EECENT EESEAECH IN EGYPT.' 



By W. M. Flinders Petrie, D. C. L., LL. B., Ph. D. 



Discoveries come so incessantly and the point of view so often 

 changes in the ever widening interests of Egyptian history that each 

 year puts out of date a great part of what has been written. Any 

 general work on Egyptian history or art needs revision every few 

 months, so thickly have new subjects and new standpoints come before 

 us lately. We propose here to show what great changes have arisen 

 in our ideas during the last three years, taking each age in historical 

 order. 



During all this century in which Egyptian history has been studied 

 at first hand, it has been accepted as a sort of axiom that the begin- 

 nings of things were quite unknown. In the epitome of the historj^ 

 which was drawn up under the Greeks to make Egypt intelligible to 

 the rest of the world, there were three dynasties of kings stated before 

 the time of the great pyramid builders; and yet of those it has been 

 commonly said that no trace remained. Hence it has been usual to 

 pass them by with just a mention as being half fabulous, and then to 

 begin real history with Senefern or Khufu (Cheops), the kings who 

 stand at the beginning of the fourth dynasty, at about 4000 B. 0. 



The first discovery to break up this habit of thought was when the 

 prehistoric colossal statues of Min, the god of the city of Koptos, were 

 found in my excavations in his temple. These had carvings in relief 

 upon them wholly different from anything known as yet in Egyj)t, and 

 the circumstances pointed to their being earlier than any carvings yet 

 found in that country. In the same temi^le we found also statues of 

 sacred animals and pottery which we now know to belong to the very 

 beginning of Egyptian history, many centuries before the pyramids, 

 and probably about 5000 B. O. or earlier. 



The next step was the finding of a new cemetery and a town of the 

 prehistoric people, which we can now date to about 5000 B. C, within 

 two or three centuries either way. This place lay on the opposite side 

 of the Mle to Koptos — that is to say, about 20 miles north of Thebes. 

 At first we were completely staggered by a class of objects entirely 



1 Eeprinted from the Sunday School Times, February 19, 1898, by permission of 

 the publishers. 



571 



