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NOTES
                                                          
1. For the reality of barbarian lifestyles  (they wore beards, dressed in furs, couldn't
read, and drank like fiends), see: Edward Gibbon, The Decline & Fall of the Roman
Empire, Volume I, pp. 190-193.  Gibbon reports that the barbarians were illiterate,
had crude technology at best, wore simple furs, and that they were usually drunk;
Justine Davis Randers-Pehrson, Barbarians and Romans, University of Oklahoma
Press, Norman, Oklahoma, 1983, p.  39; and Tim Newark, The Barbarians:
Warriors & Wars of the Dark Ages, p. 7.  For the Roman impression (barbarians
were dirty, dressed in the tattered skins of mice, drank blood, ate raw food, slept on
their horses, and couldn't comprehend even the most infantile technology), see:
Michel Rouche, "The Early Middle Ages in the West," in Paul Veyne, ed., Arthur
Goldhammer, trans., A History of Private Life: From Pagan Rome to Byzantium,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1987, pp. 419, 421; Justine
Davis Randers-Pehrson, Barbarians and Romans,  p. 41; and Philip Dixon, The
Making of the Past: Barbarian Europe, Phaidon Press, Ltd., Oxford, England, 1976,
p. 13.
2. For the latest archaeological evidence on Egyptian life shortly before Menes
united Egypt, see Michael Hoffman, "Before The Pharaohs: How Egypt Became
The World's First Nation-State," The Sciences, January/February, 1988, pp. 40-47.
3. For a first-hand sense of the opulence of early Egyptian life, see the Egyptian
collection of the British Museum.  See also The Age of the God Kings, Time-Life
Books, Alexandria, Virginia, 1987, p. 67, and the diagram of a nobleman's home in
B.W.B. Garthoff, "Egyptian Art and Architecture," Academic American
Encyclopedia, Vol. 7, p. 86.  The living room of a wealthy Egyptian was an
impressively high-ceilinged central hall.
4. As early as the fourth millennium B.C., for example, pottery was already
mass-produced in a large section of town set aside for this sort of organized
enterprise.  The industrialists who spearheaded the process shipped the finished
goods to distant markets on paddle and sail-driven riverboats, and used their profits
to acquire political power.  In the days before the pharaohs, some of these early
titans of industry probably became local kings.  It is even possible that the first
pharaoh came from among their ranks. (Michael Hoffman, "Before The Pharaohs:
How Egypt Became The World's First Nation-State," pp. 44-47.)
5. The Hyksos came up with a host of military innovations--among them chain
armor, the battle-axe, the composite bow and the chariot.  (The editors of Time-Life
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