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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.