198 



KNOWLEDGE. 



[Skptember 2, 1895. 



One great question set before us was to determine the 

 date and origin of this newly-discovered race. They were 

 clearly foreigners — their contracted burial, and the absence 



i'lG, 2. — Skiiil of oiu' of tlio iiewlv-touiid liaue, with luiir aud ear »Lill alt-ri 



of all purely Egyptian objects proved this ; that they must 

 have lived ia the country in great numbers, the size of the 

 cemetery showed. Tbey must also have lived there for a 

 long period, for the gradual change of fashion in the shapes 

 of vases could be seen as we dug from the older into the 

 later graves. Into what period of Egyptian history could 

 they fit ? 



The only way in which this could be discovered was by 

 finding Egyptian objects of known date in graves or towns 

 of the new people, or objects of the new people in Egyptian 

 ruins. A careful watch was kept, but no scarab or scrap 

 of pottery of Egyptian manufacture was found in any of 

 the new graves. A small Egyptian temple was cleared 

 out. Pottery and bricks known to be of the XVIlIth 

 Dynasty were found on the surface, underneath them were 

 found sherds known to belong to the Xllth ; underneath 

 still further were more walls, and lying against them 

 pottery known as belonging to the IVth. And in all this 

 mass of material no scrap of the new pottery — no fine 

 flints — no trace of our new people was to be seen ! 



Three hundred yards away was the site of the foreigners' 

 town. It, too, was excavated ; the new types of pottery 

 were found in abundance, but as in the graves, nothing 

 Egyptian. 



A third town, three miles north of the first, again be- 

 longing to the foreigners, was examined, and it was found 

 that alter the town had been ruined, the heaps of bricks 

 and mud had been found convenient places for burial, and 

 Egyptian full-length graves had been dug in it. The 

 graves contained no dated scarabs, but numbers of vases 

 of a peculiar drop-like shape and of straw-coloured clay. 

 The shape of the vases made us suspect them to be of the 

 Middle Empire (the XI— XIV Dynasty) and this suspicion 



was confirmed when at some distance was found a single 

 burial containing two of these same vases and a necklace of 

 beads of undoubted Middle Empire patterns. The graves 

 then dug in the ruins of the town of foreigners 

 were of the Middle Empire, and the dominion 

 of the new race must belong to some period 

 anterior to this— either to the dark period 

 between the Old Empire and the Middle, or 

 to the pre-Egyptian period altogether, for 

 during the Old Empire the power of the 

 Egyptians was too well consolidated for any 

 great tribe of foreigners to have existed in the 

 country. 



This question, too, was fortunately solved, 

 for at one point in this long, tomb-strewn 

 stretch of desert was another small cemetery, 

 plainly of Egyptian origin. Almost every tomb 

 had been robbed by dealers within recent years, 

 nnd lay open. The tombs were of an unusual 

 kmd, entered by sloping staircases cut in the 

 rock, but fragments of turned alabaster dishes 

 and potsherds of a well-known type proved 

 that they had been made by Egyptians of the 

 Old Empire. Some of the graves had been 

 robbed in ancient times, perhaps only a few 

 scoi-e years after their making, and in the soft 

 soil which soon accumulated in the open grave 

 a man of the new race had been interred. He 

 was buried, then, in an Old Empire grave ; the 

 invasion of the foreigners must, therefore, 

 have taken place after the Old Empire's fall, 

 at the close of the Vlth Dynasty. Perhaps 

 even it occasioned that fall, and we should thus 

 have an explanation, if not entirely a satis- 

 factory one, of the extraordinary and entire 

 separation of the remains of the two races. 

 The new people must have invaded Egypt at the close 



l''lCt. .i, — '\ use, jUllltt'Ll ^Wllil :i (.Ic^lgll OL a >ill|'. 



of the Vlth Dynasty, say 3300 b.c, and crushed the 

 pyramid builders. They must have swept out the Egyptians 



