ANNUAL MEETING. 



II 



uumerous as those belonging to the 5,000 years of history ; and 

 therefore to allow 2,000 years for this much less civilized 

 period is the least that is likely. 



The illustrations which were shown at the Annual Meeting 

 dealt with four divisions of the early civilization. The 

 mechanical ability was illustrated by the working of vases of 

 the hardest stones, the brilliant skill in flaking flints, the 

 pottery and its succession of forms which enable the graves 

 to be classified into different ages, and the rise of stone 

 working for masonry in the historic times. The artistic skill 

 was shown from the earliest age of rude drawing which has 

 no features, through the ivory carvings of the prehistoric age, 

 down to the incoming of the dynastic race whose slab carvings 

 show a far higher power which culminates in the figure of 

 an aged king of the first dynasty lately found, a figure which 

 has never been excelled in Egypt. The ideas and beliefs 

 were illustrated by the great amulets of the sacred serpent to 

 hang in the houses, and by the prevalence of four antagonistic 

 theories of the future which belonged to different races. The 

 power of recording was demonstrated by simple marks of 

 ownership on, pottery in the early prehistoric age, the 

 abundance and variety of such marks, and their continuity 

 through the later ages, until they were crystallized into an 

 alphabetic system by the Phoenician numeration for trade 

 purposes. Probably they were first personal, then expressed ideas, 

 then words, and lastly syllables and letters. This system on the 

 Mediterranean shores is far older than the hieroglyphs, which 

 were brought in by the dynastic race ready developed, probably 

 from the east. The hieroglyphic w^riting was first used only to 

 label pictures, and during the first dynasty it develops from 

 mere titles into a more structural form of language. 



On each side of man's activities we can now trace continual 

 fluctuation of advances and stagnations, w^hich gradually lead 

 from the man clad in goat skins up to the powerful rulers of a 

 highly organized kingdom, full of technical skill and artistic 

 powers.* 



* The remainder, and principal portion of the address, consisted of a 

 description of a large number of lantern slides thrown on the screen, 

 illustrating the results of Professor Petrie's operations in Egypt daring 

 the past season ; the most interesting, perhaps, of the antiquities being a 

 statuette of Cheops carved in ivory with the name legibly engraved on 

 the statuette itself. This great monarch, it will be recollected, was the 

 builder of the Great Pyramid, and the face of the statuette indicates that 

 of a man of strong will, capable of carrying out so colossal a work. 



