ANTIQUITY OF MAN SAYCE 521 



with forest and intersected by streams. In the middle of the wadi 

 was a huge boulder of sandstone, washed down from the plateau 

 above and marked at about two-thirds from its base by the high- 

 water level of the ancient torrent. Above this level the rock was 

 covered with drawings of elephants, giraffes, and ostriches — which, 

 it may be noted, had already ceased to exist in Egypt when the 

 hieroglyphic script was first known in its present form. The out- 

 lines of the drawings had been chipped by flint tools, some of which 

 I found at the foot of the boulder. Over some of the drawings had 

 been cut a hieroglyphic inscription in the age of the Eleventh Dy- 

 nasty, between 4,000 and 5,000 years ago. The inscription looked 

 as fresh as if it had been engraved yesterday, whereas the prehistoric 

 pictures were weathered to the color of the stone. The contrast made 

 me realize in a startling way the enormous length of time which 

 must have elapsed since the pictures themselves were drawn. 



But historical Egypt also now has its lessons to teach us. While 

 the literary historians have been vying with one another in the en- 

 deavor to minimize its antiquity, the spade of the excavator has 

 made discoveries which have rightly been termed " revolutionary." 

 At Saqqara, under the shadow of the step pyramid, generally con- 

 sidered the earliest of the pyramids still existing, Mr. Firth has laid 

 bare a complex of buildings without parallel elsewhere in the coun- 

 try. A stately avenue of fluted columns — indicating from whence 

 the Greeks, centuries later, derived the so-called Ionic design, a 

 record office or library, storage magazines, tombs, and temples, have 

 been discovered, all surrounded by a vast wall 17 meters thick and 

 faced on both sides with the finest masonry in Egypt. It is, in fact, 

 the masonry of modern Paris or London rather than that which we 

 have been accustomed to associate with the Egypt of later days. 

 And at the southwestern corner the wall is overshadowed by a cir- 

 cular bastion, the only circular building which ancient Egypt has 

 bequeathed to us. Within the fortified enclosure subterranean pas- 

 sages cut through the solid rock lead to what may have been a me- 

 morial chapel of the king, while another passage to the north 

 descends some 72 feet below the level of the ground to the royal 

 tomb under the pyramid itself. The passages consist of wide and 

 lofty corridors, the longest of which, like the tomb, has on one side 

 a wall encrusted with small plaques covered with a blue glaze and 

 grouped at times into the form of lotos buds or papyri bound to- 

 gether.2 ^j^^g ^^U of tiles is broken into three niches built of exqui- 

 sitely white limestone, in each of which is a figure of the Pharaoh 

 standing or in the act of running, and set in a frame on which his 

 name and titles are engraved in hieroglyphs of extraordinary beauty. 



2 Mr. Firth points out that these bundles of papyri are the origin of the Egyptian 

 hieroglyph dad. 



