RECENT YEARS OF EGYPTIAN EXPLORATION. 631 



of Queen Hatsliepsiit, .and lately they found the entry to still un- 

 opened royal tombs. The secret passed — for a consideration — to 

 the Department of Antiquities, and two royal tombs were opened. 

 These contained the bodies of several kings of the eighteenth and 

 nineteenth dynasties — one undisturbed, the others moved from else- 

 where. With these was a crowd of objects of funereal furniture. 

 Unhappily, nothing is published in detail of any official discoveries; 

 with the exception of the first find of the Dahshur jewelry, there 

 has never been any full account issued of the great discoveries in 

 the most important sites, which are reserved to the Government. 

 The great group of kings found at Deir el Bahri, the great necropo- 

 lis of the priests of Amen, the second find of Dahshur jewelry, the 

 second group of royal mummies, of all these we know nothing but 

 what has appeared in newspapers, or some partial account of one 

 branch of the subject. Hardly any publication has ever appeared, 

 such as the English societies issue every year about the produce 

 of their excavations. 



Many of the royal temples of the nineteenth dynasty at Thebes 

 were explored by the English in 1896. The Ramesseum was com- 

 pletely examined, through all the maze of stone chambers around 

 it. But the most important result was the magnificent tablet of 

 black granite, about ten feet high and five wide, covered on one 

 side with an inscription of Amen Hotep III, and on the other side 

 with an inscription of Merenptah. The latter account, of about 

 1200 B. c, mentions the war with the " People of Israel "; this is 

 the only naming of Israel on Egyptian records, and is several cen- 

 turies earlier than any Assyrian record of the Hebrews. It has, 

 of course, given rise to much discussion, which is too lengthy to 

 state here. 



One of the most important results of historical Egyptian times 

 is the light thrown on prehistoric Greek ages. The pottery known 

 as " Mykentean " since the discoveries of Schliemann in the Pelo- 

 ponnesus was first dated in Egypt at Gurob in 1889; next were 

 found hundreds of vase fragments at Tell el Amarna in 1892; and 

 since then several Egyptian kings' names have been found on 

 objects in Greece, along with such pottery. The whole of this evi- 

 dence shows that the grand age of prehistoric Greece, which can 

 well compare with the art of classical Greece, began about 1600 

 B. c, was at its highest point about 1400 b. c, and became decadent 

 about 1200 B. c, before its overthrow by the Dorian invasion. 



Besides this dating, Greece is indebted to Egypt for the preser- 

 vation of the oldest texts of its classics. Fragments of Plato almost 

 contemporary with his lifetime, pages of Thucydides, whole books 

 of the Iliad, and the celebrated recent publications of Bacchylides 



