ARCHAEOLOGY. (EGYPT.) 



America, Mr. Alfred P. Maudsley has drawn the 

 conclusion that the southern ruins, including Pa- 

 lenque, Copan, and Quirigua, are much more 

 ancient than those of Yucatan, and were prob- 

 ably in full decay before the Spaniards entered 

 the country; while in Yucatan some of the 

 ruined structures now to be seen were inhabited 

 by the natives at the time of the conquest. At 

 the time of the Spanish conquest the people 

 had abandoned their towns and religious centers 

 south of Yucatan, while in Yucatan, where they 

 probably still occupied some of the buildings, 

 they were in a state of decadence and many of 

 the'large centers of population had been aban- 

 doned. The early Spanish writers speak of large 

 numbers of books written and preserved by the 

 natives of Yucatan. They were written in the 

 Maya language, and in characters called hiero- 

 glyphical. The Spaniards destroyed all of these 

 books they could, thinking them the work of the 

 devil, but copies of them escaped, and are pre- 

 served in European museums. The characters 

 in which they are written are similar to those of 

 the inscriptions on the monuments ; and both are 

 believed to be in a language that is still living 

 and spoken in the region, although it has prob- 

 ably been much changed in the course of years. 



The Maya Inscriptions. Dr. Cyrus Thomas 

 believes that he has discovered the key to the 

 reading of the Maya codices and probably of the 

 Central American inscriptions. He has already 

 determined the signification of some dozens of 

 characters, and has in several instances ascer- 

 tained the general sense of a group forming a 

 sentence. 



Oriental. Connections between East and 

 West. In his presidential address before the 

 International Oriental Congress in London, Prof. 

 Max Miiller recognized it as among the greatest 

 achievements of Oriental scholarship during the 

 present century that it had proved that the break 

 in the relations between Eastern and Western 

 peoples which has existed during most of the 

 period of written history did not exist from the 

 beginning ; but that in the times called prehis- 

 toric " language formed really a bond of union 

 between the ancestors of many of the Eastern 

 and Western nations, while more recent discov- 

 eries have proved that in historic times also lan- 

 guage, which seemed to separate the great nations 

 of antiquity, never separated the most important 

 among them so completely as to make all intel- 

 lectual commerce and exchange between them 

 impossible." This is proved by the tablets found 

 at Tel-el-Amarna, in Egypt, already described in 

 the " Annual Cyclopaedia " and by the examina- 

 tion of documents recovered from the ruins in 

 Palestine and Syria. 



Among the fragments of cuneiform tablets 

 found at Tel-el-Amarna Prof. A. H. Sayce has 

 identified a comparative dictionary of three (or 

 five) different languages, compiled by order of 

 the King of Egypt, and a dictionary of Baby- 

 lonian and Accadian, in which the Accadian 

 words are phonetically written. 



An inscription in a strange writing upon the 

 bandages of a mummy in the museum at Agram 

 is regarded by eminent authorities as Etruscan, 

 and is, if the supposition is correct, the longest 

 Etruscan document in existence, containing more 

 than 1,200 words. 



A hieroglyphic inscription on the bronze 

 pedestal of a bronze statue of the goddess Neith, 

 discovered at Sais, bears a line of Karian char- 

 acters, recording that the statue was dedicated to 

 Neith and Horus by Si-Qarr, son of Kapat Qarr, 

 born of the house of Neith-mert-ha-uah-ab-ra. 

 Si-Qarr is construed by Danninos Pasha as mean- 

 ing the son of a Karian, and Kapat Qarr as 

 Kapat, the Karian. 



A cuneiform fragment relating to a person 

 named Adapa is supplemented by one of the 

 cuneiform documents found at Tel-el-Amarna. of 

 which Dr. Zimmern has published a translation. 

 This text records the adventures of a certain 

 Adapa, the son of the sea-god Ea, and is dis- 

 cussed by Dr. Zimmern as parallel both to the 

 Greek myth of Prometheus and to the biblical 

 accounts of the fall of man. 



Among the discoveries made by Mr. F. J. Bliss 

 at Tell-el-Hesy, the spot identified by Major Con- 

 der and Dr. W. M. Flinders Petrie as the site of 

 the ancient city of Lachish, is a tablet contain- 

 ing a letter written about 1400 B. c., in the same 

 hand-writing as that of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets 

 which were sent from the south of Palestine to 

 Egypt about the same time. It is a letter to 

 Zimrida, who is mentioned in the Tel-el-Amarna 

 tablets, and was Governor of Lachish, and was 

 murdered there by some of his own people. A 

 number of Babylonian cylinders and imitations 

 and forgeries of such found at the same place are 

 adduced by Prof. Sayce as further evidences of 

 " the long and deep influence and authority of 

 Babylon in western Asia." 



A paper by Prof. Hommel, of Munich, on " The 

 Babylonian Origin of Egyptian Culture," dwells 

 on the parallelism between the names of Eridu, 

 one of the oldest towns in Babylonia, and Mem- 

 phis (Men nofer) in Egypt both names meaning 

 " the good city " or " city of the good (god) " 

 and on comparisons with the deities of the two 

 countries. 



Archaeological Surrey of Egypt. The 

 general object of the archaeological survey of 

 Egypt carried on by Mr. Newberry and his assist- 

 ants, under the direction of the Egypt Explora- 

 tion fund, is to catalogue, measure,' and copy all 

 the monuments that exist above ground in Egypt. 

 The work was begun in November, 1890, at 

 Beni Hassan, where about 2,000 square feet 

 of painting were traced. From Beni Hassan the 

 surveyors went to El Bersheh. where only two 

 inscribed tombs were previously known. These 

 were the tomb of Tahutihotep, containing the 

 paintings of a colossal statue on a sledge being 

 drawn by 125 men, and the tomb of Ahanekt. 

 Ten more inscribed tombs were found here, all 

 of the twelfth dynasty, and containing many 

 lines of inscriptions. Among the inscriptions 

 was the name of one of Tahutihotep's daughters, 

 previously unknown. Among the chief results 

 of the work of the past two seasons are the ac- 

 quisition of plans of the tombs, water-color fac- 

 similes of many of the most interesting scenes, 

 and copies of the inscriptions and outline trac- 

 ings of all the wall paintings in the tombs at 

 Beni Hassan and El Bersheh"; and a genealogy 

 the longest and fullest genealogy of any ancient 

 Egyptian family that has been made out show- 

 ing that the two princely families buried at these 

 two stations were related to one another, and 



