“Sometimes, when a community is comparatively homogenous and comparatively undisturbed over a long period, such a system of belief can continue, of course with development, long after material culture has progressed far beyond the level of savagery. It may then begin to turn into something more ethical, more philosophical, even more scientific; but there will be an uninterrupted continuity between this and its savage beginnings. Something like this, it would seem, happened in Egypt. That also is unlike the history of medieval thought.”