultivated _L. angustifolium_ of the Mediterranean region, sowing it as an annual plant.[617] I am more inclined to believe that they had previously imported or received their flax from Egypt, already in the form of the species _L. humile_. Their modes of cultivation, and the figures on the monuments, show that their knowledge of the plant dated from a remote antiquity. Now it is known that the Egyptians of the first dynasties before Cheops belonged to a proto-semitic race, which came into Egypt by the isthmus of Suez.[618] Flax has been found in a tomb of ancient Chaldea prior to the existence of Babylon,[619] and its use in this region is lost in the remotest antiquity. Thus the first Egyptians of white race may have imported the cultivated flax, or their immediate successors may have received it from Asia before the epoch of the Phœnician colonies in Greece, and before direct communication was established between Greece and Egypt under the fourteenth dynasty.[620]