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Fig.1: A Canal in the Delta. [From a photograph by Mr. W. M. F. Petrie.]
Chapter
I. The Explorer in Egypt
Chapter II. The Buried Cities of Ancient Egypt
Chapter
III. Portrait Painting in Ancient Egypt
Chapter IV. The Origin of Portrait Sculpture, and the History of the Ka
Chapter V. Egypt the Birthplace of Greek Decorative Art
Chapter VI. The Literature and Religion of Ancient Egypt
Chapter VII. The Hieroglyphic Writing of the Ancient Egyptians
Chapter VIII. Queen Hatasu, and Her Expedition to the Land of Punt
Chapter I: THE EXPLORER IN EGYPT. [p.3]
It
may be said of some very old places, as of some very old books, that
they are destined to be forever new. The nearer we approach them, the
more remote they seem; the more we study them, the more we have yet to
learn. Time augments rather than diminishes their everlasting novelty;
and to our descendants of a thousand years hence it may safely be
predicted that they will be even more fascinating than to ourselves.
This is true of many ancient lands, but of no place is it so true as of
Egypt. Our knowledge of how men lived and thought in the Valley of the
Nile live or six thousand years before the Christian era is ever on the
increase. It keeps pace with the march of discovery, and that march
extends every year over a wider area. Each season beholds the
exploration of new [p.4] sites, and each explorer has some new thing to
tell. What Mariette began thirty years ago, Maspero carried on and
developed; and it was to Maspero's wise liberality that the Egypt
Exploration Fund was indebted, in 1883, for liberty to pursue its work
in the Delta. In that year the society dispatched its first agent M.
Naville upon its first expedition; and since 1883 the French in Upper
Egypt, the Eng- lish in Lower Egypt, have labored simultaneously to
bring to light the buried wealth of the most ancient of nations. Thus
the work of discovery goes on apace. Old truths receive unexpected
corroboration; old histories aye judged by the light of new readings;
fresh wonders are disclosed wherever the spade of the digger strikes
new ground. The interest never flags the subject never palls upon us
the mine is never exhausted.
I
will go yet further, and say that this mine is practically
inexhaustible. Consider, for instance, the incredible number and riches
of the tombs of ancient Egypt, and the immense population of the Nile
Valley in the times of the Pharaohs. That immense population continued
during a period of between four and five thousand years to embalm and
secrete their dead, interring with them, according to the customs of
successive epochs, funerary statues, vases, weapons, amulets, inscribed
tablets, jewels, furniture, food, stuffs; articles of apparel, such as
sandals, combs, hair-pins, and even wigs; implements, and written
documents on papyrus, leather, and linen. Conceive, then, what must be
the number of those sepulchres, of those mummies, of those buried
treasures! The cemeteries of Thebes and Memphis and Abydos have
enriched all the museums of Europe, and are not yet worked out. The
unopened mounds of Middle and Lower Egypt, and the unexplored valleys
of the Libyan range, undoubtedly conceal tens of thousands of tombs
which yet await the scientific, or unscientific, plunderer. [p.5]
The
late Dr. Birch a cautious man, and the last man in the world to
exaggerate estimated the number of corpses embalmed during two thousand
seven hundred years at no less than 420,000,000. But recent discoveries
(1) compel us to assign 4700 instead of 2700 years for the observance
of this rite ; which, calculated after the same rate, brings us to a
gigantic total of 731,000,000 of mummies. The majority of these were,
of course, mere slaves and peasants, rudely embalmed and buried in
common graves ; but even so, we may be very certain that the time can
never come when quarried rock and drifted sand shall have yield- ed all
the noble and wealthy dead, and all their riches. The Greek, the Roman,
the mediaeval Arab, the modern Arab, the Copt, the Turk, and the
European archaeologist have ravaged the soil, but the harvest is still
un- diminished; and although "mummy was sold for balsam" in Sir Thomas
Browne's day, and has been exported for manure in our own,(2) there are
probably at this moment more ancient Egyptians under the soil of Egypt
than there are living men and women above it.
It
has been aptly said that all Egypt is but the facade of an immense
sepulchre. This is literally true; for the terraced cliffs that hem in
the Nile to east and- west, and the rocky bed of the desert beneath our
feet, are everywhere honey-combed with tombs. But this is not all. The
very towns in which those vanished generations lived their busy lives,
the houses in which they dwelt, the temples in which they worshipped,
are as much entombed as their former [p.6] inhabitants. What the
ancient Egyptians did for their dead, Time has done for their cities.
All who run and read have heard of the mounds of Memphis, of Bubastis,
of Tanis, and of other famous capitals ; but few have, perhaps, any
very distinct idea of how these mounds came to be formed, or even of
what they are like. To what shall I compare them? I can think of
nothing which even distantly resembles them unless it be an ant-hill.
These giant ant-hills are scattered all over the face of the country,
and thickest of all in the Delta. They are the first objects that
excite the traveller's curiosity when he turns his back upon Alexandria
and his face towards Cairo. He looks out of the window of the railway
carriage, and yonder, a mile or so off in the midst of the
cotton-fields, he sees a huge, irregular brown tumulus, some fifty or
sixty feet in height, perfectly bare of vegetation, which looks as if
it might cover fifteen or twenty acres of ground. This strange
apparition is no sooner left behind than two or three more, some
smaller, some larger, come into sight; and so on all the way to Cairo.
At first he can scarcely believe that each contains the dead bones of
an ancient town. When he comes to travel farther and know the country
better, he discovers that these mounds are to be reckoned not by scores
but by hundreds. So numerous are they that many a district of the
Delta, if modelled in relief, might be taken for a raised map of some
volcanic centre, such as the chain of the Puy de Dome, in Auvergne.
Some
mounds are of great extent. The mounds of Tanis, for instance, cover no
less than forty acres; but then Tanis (better known, perhaps, by its
scriptural name, Zoan) was a very important city, and more than once
was the chosen capital of the empire. Others are so small that they can
scarcely represent anything but hamlets or fortified posts.
But
why, it may be asked, have these places, instead of fall ing into
heaps of ruin, become converted into mounds ? For the simple reason
that the material of which they were constructed was mere earth, and so
to earth they have returned. Like the Arab fellah of the present day,
the Egyptian of [p.7] five or six thousand years ago built his house of
mud bricks mixed with a little chopped straw, and dried in the sun. The
houses of the rich built of the same material were plastered and
stuccoed, the walls and ceilings being decorated with elaborate
polychrome designs, and the exterior relieved by light wooden
colonnades and balconies. The huts of the poor were much the same as
they are now mere beehives of brown clay, which crumble slowly away in
dry weather, and melt if it rains. Easily built and easily replaced,
they were constantly falling out of repair, being levelled to the
ground, trodden down, and rebuilt. Thus, each new house rose upon the
ruins of the old one; and every time the process was repeated, a higher
elevation was obtained for the foundation. In a country subject to
annual inundation this in itself was an important advantage; and so, in
the course of ages, what was probably a mere rising ground when first
the town was founded, became a lofty hill, visible for miles across the
plain.
Rightly to understand what I will venture to call
the geological strata of an Egyptian mound, it is, however, necessary
to have some idea of the processes of its growth and decay. These
processes were everywhere the same ; and if I attempt to sketch the
history of a typical site, it must at the same time be remembered that
my description represents no one mound in particular, but that it
applies, in a general sense, to all.
We will suppose our
typical mound to be situate in the Delta possibly in the old Land of
Goshen and we will in imagination go back to that distant time when as
yet the site was a mere barren sand-hill rising some twenty feet above
the level of the soil. These sand -hillocks are the last visible
vestiges of the old ocean-bed which underlies the whole of the Delta,
beginning at Kalyub, about ten miles below Cairo, and widening out like
a gigantic fan to Alexandria on the western coast, to Damietta on the
east. Now, the entire Delta is one vast deposit of mud annually brought
down by the inundation of the Nile, and in the course of [p.8] ages
this mud has driven the sea back inch by inch, foot by foot, for a
distance of more than one hundred miles. These sand-hills, which were
formerly under the sea, are called by the Arabs "Gezireh," or islands;
and they were naturally resorted to by the earliest nomadic tribes as
places of refuge for themselves and their flocks during the season of
the inundation. For the same reason, they became the sites of the first
settlements. Every ancient ruin, every mound, every modern town and
village in the Delta rests on a sandy eminence which once upon a time
was covered by the blue waters of the Mediterranean.
Here,
then, on an irregular platform of yellow sand surrounded by rich
pastures in winter and summer, and by turbid floods in autumn, a few
half-barbarous shepherds erect their primitive huts of wattle and daub;
and here they set up a rude altar, consisting probably of a single
upright stone brought with much labor and difficulty from the nearest
point of the eastern or western cliffs. By-and-by, they or their
descendants enclose that altar in a little mud-built shrine roofed over
with palm branches, and wall in a surrounding space of holy ground.
As
the centuries roll on, this first rude sanctuary gives place to a more
ambitious structure built of stone; and to this structure successive
generations add court-yards, porticos, colonnades, gate-ways, obelisks,
and statues in such number that by the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty
that is to say, about the time of the Oppression and the Exodus the
temple covers an area as large as St. Peter's at Rome. In the
meanwhile, the level of the inhabited parts of the town has been
steadily rising, and the crude -brick dwellings of the townsfolk
upraised like a coral-reef by the perpetual deposition of building -
rubbish have attained so great an elevation that the temple actually
stands in a deep hollow in the middle of the city, as if erected in the
crater of an extinct volcano. Such was the condition of the great
Temple of Bubastis when visited by Herodotus in the fifth century
before Christ; and such, to this day, is the condition of the
magnificent [p.9] Temple of Edfu, excavated twenty years ago by
Mariette. Here the mound has been cut away all round the building,
which stands on the paved level of the ancient city, forty feet below
the spot from which one first looks down upon it.
We have
thus far traced the history of our typical mound from its first rude
beginnings to the apex of its prosperity. As time goes on, however, and
the last native Dynasties expire, the trade of the community
languishes, the population dwindles, and the temple falls out of
repair. Then comes the prosperous period of Greek rule. Commerce and
letters revive, and the Ptolemies repair the temple, or perhaps rebuild
it. Next comes the Roman period, closely followed by the introduction
of Christianity; and by-and-by, when the national religion is
proscribed, a community of Coptic monks take possession of the grand
old building, converting its chambers into cells, and its portico into
a Christian church. The town now overflows into what was once the
sacred area. Mud huts are plastered between sculptured walls and
painted columns, and the ground begins to rise in and about the temple
as formerly it had risen outside the enclosure. Ere long the monks,
weary of living at the bottom of a pit, proceed to erect a new
monastery in one of the suburbs. The temple, therefore, is partly
pulled down for building material; and its desecrated ruins, which now
constitute the poorest and most crowded quarter of the city, become
gradually choked within and without. At last, even the roof is
converted into a maze of huts and stables swarming with human beings,
poultry, dogs, cattle, asses, pigeons, and vermin. Thus, in process of
time, the whole building becomes buried, and its very site is
forgotten. A few centuries later the town is devastated by some great
calamity of plague or war, and, after an existence of perhaps five
thousand years, is finally deserted. Then the crude- brick shells of
its latest habitations crumble away, and what was once a busy city
clustered round a splendid temple, ends by becoming a heap of desolate,
unsightly mounds strewn with innumerable potsherds. [p.10]
Such
are the constituent parts of my typical mound; and all the mounds of
Egypt are but variations upon this one original theme.
A
mound is a concrete piece of history; and, given the date of its first
and last chapters, nothing is easier than to predict what may be found
in it. Let us now excavate this typical mound, which began with
prehistoric Egypt, and ended, probably, about Anno Domini 600. The
explorer who should sink a vertical shaft through the heart of the mass
would cut through the relics of one hundred and sixty-eight generations
of men. It would not be one town which he would lay open; it would be
an immense succession of towns, stratum above stratum, with a
semi-barbarian settlement at the bottom and a Christian town at the
top. Amid the caked dust and rubbish of that Christian town he would
find little terracotta lamps of the old classical shape, stamped with
the palm or cross. And he would find Roman coins, Gnostic gems, and
potsherds scribbled over with Coptic, Greek, and demotic memoranda.
Here, too hidden away, perhaps, in an earthen jar, in the evil days of
religious persecution he might hope to find a copy of the earliest
Coptic translation of the Scriptures, or a priceless second century
codex of the New Testament.
Next below this, in strata of
the Greek period, he would find coins of the Ptolemies, Greek and
Egyptian inscriptions, Greek and Egyptian papyri, images of Greek and
Egyptian gods, and works of art in the Graeco-Egyptian and pure Greek
styles. Among other possible treasures might be discovered a copy of
Manetho's History of Egypt, or some of the lost masterpieces of the
Greek poets. Still working down- ward, he would come upon evidences of
various periods of foreign conquest, in the form of Persian and
Assyrian tablets; and below these, in strata of the Sa'ite time, would
be found exquisite works of art in bronze, sculpture, and personal
ornaments. Even when so low down as the Nineteenth Dynasty the grand
epoch of Rameses the Great we are not yet half through our mound. Under
the debris of that [p.11] sumptuous period we may find traces of the
Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings- those mysterious invaders of Mongolian type
who ruled Egypt for five hundred years. Below this again, we come upon
relics of the magnificent Twelfth Dynasty; and so on down to the time
of the Pyramid Kings, when we should find scarabs of Pepi, Unas,
Khafra, and Khufu, and perhaps even of Mena himself! Nor must the
temple buried in the heart of our mound be forgotten a temple of which,
perhaps, no two stones are left standing the one upon the other, but
which, nevertheless, is rich in broken statues of Kings and gods, and
in fragmentary records of victories and treaties, calendars of feasts,
and votive inscriptions.
This sketch, however, is a mere
outline of possibilities. No mound would be likely to yield all these
consecutive links of history. Some would be found in one mound, and
some in another. There are mounds and mounds. Excavation is a lottery,
and the prizes vary in number and value. Excepting, of course, the
second century codex and the copy of Manetho's History, almost every
object which I have named as likely to be discovered in my typical
mound has, however, actually been found in different places and at
different times. I have myself picked up terra - cotta lamps stamped
with early Christian emblems on the mounds of Memphis, inscribed
potsherds in Nubia, scraps of beautiful blue-glazed ware at Denderah,
mummy-bandages in the tombs of Thebes, and fragments of exquisite
alabaster cups and bowls in the shadow of the Great Sphinx at Ghizeh.
The mountain-slopes of Siut are strewn with cerement wrappings, and the
debris of mummies broken up for the sake of their funerary amulets by
the predatory Arabs; and there is not an ancient burial-ground, or
mound, or ruined temple in Egypt where the traveller who has patience
enough to grub under the soil beneath his feet may not find relics of
the dead and gone past.
The Valley of the Nile is, in
short, one great museum, of which the contents are perhaps one-third or
one-fourth part only above ground. The rest is all below the surface,
waiting [p.12] to be discovered. Whether you go up the great river, or
strike off to east or west across the desert, your horizon is always
bounded by mounds, or by ruins, or by ranges of mountains honey-combed
with tombs. If you but stamp your foot upon the sands, you know that it
probably awakens an echo in some dark vault or corridor, untrodden of
man for three or four thousand years. The mummied generations are
everywhere in the bowels of the mountains, in the faces of the cliffs,
in the rock-cut labyrinths which underlie the surface of the desert.
Exploration in such a land as this is a kind of chase. You think that
you have discovered a scent. You follow it; you lose it; you find it
again. You go through every phase of suspense, excitement, hope,
disappointment, exultation. The explorer has need of all his wits, and
he learns to use them with the keenness of a North American Indian.
Here
his quick eye notes a depression in the soil, and beneath the sandy
surface he detects something like the vague outline of a vast
chess-board. Do these indicate the foundations of a building? Farther
on the ground is strewn with splinters of limestone. Do they mark the
wreck of a tomb? Yonder the mountain-side is seamed with beds of
calcareous deposit, layer above layer; but at one point the cliff is
broken clear away, and this escarpment, whether natural or artificial,
is marked by a pile of fallen blocks and debris. Is this an accident of
nature, or does it mark the entrance to some hitherto undiscovered
sepulchre? Here, again, is a mysterious sign cut on the face of a
cliff, and here another, and an- other. What do these figures mean? Do
they point the way to some cavern full of treasure hidden away
thousands of years ago, and has the rock been " blazed," as the
Canadian settler blazes the forest-trees, that he may know how to
retrace his steps?
The slenderest clew may lead to good-fortune, and every inch of the way is full of vague suggestions. [p.13]
At
last, guided half by experience, half by instinct, the explorer decides
on a spot and calls up his workmen. They come perhaps a dozen
half-naked Arabs and some fifteen or twenty children the men armed with
short picks, the children with baskets in which to carry away the
rubbish. A hole is dug, the sand is cleared away, the stony bed of the
desert is reached, and there, just below the feet of the diggers, a
square opening is seen in the rock. There is a shout of rejoicing. More
men are called up, and the work begins in earnest. The shaft, however,
is choked with sand and mud. A little lower down, and it is filled with
a sort of concrete composed of chips of limestone, pebbles, sand, and
water, which is almost as compact as the native rock. The men get down
to a depth of six, twelve, fifteen, twenty feet. The baskets are now
loaded at the bottom and hauled up, generally spilling half their
contents by the way.
At last the sun goes down; twilight
comes up apace; and the bottom of the square black funnel seems as far
off as ever. Then the men trudge off to their homes, followed by the
tired children; and the explorer suddenly finds out that he has had
nothing to eat since seven o'clock in the morning, and that he has a
furious headache. He goes back, however, at the same hour next morning,
and for as many next mornings as need be till the end is reached. That
may not be for a week or a fortnight. Some tomb-pits are from a hundred
to a hundred and fifty feet deep ; and some pits lead to a
subterraneous passage another hundred or hundred and fifty feet long,
which has to be cleared before the sepulchral chamber can be entered.
When that long - looked-for moment comes at last, the explorer trusts
himself to the rope a flimsy twist of palm fibre, which becomes visibly
thinner from the strain and goes down as if into a mine.
What
will he find to reward him for time spent and patience wearied ? Who
shall say? Perhaps a great nobleman of the time of Thothmes III or of
Rameses the Great, lying in state, just as they left him there three
thousand years ago, enclosed in three coffins gorgeous with gold and
colors; his carven staff, his damascened battle-axe. his alabaster
vases, his libation vessels, and his "funeral baked meats," all [p.14]
untouched and awaiting his resurrection. For so lie the royal and noble
dead of those foregone days:
"Cased in cedar and wrapped in a sacred gloom;
Swathed in linen and precious unguents old ;
Painted with cinnabar and rich with gold.
Silent they rest in solemn salvatory,
Sealed from the moth and the owl and the flitter-mouse,
Each with his name on his breast."
Or
perhaps the explorer may find only a broken coffin, some fragments of
mummy-cloth, and a handful of bones. The Arabs or the Romans, the
Greeks or the Persians, or perhaps the ancient Egyptians themselves,
have been there before him, and all the buried treasures the arms, the
jewels, the amulets, the papyri are gone.
Yet, even so,
there may be an inscription carved on one of the walls or passages
which alone is worth all the cost of opening the tomb. It may possibly
be a new chapter of "The Book of the Dead"; or a genealogical table of
the family of the deceased, restoring some lost link in a royal
Dynasty; or perhaps a few lines scratched by an ancient Greek or Roman
tourist who happened to be there when the tomb was plundered in the
days of the Ptolemies or the Caesars. The traveller of olden time was
as fond of leaving his autograph on the monuments as any Cook's tourist
of to-day, and an ancient traveller's graffito may be of great
historical interest. The explorer who should find the autograph of
Herodotus or Plato would feel that he had made a discovery worth at
least as much as a papyrus, and more than a good many mummies.
(* This description (from page 12 to page 14) of an exploration in Upper
Egypt is a free adaptation from a passage in Professor Maspero's address,
delivered to the pupils of the Lycee Henri Quatre in August, 1887. [p.15] )
Such
an exploration as I have just described would belong to Upper Egypt,
where the ruins are all above ground, and where the explorer's object
is mainly to discover subterraneous tombs. In Lower Egypt, his work
assumes a quite different character. There he has to deal chiefly with
mounds huge rubbish-heaps from twenty to sixty or seventy feet in
height which extend over many acres, and mark the sites of deserted and
forgotten cities. The labor here is all above the surface; but it is
none the less difficult on that account, and none the less costly. The
work of the Egypt Exploration Fund, for instance, has hitherto been
restricted to the Delta, and its excavations have all been excavations
of mounds. I know, therefore, only too well what unmanageable and
expensive articles they are, and how heavily they tax the energies and
health of the explorer.
[p.16] A mound may be
situated some fifteen or twenty miles from the nearest railway station,
market-town, or post-office. It may be in a district so thinly
populated that the work-men have to be hired from a distance, and are
obliged to camp out in the open desert. Long after the annual
inundation has subsided south of Cairo a mound in the Delta may be
surrounded by unwholesome swamps, and be unapproachable except by the
higher order of amphibia, such as the explorer and his followers.
When
Mr. Petrie and Mr. Griffith went to Tell Nebesheh in the month of
February, 1886, they literally landed on an unknown island in the
Eastern Delta, far from the Nile, far from the Mediterranean, and
farther still from the Gulf of Suez. This statement, if unexplained,
might well be received with polite incredulity; but it is literally
true.
The winter floods were still out; the marshes were
lakes; the desert was mud; the roads were under water. Mr. Petrie,
coming from the westward by canal-boat, found himself put ashore, with
three miles of swamp (including a canal, which he waded) between
himself and his destination. Mr. Griffith, coming from the south-east,
encountered worse swamps, and a canal both wider and deeper, which he
was obliged to swim. To the southward, to the northward, it was all the
same water and sand, water and mud, water and marsh. On this dreary
island the two explorers lived and labored for some eight or ten weeks,
and it was not till the last month of their sojourn that the
surrounding country became really dry. Nor could they be said,
meanwhile, to have lived in the lap of luxury. They were lodged in a
guest-chamber attached to the house of the Sheikh of Xebesheh, who rode
into the room every evening on his donkey and paid them a visit of two
hours. This room was of large size, with an earthen floor strongly
impregnated with salt, and always damp. An earthen divan, under which
the rats burrowed in legions, ran round the walls; and the ceiling was
made of palm trunks, along which the said rats ran upside-down with
alarming activity from sunset till dawn. [p.17]
Like many
places in Egypt, modern as well as ancient, this mound rejoiced in a
variety of names, being known as Tell Istebesheh, alias Tell Bedawi,
alias Tell Farun. The first is the name of the modern village; the
second means "the mound of the Bedouin"; the third (perpetuating,
perhaps, an echo of old tradition) means "the mound of the Pharaoh."
"The mound of graves" would be a better name than any of these, for the
place proved to be a vast and very ancient cemetery, the level of which
had been raised from age to age by successive strata of interments.
Moreover, it was a large mound; so large that, besides the above-named
cemetery, it contained the remains of two ancient towns and the site of
a temple. The temple occupied the eastern extremity of the mound, and
was formerly surrounded by a sacred enclosure about six hundred feet
square.
Now this cemetery turned out to be a very curious
place, quite unlike the cemeteries of Memphis, Abydos, and Thebes. It
consisted of an immense number of small chambers, or isolated groups of
chambers, scattered irregularly over a sandy plain. These were built of
unbaked brick and roofed with barrel- vaulting. Some of the largest
were cased (or lined, if subterranean) with limestone. These
tomb-chambers dated from about the period of the Twentieth Dynasty. In
later times in the sixth century B.C., and after large blocks of about
a dozen chambers became frequent. These tombs had nearly all been
pillaged in early times, so that in a hundred only half a dozen bodies
were found ; and not only had the chambers fallen to decay, but they
had been levelled, and others built on them, so that three or four
successive occupations of the same ground might be traced. In some of
these vaults Mr. Petrie found quantities of bones indiscriminately
piled, not as if they had been thrown in by spoilers or tomb- breakers,
but as if they had been dug up en masse from some other site, and
reinterred without ceremony.
In one of the earlier tombs
no fewer than two hundred uninscribed funerary statuettes in
green-glazed pottery were found; and in another some thirty thousand
beads of glass, silver, and lapis lazuli. Bronze spear-heads, amulets,
[p.18]
scarabs, etc., were also turned up in considerable numbers.
Last, but in point of interest certainly not least, came the discovery
of two sets of masonic deposits under the corners of an unimportant
building in the cemetery. These consisted of miniature mortars,
corn-rubbers, and specimen plaques of materials used in the building,
such as glazed- ware, various colored marbles, jasper, and the like.
A
magnificent gray granite sarcophagus inscribed for a prince and priest
of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, and part of a limestone statue dedicated
to Harpakhrat, the "child Horus," whose legendary birthplace was in
these Delta marshlands, yielded the Egyptian name of this site, which
represented all that remained of the ancient city of Am; while among
other valuable monuments exhumed in the course of the excavations were
a black granite altar of the reign of Amenemhat II., third Pharaoh of
the great Twelfth Dynasty ; two thrones in red sandstone, belonging to
statues of royal personages of the same line ; a colossal seated statue
of Rameses II, in black granite ; and, most interesting of all, a
headless black granite sphinx, (3) upon which successive Pharaohs had
engraved their cartouches, or royal ovals, each in turn erasing the
names and titles of his predecessors. The description of this granite
palimpsest is best given in Mr. Petrie's own words, as written in his
weekly report at the time of the discovery:
"Originally
made under the Twelfth Dynasty, to judge by the style, it has erased
cartouches on the chest, between the paws, on each shoulder, on the
right flank (the left being broken away), and, sixthly, an erased
inscription around the base. Besides these, two legible inscriptions
remain namely, the cartouche of Seti II on the chest, and the
cartouches of Set-nekht [Rameses I] on the left shoulder."
If,
however, statues and inscriptions and funerary treasures are the reward
of the explorer, he pays amply for that reward in personal discomfort,
and sometimes even in actual privation. At Tell Defenneh, where Mr.
Petrie made his celebrated discovery of the ruins of "Pharaoh's House
at Tahpanties," [p.19] there were greater hardships to be borne than at
Tell Jetebesheh. Here the mounds were hemmed in between a barren desert
and a brackish lake; there was no food purchasable nearer than Zagazig,
some fifteen miles distant,and the water was barely drinkable. The
diggers lived on mere lentils, and in default of any shelter from the
burning sun of mid-day and the cold chills of midnight, they dug out
burrows for themselves in the sand-hillocks, and roofed them over with
tamarisk boughs. Mr. Petrie, of course, had his tent ; but in the
matter of food he was not much better off than his Arabs, having only
biscuits and tinned vegetables in his scanty larder.
[p.20]
When Mr. Petrie, Mr. Griffith, and Mr. Ernest Gardner were working all
three together at Naukratis they divided the work; one superintending
the excavation of the Temple of Aphrodite, another the excavation of
the ancient town, and the third the excavation of the cemetery. Then
arose a very important question which should undertake the cooking, and
which should do the washing-up? Now the work in the town was the
heaviest, so he who took the heaviest task could not also be the cook.
The cemetery, again, was a long way off, and the cook could not
therefore go to and fro between the camp and the cemetery. The temple,
though requiring great care and attention, was really the lightest
work; so it was finally agreed that the town should take life easily
when not on duty in the diggings, that the temple should do the
cooking, and that the cemetery should do the washing-up.
The
explorer, of all men, must "scorn delights and live laborious days."
His day must begin at sunrise, when his workmen are due. First he must
go round and assign to each worker his individual task, booking every
man's name as he comes in : this takes perhaps one hour and a half. He
then goes to his tent and has breakfast, and after breakfast he makes
his second round. He now helps, perhaps, to move a huge block or two,
stirs up the lazy digger, catches a pilferer in the act and dismisses
him, separates gossips, copies inscriptions, or takes photographs, with
the sun blazing overhead and the thermometer standing at 99 in the
shade. In the evening he writes reports, journals, and letters;
classifies and catalogues the objects discovered during the day; draws
plans, makes up his accounts, and so forth. At last he goes to bed,
dead tired, and is kept awake half the night by predatory rats, mice,
and other "small deer." At Tanis the mice were simply unbearable. Being
field-mice, they would not walk into traps like civilized mice, so the
explorer's only resource was to burn a night-light and shoot them. Now
to lie in bed and shoot mice with a revolver is surely a form of sport
exclusively reserved for the explorer in Egypt. Flies, of course, are
legion, and the white ant is a perpetual plague of [p.21] the first
water. Besides a way they have of transporting biscuits, dates, coffee,
sugar, and all sorts of portable provisions to their own private
residences, these horrid insects have an abnormal appetite for paper,
and consume reports, correspondence, and even hieroglyphic dictionaries
as eagerly as young ladies devour novels and romances.
Fig.5:
Tell Nehirkh. Two of the great trenches cut by Mr. Petrie are visible
in the illustration, one at the north end, the other at the south end
of the mound. On the highest part to the left is an Arab cemetery.
The
great field of archaeological exploration in Egypt is not by any means
an easy field to cultivate. The ground has gone to waste for hundreds,
perhaps thousands, of years, and become sheer wilderness; and he who
would hope to reap a harvest from it must clear it, dig it, and put in
a vast amount of that expensive patent manure called brains. Few, very
few, probably, of those who "sit at home at ease" have any clear notion
of the qualifications which go [p.22] to make an explorer of the right
sort still less of the kind of life he is wont to lead when engaged in
the work of exploration. They know that he goes to Egypt just as our
November fogs are coming on, and that he thereby escapes our miserable
English winter. They also know that he lives in a tent, and that he
spends his time in "discovering things." Now what can be more romantic
than life in a tent? And what can possibly be more charming than
"discovering things?" They may not be very clear as to the nature of
the "things" in question; but they, at all events, conceive of his life
as a series of delightful surprises, and of himself as the favorite of
fortune, having but to dip his hand into a sort of archaeological
lottery -box, and take out nothing but prizes. Of the judgment, the
patience, the skill which are needed in the mere selection of a site
for excavation ; of the vigilance which has to be exercised while the
excavations are in progress ; of the firm but good-humored authority
requisite for the control of a large body of Oriental laborers; of the
range of knowledge indispensable for the interpretation and
classification of the objects which may be discovered, the outside
public has no more conception than I have of the qualities and training
necessary for the command of an iron-clad.
In the first
place, the explorer in Egypt must have a fair knowledge of colloquial
Arabic, no small share of diplomatic tact, a strong will, an equable
temper, and a good constitution. It is important that he should be well
acquainted with Egyptian, Biblical, Babylonian, Assyrian, Greek, and
Roman history ; for the annals of these nations continually overlap, or
are dovetailed into one another, and the explorer is at any time likely
to come upon cuneiform tablets such as have lately been found in large
numbers at Tell el Amarna, in Upper Egypt; or upon relics of the
Hebrews, such as the ancient Jewish cemetery discovered by M. Naville
at Tell el Yahudieh, in Lower Egypt, in 188T; or upon Greek documents,
Greek pottery, and Greek terra-cottas, such as have rewarded the labors
of Mr. Petrie, Mr. Griffith, and Mr. Ernest Gardner [p.23] at
Naukratis, in the Eastern Delta. Fragments of Homer, Alcaeus, Sappho,
and other Greek poets have been found from time to time in Egypt during
the present century, some scribbled on potsherds and some written on
papyrus. It is not three years since Mr. Petrie found a complete copy
of the Second Book of the "Iliad," written on papyrus in most beautiful
uncial Greek by a scribe of the second century after Christ, and buried
under the head of a woman in the Graeco-Egyptian necropolis of Hawara,
in the Fayum. The woman had apparently been young and beautiful. Her
teeth were small and regular, and her long, silky black hair had been
cut off and laid in a thick coil upon her breast. Was she a Greek, or
was she an Egyptian lady learned in the language of the schools? We
know not. There was no inscription to tell of her nationality or her
name. We only know that she was young and fair, and that she so loved
her Homer that it was buried with her in the grave. Her head and her
beautiful black hair are now m the Ethnographical Department of the
Natural History Museum at South Kensington, and her precious papyrus is
in the Bodleian Library at Oxford.
To appreciate and
report upon such a find as this, or upon the inscriptions discovered at
Naukratis, the explorer must, of course, be a fairly competent Greek
scholar.
Still more of course must he be sufficiently
conversant with the ancient Egyptian language to translate any
hieroglyphic inscriptions which lie may discover. A knowledge of
trigonometry, though not absolutely indispensable, is of value in
surveying sites and determining ancient levels.
But, above all, the explorer must be a good "all-round" archaeologist. [p.24]
Now,
does the world meaning thereby the great body of cultivated readers at
all realize what it is to be a good "all- round" archaeologist? It must
be remembered, first of all, what that science is, or rather that
aggregate of sciences, which goes by the name of Archaeology. Were I
asked to define it, I should reply that archaeology is that science
which enables us to register and classify our knowledge of the sum of
man's achievement in those arts and handicrafts whereby he has, in time
past, signalized his passage from barbarism to civilization. The first
chapter of this science takes up the history of the human race at a
date coeval with the mammoth and other extinct mammalia; and its last
chapter, which must always be in a state of transition, may be said to
end for the present with about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years
ago.
Now archaeology in Egypt begins later, and ends
earlier, than archaeology in this broad and general sense. We have
never yet got far enough behind the first chapters of Egyptian history
to discover any traces of a stone age.(6) The stone age of the Nile
Valley, if it ever existed, underlies such a prodigious stratum of
semi-barbaric civilization that the spade of the excavator has not yet
reached it. Also, Egyptian archaeology, properly so called, ends with
the last chapter of Egyptian history; that is to say, with the
abolition of the ancient religion in the latter half of the fourth
century of our era. Hence, our explorer in Egypt is only called upon to
be an "all-round" archaeologist within the field of the national
history: namely, from the time of Mena, the prototype of Egyptian
royalty, who probably reigned about five thousand years before Christ,
down to the time of the Emperor Theodosius, AD 379. Yet even within
that limit, he has to know a great deal about a vast number of things.
He must be familiar with all the styles and periods of Egyptian
architecture, sculpture, and decoration; with the forms, patterns, and
glazes of Egyptian pottery; [p.23] with the distinctive characteristics
of the mummy - cases, sarcophagi, methods of embalmment and styles of
bandaging peculiar to interments of various epochs; and with all phases
of the art of writing, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. Nor is this
all. He must know by the measurement of a mud brick, by the color of a
glass bead, by the modelling of a porcelain statuette, by the pattern
of an ear-ring, to what period each should be assigned. He must be
conversant with all the types of all the gods; and last, not least, he
must be able to recognize a forgery at first sight.
. .
Continue to the second part of Chapter 1.
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