SESSION 1901—1902. 
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 171, 1901. 
Gxeabating in Egupt and its Results, 
BY 
Proresson FLINDERS PETRIE, F.RS., &c. 
eae Lecturer commenced by pointing out to his hearers the 
immense difference between the Egypt of the present, which 
consists of a great canyon, going down in parts 1,500 feet below 
the level of the dry, elevated plateau through which it cuts, and 
the Egypt of ancient times, in which the plateau was green and 
well-watered by rains and by numerous streams, running down 
into that Nile which to-day is a sluggish river of brown, muddy 
water, but which then was a lordly stream, with a level 30 feet 
above the point to which it has shrunk at present. The Egypt 
that the modern tourist sees is generally little but the banks of 
the Nile and the immediate vicinity. The Egypt where he 
carries on his persevering researches is the great dry plateau 
above, where, in the beds of now empty water-courses, and in 
the sides of the rocks, and buried under the accumulation of 
millenniums of sand and rubbish, lie the relics of the remotest 
human races of which we have any definite knowledge to-day. 
To this bare sun-baked plateau no one goes now but the excava- 
tor and the archeologist, with their trained bands of native 
workmen. There is no life, of men or of animals, unless it be a 
few birds who fly thither to prey upon the insects that the wind 
sweeps up from the Nile basin. Yet everything in this dried-up 
land testifies to the large amount of rainfall it once enjoyed, 
when men lived there long before historic time began. It is 
impossible to walk a quarter of a mile, said Professor Petrie, 
without coming across some flint that has been worked by man, 
washed down in the gravel of the long dry beds of streams. 
The archeologist in Egypt has to deal with continuous 
written history handed down from an antiquity as remote as 
5,000 z.c., while back over even that dim chasm of ages there is 
a further period of about 2,000 years, of which we have, indeed, 
no written relics, but which has left numerous traces, which 
