CHAPTER III

WhenProfessor 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 isone 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 spotonly 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 ThothmesIIIwas 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 hesought 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 inevolution. 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 Petriehappened 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 sowondrously 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.

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