H.— ANTHROPOLOGY i6i 



that which is observed in the historical layers above it is worse than 

 illegitimate, it is sheer fantasy. 



In a less crude, but not very different form, the same error appears in 

 the attempt made by several justly admired writers to establish a chrono- 

 logical scale for the typological series preceding the historical in a country 

 like Egypt. The system of sequence-dating based on typology is now 

 familiar to all students. It was established for Egypt by Sir Flinders 

 Petrie, and for Europe in general by Montelius. As a scheme of relative 

 chronology it sometimes creaks a little, but on the whole it works well 

 and has justified itself, though it may need occasional emendation. But 

 the recurring attempts made by one author after another to translate this 

 relative system into an absolute chronology of years have no logical 

 justification whatsoever and only encourage self-deception. The argu- 

 ment is really based on an assumption which can easily be shown to be 

 fallacious. This is the assumption that the rate of progress in civilisa- 

 tion is always uniform. If we know the rate of development in types 

 which took place during the First and Second Dynasties and know also 

 from inscriptions the length of these dynasties, then, it is argued, we have 

 a yard-stick which can be applied to the period preceding the First and 

 Second Dynasties. It is as though a policeman, having timed a speeding 

 motor car over a measured mile, and found that it was going at sixty 

 miles an hour, should appear before the magistrate and state that it was 

 evident the defendant had been proceeding all day at sixty miles an hour. 

 The falsity of the conception is evident as a mere matter of logic ; but 

 it can also be shown by numerous examples in the well-known periods 

 of mediaeval and modern history. Would any historian, for instance, 

 seriously maintain that the rate of intellectual and artistic achievement 

 was exactly the same during the Dark Ages as in the Gothic time or the 

 Renaissance ? Would anyone venture to argue that the industrial pro- 

 gress of the nineteenth century a.d. was no more rapid than that of the 

 eighteenth, or that material development proceeded at the same rate in 

 the reign of George I as in that of George V ? Merely to ask such ques- 

 tions is sufficient. I need not dwell on the long centuries of Byzantine or 

 Chinese immobility, or on the static quality of much actual Egyptian art. 



If, however, we must abandon such illegitimate methods, it is not quite 

 impossible that properly directed ingenuity may find some others which 

 will give a rough scale, less accurate indeed than the chronological, but 

 nevertheless valuable. The recent success of Miss Caton-Thompson in 

 settling the very difficult dating of Badarian culture by truly logical 

 methods based on geology is very encouraging ; and thirty years ago 

 I myself made a suggestion which I still think has some value. If, 

 I suggested, we could discover the village corresponding to an ancient 

 cemetery, and also ascertain the total number of burials in that cemetery, 

 then we should be able by calculating the presumable death rate to arrive 

 at a rough estimate of the number of generations. It is evident that several 

 factors in this equation can never be established more than approximately, 

 but it would be worth attempting if ever a suitable site could be found. 



Next we may briefly consider the problem of the dissemination of 

 cultures. This is one of the most interesting and important aspects of 



