60 



DISCOVERY 



permeation of the East without the coinage of India 

 and Baktria, nor have reahsed the familiar presence 

 of Indians in the West without the Indian portraits 

 modelled in Memphis. The coins of the Xabathreans, 

 required by those busy traders, show us the importance 

 of feminine consorts among the early Semites, before the 

 bhght of Islam. In the Crimea, in Spain, or Gaul, or 

 Britain, we find the active Graeco-indigenous civilisa- 

 tion of lines of rulers and city-states, before they went 

 under the overwhelming power of Rome. Little or 

 nothing was known of all this from the tattered 

 remains of authors who were too well satisfied at home 

 to look abroad. 



To the classical wTiter there were various Eastern 

 civilisations going back into a fabulous past, and 

 Belus or Semiramis or Sesostris served as figure-heads 

 in wondrous tales. Two chroniclers — Manetho in 

 Egypt, Berosus in Babylon — gathered an outline of the 

 history from the records of those lands, and what has 

 been preserved to us by chroniclers is a more valuable 

 skeleton plan for placing in order what else we may 

 recover. It is, however, the direct information from 

 the contemporary records that we now rely upon. 

 Within the last hundred years the WTitings and 

 monuments of Egypt, Babylonia, Sumaria, and Elam 

 have been read and translated ; and recently various 

 outlines of neighbouring tongues have also been 

 partly understood. From this mass of documents we 

 can largely reconstitute the long ages of the changes 

 of civilisation and the movements of peoples. At the 

 present day we have tangibly before us the contem- 

 porary objects of half of the kings who are stated to 

 have ruled in Egypt, counting in even the most 

 ephemeral ; or, reckoning by the length of time, we 

 have objects of reigns that cover three-quarters of the 

 whole length of the 5,000 years of that history down to 

 Alexander. WTien we look at the vast dust-heaps of 

 ancient cities, and think what chance there can be of 

 finding anything of a king who reigned for a year or 

 two many thousand j-ears ago, the recovery of half the 

 names is more than we could expect. The general view 

 that we get is one of incessant turmoil and change. 

 The great and brilliant ages were each of only two or 

 three centuries' duration, and were separated b\' long 

 ages of decay and of reconstitution. Mankind has 

 been like a beautiful tree, which is mere bare sticks 

 for half its time, and only flowers for a few weeks in 

 the whole year. From classical times we only know of 

 one flowering, and another at the close of- the middle 

 ages, with a winter between ; now we can trace 

 eight or nine flowerings and winters, and begin to get 

 a true perspective of the nature of man and his works. 

 How is this history discovered ? The foundation 

 is formed by the lists of kings ; none of these are com- 

 plete, but they supplement one another. In Egypt there 



is the list of the temple of Abydos, complete from the 1st 

 to Vlllth 1 dynasties, and in the Xllth and XVIIIth ; 

 there is the broken-up papyrus list at Turin giving 

 much of the Xlllth and XlVth dynasties, besides 

 earlier portions ; there is the summary of Manetho, 

 which, for the obscure periods, only gives totals. For 

 more detail, there are a few fragments of the yearly 

 annals, kept from the beginning of the kingdom, which 

 show the utmost precision to a single day ; there are 

 various private monuments of officials who lived 

 through several reigns, and recorded their services 

 under each. For the events within a single reign there 

 are many triumphal inscriptions, notices of progress 

 of royal expeditions, and the many small objects 

 commemorative of events, such as erecting great 

 obelisks, or conquering Qedesh, or establisliing hunting 

 on horseback, when a larger breed was introduced to 

 replace the small chariot horse. 



I write this encamped inside a great fortress built 

 7,000 years ago, dated by the clay sealings left behind 

 with the king's name ; and I watch hour by hour the 

 clearance of a royal tomb still older, anxiously looking 

 for some object with a name to fix the reign. The 

 skeletons of the royal servants lie before my tent, to 

 be measured and compared with others, so that differ- 

 ences of race may be sought for. The pottery found 

 with them is all compared with types from other tombs 

 that are dated, so that the period of the making 

 may be fixed to within a generation or two. The 

 great flint knife, the gaming pieces, the tomb-stone of a 

 court-carver, the ivory label of a necklace, all tell their 

 own tale of date, and show the state of civilisation. 

 Yet this touches a time which was longer before Moses 

 than we are after him. Evidence does not consist only 

 in large moniunents and long inscriptions. A single 

 handful of little things will carry much, meaning ; a 

 few badges found at the end of the \Tth dynasty and 

 soon after have patterns which are from Mesopotamia 

 and northern S\Tia, while a cylinder seal shows a 

 Syrian king of Egypt with the same name as in a list 

 of kings of the Vlllth d5-nasty. Here is a Syrian rule 

 of Egypt, with its own art brought in. and mixing also 

 with Eg3'ptian motives of design. On the other hand, 

 many small points of custom and belief of ancient 

 Egypt are identical in Central Africa now. All tliis is 

 the material of history. 



The term " prehistoric " implies but a narrow view 

 of historia. If a connected account of any period can 

 be WTitten, from whatever material, that account is 

 history. If one finds in a house a dead body, a revolver, 

 a strange hat, and a lot of finger-marks, no one doubts 

 that the history of a crime may be \\Titten from such 



1 I.e. from about 3400-2460 B.C.. For a note on the dates 

 of the Egyptian D>Tiasties see Prof. T. E. Feet's article on The 

 at of the Sun-Cult, in Discovery, vol. ii. No. 22, p. 252. — Ed. 



