There were two areas in which Egyptian military capability was notably deficient. Although the upper class (which furnished the army with chariot commanders) boasted fine archers, the use of the bow was almost unknown to the middle and working classes. Further, the Egyptians were charioteers, not horsemen as that term is usually understood. Their army needed cavalry and more archers; both these deficiencies were made up by enlisting mercenaries from Nubia whenever Egypt and Nubia were not at war.

To picture Egypt and, particularly, Nubia at the time this scroll was written, the reader must understand that North Africa has been drying up for thousands of years. Twenty thousand years ago, the Sahara was a damp plain dotted with shallow lakes, the home of great herds of hippopotamuses. Rock carvings in the pitiless desert west of the Red Sea show men and dogs hunting giraffes.

The term "Nubia," so often employed by the narrator, is itself interesting. It was only just coming into use in his day, and he may well have introduced it. If so, he presumably picked it up from his Phoenician friends and Latinized it. The original Phoenician probably meant "Land of the Nehasyu." This is the riverine tribe the narrator most often calls the Crocodile People.

The ancient Greeks called Nubia Aethiopia-"Land of Burnt Faces." Note that some ancient geographical terms such as Nubia, Aethiopia, Kush, Nysa, and Punt were very vague and meant different things in the mouths of different speakers. Nysa may sometimes have referred to the area around Lake Nyasa in Central Africa.