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?
[Illustration: 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.