"The limits of the dominion of the Egyptian gods had been fixed as the outer fringes of the Nile valley long before the outside world was familiar to the Nile-dwellers; and merely commercial intercourse with a larger world had not been able to shake the tradition. Many a merchant had seen a stone fall in distant Babylon and in Thebes alike, but it had not occurred to him, or to any man in that far-off age, that the same natural force reigned in these widely separated countries."