THE ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION

SOME OE THE ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION IS BROUGHT OUT BY THIS BUSY SCENE AT THEBES SHOWING A SMALL ARMY OF NATIVES DIGGING AMID THE RUINS OF A TEMPLE

THE ROMANCE
OF EXCAVATION
A RECORD OF THE AMAZING
DISCOVERIES IN EGYPT,
ASSYRIA, TROY, CRETE, ETC.
WITH TWENTY-NINE ILLUSTRATIONS
BY DAVID MASTERS
LONDON
JOHN LANE THE BODLEY HEAD LIMITED

First Published in 1923
MADE AND PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN BY MORRISON AND GIBB LTD., EDINBURGH

TO
A. A.
WHO SAVED MY LIFE

FOREWORD

Now and again the world is stirred by a discovery such as that of the Tomb of Tutankhamen by Mr. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon. In the following pages I have sought to reveal some of the romance of excavation, to tell the fascinating story of the men who have gone out into the desert places and dug up long-lost cities and the fabled treasure of ancient kings. Brilliant men, who have played their part in unearthing the glories of the past, have written many volumes on the subject which is nearest their hearts, and if, after closing this book, the reader and student feel a desire to seek them out, I shall be content. In conclusion, I wish to thank Major Kenneth Mason, M.C., R.E., The British School at Athens, and The Trustees of the British Museum, for their kindness in allowing me to use various illustrations in this volume.

DAVID MASTERS.

1923.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

THE ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION

THE

ROMANCE OF EXCAVATION

CHAPTER I

A scientist stood in the British Museum gazing at a piece of rock. Many people passed to and fro, but never one halted to see what held his attention, never one save a little boy, who wondered what the grown-up was looking at. Those who glanced in that direction merely saw a shattered stone, and passed on unheeding.

Had the fragment of stone been the Cullinan diamond or a glowing ruby, everybody would have clustered round to gaze at it. As it was neither one nor the other, everybody walked on. Yet that fragment of stone was, and is, much more wonderful than the finest diamond or ruby ever dug out of the earth.

The fragment over which the scientist dreamed was the Rosetta Stone. It is merely a piece of black basalt 28½ inches wide and 45 inches in length. The top left corner has disappeared in the dust of centuries, and both corners on the right side have been smashed off. The remainder is one of the world’s greatest treasures, for it has given us the clue to the past, unfolded for us the romance of ancient Egypt, and enabled us to glimpse the Pharaohs in all their glory.

The Rosetta Stone is divided into three sections, each of which is covered with writing cut into the surface. The top section is composed of hieroglyphics, the curious picture-writing of ancient Egypt, the middle section is in the everyday writing of the ordinary people of ancient Egypt, known as demotic characters, and the bottom section is in Greek.

This famous stone has travelled far from its original resting-place in the Nile delta, where it may have lain for close on two thousand years. Had Napoleon not made up his mind to conquer Egypt it might never have been recovered. By chance, Napoleon managed to escape Nelson, who was searching the Mediterranean for him, and landed his expedition at Alexandria. Sweeping everything before him, Bonaparte soon dominated the country and despoiled the conquered people of the relics of the past.

Then Nelson, coming back to look for his foe, found the French fleet in Aboukir Bay, and swept it for ever from the seas. Napoleon was shaken, but hid his mortification, and in due course set off to invade Syria. Gazah, of Biblical history, fell before him, Jaffa was captured, but at Acre another British Admiral, Sir Sydney Smith, intervened. The French ships sailing along the coast with stores for Napoleon’s troops were captured, and the British sailor then threw himself heart and soul into the defence of the city. Napoleon fought desperately for weeks to capture Acre, but the Admiral was his match, and the French forces were at last compelled to retreat.

About this time a sapper was digging away in the ruins of Fort St. Julian when his pick struck against a rock. He drove the tool into the soil to see if the rock were large or small, and whether it would be difficult to remove. He quickly discovered that the rock was of no great size, and in a few minutes it was lying clear at the bottom of the trench.

Glancing idly at the stone, the Frenchman noticed it was covered with strange characters. The soldier was quite interested in his find, so interested that he cleaned the whole surface of the strange stone he had unearthed. That the characters were some sort of writing was obvious, but what it was all about was much more than he could tell. Other men might have thrown the stone aside and covered it up again, but fortunately the finder possessed intelligence and the curious stone was added to the rest of the booty collected by the French.

That stone, unearthed in 1798, was the piece of black basalt which is now to be seen at the British Museum in London. It became known as the Rosetta Stone because it was found near Rosetta, the seaport whence Napoleon eventually fled from Egypt, and when the French were defeated it passed into our possession as one of the spoils of war.

It seems strange that two of the greatest figures in history, Nelson and Napoleon, should be connected with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone. Stranger still to think what might have happened had the soldier who found the stone smashed it to pieces or tossed it out of the way. These things might easily have occurred, as they have no doubt occurred to many valuable relics in bygone times.

Had the Rosetta Stone not come to light, one of the vital links with Egypt’s past would have been missing. We might still be groping in the dark, wondering what all the quaint picture-writing of the Egyptians meant, seeking for the clue that would tell us. Luckily the man who found the stone saw that it was something more than a broken piece of rock, and so preserved it for posterity.

By courtesy of the British Museum

THE SHATTERED ROSETTA STONE WHICH PROVIDED THE CLUE TO THE PICTURE WRITING OF THE EGYPTIANS

Many people wondered what all the strange signs meant when they first saw the stone. Men of science pored over it and racked their brains in their efforts to solve the mystery. The Greek script was soon translated, and proved to be a decree of Ptolemy V, dating about 196 B.C.

The fact that there were three inscriptions seemed to indicate that it was one decree engraved in three different forms of writing in order to appeal to as many people as possible. But this was by no means certain. It might easily have been three different decrees, though in such a case no purpose could have been served by inscribing them all on one stone. It was, therefore, more than probable that the three inscriptions were one decree, and that the known writing would give a clue to the weird pictures to be found in the tombs and on the monuments scattered about Egypt.

The hieroglyphics were a mystery of the past. No one could read them. The strange pictures of men and birds and beasts might have been merely decorative. They might have had no meaning at all, or no more meaning than the pictures we place on our walls to decorate our houses.

Other signs, however, in combination with the pictures, indicated that the hieroglyphics were a form of writing. Some people think that this picture-writing of the Egyptians is actually the oldest writing in the world, and that all writings must have sprung from it. This idea, however, is not quite accurate. A child of three years old cannot draw wonderful portraits. Childish drawings of a house with four straight lines for the house, a door in the centre, and a window on each side of the door are well known.

Man in the beginning may be likened to the child, and his earliest drawings must have been cruder than the childish drawings of our own age, far cruder than anything that is preserved for us. The first man to scratch a rough line or two on a rock was the forefather of Raphael and Michael Angelo and Rembrandt, but untold ages elapsed before the art of the first primitive artist developed into that of these masters.

The Egyptian pictures in the picture-writing are cleverly drawn, and indicate true artistic perceptions. It must have taken a long time to reach the pitch of perfection that is shown. So it seems logical to assume that the hieroglyphics were the outcome of another form of writing. For years there were no proofs that this was the case, but it is now definitely established by Professor Flinders Petrie that crude signs were used in Egypt at a much earlier date than the picture-writing, and the extraordinary thing is that some of these signs may be traced in the alphabets of other countries.

An English medical man, Dr. Young, was the first to furnish a clue to the mystery of the Rosetta Stone. Happening to take a keen interest in dead languages as well as in living people, he saw among the hieroglyphics two sets of signs with a line drawn round them, and as the name of Ptolemy was twice mentioned in the Greek text he reasoned that these signs stood for the name of the ruler who made the decree. He reasoned correctly, and we learned in time that a king’s name was always enclosed in a panel, which is now generally known as a cartouche.

The deciphering of the king’s name was a happy discovery which pointed to the general significance of the cartouche in connection with royal names. But the deciphering of the rest of the hieroglyphics bristled with difficulties. No one knew whether the signs stood for sounds, letters, words or things.

Egyptians had painted these puzzling pictures, but there was not a single man in all Egypt who knew what they meant. The oldest Egyptian peasant was ignorant on the subject, the most learned Egyptian scholar had not the faintest idea of their meaning. The Egyptians had forgotten how to read the writing of their forefathers. It was the writing of a dead age, of a vanished civilization.

Dr. Young threw himself enthusiastically into the task of deciphering the signs. The difficulty seemed to add a zest to his search. He pored over the copy of the writing on the Rosetta Stone day after day. There was absolutely nothing to guide him. Everything was sheer deduction at first, and then his deductions had to be tested and verified.

So difficult was his task that the discovery of a single letter was an event. Perhaps by great good fortune he would succeed in deciphering two signs in a week, then for a month he might study the copy until his brain reeled, and decipher nothing at all. It was a heart-breaking undertaking. On one occasion he announced that he had succeeded in translating a certain set of hieroglyphics into a word of seven or eight letters. It was afterwards proved that he was right in only one letter, and that the rest were hopelessly wrong.

He began on his project in 1814 and, after struggling with it for four years, the sum total of his labours amounted to the deciphering of just over ninety characters. His discovery thus averaged fewer than twenty-five signs a year. It meant that he had to concentrate all the power of his exceptional brain, and all his knowledge of languages, for a whole month to decipher two characters. In doing what he did, he accomplished an astounding feat. It is impossible to praise Young too highly for his early work on the Rosetta Stone.

At the same time that Young was wrestling with hieroglyphics in England, François Champollion was trying to solve the puzzle in France. Champollion’s interest in hieroglyphics did not spring up in a night; it was of slow growth, starting in his childhood when Egypt bulked large in the imaginations of most French boys owing to the stirring deeds of Napoleon against the Mamelukes. By the time Champollion was eleven years old, he was already taking more than an ordinary boyish interest in things Egyptian, and, as the years passed, he slowly gathered books and material bearing on the subject which he was to make peculiarly his own.

He was eager, anxious, to decipher hieroglyphics. It was the ambition of his life, the thing for which he lived, of which he dreamed. He collected every copy of the strange picture-writing that he could find in order to study it, in the hope of deciphering one more character. He was terribly handicapped by the small quantity of material on which he could work, and while his brilliant contemporary Young lay dying in England, in 1829, Champollion was leading an expedition in Egypt, gathering material for France.

Champollion found the picture-writing even more complex than any one anticipated. A single letter might be represented by seven or eight quite different signs, and a sign might represent a whole word or part of a word. A circle with lines radiating from it might represent the sun god, or it might stand for the word “day.” A sign which ordinarily stood for a letter might represent a god if a dot or some other sign came after it.

The Egyptian hieroglyphics were indeed one of the greatest puzzles of the ages. The discovery of other inscriptions helped to verify Champollion’s work, and provide proof that he was deciphering the signs accurately. It is, nevertheless, incredible that any human being could read even a sign of this dead writing correctly. That any one could do what Champollion ultimately did is almost a miracle. He laboured at his self-appointed task with so much courage and determination that he eventually succeeded in building up a hieroglyphic dictionary—a marvellous feat.

Champollion himself did not long survive Young, for he so sapped his strength over his Egyptian expedition that he fell ill and died in 1832. He was comparatively a young man, only forty-two, yet he crowded an enormous amount of work into these few years, and it may truly be said that his love of Egyptology cost him his life.

By the aid of his dictionary, which grew directly out of the finding of the Rosetta Stone, our scholars are now able to read without much trouble the sacred writings of the ancient Egyptians. Thus that fragment of black basalt in the British Museum, which is passed unnoticed by so many people, is really one of the most interesting stones in the world.

CHAPTER II

A little over a century ago the past of Egypt was concealed from living eyes. The Pyramids still stood four-square to the sandstorms of the desert as they had stood for ages, the Sphinx regarded the Nile with the same inscrutable gaze that had puzzled the ancients. Throughout Egypt were mighty ruins, but little was known about them.

People used to sit astride their asses and jog along into the stony places to see the relics. They saw merely heaps of stones, buildings grown so old that they had toppled to pieces. There were broken statues and shattered columns lying in the utmost confusion. There were mountains of sand, with fragments of masonry protruding. Occasionally, amid the shifting sands, a few columns stood upright, some so strangely shaped that their like was not to be seen elsewhere on earth.

They added to the general mystery of Egypt. The natives were poor, utterly incapable of building on such a gigantic scale. How, then, did the original buildings get there? By whom were they erected, and for what purpose?

THIS PILE OF MIGHTY BLOCKS OF STONE, THROWN DOWN AS IF BY GIANTS IN PLAY, GIVES AN IDEA OF THE MAGNIFICENCE AND HUGE SIZE OF SOME OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIAN BUILDINGS. THE PEOPLE GAZING IN WONDER ON THE GLORIES OF THE TEMPLE OF KARNAK ARE ALMOST LOST TO SIGHT AMONG THE MASSIVE RUINS

Most people asked many questions, and received different answers. The myths of the natives are as numerous as the broken monuments, but, whereas the broken stones are facts, the myths woven round them were often otherwise. Any fanciful story that served to win money from the traveller was repeated in a variety of ways, and any little truth there may have been originally was lost in continued repetition.

The ruins, however, could not lie. They said, as plainly as stones can speak: “We were fashioned by Man in the long ago, and the sun shone on us in our glory just as it shines on us in our decay.”

Fortunately, all men did not merely look at the ruins and pass on their way voicing their amazement. Some were so fascinated by what they saw that they could not leave it, and these are gradually unfolding to us one of the most romantic stories in the world, a romance beside which the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is but a single chapter.

The spoils collected in Egypt during the time of Napoleon turned the attention of scientists to the Nile. Men began to work to see if they could unravel the past from the evidence afforded by the remains. They began to dig. And, to-day, in the arid places of the earth are many men toiling like navvies, suffering untold discomforts, living in huts and delving in ruins to add to our knowledge of the past. These are the men who are writing history. They are doing it not with a pen, but with spade and pick.

People have eyes, yet they see so little. They are not trained to see. To most men a rose is only a flower, but to the exceptional man it is a miracle, for as he gazes at the glorious bloom with its many-tinted petals he visualizes the tiny single rose—the common dog-rose—from which all roses in their wondrous diversity of colour and shape and size and perfume have sprung. Many people regard the earthworm as an annoyance which disfigures the lawn, but Darwin saw in it the lowly creature that is helping to keep the earth sweet and clean by removing the decaying leaves, a blind thing that is continually providing the earth with a layer of new soil in which man may plant his seeds and harvest his crops. Countless earthworms are the servants of men.

The diggers toiling in the heat of the sun in Egypt and Mesopotamia and Crete and other places are blessed with this keen vision. Without it they would be useless. If the Rosetta Stone to them were just a broken piece of rock, the romance of the past would not appeal to them. They would not possess the imagination which drives them into the lonely places to find traces of many lost civilizations.

When they glimpse a ruin they can close their eyes and see the men quarrying the stones and the masons squaring them and the sculptors carving them; they can see kings consulting their architects, and architects giving orders to the masons; they can see the stone blocks being hauled in place and set one upon another. These and many other things they can see. They are using their eyes to benefit the majority of people, who cannot see these things for themselves.

Unfortunately the men who were early interested in the past of Egypt had little to guide them, and they sought for written records. They were all papyri mad. So long as they could find papyri and carry them off to their museums they were content.

In the light of our later knowledge we are wont to blame them, but there may be some excuse for them. The Egyptian papyri are wonderful, quite apart from what is written upon them. They are the gift of the Nile and of Egypt to the world. Almost they might be called the first sheets of paper ever made.

Papyrus nearly six thousand years old has already been found, and it appears doubtful whether we shall ever be able to trace the name of the first man who thought of using the stem of the papyrus plant in so useful a manner.

It seems likely that the discovery may have been due to Egyptian children. If you walk about the English country-side when the bulrushes are flourishing, it is a common sight to see children plucking the rushes and skinning them to make flowers out of the pith. The papyrus plant flourishes in the Nile water, where it roots in the mud just as the bulrush roots in the mud of English ponds. It often attains a height of 15 feet or more, and the green stem of the plant grows straight up without any joints from top to bottom.

What children do in one country in one age they are likely to do in all countries in all ages. Human nature is fairly constant, and rushes growing in a river will always attract children. Probably some dark-skinned Egyptian children in the misty ages picked the skin off the papyrus reeds in order to play with the pith, which differs materially from that of the English bulrush. In the course of their childish games they may have cut the fibrous pith into layers and spread them on a rock, just as children spread out things to play at shops, whereupon the hot sun of Egypt would quickly dry the fragments.

Perhaps the father, interested in the games of his children, seized on this curious substance and was struck by its fine texture and smooth surface. Experimenting for himself out of sheer curiosity, he may have cut some strips of pith and joined them in a simple manner by pressing the edges with his finger while they were still moist with sap, thus making the first sheet of papyrus. Whatever its origin, papyrus in time was made by cutting the pith into thin strips, placing the strips so that one edge overlapped another, and pressing them all together. When they dried, the overlapped edges adhered, and the result was a continuous sheet of white material on which it was possible to work with a brush and a reed pen.

The papyrus reed still flourishes in the Upper Nile as it did in ancient days. Indeed it has become rather a curse to the country, and a few years ago it threatened to choke the river completely. It was such a menace, owing to its interfering with the flow of water on which the whole life of Egypt depends, that drastic steps, costing a huge sum of money, had to be taken to clear the upper reaches. Steamers slowly ate their way into it for hundreds of miles, clearing channels and destroying the sudd, as it is called, the sudd which is largely composed of the papyrus on which the ancients relied for their writing materials! Nowadays, the sudd is being compressed into blocks and used as fuel, so the papyrus is still serving humanity.

As has been said, the early workers who sought for knowledge of old Egypt hunted mainly for papyri. Manuscripts were of undoubted value in throwing light on the past, and while the seekers were prepared to recover statues, jewels and similar objects, they placed the recovery of manuscripts before everything else. The fact that they could not read the papyri, in those early days when a glimmer of interest in Egypt was beginning to filter through to the outside world, was no drawback to the hunters. The rows of quaint pictures, with bird-headed men, the natives with mops of black hair, and other queer things, were attractive in themselves. They had a value to the collector for their strange writing alone. And those early collectors realized that, given the manuscripts, some brilliant men would manage to read them some day, as Young and Champollion actually did.

So those early enthusiasts spent their time hunting tombs, digging here, there and everywhere in their endeavours to locate something that was worth carrying away. When they were successful they seized on the mummy cases and eagerly opened them to see if any manuscripts were inside with the mummy. In their eagerness they overlooked much. They searched haphazard. Their knowledge was small, and they undoubtedly cast aside many things which they looked upon as so much rubbish, trifles which to the scientist of to-day would light up the past as with a searchlight.

A square inch of broken pottery is not particularly noticeable in a mound of rock and sand, and even if the eye does light on it the hand is seldom prompted to pick it up. But there are men so skilled in their knowledge of the pottery of past ages that a fragment may serve to link places thousands of miles apart, and thrust the history of mankind backward into the mists of time for several thousands of years.

A brilliant scientist like Professor Flinders Petrie is able to deduce the most amazing things from a piece of pottery, even if it be but a fragment. To him the fragment serves the purpose of a calendar. It is as though he were picking up a modern calendar on which the year stood boldly out. Of course the fragment of pottery does not date quite so exactly as that, but it easily falls within a well-defined period.

A glance would enable the famous scientist to say: “This is seven thousand years old.” And, seeing a different fragment, he would know that it was a great deal older—perhaps ten thousand years old.

How much valuable evidence of this sort has been ignorantly destroyed in the past will never be known. In the early days of last century, and even to within measurable distance of this, men were too intent on the big things to pay attention to the little things that slipped through their fingers. It is the common things that tell us the history of a period, the things that people use and wear. If we recover these fragments of common things, they serve to indicate how the people lived.

Thieves, too, have been responsible for the loss of most valuable evidence. The Egyptian natives are born pilferers. They have a natural aptitude for causing things to vanish, and when a discovery has been made the discoverer has seldom been able to preserve his find in its entirety. There have been cases where the greater part of a find has disappeared in a night, and once it is gone you might as well seek to find a particular grain of sand in the desert. Statues, vases, jewels, furniture—all have been carried off, and the finders have wakened to discover that their labour has been wasted, and that instead of enriching our knowledge of the world they have merely enriched a few native thieves.

The natives, too, often seize the opportunity of digging in places where they know they will not be disturbed. They do not go to the trouble of obtaining a permit to dig. The last thing they desire to do is to call the attention of the authorities to their work, so they run the risk and dig surreptitiously. While it is obvious they must waste a lot of energy in conducting these illegal searches, it is also obvious that they are often rewarded by finding objects of value.

The things they find, they smuggle to their huts, and in due course sell to some traveller, who places them in his private collection, where they are as completely lost to sight as if they had never existed. Then there are things that the natives stumble on accidentally. If their find is not portable, they may inform the authorities, but if it is easy to handle, there is little prospect of their discovery becoming known.

No one has the faintest idea how much material has been lost in these ways. Its scientific value must be incalculable.

CHAPTER III

When Professor Flinders Petrie first set foot in Egypt he was a young man, only twenty-seven years of age. The older men of other nations who had spent their lives delving in the past smiled at the idea of the new-comer bringing about a revolution in the work they knew so well. They had done so much themselves that there seemed little more for him to do. They had found tombs and statues and papyri that took them back some five thousand years to what they thought was the beginning of Egyptian history.

What else was there to discover?

Nobody knew then. Nobody knows now. When men start digging up the earth in search of relics of the past, it is beyond human foresight to foretell what will come to light. Men may dig 50 feet and find nothing. They may say there is nothing to be found in that particular spot. Another man may come along, set up his tent a few yards away, just scratch the surface of the soil, and find a buried city. This is what lures men to the work; it is one of the fascinations and provides much of the romance.

The wonderful discovery of the tomb of King Tutankhamen by Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter is a notable instance of this sort of thing. For years they dug, poured money into the sands of the desert, shifting mountains of sand and rock in their endeavours to discover something worth while. Lord Carnarvon himself stated that they had moved about 70,000 tons of rubble during their search. They were lucky to be rewarded in the end, for millions of tons of rock and sand have been dug up in Egypt without yielding to the diggers a single article of value.

Mr. Howard Carter was hopeful that something might be found in the neighbourhood of the great discovery, and the work of excavation was started. The diggers wielded their picks week after week and shovelled the rubble into the baskets of the men who carried it away from the hole that was growing in the ground. Daily the hole grew bigger, the mound of sand and rock grew larger.

Not a sign of a tomb was discovered. Work was continued in the hope that something would turn up. They were always hopeful, but the end of the day brought nothing to light and it proved so much wasted labour.

The quest in the old place was thrown up, and the picks of the diggers were directed to a spot only a few yards away. There was the same monotonous, back-aching work, the same running to and fro of the natives with their little baskets of rubble. In such circumstances only a born optimist could carry on. The pessimist would throw up the task in despair at the end of two or three days.

Even Mr. Howard Carter began to think that he had again drawn a blank; he began to consider whether it was time to shut down operations and have another try elsewhere. For a day or two his thoughts ran in this groove, until he decided to dig just one more day, and if nothing turned up then to stop it.

Truly a momentous decision. But for it the tomb of Tutankhamen would still be undiscovered, and the world would yet be in ignorance of the marvels that it contained. Before the day’s digging was over, the shape of a step gladdened Mr. Carter’s eyes, and fully justified his selection of that particular spot for his operations. A yard or two more to the right or left, and he might have missed the tomb. It was a much nearer thing than the world imagines.

The accuracy of Mr. Howard Carter in selecting his second site is rather amazing. Digging was not started there haphazard. The ground had been thoroughly gone over and studied, and the possibilities summed up before the pick was driven into the sand. It was a happy combination of expert knowledge and good luck.

THIS PHOTOGRAPH INDICATES THE UTTER DESOLATION OF THE ARID VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS, WHERE EVEN A BLADE OF GRASS CANNOT LIVE. THE TOMB OF TUTANKHAMEN, GUARDED BY SOLDIERS, IS SHOWN IN THE FOREGROUND

It at once became obvious why the tomb had remained for so long undiscovered, for just above it the last resting-place of Thothmes III was cut into the rock, and all the debris from this later tomb had been shot by the builders on top of the earlier tomb. This rubbish had completely covered in the site of the tomb of Tutankhamen and buried it for centuries.

Few men would think of looking immediately under one tomb for the site of another. Such a place is so unexpected that Mr. Howard Carter deserved every credit for selecting so unlikely a spot in which to carry on his search.

Every man digging in Egypt has learned something from Professor Flinders Petrie. He has a keen, analytical brain, and for years before going to the Nile valley he brought his acute mind to the study of the prehistoric remains to be found in Great Britain. Many a day he might have been seen within the magic circle of Stonehenge, pondering on the origin of the most massive ancient monument in England. His work on the prehistoric remains in Great Britain was but a preliminary to his greater work in the land of the Pharaohs.

With the coming of Flinders Petrie, all the old, haphazard methods went by the board. What he sought was evidence, something that would throw light on the past, that would help to fix dates. The actual intrinsic value of an object was of no concern to him. A bead, in his eyes, found in a certain place, would be of greater value than a nugget of gold. The bead might prove that glass was made centuries earlier than men thought, whereas the golden nugget might prove nothing at all.

Many things slipped through the fingers of the earlier seekers. Nothing slipped through his. He directed the attention of all to the value of every trifling thing that could claim to have been fashioned by the hand of man. He introduced scientific methods. He noted where everything was found; how it was found; the depth at which it was found; what was found with it.

He was not out for an easy life. He lived hard, pitched his tent on the edge of the eternal desert, and at dusk washed the dust out of his eyes and nostrils, took his meal by his camp fire, and wrote up the notes of his day’s work. He snatched what sleep he could, and was up early to get to work before the heat of the day became insufferable. He wasted no time going to and from the site. He slept near by, with the scene of his labours only a few yards from his tent pegs.

THE RUINS OF THE TEMPLE WHICH AMENHOTEP BUILT AT LUXOR ABOUT 1,450 B.C. THE COLUMNS IN THE DISTANCE ARE UNIQUE, BEING FASHIONED IN THE SHAPE OF LOTUS BUDS. THEY INDICATE HOW THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS DERIVED MANY OF THEIR ARCHITECTURAL FEATURES FROM NATURAL FORMS

Flinders Petrie is one of the outstanding explorers of the ruins of Egypt. He started with an innate genius for the work, and to this genius he added a sound scientific knowledge and an all-round mastery of his subject. He used his muscles as well as his brain, and he preferred to trust his own trained eyes to those of his native diggers.

He went to Egypt with hands that were soft, unused to manual labour. He knew how often careless workmen have ruined things by striking them with their picks, and the first thing he did was to make a rule that directly anything peeped out of the sand, he would himself uncover the object to prevent it being injured.

He began tracing the contours of the things in the soil, digging away with his fingers and scratching away with his nails, his hands perhaps buried up to the wrist in sand. Thus he would clear an object a little at a time, so carefully that it could not possibly suffer damage.

But his hands were not made for such work. Finger-nails of steel and a skin of tanned leather were needed to grub about in the sands of the desert. No wonder that his fingers became frightfully sore and tender, that his nails were almost worn away by continual contact with the sand. That was one of the minor hardships of such work, a discomfort that he treated lightly.

The soreness of his hands did not prevent him from using them as digging implements, and in a week or two he was having a personal lesson in evolution. Soft hands were useless to him in such a task. So nature quickly readjusted itself to the different circumstances and evolved hard hands for him, toughened the skin of the palms and back and tempered the finger-nails until he could rummage about all day in the sand with absolute impunity, running no more risk of injuring his fingers than if he were actually wearing thick leather gloves.

When he turned his attention to Abydos in Southern Egypt, he found a Frenchman had been granted the privilege of exploring the spot. Amelineau was installed at Abydos. He had dug away for four years, finding tombs and exploring them, and adding a little to the sum total of the knowledge of Egypt.

The Egyptian Government gave Amelineau a five years’ concession, and at the end of the fourth year’s work he surveyed the site. He went over it, looked at the mountains of rubbish his diggers had shifted, summed up his discoveries, and at last concluded that it was useless digging there any longer. He decided that he had explored the place thoroughly, and had found all that existed there.

Not one man in a thousand would have thought it worth while to look for anything at Abydos after that. Apparently the field had been thoroughly explored and worked out. But Flinders Petrie happened to be the one man who thought otherwise. While he respected the opinion of the Frenchman, he yet felt that here was a field for further investigation, that Abydos had not yielded up all its secrets to the previous seekers.

So he set his diggers to work. He went over the ground systematically, digging away, picking over and casting aside the debris. His sharp eyes detected things to which previous eyes had been blind. He found pots that were not turned on the potter’s wheel, pots made before the potter’s wheel had been invented. These pots were shaped solely by hand, fashioned from the bottom upward, and they were almost as true in form as if they had been turned on a wheel.

He was hot on the scent, turning back the wheels of time. He found the hitherto unknown names of four of the ancient kings of Egypt, the first men who could lay claim to rule the tribes, the men who figure before the first Dynasty. He was pushing civilization back, and yet farther back. Whereas others set the limit of the civilization of Egypt as five thousand years, he added another fifty centuries to it, doubled the life of the civilization that flourished and decayed and flourished and decayed many times in the valley of the Nile.

Came a day when his eyes lit up at the unusual in a piece of pottery, not that it was so wondrously beautiful, but because the markings on it linked it up with Crete far away to the north in the middle of the Mediterranean, proving that intercourse existed between the two peoples in those dim ages.

The native diggers cast casual glances at the jar. They were not particularly interested. To them it was merely an ordinary piece of pottery.

If that same piece of earthenware were placed in a china shop in London to-day with the rest of the oddments of china, and marked at five shillings, no one would trouble to buy it, unless by chance he possessed expert knowledge.

It seems remarkable that this piece of pottery, so fragile that a moderate blow would shatter it, should have survived for all these thousands of years. The ancient potter who shaped the soft clay and baked it until it was hard was indeed working for posterity. He little knew, as the jar grew under his nimble fingers, how many centuries would elapse and find it still as perfect as when he took it from the fire; nor could he guess how much his little jar, which he moulded so cunningly, would tell to the brilliant man who found it.

Fate ordained that his handiwork should be buried in a grave, and there remain in absolute security until the centuries brought the right man along to unearth it.

It was but a Cretan pot in an Egyptian grave, but that little pot for a time made scholars wonder whether the civilization of Egypt was founded on a far older civilization which came from Crete, the little island in the Mediterranean.

CHAPTER IV

The men who are digging history out of the earth with pick and shovel rely upon something more than chance to obtain their results. The general idea of a man casually strolling out into the desert, and uncovering a city which has never been heard of, has little relation to the facts. It would be just as reasonable to start fishing for Japanese pearls in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, as to start blindly digging through the sands of Egypt in the hope that something would turn up.

Ancient monuments, papyri and wall-paintings, even the legends of the country, are carefully considered with a view to finding a clue to the past. The sites of the ancient tombs and palaces and cities have gradually been located, and the explorers naturally select a spot which holds out some prospect of success. They generally have a definite object in view when they start their search. For instance, Lord Carnarvon and Mr. Howard Carter were hoping to find another tomb when they came across that of Tutankhamen. When Maspero made his discovery of so many of the Pharaohs about forty years ago, the mummy of Tutankhamen was missing, and there was accordingly the possibility that some diligent man might eventually unearth it.

For forty years the search went on. Other tombs were found, but that of Tutankhamen still eluded discovery, until the autumn of 1922. The digger always has hopes of finding a certain thing, but as often as not he comes across something else.

Before a pick is stuck into the ground, the digger will spend several days on the spot, going over it carefully, and noting any irregularities. Long experience teaches him many things. What the ordinary man cannot see, even when it is pointed out to him, may be quite plain to the trained eye. A slight depression may indicate to the expert the site of a buried building, a tiny bank may tell him where the sand of the desert has blown against a wall and gradually accumulated until the wall is covered beneath the drift. It is invisible, but there is the slight slope to prove that the sand has been heaped against something, to show that its path has been stayed by some object. These are some of the things which help the experts to select the spot on which to dig. The man who prospects for gold knows what signs to look for, and the scientist prospecting for relics of past ages is equally proficient in reading the signs. The gold prospector digs a hole, and washes the contents to find a colour of gold; the seeker for relics prospects by digging a trench to see if he can find a bit of brick or stone showing traces of man’s handiwork.

Egypt happens to be a particularly happy hunting-ground, inasmuch as it not only possessed an extremely ancient civilization, but also enjoys a wonderful climate, which preserves the relics of the past. The sun is always shining, and rain falls so seldom that things are preserved almost indefinitely from damp and mildew where in other countries they are destroyed in a few years.

The ancient cities of Egypt were founded on the banks of the Nile, just as are the modern cities. Away from the river, life is insupportable. It has often been said that the Nile is Egypt, and Egypt is the Nile. This is true, for the cultivable land of Egypt above the Delta is just a green strip a mile or two wide on each side of the river all along its course. On the margin is the encroaching desert, which only the waters of the Nile prevent from overwhelming the land. Where the waters of the Nile flow into the little irrigation canals and feed the fields, there abundant crops of cotton, sugar-cane, and other things are raised. Beyond, are the arid hills, and the cruel sands where the rock in summer becomes so hot that it is possible to bake bread by the heat of the sun.

The people living in lands that are blessed with an adequate rainfall can have no conception of what the Nile means to Egypt. The drought which occasionally affects our own country brings home to us the importance of rain to the land. Our whole country-side soon begins to complain about lack of water. Wells begin to run dry. Water has even to be carried to some villages by train.

A traveller spent a night at an old inn on the Sussex downs, and found an inch of chalk sediment at the bottom of his small jug of shaving water in the morning. Crops which should have been 4 feet high had struggled up only a few inches. There was no moisture to help them to develop. Fields of heavy land were all ploughed up, but before the farmer could harrow them and prepare a fine tilth for the seeds, the clods were baked as hard as iron, so hard that it was impossible to do anything with them, and the fields carried no crops at all. A succession of such seasons would have a profound effect on the life of this country, and compel our people to live where water could be obtained.

That is why the Egyptians were—and are—chained to the Nile. The floods fed the land. When the river failed to rise, and the water was confined within the banks, there was famine. No wonder those ancient Egyptians worshipped the Nile. Their lives depended on it.

They watched the river anxiously to see what it was going to do, scanning the chocolate-coloured waters as they went flowing by. They wondered whether the river was going to condemn them to starvation, or whether it was about to scatter plenty over the land. Far away from Cairo, up at Khartoum, the rise began about the end of April, but so great is the distance that no perceptible increase was to be noticed at Cairo until the end of June.

As the water rose, so did the spirits of the natives. We can imagine with what joy they saw the flood break over the banks and sweep into the fields on either side. Stone pillars were put up to measure the rise. They were marked off in cubits, and the officials would watch the water stealing up and up. If it only reached 12 cubits there would be wailing throughout the land, for the people knew that famine would overtake them, that the life-giving water would not reach their fields. Another 3 cubits would suffice to feed them until the next harvest came round, if they exercised care and were not unduly wasteful, while 16 cubits, or 28 feet, would fill their granaries to overflowing, and every one would have enough and to spare.

ALL THAT REMAINS OF THE GRAND AVENUE OF SPHINXES AT KARNAK, ORIGINALLY A MILE LONG, TO REMIND US OF THE GLORIES OF EGYPT LONG AGO (see page [71])

They prayed long and earnestly to the Nile god, and held great festivals in his honour in a temple built in the vanished city of Nilopolis. Here they performed their rituals and made their offerings, and gave thanks to the god in years of plenty, expressing their joy and gratitude for the bounty they had received. They worshipped the Nile as the source of their blessings, just as they worshipped the sun.

The sun worshippers built a magnificent temple to their god, whom they called Ra, at Heliopolis, and Cleopatra’s Needle, now standing on the Thames Embankment, is one of the two monuments which Thothmes III set up before the Temple of the Sun on the banks of the Nile. Here they remained until the legions of Augustus Cæsar defeated Cleopatra just before the dawn of the Christian era. Eight years after the dramatic death of the beautiful Egyptian queen, whom Julius Cæsar loved and Mark Antony worshipped, Augustus set his engineers and slaves to work transporting the obelisks down the Nile, to set them in front of the wonderful palace of the Cæsars built in Alexandria. The new palace of the Roman invaders grew old, decayed, and fell in ruins, but the ancient obelisks of Heliopolis still reared their pinnacles to the skies. For fifteen hundred years Cleopatra’s Needle stood firm before crashing to the ground, to lie half buried in the drifting sands for three centuries, leaving the twin obelisk standing alone.

Then British soldiers, flushed with their victory over the French in Egypt in 1801, craved a memento of their triumph. Seizing on the fallen obelisk, they subscribed their hard-earned money, and sought to remove the stone to England. That weight was too much for them; it defied their efforts, so, fixing a commemorative brass plate, they left the stone lying in the sands.

Mehemet Ali, knowing the British were interested in the obelisk, presented it to George IV. That monarch made no effort to remove the unwieldy present. Once more, in 1831, Mehemet Ali approached the British Government, and this time offered to ship the monument free to Great Britain. The offer was politely declined. By the time the British Government decided to remove the stone, in 1849, there was such opposition to spending £7000 on its removal, that the matter was dropped.

Eighteen years later, the land on which the monolith lay was sold, and the new owner quickly requested the British Government to remove their property. The Government were so loath to do anything at all that the Khedive informed them they must either remove it, or forfeit the title to it. The threat had no effect. The Government seemed to look upon the present much as a suburban dweller would look upon the present of an elephant.

The owner of the land began to plan to break up the obelisk, and use it for building purposes. For ten years all the efforts of General Alexander were needed to induce the landowner to refrain from such an act of vandalism, and at last, when it was seen that the Government would do nothing, Sir Erasmus Wilson came forward and offered to remove the obelisk to England.

Accordingly a mighty iron cylinder 100 feet long was made. The obelisk, which measures 86½ feet high, and weighs 186 tons, was dug out of the sand, and after tremendous trouble safely housed in the cylinder, which, upon being completely sealed, was quite buoyant. Eventually it was floated, and taken in tow for England. All went well until the Bay of Biscay was reached, when a terrific gale sprang up, so terrific that Cleopatra’s Needle threatened to drag the tug to the bottom. At midnight the situation became so desperate that the captain ordered the obelisk to be cut adrift, feeling certain it was sinking, and when he arrived in England Cleopatra’s Needle was given up for lost.

But the monument, which had survived the accidents of Time for so long, was fated to survive the storm. Instead of plunging to the bottom of the Bay of Biscay, it tossed about on the heaving waters for nearly three days. Then it was sighted by a steamer, and taken in tow, to be brought at last to England.

It is remarkable that this same monolith, which a Pharaoh erected on the banks of the Nile to tell the sun-worshippers of his glorious deeds in war, should now be reposing on the banks of the river Thames, and that it has survived the age of bows and arrows to be damaged by bombs from aeroplanes. What a story Cleopatra’s Needle would tell if it could only speak.

Kings were more than kings to the common people of Egypt. They were looked upon as gods, the possessors of divine power. They were called the sons of Ra, and Ra often figures in their titles. From being called the son of Ra, the ruler in the eyes of the people acquired the mythical power of the god himself, and was worshipped by his subjects, who shielded their faces from the glory which the monarch spread around him.

The Egyptians have worshipped many gods in many ages. Gods have risen, grown powerful, and been superseded, but always the kings have shared the powers of the various gods, and the people looked upon the king as the living image of the god they worshipped.

Their religions, after the lapse of ages, seem very strange to peoples in other lands. Yet they had much to commend them, and many of the teachings of the Christian religion were anticipated in the religions of the ancient Egyptians.

We look upon the Nile dwellers as pagans, but we cannot deny the logic of the religion which taught them to worship the sun and the Nile, on which they depended for light and life.

CHAPTER V

Gradually the romance of ancient Egypt is being revealed by the graves of those who died in remote times, yet to read the romance at first hand requires exceptional ability that is possessed by only a few men. Little bits of evidence of no importance to the casual onlooker are fraught with immense importance to the scientific seeker.

The most wonderful tombs in the world are to be found in Egypt in the shape of the Pyramids, and as the centuries recede the tombs gradually become simpler until they arrive back at the simplest of all—just a shallow hole scooped out of the ground, in which the dead man rests on a skin.

Consequently the graves of Egypt reveal the rise of Egypt’s civilizations; they indicate how man’s ideas have changed, how primitive customs have slowly passed away and given rise to the most remarkable practices connected with the dead of which we have any trace. The later stone tombs needed no seeking; they were plain to every traveller who journeyed up the Nile. Earlier tombs built of brick were found, revealing a more ancient state of civilization, when men were ignorant of the ways of working stone, or found it too difficult to devote their energies to shaping stone to be built into a tomb. Going back and back, the brick tombs get smaller and smaller, until they disappear, and only the grave remains in which the dead lie doubled up. These were the things that years of work taught, but the earliest graves of all long eluded the eyes of modern workers.

One day Professor Flinders Petrie came across remains. The greatest care was exercised in digging, so that every shred of evidence could be collected, and as the sand and soil were drawn aside he saw it was a very ancient grave, older than anything ever dreamed of in connection with Egypt. No one had any idea that Egypt was inhabited so long ago, but here was proof that men lived in the Nile valley in the dark ages of Time.

The evidence goes to show that a crude civilization existed there ten thousand years ago, and that men may have lived in the Nile valley over twenty thousand years ago. Whether any relics will ever be found to throw any light on this epoch of Egyptian history remains to be seen, but it would not be astonishing if something did eventually appear, for the country has powers of preservation which even to-day are only faintly recognized, and the earth can hide things so cunningly that human beings may search for centuries and never find them again. The fact that they are not found is no proof that they never existed.

When this ancient man hunted on the banks of the Nile, he gazed upon a very different land from that which exists to-day. The river was wider and shallower. It overflowed its banks for greater distances. The banks of gravel which show where the waters of the river lapped in bygone centuries still exist, but they are far removed from the river, and a hundred feet or so higher.

In all the thousands of years that have elapsed since then, the Nile has been cutting a deeper and deeper channel for itself. In all the years that it has been bringing down the mud in solution, flowing over the land, some of the mud has sunk to the bottom and remained; much of it has been carried from the Delta to the sea. The mud that sank has got deeper and deeper. The river has added to the deposit inch by inch, until there is now a wonderful layer of alluvial soil: just the mud of the Nile, between 30 and 40 feet thick on each side of the stream.

This deposit itself has helped to give scientists an idea of the age of the earliest human remains that have been found. The rate at which the river leaves the mud behind has been carefully measured, and men have learned that in a century the Nile will add 4 inches of soil to the fields by flooding. Test holes have revealed the present depth of the alluvial, and if roughly about a yard of deposition is allowed for one thousand years, and about 10 or 12 yards are allowed for the depth, then the age of the deposit is fixed at ten or twelve thousand years.

In some quarters this time is considered as absolutely accurate and definitely fixed, but there are so many factors to be taken into account that we should hesitate to regard them as unalterable. The Nile, it is true, has been depositing mud at the rate of 4 inches to the century in modern times, but this is no proof that it has always deposited mud at this rate, and there may have been considerable changes in the rate at which the mud banks have grown on each side of the stream. We know the floods vary considerably, and the rate of deposition must vary similarly. There seems at least the possibility that it took twice as long as the accepted estimate to deposit the mud on each side of the river, that is twenty thousand years. For aught we know, it may have taken two hundred thousand years.

It will be seen how difficult it is in dealing with the lapse of such ages to mention any definite dates. This is why the men who are digging up the past in Egypt refer to Dynasties, starting with the First Dynasty, and working up to the last or Thirtieth Dynasty.

A great deal has been done towards discovering the names of the various kings in the different Dynasties, but there are still many gaps to fill in. Most of our information in this respect has been given us by a list of names compiled by a priest named Manetho, who lived about two thousand one hundred years ago. Manetho undoubtedly based his names of kings on more ancient lists which have totally disappeared, but that he was fairly accurate is borne out by the Turin papyrus so far as it has been translated. The difficulty with this papyrus is that it was discovered in a number of fragments, and some parts of it are missing. However, the parts that remain have been most carefully pieced together, and seem to verify Manetho’s list, which starts with Menes, who is looked upon as the first king of the First Dynasty, and is thought to have reigned about seven thousand years ago.

Throughout the ages that followed the reign of Menes, there grew up those religious beliefs and quaint burial customs which have done so much to unfold to us the life of the past. At first sight there seems to be no reason for all the statues, the tiny figures, and wonderful wall inscriptions to be found in the ancient tombs of Egypt. It seems incomprehensible that the dead should be buried with food and flowers beside them, that all this artistic talent should be wasted in this manner. Yet some such customs exist in all lands, and survive to this day, for we still place wreaths of flowers on the graves of our departed in memory of them, but actually the giving of a wreath is based on a custom that recedes so far back that all trace of it has been lost.

The Egyptians believed that there was another world, to which the soul journeyed after death. But the journey was long and hazardous, and the soul faced many perils on the way. In order to protect the soul from danger, the Egyptians used to paint an image of the Sun God within the tomb, thus placing the soul directly under the protection of the god, and the soul would wander over the heavens in the company of the god, immune from all harm, so long as the daylight lasted.

Directly darkness fell, all the evil spirits would come forth from their retreats, and try to trap the soul as it stumbled blindly through the labyrinths of the lower regions. All night the soul would fight against these perils, struggling continually towards the dawn. Then, as the sun came up, the soul would escape from the evil demons, and wander free of danger through the heavens once more until darkness fell.

Every human being was also considered to possess a perfect duplicate, a double, and the Egyptians were taught that the life of this double depended on the survival of the body, and if the double had no body to return to, the double would become extinct and die for good. Such a thing was too terrible to contemplate, and had it happened it would have signified eternal disgrace to the living, as well as obliteration to the dead. Consequently the body was embalmed, so that it would be preserved for all time as a place of refuge for the double.

There was the risk, however, that despite all precautions, something might happen to the embalmed body, that it might be destroyed by some accident quite unforeseen and unforeseeable. The Egyptians must have considered this danger long and earnestly before they arrived at a method of averting it.

The method was simplicity itself. What could serve the purpose better than a statue of the deceased? If the mummy became damaged, there was always the likeness in stone for the double to inhabit. Then somebody decided that two statues would provide two chances for the double to survive in case of accident to the mummy, and once the idea was fully established the number of statues multiplied until there was a dozen or more, all the same, carved in stone, to represent the dead man. To avoid the possibility of the double making any mistake, the likeness of the dead man was portrayed. This accounts for the finding of so many statues of kings; each statue gave the king a chance in the afterlife.

To provide sustenance for the double before it reached the Egyptian equivalent of Paradise, jars of water, meat and bread were buried with the mummy. It would not do for the dead to go hungry. Theoretically the foodstuffs should have been replenished from time to time, and no doubt for long this was done, but the Egyptians finally found that it was difficult enough to provide for the living, without toiling to feed the dead.

There is no doubt that the offerings to the dead became somewhat of a drain on the resources of these ancient Nile dwellers, so again they solved the problem in quite a simple way. If they painted all the offerings on the walls of the tombs, and prayed to the gods to provide the departed with the things needed in the afterworld, such painted offerings would last for ever, and relieve the living of the demands on their foodstuffs. Consequently, all over the tombs, these pictures of offerings may be found, to serve the deceased if he should need food during his wanderings to the Egyptian Paradise.

The little images known as Ushabti were placed in the tomb, in case the deceased were called upon to work in the next world. They were his servants, who would labour for him and save their master from performing menial tasks. The boats or barges that are found were to ferry the dead man over the sacred waters to the Fields of the Blessed.

The Egyptians, indeed, considered that everything required in this life would be needed in the next. It is well for us that they had these ideas, for they have resulted in many remarkable relics being found in the tombs, relics which help the scientists to reconstruct the life of these wonderful ancients, to revive the romance of their lost civilization.

In order that the dead man might not lose his identity, his name was graven within the tomb, and in time the outstanding features of his life were also mentioned, so that the gods should be conversant with all he had done. Some of these notes are short, others long, but all of them are of importance as showing us what happened while the dead man was alive. We have our own National Biography printed on paper, and carefully bound to place on our shelves, but the National Biography of Ancient Egypt is carved upon mountains of stones in the tombs of the land. They are the books of the distant past, but there is the possibility that they will survive when many of our modern books have perished utterly from the earth.

By courtesy of the British Museum

A SCENE FROM THE FAMOUS BOOK OF THE DEAD, PAINTED 3,000 YEARS AGO ON PAPYRUS, SHOWING KING HER-HERU AND QUEEN NETCHEMET PRAYING TO OSIRIS WHILE THE HEART OF THE QUEEN IS BEING WEIGHED IN THE BALANCE

The commonest of all the ancient manuscripts that have survived to our day is the well-known Book of the Dead. It is another relic which serves to indicate the thought devoted by the Egyptians to life in the next world. The Book of the Dead is a sacred book, which tells the dead man what to say to the gods when he meets them, how to answer their questions. Osiris is the Judge who weighs the man’s heart, and considers if he be worthy to enter the Realms of Bliss. And the departed is instructed what to say. “I have not played the hypocrite,” he avers. “I have not stolen,” is another answer he must make. “I have not lied. I have not committed adultery. I am no slayer of men.”

There are forty-two of these Confessions in the Book of the Dead, and it is astounding how they resemble the Ten Commandments upon which are based the Christian religion. In the replies just quoted may be traced three commandments: “Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not commit adultery. Thou shalt do no murder.”

Who can say after this whence the wisdom of the Bible sprang? The religion of the ancient Egyptians seems false to our eyes, but underlying it are many fine principles, and much of the truth that is eternal.

Even in those remote times, however, there were people who were ever ready to take advantage of the grief of the relatives of the departed. A Book of the Dead was essential to the well-being of the departed, once he came into the presence of the gods, and the living would go to the scribe and acquire the finest copy of the Book that lay within their means. The wonderfully painted Books were only for the wealthy and the nobles. The poor people had to be satisfied with something that was much inferior, from which a great deal of the text was missing.

The poorer classes were, of course, unable to read the sacred script, and would therefore be unaware that much of the text was missing; that the Book was, in fact, so much abridged, that they were acquiring a garbled version, bearing little resemblance to the full Book. They would have the body embalmed, and see the sacred Book placed within reach of the mummy’s hand, so that it could be consulted directly it was required, little knowing that the Book upon which they relied was but an imitation of the genuine sacred Book.

In fact, in those days, it was more or less the same as it is to-day. The scribe scamped the work of the Book that he was poorly paid for, and took more pains with the Book for which he received a better price.

Discoveries seem to indicate that although the people had faith in the Book of the Dead, the scribes themselves were inclined to be unbelievers. It is fairly evident that they had no compunction in defrauding the relatives, for when the scribe had sold a beautiful copy to place with one of the departed, he would very often slip in a blank papyrus along with the mummy, and abstract the fine Book, knowing full well that his fraud would never be found out. Probably he reasoned that it was rather a waste to place such a fine specimen of his work where it would be lost for ever. It is quite likely that some of the scribes devoted a vast amount of time and skill to making a wonderful copy of the Book of the Dead that they could show to relatives to get their order, with the intention of substituting an inferior work, or even a blank. Thus their one fine copy would be a source of income to them, and they would never part with it if they could possibly avoid it.

Judging from the blanks and poor copies that have been recovered, there is little doubt that the Egyptians of old were quite as guilty of sharp practices as are some of the people of to-day.

CHAPTER VI

Since the dawn of history the Pyramids have been considered one of the wonders of the earth. They are unique. There is nothing to compare with them in any other land. Strangers have gazed upon them in amazement, and pondered what they were and how and why they were built.

Myths that they were the work of the gods became numerous, for the structures were so gigantic that it seemed impossible that puny man could have built them. About their human origin there was no doubt to discerning travellers, but the object in building them was not always so plain.

Long and learned books have been written to show that the Pyramids bore some special astronomical significance; that one of the main passages in the Great Pyramid was built at a certain angle to enable the astronomers of earlier days to watch a certain star pass in its course across the opening in the face of the Pyramid; that the height of the Great Pyramid bore a definite relation to the distance of the earth from the sun; that the base of the Pyramid meant something else. In fact, the Pyramid has been measured in all directions, in all sorts of manners, and these measurements have been made to fit in with pet theories which have been the basis of many books.

There is not the slightest mystery as to what the Pyramids actually are. They are merely tombs. But people have not been content to accept this explanation, perhaps because it is too simple, so they have endowed the Pyramids with all sorts of wonderful meanings which would astound the builders were they to come back from the Fields of the Blessed. Astrologers who puzzled on the meanings of the stars in the heavens claimed the Great Pyramid as peculiarly their own, and pointed out certain coincidences in measurements to support their claim; the astronomers adduced their own reasons for claiming that the Pyramid had some astronomical meaning; Biblical students, on the other hand, who sought the hidden meanings of the Bible, concluded that the Pyramid was definite proof of certain of their own theories.

The Pyramids have indeed been so enwrapped in mystery, by the writings and theories of successive generations, that thousands of people to-day regard them with a sort of religious belief.

Notwithstanding all that has been written on the subject, and the undoubted cleverness with which these theories have been propounded, the Pyramids are only tombs. But they are the most wonderful tombs in the world. They are simple and grand, with the desert sands surging round their bases, while a short distance away the Nile flows along to the blue sea. There is one other tomb without peer, the Taj Mahal, in India, that beautiful dream in marble which Shah Jehan erected in Delhi to the memory of the lady he loved so well. But the Taj is very different—graceful, glorious. Yet the Pyramids, in their simple grandeur, are not without a beauty of their own.

Kings have come and gone, civilizations have bloomed and vanished, the very earth itself has altered since the Pyramids were first built. Whirlwinds have caught up the sands of the desert and used them as a giant sandblast in their attempts to wear away the stone, earthquakes have shattered temples, but on the monuments the forces of Nature have had little effect. The hand of man has wrought more destruction in a few centuries than Nature herself wrought in two or three thousands of years. What man built, man has partly destroyed; yet man, with all his ingenuity for destruction, has done little but touch the outer surface of the Great Pyramid.

THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZEH, ONE OF THE WONDERS OF THE WORLD, WITH THE GREAT SPHINX IN THE FOREGROUND, LAPPED BY THE ETERNAL SANDS OF THE DESERT

There are nearly eighty Pyramids of different sizes scattered throughout the Nile valley. The greatest and most renowned is that of King Khufu or Cheops, at Gizeh, which originally measured 355 feet 8 inches at the base, and 481 feet 4 inches in height. The base of the Great Pyramid covers well over 12 acres, and an idea of the size of the monument may be gained when it is known that to walk round it means trudging through the sands for more than half a mile.

Over nineteen centuries ago, Julius Cæsar sent from Egypt one of the most famous letters ever written. It was short, but three words: “Veni, Vedi, Veci.” These three words carried a wealth of meaning. They told of a safe journey, of an emperor gazing on the land he was going to conquer, of a successful invasion. “I came, I saw, I conquered,” wrote Cæsar, who in turn was conquered by the beauty of Cleopatra.

Who can say what were the thoughts of the Roman emperor as he stood within the shadow of the age-old Pyramids? He was a powerful potentate, but the same thoughts must have flitted through his mind as have surged through the brains of countless unknown men when they first caught sight of the Wonders of the Desert. He must have meditated on their origin, and how they were built.

In modern times Napoleon, the greatest soldier the world has ever seen, paced in the shadow of these same Pyramids, and reflected on the eternal questions regarding them. Lord Kitchener, before he attained to fame, gazed on them hundreds of times. The great ones go to their eternal rest, but the Pyramids remain.

They were built to endure for all time. The Egyptians looked upon the tomb as their permanent home, which was to last for all eternity. This is the reason for the erection of these mountains of stone, for their solidity of construction, for their gigantic size. They have grown out of Egypt’s religious beliefs. They were built solid and big and strong, so that nothing should overturn them, so that they should defy the hand of Time and Man, and forever provide a resting-place, a home for the shadow-self of the King.

Directly a Pharaoh came to the throne, he began preparing for his last long sleep. His lifework was to prepare a tomb for himself befitting his rank and power, and he spared no pains nor means to accomplish his desire. He called his chief architects and his high priests around him, and demanded that plans be made and a site selected. Then he saw the foundation stone laid, and year by year watched the pile of masonry grow.

Judging by the number of Pyramids in existence and their size, it has been reckoned that the total man-power of Egypt was devoted for over a thousand years to building tombs for the rulers, that tomb-building, in fact, was the main industry of the country for centuries.

To build another pyramid the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu or Cheops would be a brilliant engineering feat even in our time, with all the engineering means we have at our disposal. The more we consider the Great Pyramid, the more amazing it seems that the Egyptians should have succeeded in erecting such an enormous monument some six thousand years ago. To this day it is not fully understood how it was done, but gradually evidence is accumulating which serves to indicate the principal methods that were adopted.

A few miles away, on the other side of the Nile, the limestone was quarried from the hillside at Turah. Thousands of men laboured at cutting out the mighty blocks. These were probably squared up roughly in the quarries, and then either transported to the barges on rollers made from the trunks of palm trees, or else mounted on wooden sledges that were dragged over the ground by the united efforts of hundreds of slaves. Great skill must have been required to get them safely aboard, and to unload them from the barges when they arrived on the other side of the river. There is little doubt that the site of the Pyramid was chosen close to the river and to the Turah quarries to make transport as simple as possible.

The Pyramid is built in a series of steps, the lower courses of blocks being 4 feet 11 inches high, the size diminishing as the Pyramid gets higher. Before a stone was cut or laid the Pyramid must have been carefully planned on papyri; for aught we know models may have been built to ensure its accuracy. It is plain that the builder must have calculated the sizes of all the stones course by course and the number required, for their regularity in size is not only amazing, but is also proof that the building of the Pyramid was most carefully worked out.

So extraordinary was the degree of accuracy attained by the ancient architects, that it is doubtful if a single building in all London is so correctly and accurately built as was the Great Pyramid sixty centuries ago. The Egyptians were clever enough to fix their site so that the sides of the Pyramid faced exactly north, south, east and west, without any deviation whatsoever. They had some means of measuring whereby they were able to build the lengths of the sides so truly, that there was not half an inch of difference in any one of them. The builder who is able to build four such walls over 750 feet long, without varying them half an inch in all that length, is a king of his profession. Probably there is not a house put up to-day that does not vary considerably more in the length of its small walls. For sheer accuracy in its measurements, the Great Pyramid is one of the most marvellous structures on earth, and the Egyptians were apparently able to do six thousand years ago what we find it difficult to accomplish to-day.

The Great Wall of China was built at the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives, and probably thousands of men perished in the building of the Pyramids. Accidents must have been happening all day long. The huge blocks were handled by men who dragged and pushed them to their positions. The labourers were kept hard at it by their taskmasters, whose one thought was to keep up the supply of stone. Mighty blocks weighing many tons must have often slipped and crushed the workers to death. Many of the labourers must have been maimed for life; legs were broken, arms smashed, heads and bodies crushed, as the blocks rolled and swerved in their progress.

From inferences from papyri, the great Pyramids were looked upon by the Egyptians as one of their plagues, as a scourge to the land. Men were pressed into the work, were compelled to go on with it. What mattered it to Khufu if his subjects and slaves died, so long as he built a home that would last his shadow-self for ever? We are wont to marvel at the building of the Pyramids, but under it all there must have been great cruelty as well as an incredible skill. Those monuments which to-day are the glory of Egypt, were in the past one of the afflictions of the land.

The building of the Great Pyramid entailed the creation of a mighty sloping road, which Herodotus says took 100,000 men ten years to construct. Men swarmed over the desert like ants over a disturbed anthill, making this enormous slope up which to drag and push these gigantic blocks. The centre of the slope was paved with polished stone, so that the blocks would slide easily along, but in spite of this attempt to ease the burden, the moving of the stones must have been a heart-breaking task. As the Pyramid rose, so the road grew higher.

The blocks would be heaved out of the barges by dozens of men. Great wooden levers would be inserted under the stones to prise them up to allow the rollers to be slipped under; then hundreds of men would take hold of the long ropes, harnessing themselves like beasts of burden, and drag the stones along. Men with levers would help by thrusting behind; others would walk at the sides to attend to the rollers, and run to the front with new ones directly the last had passed underneath the stone at the back. We can imagine ropes breaking, and mighty stones plunging down the causeway, sweeping scores of poor victims to destruction. Blood and tears as well as labour went to the building of the Pyramids.

From first to last, so far as we are able to gather, about 100,000 men slaved for thirty years to build the tomb of Khufu. The site chosen was not exactly level. A little hillock of rock rose on one part of it, and this was cleverly squared off and incorporated into the Pyramid, saving the transport of so many hundreds of tons of rock.

The great aim of Khufu, or Cheops, as that of all the other Pharaohs, was to protect his mummy, and prevent thieves getting into his burial chamber. To this end were devised numerous secret passages, all of which show an extraordinary ingenuity in planning, and great engineering skill in execution. The entrance to the Great Pyramid is about 45 feet up on the north face. One of the blocks of stone was made to swing inward on a pivot, and when closed it was quite impossible to locate the entrance. The Pyramid looked quite solid, without a single breach in any one of its sides. So cleverly was the entrance contrived that it baffled men for thousands of years, although countless thieves went over the Pyramid seeking eagerly for a way in. Only a lucky accident could have led the discoverer to touch that particular stone in the right way to make it swing back and disclose the opening.

Even when he found the opening, he was not much nearer the burial chamber. An underground passage was driven for over 350 feet through the solid rock at an angle below the foundations of the Pyramid, until it opened out in a chamber immediately beneath the point of the Pyramid. The chamber is really a fine hall about 46 feet long by 27 feet wide, with a roof 11½ feet above the level of the floor. On the other side of the chamber the underground passage continues for over 50 feet, but we are quite at a loss to divine the reason for this extension. Maybe the engineers drove this gallery with the definite intention of misleading any one who should eventually break a way into this underground retreat. At any rate, it is, like the rest of the passage, driven through the solid rock, and finishes up against the rock wall. No other outlet from this passage has ever been discovered, so its object is a mystery. Perhaps the engineers’ plans were altered, or perhaps it was designed to baffle thieves, and compel them to waste time by searching for an opening where none exists.

Khufu did not underrate the skill of the plunderers of the tombs. He realized to the full their patience and cleverness, and did all in his power to outwit them. The passage is lined throughout with blocks of stone, and we can imagine the robbers searching anxiously up and down the dark passage, casting back and fore, tapping the stones to try to find the outlet leading to the King’s Chamber. All the blocks look exactly alike, and they may have sought for months before they found that block in the roof which pivoted in a similar manner to the stone covering the entrance. This passage branched upward to the Queen’s Chamber, and opened out to the Grand Gallery, which is very narrow and high, at the end of which comes another passage leading to the Chamber of King Khufu.

Before the robbers were able to reach these chambers, they had many difficulties to surmount and problems to solve. At various intervals the passage was sealed by four mighty blocks of very hard granite. These blocks must have been supported until after the funeral ceremonies were completed; then the priests withdrew, the supports were knocked away, and the blocks crashed down into position in the deep grooves that were cut for them in the passage.

When the intruders surmounted one block, they were confronted by another. Their labours on the second brought them to a full stop against the face of the third. No one knows how long it took for the thieves to break into the Pyramid, but it must have taken years from the time the first secret opening was discovered. So hard was the granite with which the passage leading to the King’s and Queen’s Chambers was closed, that in one case the thieves despaired of ever getting through it, so they laboriously cut a way through the roof of the passage and clambered over the top of the granite block. They must have reaped a very rich booty, of which every trace has long since vanished.

All that remains to-day is the red granite sarcophagus in the King’s Chamber. It is an enormous stone coffin, so big that its removal is an impossibility. It is too big to be taken through the passages. The size of it indicates that it must have been placed in position when the Pyramid was being built. It shows how carefully everything was planned.

The King’s Chamber is 34 feet 3 inches long, by 17 feet 1 inch wide, with a height of 19 feet 1 inch. It is one of the wonders of the Pyramid, lined with enormous slabs of highly polished granite which reach from floor to ceiling, slabs 19 feet 1 inch high. The ceiling itself is composed of the same granite, in giant slabs nearly 4 feet wide and 17 feet 1 inch long. There are nine of these mighty slabs of polished stone, reaching from wall to wall. Their weight must be enormous, and the difficulty of getting them into position must have been prodigious. So skilfully and accurately fitted were many of the stones in the passages, that even now the point of a needle cannot be inserted between the slabs where they join.

It seems incomprehensible at first sight why this King’s Chamber has not been crushed out of existence thousands of years ago by the weight of the masonry over it. It must be remembered that what amounts to a mountain of stone rears its peak 200 feet or more above. Investigation reveals that the builders were fully alive to this danger, and the steps they took to avoid it were not only very clever, but they have worked perfectly for thousands of years. Earthquakes have occurred from time to time and displaced some of the stones, but the King’s Chamber is still intact and uncrushed.

The methods adopted by these clever old builders to preserve the Chamber are very simple, yet anything more brilliantly successful it would be difficult to devise. Above the King’s Chamber four other chambers were built to take the weight off the roof, and over these chambers two mighty slabs of hard stone were placed astride, leaning together at the top edges, which were so accurately cut that they could not possibly become displaced. These two stones, with their tops resting against each other, just as children lean two cards together on a table, take the weight of all the masonry above them, and deflect the thrust of the weight outwards instead of downwards, so that the King’s Chamber is amply protected.

The Pyramid of Khafra or Chephren, slightly smaller than the Great Pyramid, is still a mighty monument of the past, and although the Egyptians were free from foreign wars when it was built, they groaned under the necessity of doing this work for the king at home. The building of the Pyramids was one of the hardships of the Egyptian nation.

When the Great Pyramid was finished, a pinnacle of hard limestone was set on the top, and all the steps were filled in from the peak downwards with the same stone, to make the surface of the Pyramid quite smooth from apex to foundation. But the facing blocks of stone have now all disappeared. Many of them have been carried off to put into new buildings, others lie shattered all about the base, where the debris rises for 40 feet or so. The point of the Great Pyramid has also gone, and there is now a platform about 36 feet square, on which visitors may stand and gaze on the wonders of the desert.

Only 500 yards away the head of the Great Sphinx emerges from the sands. Nobody knows what the Sphinx represents. The most learned investigators are uncertain of its origin and age. Some think it may have been carved by the sculptors of one of the great pyramid builders, but others regard it as very much older. Probably it represents the sun god Ra, but for centuries the Arabs have known it as the Father of Terrors.

From the tip of its paws to the end of its back it measures 190 feet. It is 65 feet high, and its neck is 69 feet round, while the tallest man could roll in between the lips, were they open, for they are 7 feet wide. The Sphinx is still joined to the mother rock which forms the floor of the desert hereabouts. It was carved out of the outcropping stone, which the sculptors chipped and fashioned with infinite labour into the shape of the Father of Terrors. The astounding thing is that in spite of the gigantic size of the figure, the proportions are faultless.

THE COLOSSI OF MEMNON, SET UP BY AMENHOTEP III., IN FRONT OF HIS TEMPLE AT THEBES. THE TEMPLE HAS DISAPPEARED, BUT THESE GIGANTIC FIGURES, WHICH ARE ABOUT 50 FEET HIGH, ARE AMONG THE MARVELS OF THE NILE

Between its paws was a temple, that gave up a statue of Khafra, the builder of the Second Pyramid, but temple and paws are now covered with sand. Indeed the Sphinx has spent the greater part of its existence under the sands of the desert. One of the first things Thothmes IV did when he came to the throne over three thousand years ago, was to set men to uncover the Sphinx, and dig the sand away from its 140-foot-long body. From time to time others have removed the sand, but always the sand comes back and quickly steals over the body and covers it, leaving the head emerging like some monster of the desert.

In the past the Sphinx has been badly treated by the ignorant Arabs, who have smashed its face about and given it that strange expression which is a half-wry smile. Probably thousands of years hence, when our present civilization has disappeared and been forgotten, the Sphinx will still be regarding the Nile and the world with the same half-sad, half-mocking expression.

The Sphinx is as lasting as the mountains, as eternal as the rock out of which it is carved. The riddle of the origin of this masterpiece of an ancient civilization may yet be solved by a man digging with a spade in the desert sands.

The famous Colossi of Memnon, set up by Amenhotep III in front of his chapel on the bank of the Nile at Thebes, almost rival the Sphinx in their gigantic stature. The great figures, 50 feet high, are carved out of solid blocks of limestone, and there they sit on guard as they have sat for thousands of years. The floods of the Nile swirl about them, laving their injured feet, but the temple they guarded has long since vanished from the face of the earth.

CHAPTER VII

Thebes at its zenith was one of the glories of the old world, with some of the most marvellous temples ever imagined by the mind of man or executed by human hand. The ancient capital of Egypt was unequalled in magnificence. King after king increased the wonders of the temple of Ammon; their sculptors carved great sphinxes out of stone, which were set up in an avenue over a mile long. Building after building was added to the original one. Mighty gateways, or pylons, 142 feet high, were built, and from these projected flagstaffs on which gaily coloured banners fluttered in the breeze.

The great hall of Ammon was composed of pillars 78 feet high and 33 feet round, all carved and painted in vivid colours. Lesser halls and temples were added, and here, amid a blaze of colour and sunshine, the festivals were held, the high priests performed their sacred rites, the Pharaoh drove up in his gorgeous chariots with the harness of his horses ablaze with gold, while his subjects shielded their faces from the monarch who shared the glory of Ammon. At intervals the high priests brought out the sacred boat of the god, raised it aloft on their shoulders, and carried it around the temple, while the populace stood silent with awe. For a brief instant the curtains were drawn aside, and the god was disclosed to the multitude before returning to the silence and sanctity of the temple, from which the common people were rigidly excluded.

About the king gathered all the wit and wisdom of the Egyptian empire. Magnificent banquets were held, at which were served to the guests fine dishes of venison, roast ducks and other fowl, and fish. Wine flowed, maidens danced. There was talk and laughter and love.

To-day Thebes has vanished. The one-time capital of Egypt is a desert ruin. Near by are the villages of Karnak and Luxor, with a few natives living in their humble dwellings, and just a big hotel for the use of travellers, who come here to gaze on the ruins of the past.

It is strange that thousands of years ago, when these islands were inhabited by a few savages who painted their bodies, threw a skin about them for warmth, and lived in the rudest of huts for shelter, far away to the south on the Nile a mighty civilization was flourishing, that would compare very favourably with the civilization of to-day.

A PARTLY-HEWN OBELISK STILL ATTACHED TO THE ROCK IN ONE OF THE ANCIENT QUARRIES

While the barbarians of Britain were building their rude huts, the Egyptians were carving colossal pillars for the Hall of the Temple of Ammon, pillars over 30 feet round, and painting them with colours which are still fresh after all this lapse of time. Even then they had been building with brick for thousands of years. The tomb paintings show the brickmakers puddling the alluvial soil with their feet, shaping the mud into bricks, and baking them hard in the fierce heat of the sun. Moreover these bricks endured for centuries, and still endure; whereas many of the red bricks made in England thirty or forty years ago are perishing fast.

Speculation is still going on as to how the Egyptians used to handle the enormous stones found in the ruins, and how they managed to place in position monuments like Cleopatra’s Needle. There is mention of certain engines having been used to lift the stones of the Pyramids, but what these engines were, nobody to-day can say with certainty.

Cleopatra’s Needle was roughly shaped on three sides in the quarry, before it was detached from the mother rock. The methods of detaching a monument from the rock show that the Egyptians were quite conversant with natural laws, that they possessed the ability to harness these laws in order to save human labour. How many modern craftsmen would succeed in separating one of these huge stones from the mountain-side, by using such simple things as a drill, some wooden pegs, and water? With these crude implements the task would be looked upon nowadays as impossible. Yet from obelisks still attached to the rock, it is obvious that such primitive appliances were sufficient to enable the Egyptians to perform their ancient miracles.

On the exact line where they desired to sever the stone, they cut a deep groove, and at frequent intervals along this groove they drilled holes, into which they hammered wooden pegs very tightly, until the tops were a little below the surface of the stone. Then water was poured on the pegs, and as it soaked into the wood they swelled, until the expansion of them all together was so irresistible that the rock was split along the groove.

Many huge pillars and statues were also sculptured in the living rock before being detached, for areas of rock have been found all marked off in squares with figures drawn on them ready to be carved by the sculptor. Like the stones of the Pyramids, many of these figures and monoliths were transported on sleds, others were dragged over rollers. It was a common practice to send thousands of men to some distant place, to cut out a giant block of stone, and bring it back for the use of the king. Ancient drawings showing gigantic statues being dragged along on sledges by armies of slaves, reveal to us how the transport was effected.

But there was the difficulty of erecting an obelisk when it had reached the spot for which it was intended. A weight of 186 tons, like that of Cleopatra’s Needle, is a tremendous problem to handle, yet the Egyptian engineers accomplished it successfully. Such a weight was actually small compared with some of the weights they tackled, for they moved and erected single stones weighing twice and thrice as much, that is weights up to nearly 600 tons.

If our engineers to-day were given the same problem, they would still have to puzzle over it, in spite of the giant cranes that could be brought to the spot to help them. The mammoth lifting machines designed by modern engineers were unknown in the days of the Pharaohs, yet the ancients were able to do work without them which we would find it rather difficult to do with them.

Ever so many theories have been propounded as to how they set up these huge blocks of stone. One suggestion is that the stones were dragged to the site and their bases placed in position; then in some way, perhaps by the use of giant beams over which the ropes attached to the top ends of the stones were passed, they were pulled upright, a little at a time. As they were hauled up, blocks of stone may have been slipped under them to carry the weight.

Other theories abound, but the likeliest theory of all is that the Egyptians built a big sloping embankment like that used in the construction of the Pyramids. Up this the obelisk was hauled, base first, until it reached the very top, and projected on to a bed of sand. Labourers shovelled the sand away from under the obelisk, just as ants dig the earth from beneath a mouse they want to bury, and as the sand was removed, so the base of the obelisk sank down, until it gradually tilted upright exactly in the position designed for it. No simpler, or more brilliant, way could be found of solving this difficult problem.

One of the monoliths erected by Queen Hatshepsut, at Karnak, is 109 feet high, and she records that at her bidding this mighty stone, weighing hundreds of tons, was hewn out of the quarry, the sides were properly shaped, and the stone conveyed to the site, all within seven months. The Queen gave her orders, and the people obeyed.

Such methods, if they were followed to-day, would be so expensive as to be prohibitive. In those days there were no unions, and no union rates of wages. The overseer of the works could have all the labour he needed. If he could not manage with a thousand labourers, then he could have ten thousand. The king was the lord and master of his people, as well as of his slaves. The overseer had only to say that he wanted more men, and the king would give orders for the men to be procured. If they did not come willingly, they would be seized and pressed into the service of the king. So long as they were doing the king’s work they would be fed, but wages in the present sense were unknown.

THE BEAUTIFUL TEMPLE KNOWN AS PHARAOH’S BED, CRADLED IN THE WATERS OF THE NILE, WHICH HAVE COVERED THE ISLAND OF PHILÆ AND PARTLY SUBMERGED THE NOBLE RUINS SINCE THE BUILDING OF THE ASSOUAN DAM

Those noble ruins on the island of Philæ higher up the Nile above Assouan may no more be seen in all their glory. They have been sacrificed to the Nile god and to modern necessities. Realizing that the building of the great dam at Assouan would raise the level of the river and submerge the island, the builders went to enormous trouble to underpin the ruins and make them secure against the flood. This work was carried out with great difficulty, and in a masterly manner. The completion of the Assouan dam saw the waters of the Nile slowly creep over the ruined temples, and there may now be seen peeping above the surface of the water the tops of a few columns which, owing to their peculiar resemblance to a fourpost bed, are generally known as Pharaoh’s Bed.

A wonderful work in a land of wonders is the barrage of Assouan, but the benefits that would accrue to the land by holding up and deflecting the waters of the Nile were not unrealized by the ancients. Thousands of years ago the problems of controlling the Nile were studied as carefully as they have been studied in our own time. One Pharaoh, known as Amenhotep III, ordered his engineers to work out a scheme for controlling the inundation. He desired to store up some of the Nile water when there was an excess, and draw on these surplus supplies when the river was low.

The work he undertook was in its way as wonderful as that at Assouan, but when we consider that it was started nearly four thousand years ago it appears even more marvellous. Labourers swarmed over the land, cutting channels in the rock, and driving canals connected with the great expanse of water near Fayoum known as Lake Moeris, a natural reservoir which served to store the water just as the barrage at Assouan stores the water to-day. The Pharaoh had the foresight to tap this huge supply of water to irrigate the surrounding country, and the land, no longer at the mercy of the Nile floods, prospered accordingly.

Amenhotep, like all the other Pharaohs, was anxious to protect his treasure from thieves, and he commanded his cleverest architects to design a palace in which people who went inside without permission might wander for ever without finding their way out again. The whole of the interior of the palace was composed of small rooms, in number three thousand, leading by narrow passages one into the other. The way in and out was a strict secret, and those who broke in might wander round and in and out of the chambers until they died of starvation. This palace was the famous Labyrinth, a maze in stone to defeat thieves and robbers. No trace of it now remains.

The kings of Egypt and the chief men were obsessed with the idea that their tombs would be plundered, and that the robbers would deprive their doubles of all chance of future life. It must be admitted that they had good cause for their obsession. They knew that the same subjects who had buried previous kings and lamented their deaths, had seized the first opportunity of rifling the tombs of their treasures, and the Pharaohs were well aware that their own subjects would not be above doing the same thing.

To rifle a tomb was one of the greatest crimes that could be committed, but the thieves were quite prepared to sacrifice their chances in the next life for the prospect of gaining something in this.

The tombs indicate that for thousands of years a continual battle of wits was being fought between the kings, who wished to preserve their tombs from desecration, and the thieves who wished to plunder them. The kings built temples for themselves, and had a strong burial chamber placed at one end. The thieves broke in easily and abstracted the treasure. Then the kings made secret burial chambers in their temples for the safeguarding of their mummies, but the thieves located them, and robbed them just the same.

At last a queen hit on the idea of building a fine temple for herself at Thebes, with a special sanctuary for her mummy. But not for a moment did she intend her mummy to rest within the shade of the temple. She sent her priests and tried servants into the desolate valley, to seek a secret hiding-place for her mummy high up in the cliff. They cut a chamber in the rock, and made the tomb in that valley known to-day as the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings.

Other kings came to the valley. They erected temples, and their engineers cut into the heart of the mountains, to make chambers in which to hide their bodies. They built up the places as strongly as they could. They devised obstructions to stop any one from entering. They hid the entrances to the tombs so carefully, that it was impossible to tell whether the places had ever been disturbed.

All their labour, all their secrecy, was in vain. Not a single tomb in all Egypt has yet been found intact. Every tomb discovered has been rifled of its treasure. Even the tomb of Tutankhamen is no exception. The actual holes which the robbers made to enter the tomb were discovered, and, judging by the wealth of the furniture and other things remaining, the haul of gold and silver must have been enormous.

The high priests, horrified at the desecration of the tombs, feared so much for the royal mummies in their charge, that they went out stealthily into the deserted hills and sought a secret hiding-place. Then they brought many royal mummies to it, one by one, probably under cover of darkness, and hid them away from thievish eyes and hands.

For centuries, for thousands of years, the robbers were defeated; the ancient kings and queens of Egypt slept on undisturbed in their secret sepulchre. Yet in the end the tomb robbers triumphed. Somehow, sometime, they managed to find the tomb. They did not blazon their discovery to the world. The booty was too rich for that, so they began systematically robbing the tomb and disposing of the relics to travellers who passed that way.

The ultimate discovery of the tomb by Sir Gaston Maspero is one of the greatest romances of Egyptology. One day in 1881, a visitor showed Maspero some wonderfully illuminated pages of a royal ritual. Maspero, gazing on them in amazement, inquired whence they came, and learned that they had been bought at Thebes.

Instantly all Maspero’s suspicions crystallized into action. He had long suspected that the Arabs had found a royal tomb, and here was definite evidence. Without delay he journeyed to Thebes, and discussed the matter with the authorities. Secret inquiries pointed to four brothers, who lived in some deserted tombs, as having knowledge of the find. A decision to arrest one of them, in the hopes that he would speak, was at once carried into effect. The Arab was thrown into prison, but he said nothing, denied all knowledge of the matter for seven or eight weeks. Maspero could not wait. Offering a big reward for information of the discovery, he returned down the Nile, and ultimately his reward tempted one of the brothers to come forward and agree to lead the authorities to the tomb.

Maspero, back in Cairo, sent an Egyptologist with an assistant hot-foot to Thebes. A rendezvous was fixed at Deir-el-Bahari. Picking their way over the rocks, the Arabs led the two strangers along the foot of the escarpment which frowned bare and sinister above their heads. In a short while they came to a boulder which had fallen from the cliffs above. Screened in the most remarkable manner by this mighty rock, the entrance had escaped human eyes for three thousand years. Arabs and strangers lit their candles, a rope was uncoiled and shaken down the black shaft, and one after another they slid down 40 feet to the bottom.

The strangers groped their way along a tunnel, following the flickering candles just ahead, stooping to escape the rocky ceiling, at times almost having to go down on their hands and knees. They turned a corner, still groping and climbing along the rocky passage, down a flight of rock-cut stairs, deeper and deeper into the recesses of the mountain, kicking against bits of mummy cases, fragments of bandages. On they went, their excitement rising with every step.

At last they came to a chamber in the rock. It was like an Aladdin’s cave. Mummy cases were everywhere, standing up against the wall, lying down and piled on top of each other. Great piles of boxes, alabaster vases, statuettes—it was incredible, absolutely amazing.

Without giving the newcomers time to take in the wonderful sight, the Arabs led the way through this chamber down and down through another passage. After traversing 60 yards they came to a chamber that was even more amazing, more wonderful than the last. The strangers could hardly believe their eyes. All around the burial chamber were royal mummies, the glitter of gold and colour showing up under the flickering candles. The cases were exquisitely carved and decorated, so well preserved that it was as though they were made but yesterday.

So intensely excited was the Egyptologist, that it required an effort of will to make him realize this was not a dream, but reality, that he was the first white man in the history of the world to gaze on such a glorious sight; to see the ancient kings and queens as they had slumbered through the centuries.

He looked around him, examined the royal names and titles. Here were Seti I, Thothmes II, Thothmes III, Rameses II. Wherever he looked the mummy of a king or queen greeted his astonished gaze. He was literally astounded, hardly able to take it all in. The magnitude of the find overwhelmed him. He counted the mummies one by one—eleven kings, nine queens, a prince and a princess! It was unbelievable.

In a little while, when the first excitement had passed away, he became the man of action once more. Realizing to the full that only the promptest measures could save the tomb from being looted, he quickly collected three hundred Arabs, and he and his assistant began to remove the treasures. They never halted, never rested, labouring on all through that day and the next without a moment’s sleep, removing the kings and queens from their resting-place, sewing them up in sailcloth, and getting them into the open. In forty-eight hours they cleared the tomb of everything it contained, and in another three days they had conveyed the mummies over the plain of Thebes to the Nile.

The natives were ugly, threatening, angry that their kings should be disturbed—still more angry that there was no chance for them to plunder the tomb any more. Not for a moment dared the Egyptologist and his assistant leave their precious charge, not until the steamer arrived that was to take the royal mummies down to Cairo.

The news of the discovery spread like wildfire through the villages, and as the steamer passed slowly down the Nile, the Egyptian women hailed the passing with the death wail, running along the banks, tearing their hair and uttering their awful cries. Men wailed and fired their guns. It was one of the most remarkable sights ever witnessed, the natives of our own time mourning the Pharaohs who reigned thousands of years ago.

It was the triumph of a man whose whole life was wrapped up in the past life of Egypt, whose own life was as romantic as that of any man who was destined to throw a little light upon the dead civilizations of the Pharaohs. Maspero was but a boy of fourteen when he was attracted by some of the ancient picture-writing of the Egyptians. The queer little figures exercised a strange spell over him. He was quite fascinated by them, so much so, that he made up his boyish mind to learn to read them.

Probably hundreds of thousands of boys have seen pictures of the hieroglyphics and thought them very funny, but who has heard of another boy who was so anxious to read them that he studied them at any and every opportunity, as Gaston Maspero did? He who seeks knowledge will always find some way of acquiring it. Gaston Maspero studied the picture-writing to such good purpose that he learned to read it quite easily and translate it with considerable skill. He used to read the pictures to his school friends, and they were considerably impressed by this ability.

One night in 1867, some of Maspero’s fellow-students were having dinner with their tutor, and Mariette, the famous Egyptologist, was present. Naturally the talk turned on Egypt, and the students tried to impress Mariette by mentioning that Maspero could read hieroglyphics, and that he had taught himself.

Mariette was amused at the idea. “Ask him to read this for me,” he said, and gave them an inscription he had just discovered and which had not been translated.

Maspero’s companions took the inscription, and Maspero sat down and translated it. When Mariette received the translation he was far more amazed at finding this young man of twenty-one in Paris who could read hieroglyphics, than he would have been at finding some new temple on the Nile. It seemed to him simply incredible, so he gave Maspero something else to translate—lines that were all mutilated and from which a great deal was missing.

Maspero sat down to the problem, and after a few days managed to translate the fragments and supply the missing parts. Then Mariette realized that he had indeed found a born Egyptologist, and it is not surprising that the boy who was so interested that he taught himself to read the picture-writing should succeed Mariette in Egypt.

Who knows what Mariette thought when the translations of Maspero were brought to him? Perhaps his mind flashed back over the years to the rather unhappy time when he, a lad of eighteen, was professor of French at a school in Stratford-on-Avon, to the days when his talent for drawing was confined to designing ribbons for a Coventry manufacturer. Maybe he remembered how happily he returned to France to take his degree at Douai, those articles he wrote to add to his income, the cousin who had been dealing with Champollion’s material, and whose death brought all the material of that great man under Mariette’s own fingers.

From that period dates Mariette’s own romantic career. He was under thirty when he went to Egypt in search of manuscripts, and found instead the ruins of the Serapeum at Memphis. His diggers fought the desert, and rescued the Sphinx from the grasping sands, tore the drift of centuries from the ruins of the temples of Edfu, uncovered the glories of Karnak. The years brought more discoveries, his work was acclaimed, honours were heaped upon him. The call of Egypt to Mariette was irresistible, as it had been to Champollion, as it was to Maspero. Fate linked these three Frenchmen together to add to our knowledge of the past. They loved France, but the deserts and the debris of Egypt became part of their lives.

Often they went in the burning sun to the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings—one of the most desolate places on earth. Not a tree to be seen, not a flower, not even a blade of grass. Vegetation cannot live there. It is a veritable valley of the dead, an inferno of desolation. Birds avoid it, animals shun it, only the bats haunt the tombs. There at the base of the hills is the wonderful temple of Queen Hatshepsut, with its rows of pillars standing like sentinels before the blackness which is beyond. Years ago no trace of it could be seen, but a man with a spade came along and found it, and after prodigious labours it was dug out of the overlying rubble and rock in which it was buried.

Everywhere is the eternal rubble and sand. Huge piles of debris mark the sites where the diggers have been working; broken steps leading downwards into the mountains indicate where tombs have been found.

Rain hardly ever falls there.... If you sat and waited for a shower of rain, you would have to wait on an average for five years! Perhaps twenty times in a century the clouds break over the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings, but the ground is so parched and rocky that a deluge is almost swallowed up as it falls. In an hour the valley is again as dry as a bone.

THE WONDERFUL TEMPLE OF QUEEN HATSHEPSUT AT THE BASE OF THE CLIFFS IN THE VALLEY OF THE TOMBS OF THE KINGS. THE TINY FIGURE OF A MAN, NO BIGGER THAN A PIN-HEAD, ON THE CENTRAL ROAD, SERVES TO INDICATE THE SIZE OF THE TEMPLE

The valley leads nowhere, except into the desert. There was nothing to call the natives in that direction. It was like a lonely valley in another world, and this loneliness no doubt was one of the factors which decided the Pharaohs to seek their last resting-places here. Another factor was that the limestone of the hills was an excellent stone in which to cut the chambers which were to be the eternal homes of the kings.

All their thought, all their secrecy to keep their tombs inviolate, was in vain. The most trusted men were chosen to carve out these underground chambers, but where many men are engaged on a secret mission, the secret is bound to leak out.

Some of the workers may have told their wives, who in turn may have dropped a remark in all innocence which led the robbers to the exact spot. The workers themselves, despite the faith of their masters, were not always to be trusted, and there is little doubt that some of them led the thieves to the tombs and told them exactly where and how to break in, that in some cases the very men who had built the tombs came back afterwards by night and plundered them.

It may easily have been the builders who robbed the tomb of Tutankhamen, for Mr. Carter discovered that the thieves entered within a few years of the King’s burial, and that the tomb was then resealed by the keepers of the royal burial-places.

CHAPTER VIII

The romance of ancient Egypt is not nearly told. Hundreds of volumes have been written about it; hundreds more are still to write. Day by day something is being turned up under the spade to increase our knowledge of those far-off times, and though we know more than the people of a century ago, our present knowledge will probably prove trifling compared with the knowledge of a century hence.

For years the French, favoured by important digging concessions, made many fine discoveries, among them those of Mariette who, going up to Thebes, saw a few columns sticking out of the sand at Karnak and began to excavate the site. Most men would have quailed before the gigantic task, but Mariette set his diggers to work, and slowly but surely rescued from the clutches of the desert all that remained of one of the most remarkable temples in the world. Mountains of sand and broken rock were shifted, not by mammoth machines that dug out a truck-load of sand at once, but by natives who shovelled it into baskets and ran off with it, seven pounds at a time!

When Mariette returned to Egypt with Louis Napoleon some years later, the Egyptologist was as keen on the work as ever. He again began to excavate, and among other things found a statue representing the god Ammon, in whose honour the temple at Karnak was originally built. Standing by the knee of the god was a headless figure, said to be that of Tutankhamen in his boyhood.

Mariette, well knowing the value of the group, showed his regard for Prince Napoleon by making him a present of the statue, and the Prince, fired by what he saw in Egypt, and no doubt by Mariette’s enthusiasm, started to collect things Egyptian.

The time came when Prince Napoleon made up his mind to sell his Egyptian treasures. He sold many things, but no one would look at the statue, so it was bought in at the sale for £20. For long it remained in the Prince’s château, until a dealer eventually acquired it for a trifling sum. Quickly assuring himself of the antiquity of the statue, the dealer went to the Louvre to offer the piece to the nation.

The authorities inquired the price.

“I have been offered 300,000 francs by an American, but I would rather let France have it for 250,000 francs,” was the reply.

It was true. An American had offered £12,000 for the despised statue, which no one would buy at the original sale, the same statue which the Louvre gladly acquired for £10,000.

Museums will pay almost anything for fine specimens that throw some light on past ages. They will willingly fit out special expeditions to various parts of the world. Often museums cooperate in working a site, as in the case of the Temple of the Moon God at Ur, in Mesopotamia, which has been worked by the University Museum of Philadelphia and the British Museum. The Americans are indeed taking an increasing interest in digging up the past, and they have many fine discoveries to their credit, not least among them being the finding of the famous Nippur tablets in Mesopotamia, tablets which now grace the museum at Philadelphia. Theodore Davis, too, has done splendid work in the Nile Valley, and found several important tombs, among them that of Thothmes IV.

Yet, since men began to dig in Egypt, no tomb has revealed so many treasures as that of Tutankhamen. The value of the contents of the tomb, with its lion-couches and chariots and alabaster statues and vases, is computed at £3,000,000. It is indeed impossible to fix the monetary worth of such things. All that can be said is that their value to science is incalculable.

This is by no means the first big find to be made by Mr. Howard Carter, for years ago he revealed the tomb of Queen Hatshepsut, whose temple is one of the sights of the Valley of the Kings. The entrance to her tomb, high up on the face of the rocky hillside, led to a gallery winding round and round like a corkscrew. The builders of the tomb must have had a terrible time, for they unluckily selected a very bad spot, where the rock was soft, and so they were driven to go down and down, until they hit on a place where the rock was hard enough to serve for the burial chamber. Here the chamber was hewn out of the rock, and here it was found by Mr. Howard Carter several thousand years later, after the usual thieves had plundered it. The stench and heat were almost overpowering.

Mr. Howard Carter is more familiar with Thebes than most Londoners are with London. At one time he was Inspector-General of Antiquities there, so it will be realized that his knowledge of the Valley of the Tombs of the Kings is quite exceptional, and that it was something more than good luck which led him to his greatest find of all.

It is astonishing how trifles sometimes lead to big discoveries. For instance, when Professor Flinders Petrie was at Gizeh in the ’eighties, an Arab offered to sell him part of an alabaster statuette. Instantly Petrie recognized it as a very early Greek work.

“Where did you get it?” he asked.

The Arab told him, and at the first opportunity the Egyptologist took the train to the nearest point. For 20 miles he trudged over the country, often going astray, but coming in the end to many mounds in the desert. Countless fragments of early Greek pottery furnished Petrie with all the evidence he needed. Quickly filling his pockets, he started on his long walk back to the train.