Part 1 (1/2)

The Treasury of Ancient Egypt.

by Arthur E. P. B. Weigall.

PREFACE.

No person who has travelled in Egypt will require to be told that it is a country in which a considerable amount of waiting and waste of time has to be endured. One makes an excursion by train to see some ruins, and, upon returning to the station, the train is found to be late, and an hour or more has to be dawdled away. Crossing the Nile in a rowing-boat the sailors contrive in one way or another to prolong the journey to a length of half an hour or more. The excursion steamer will run upon a sandbank, and will there remain fast for a part of the day.

The resident official, travelling from place to place, spends a great deal of time seated in railway stations or on the banks of the Nile, waiting for his train or his boat to arrive; and he has, therefore, a great deal of time for thinking. I often try to fill in these dreary periods by jotting down a few notes on some matter which has recently been discussed, or registering and elaborating arguments which have chanced lately to come into the thoughts. These notes are shaped and ”written up” when next there is a spare hour, and a few books to refer to; and ultimately they take the form of articles or papers, some of which find their way into print.

This volume contains twelve chapters, written at various times and in various places, each dealing with some subject drawn from the great treasury of Ancient Egypt. Some of the chapters have appeared as articles in magazines. Chapters iv., v., and viii. were published in 'Blackwood's Magazine'; chapter vii. in 'Putnam's Magazine' and the 'Pall Mall Magazine'; and chapter ix. in the 'Century Magazine.' I have to thank the editors for allowing me to reprint them here. The remaining seven chapters have been written specially for this volume.

LUXOR, UPPER EGYPT, _November_ 1910.

PART I

THE VALUE OF THE TREASURY.

”History no longer shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise man. You shall not tell me by languages and t.i.tles a catalogue of the volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets have described that G.o.ddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful events and experiences.... He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars, and all the recorded benefits of heaven and earth.”

EMERSON.

CHAPTER I.

THE VALUE OF ARCHaeOLOGY.

The archaeologist whose business it is to bring to light by pick and spade the relics of bygone ages, is often accused of devoting his energies to work which is of no material profit to mankind at the present day. Archaeology is an unapplied science, and, apart from its connection with what is called culture, the critic is inclined to judge it as a pleasant and worthless amus.e.m.e.nt. There is nothing, the critic tells us, of pertinent value to be learned from the Past which will be of use to the ordinary person of the present time; and, though the archaeologist can offer acceptable information to the painter, to the theologian, to the philologist, and indeed to most of the followers of the arts and sciences, he has nothing to give to the ordinary layman.

In some directions the imputation is unanswerable; and when the interests of modern times clash with those of the past, as, for example, in Egypt where a beneficial reservoir has destroyed the remains of early days, there can be no question that the recording of the threatened information and the minimising of the destruction, is all that the value of the archaeologist's work ent.i.tles him to ask for. The critic, however, usually overlooks some of the chief reasons that archaeology can give for even this much consideration, reasons which const.i.tute its modern usefulness; and I therefore propose to point out to him three or four of the many claims which it may make upon the attention of the layman.

In the first place it is necessary to define the meaning of the term ”Archaeology.” Archaeology is the study of the facts of ancient history and ancient lore. The word is applied to the study of all ancient doc.u.ments and objects which may be cla.s.sed as antiquities; and the archaeologist is understood to be the man who deals with a period for which the evidence has to be excavated or otherwise discovered. The age at which an object becomes an antiquity, however, is quite undefined, though practically it may be reckoned at a hundred years; and ancient history is, after all, the tale of any period which is not modern. Thus an archaeologist does not necessarily deal solely with the remote ages.

Every chronicler of the events of the less recent times who goes to the original doc.u.ments for his facts, as true historians must do during at least a part of their studies, is an archaeologist; and, conversely, every archaeologist who in the course of his work states a series of historical facts, becomes an historian. Archaeology and history are inseparable; and nothing is more detrimental to a n.o.ble science than the att.i.tude of certain so-called archaeologists who devote their entire time to the study of a sequence of objects without proper consideration for the history which those objects reveal. Antiquities are the relics of human mental energy; and they can no more be cla.s.sified without reference to the minds which produced them than geological specimens can be discussed without regard to the earth. There is only one thing worse than the att.i.tude of the archaeologist who does not study the story of the periods with which he is dealing, or construct, if only in his thoughts, living history out of the objects discovered by him; and that is the att.i.tude of the historian who has not familiarised himself with the actual relics left by the people of whom he writes, or has not, when possible, visited their lands. There are many ”archaeologists” who do not care a snap of the fingers for history, surprising as this may appear; and there are many historians who take no interest in manners and customs. The influence of either is pernicious.

It is to be understood, therefore, that in using the word Archaeology I include History: I refer to history supplemented and aggrandised by the study of the arts, crafts, manners, and customs of the period under consideration.

As a first argument the value of archaeology in providing a precedent for important occurrences may be considered. Archaeology is the structure of ancient history, and it is the voice of history which tells us that a Cretan is always a Cretan, and a Jew always a Jew. History, then, may well take her place as a definite a.s.set of statecraft, and the law of Precedent may be regarded as a fundamental factor in international politics. What has happened before may happen again; and it is the hand of the archaeologist that directs our attention to the affairs and circ.u.mstances of olden times, and warns us of the possibilities of their recurrence. It may be said that the statesman who has ranged in the front of his mind the proven characteristics of the people with whom he is dealing has a perquisite of the utmost importance.

Any archaeologist who, previous to the rise of j.a.pan during the latter half of the nineteenth century, had made a close study of the history of that country and the character of its people, might well have predicted unerringly its future advance to the position of a first-cla.s.s power.

The amazing faculty of imitation displayed by the j.a.panese in old times was patent to him. He had seen them borrow part of their arts, their sciences, their crafts, their literature, their religion, and many of their customs from the Chinese; and he might have been aware that they would likewise borrow from the West, as soon as they had intercourse with it, those essentials of civilisation which would raise them to their present position in the world. To him their fearlessness, their tenacity, and their patriotism, were known; and he was so well aware of their powers of organisation, that he might have foreseen the rapid development which was to take place.

What historian who has read the ancient books of the Irish--the Book of the Dun Cow, the Book of Ballymote, the Book of Lismore, and the like--can show either surprise or dismay at the events which have occurred in Ireland in modern times? Of the hundreds of kings of Ireland whose histories are epitomised in such works as that of the old archaeologist Keating, it would be possible to count upon the fingers those who have died in peace; and the archaeologist, thus, knows better than to expect the descendants of these kings to live in harmony one with the other. National characteristics do not change unless, as in the case of the Greeks, the stock also changes.

In the Jews we have another example of the persistence of those national characteristics which history has made known to us. The Jews first appear in the dimness of the remote past as a group of nomad tribes, wandering over southern Palestine, Egypt, and the intervening deserts; and at the present day we see them still homeless, scattered over the face of the globe, the ”tribe of the wandering foot and weary breast.”

In no country has the archaeologist been more active than in Egypt during the last half century, and the contributions which his spade and pick have offered to history are of first-rate importance to that study as a whole. The eye may now travel down the history of the Nile Valley from prehistoric days to the present time almost without interruption; and now that the anthropologist has shown that the modern Egyptians, Mussulman and Copt, peasant and townsman, belong to one and the same race of ancient Egyptians, one may surely judge to-day's inhabitants of the country in the light of yesterday's records. In his report for the year 1906, Lord Cromer, questioning whether the modern inhabitants of the country were capable of governing their own land, tells us that we must go back to the precedent of Pharaonic days to discover if the Egyptians ever ruled themselves successfully.