THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN PERIOD
The coming of Mariette in 1850 marked the close of the old and bad
period of reckless pillage in Egypt. His thirty years of ceaseless
struggle against difficulties formed the transition period, in which
the foundations of the modern science of Egyptology were being laid,
but in which its aims and methods were as yet but partially and
imperfectly understood. With his death in 1881, and the beginning of
the reign of his successor, the late Sir Gaston Maspero, we may fairly
be said to reach the dawn of the modern period, in which new men
and new methods have completely revolutionised the whole conception
of archæology, and made it one of the most fruitful aids to the
reconstruction and the comprehension of ancient history, and above all
the indispensable interpreter of the life of ancient peoples. It seems
fitting, therefore, that at this point we should stop for a little to
consider what archæology is, and what are its aims, its methods, and
its materials; for with regard to all these points there is, save in
the case of those who are more or less students of the past, a very
general haziness in the public mind.
To the average man, archæology might be quite satisfactorily defined
as the study of old stones and old bones, potsherds, and fragments of
corroded metal--a study presupposing, on the part of the student, a
curious and perverted taste for the dry and the dusty and a disregard
for all the things which have in them the true sap and joy of life.
“Your true antiquarian,” it has been said, “loveth a thing the better
for that it is rotten and stinketh”; and this judgment, more pointed
than polite, fairly represents the conception which most people cherish
of the work of the excavator and the interpreter of his results.
Now and again this crude and summary judgment is shaken for a little
by some wonderful discovery which seems to hint that there is more in
archæology than the man in the street had thought. Some Pharaoh, like
Tutankhamen, is found “lying in glory, in his own house,” as Isaiah
puts it, and the world in general begins to turn in its sleep and dream
for a while of the romance of buried treasure. It may be suspected that
no small part of the interest awakened with regard to Tutankhamen’s
tomb arose from the fact that there was talk of the money value of the
find running into millions sterling. A science which can produce assets
like that must be worth attention. To tell anyone whose interest has
thus been excited that the money value of the find, even if it has
not been ridiculously overestimated, as is most likely the case, is
the least important aspect of it, absolutely negligible in comparison
with its other values, is merely to invite incredulity, polite or
otherwise. In any case the temporary interest of the find soon dies
away, and the public reverts to its old and normal conception of the
archæologist as an amiable and quite harmless lunatic, and of his study
as the dullest and dustiest thing under heaven.
All this, of course, is just about as wrong, and as stupidly wrong, as
anything well can be. It is, indeed, exactly the opposite of the truth.
The explorer, instead of being inspired with a malignant disregard for
the sap and joy of life, is really so enamoured of these very things
that one of his main objects is to endeavour to make the world realise
them not only in the present, but for the past also. His purpose, and
his business, if he has any real understanding of the end for which
Providence created him (for there are some archæologists who have not,
and who almost justify the worst that the public can believe of their
science), is not the mere gathering of facts, but the reconstruction
by means of these of the life of the past, for the interest, the help,
and the guidance of the present. His work is not complete until he has
presented a picture of that ancient world in which he is interested,
not as it is now, a handful of unrelated fragments of dry bone and
dusty papyrus and mouldering metal, but as it was when the dry bones
were alive, clothed with flesh and inspired with spirit, when the
words on the scroll throbbed with the hopes and fears of a living man
or woman, and the corroded bronze or iron was a sword in the hand of
a mighty man of valour, or a chisel in that of a cunning sculptor.
Unless he keeps this in view as his real object, he is misconceiving
his whole purpose, and substituting means for ends; unless he can to
some extent accomplish this (no man, of course, can do it completely)
he is failing of his aim.
But we are still waiting for our definition of what archæology is,
and what are the ways in which it is to accomplish this desirable
revivifying of the past. It has been defined by a well-known excavator
and writer as “the study of the facts of ancient history and ancient
lore”--which is very well as far as it goes, but omits, strangely
enough, the very point in which its author has shown himself most
keenly interested. To complete the definition, one would need to add,
“and of ancient life in all aspects.”
The archæologist deals with ancient history, and may prove helpful to
the historian of the past in many ways; he deals with ancient lore, and
may reveal material which is of the utmost importance for the study
of the knowledge and literature of the past; but his main concern is
always with the life of the past, and his main use to the world is to
enable the present to see and to realise the life of the past as it
really was, to give life again to the men of old so that they shall
no longer be names in a dry text-book, but flesh-and-blood figures,
and to do this for the common man of the past as well as for his
rulers, so that ancient history shall no longer be the chronicle of
the deeds, great or otherwise, of Pharaohs and monarchs of all sorts,
but shall give you the whole many-coloured tapestry of life as it was
in those far-off days with the fates of common men interwoven with the
glittering destinies of their lords and masters.
“Archæological research,” says Dr. R. A. S. Macalister in the latest
summary of its results, “consists principally in the discovery and the
classification of the common things of daily life, houses, personal
ornaments, domestic utensils, tools, weapons, and the like.” To
have said such a thing fifty years ago would have been to make the
scientific man of those days hold up his hands in horror at such a
degradation of a science whose chief end was the discovery of the great
monuments of great men, and the substantiation or correction of history
by their means.
To put the change of view in a word, archæology has during the modern
period become human. It has learned that history never existed, and
cannot be viewed, in a vacuum; and that quite as important for its
right apprehension of the facts is the realisation of the medium in
which the facts transpired, and which largely conditioned them. “The
true function of archæological research,” says Dr. Macalister again,
“is to discover the conditions amid which lived such heroes of old
as we have mentioned; to show them, no longer as solitary, more or
less idealised or superhuman, figures, but as men of like passions
to ourselves moving with other men, in a busy world engrossed in its
secular interests, and making daily use of the common things of life.”
To take an illustration from a familiar figure of Egyptian history,
we know, as a fact of history, that the favourite son of the mighty
Ramses II was Setna-Khaemuast, that he fought in his father’s Syrian
wars, that about the middle of the reign he was high-priest of Memphis,
and that he died somewhere before the fifty-fifth year of Ramses; in
other words, so far as the big records of the historical monuments
go, he is to us “magni nominis umbra,” and no more. The real living
interest of the man begins for us with the discovery of a papyrus of
the Ptolemaic period, now in the Cairo Museum, which shows him studying
the old inscriptions at Memphis in search of magic charms, stealing the
roll of Thoth from the tomb of an earlier prince, just like a modern
explorer, and getting into trouble over the theft.
[Illustration: 5. TEMPLE OF EDFU--THE PYLON, AND VIEW FROM THE PYLON.]
“The lofty personages,” says Maspero in the Introduction to his
charming _Contes Populaires_, “The lofty personages whose mummies
repose in our museums had a reputation for gravity so thoroughly
established, that nobody suspected them of having ever diverted
themselves with such futilities in those days when they were only
mummies in expectation.” That is just the point. It is not the
impassive mummies, with their reputation for gravity, thoroughly
well-deserved for the last three thousand years, since they became
mummies, that we want to know; it is the folk who were only “mummies
in expectation,” who lived and loved, hated and fought, and made fools
of themselves, like other people. And the business of archæology is
to show you these people, in their habit as they lived, and in the
ordinary medium which conditioned their actions. If it cannot or
does not do that, then it deserves all the vivid abuse which Carlyle
used to hurl at the Dry-as-dusts of the past.
Now it is the supreme merit of the modern period that it has been
steadily learning the importance of this aspect of its work among the
treasures of the past, till now it can say “nothing human is foreign to
me.” The change of view is set before us very plainly in the contrast
between our modern histories of Egypt and those of our forefathers.
Take, for instance, Maspero’s _Histoire Ancienne_, or Breasted’s
_History of Egypt_, and compare the brilliant pictures of ancient
Egyptian life which you will find in their pages with the dry summaries
of events which passed for Egyptian history fifty years ago. What
has made the difference? Simply the fact that in the interval the
archæologist has been learning that his business is not only or even
chiefly with the great historical monuments of the land with which
he is dealing, but, above all, with the small things which made the
background of life, “the pots and pans,” as Dr. Macalister puts it,
“which are essential if he is to fill in the picture of the ancient
life of the region.”
The change of view thus brought about is marked by a corresponding
change of judgment as to what shall constitute the chief object of
search in the excavations which reveal the past to us. In the dawn
of excavation it was the big and imposing monument which was eagerly
and almost exclusively sought for--very naturally, for it was only
by the discovery of such relics that the explorer could hope, in the
existing state of knowledge, to justify his work, and to create the
interest on the part of the public which would provide him with the
funds which were needed for its prosecution. Colossal statues, granite
sarcophaguses, intact burials in Egypt, winged human-headed bulls,
alabaster slabs carved in relief, cuneiform tablets inscribed with
legends of the Creation and the Flood in Mesopotamia; such were the
prizes which rewarded and vindicated the labours of men like Mariette,
Botta, and Layard in the middle of last century. It was all very
natural and inevitable, as things then were; and it is both unjust and
unreasonable to denounce the work of such pioneers because they worked
with the knowledge and under the conditions of their own time.
The science of excavation and the knowledge of its true objects did
not exist when they did their work; it had to be slowly and painfully
created by experience, and in the process it was inevitable that many
things should suffer and that there should be much loss of material
which a better instructed generation would have known how to value.
These great men would doubtless do their work very differently now;
but it is vain to criticise them for not possessing a knowledge which
nobody possessed in their day. We owe them rather our gratitude for
that they accomplished so much in such unfavourable circumstances.
There can be no doubt, nevertheless, that the methods of the early
excavators, judged from the modern point of view, were wasteful to
a large degree of the things which we have learned to consider of
supreme importance in the study of the past. In their search for the
big game of excavation they overlooked, too often with fatal loss to
the science of the future, the common things which would have made
the indispensable background to their more imposing discoveries, and
in many instances what they let slip will never be recovered. To-day
the outlook is entirely changed, and the man who should excavate on
the lines of Mariette or Layard would be a hopeless anachronism among
explorers. The excavator goes to his work now, not with the hope of
finding some great monument which will confirm some doubtful statement
of history or disprove some theory of succession, not even with the
hope of discovering some store of tablets which will let new light in
on a dark period. Such things may of course be found, and are welcomed
when they are found; and such discoveries as that of the tomb of
Tutankhamen tell us that the romance of exploration is by no means a
thing of the past. But the modern explorer has learned the infinite
importance of little things, and the results for which he mainly
hopes are such things as would be heartily despised by the casual and
uninstructed beholder. Perhaps the change may be expressed most simply
by saying that while the explorer of two generations back looked for
colossi, his present-day successor looks for crockery.
It may seem that from a science thus occupied and concerned mainly with
the infinitely little, the romance of the early days of exploration
has departed; but this is to misunderstand the situation. The
explorer’s work was never romantic in the sense in which the average
man understands the word. The idea of the excavator as a man who spends
his days in exploring wonderful underground chambers filled with the
treasures of the past, is just about as true as the picture of the
great detective who is always unravelling the mysteries of crime by
the most amazing strokes of genius, and landing himself incidentally
in the most appalling situations. There never was such an explorer, or
such a detective; and the life of the one as of the other is mainly
one of monotonous drudgery at which most of the folk who talk about
romance would shudder. The great thrilling moments, when a discovery
which will excite the imagination of the world is made, have always
been far between, and the finding of Tutankhamen’s tomb has shown that
they may still come to the modern explorer just as richly as to his
predecessor. But the true romance of modern excavation lies in this,
not that it can reveal the dead monarchs of thirty centuries back
in all their splendour, but that by its patient piecing together of
innumerable small details it can give back to us the actual life of the
period in which the dead monarch lived, and let us see the order of his
court, and what is far more important to our knowledge of the past,
the traffic of the market-place in his cities, and the intercourse of
his land with the nations around it. It is scarcely too much to say
that because of the minute care with which the modern excavator has
treated the minutest fragments of the relics of ancient days we are
better acquainted with the life of the Egypt of the New Empire than we
are with that of the ordinary European nation of the Dark Ages, though
the latter be more than two millenniums nearer us in time. A science
which can accomplish such a miracle of resurrection can never lack the
element of true romance in the eyes of anyone who has a real sense of
the wonder of life.
It follows from the fact that the modern excavator is called to deal
with such a multitude of matters, each in itself perhaps comparatively
insignificant, but each of importance, as an additional stroke in the
picture of the past which is being slowly built up on the canvas, that
far more extensive qualifications are exacted of him than sufficed for
his predecessor. “Our explorer in Egypt,” says Miss Amelia Edwards, “is
only called upon to be an ‘all-round’ archæologist within the field
of the national history: namely, from the time of Mena, the prototype
of Egyptian royalty, who probably reigned about five thousand years
before Christ, down to the time of the Emperor Theodosius, Anno Domini
379. Yet even within that limit, he has to know about a vast number of
things. He must be familiar with all the styles and periods of Egyptian
architecture, sculpture and decoration; with the forms, patterns and
glazes of Egyptian pottery; with the distinctive characteristics of the
mummy-cases, sarcophagi, methods of embalmment and styles of bandaging
peculiar to interments of various epochs; and with all phases of the
art of writing, hieroglyphic, hieratic, and demotic. Nor is this all.
He must know by the measurement of a mud brick, by the colour of a
glass bead, by the modelling of a porcelain statuette, by the pattern
of an earring, to what period each should be assigned. He must be
conversant with all the types of all the gods; and last, not least,
he must be able to recognise a forgery at first sight. After this, it
must, I think, be admitted that the explorer, like the poet, is ‘born,
not made’! The wonder perhaps is that he should ever be born at all.”
It seems, no doubt, a sufficiently formidable catalogue of
qualifications; but to Miss Edwards’ list others would now have to
be added. For the progress of investigation of the inter-relation of
the nations of the ancient east has broken down the limitation which
she imposed upon the knowledge of her imaginary explorer, and the
Egyptian excavator of the present day must be familiar, not only with
all that has been mentioned, but with the related work of Mesopotamia
and Babylonia, with the art of the brilliant Minoan craftsman, with
all that is known of the enigmatic Hittite civilisation, and with the
art, both archaic and mature, of Greece, together with a score of other
related matters!
All this development of a science which has grown almost within the
lifetime of some of its exponents from a comparatively simple thing
to one of the most complex and exacting of human studies, has, of
course, been the work of many minds and hands. But if the name of any
one man must be associated with modern excavation as that of the
chief begetter of its principles and methods, it must be the name of
Professor Sir W. M. Flinders Petrie. It was he, as one of the most
brilliant of the exponents of his methods has recently stated, who
first called the attention of modern excavators to the importance of
“unconsidered trifles,” as means for the reconstruction of the past.
Above all, it was he who first taught us that for purposes of certainty
in the establishment of the succession of different periods, the
“broken earthenware” of a people may be of far greater value than its
most gigantic monuments. And it has been men trained in the principles
which he established who have during the last generation been doing
the work which has made the past of the Classic East a living thing
to the world of to-day. It remains now to trace the outline of their
accomplishment in Egypt.