456 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1924 



preserved. For more than a century excavators have been busy in 

 many parts of the country, but there is yet no sign that the soil is 

 becoming exhausted; it is, in fact, almost daily yielding up its buried 

 treasures. The past two or three decades have been prolific in sur- 

 prises. Mines of hidden wealth have been unearthed where but a 

 few years ago we only saw the sands and rocky defiles of the desert. 

 Since we met at Hull last year, the most sensational archeological 

 discovery of modern times has been made in a place that had been 

 abandoned by many excavators as exhausted. This discovery, due 

 to tlie untiring persistence of an Englishman, promises to yield re- 

 sults of extraordinary interest, but it will take years before they can 

 be adequately published. Other discoveries have been made in Egypt 

 during recent years which have opened out a vista of human history 

 that we little dreamt of a quarter of a century ago. Three decades 

 ago not a single monument was known that could be ascribed with 

 certainty to the period before the Third Egyptian Dynasty. To-day 

 we possess a continuous series of written documents which carry 

 us back to Menes, the founder of the Monarchy, some 3,400 years 

 or more before our era. These written documents, moreover, show 

 clearly that Menes himself must have come at the end of a very 

 long period of development. Egypt had already had a long history 

 when the upper and lower countries were first united under a single 

 sceptre. From Upper Egypt Ave possess a continuous series of un- 

 inscribed monuments which take us back far into prehistoric times. 

 An immense vista has been opened out before our eyes by the dis- 

 coveries of the last thirty years, and now, in Egypt better than in 

 any other country in the world, we can see man passing from the 

 primitive hunter to the pastoral nomad, from the pastoral nomad 

 to the agriculturalist, and then on to the civilized life wdiich begins 

 with the art of writing. We can see in the Delta and in the Lower 

 Nile Valley tribes becoming permanently settled in fixed abodes 

 around primitive cult centers, and then uniting with others into one 

 community. We can trace the fusion of several communities into 

 single States, and then, later, the uniting of States under a supreme 

 sovereign. AVliat other country in the world preserves such a record 

 of its early history? 



I have but little time left to speak of the modern Egyptians, but to 

 the anthropologist few people are more interesting. In almost every 

 circumstance of daily life we see the old in the new. Most of the 

 ceremonies from birth to burial are not Muslim, or Christian, or 

 Roman, or Greek; they are ancient Egyptian. In the transition of a 

 people from one religion to another the important institutions of the 

 older doctrine are generally completely abolished; many ceremonies 

 and much unessential detail, however, survive, and in the Delta and 



