CHAPTER III

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.