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ADDENDA TO BAEDECKER'S VOCABULARY 196

INDEX 197

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KINGS AND DYNASTIES NAMED IN THIS VOLUME

Ptolemaic. Ptolemy II 286-247

Roman period 30 B.C.-400 A.D.

Coptic period about 400-700 A.D.

Cufic period about 700-1000 A.D.

Arabic period 1000 A.D. to present

THE PYRAMIDS OF GIZEH.

The first consideration on reaching Egypt was where to be housed. In those days there was no luxurious hotel close to the pyramids; if any one needed to live there, they must either live in a tomb or in the Arab village. As an English engineer had left a tomb fitted with door and shutters I was glad to get such accommodation. When I say a tomb, it must be understood to be the upper chamber where the Egyptian fed his ancestors with offerings, not the actual sepulchre. And I had three rooms, which had belonged to separate tombs originally; the thin walls of rock which the economical Egyptian left between his cuttings, had been broken away, and so I had a doorway in the middle into my living-room, a window on one side for my bedroom, and another window opposite for a store-room. I resided here for a great part of two years; and often when in draughty houses, or chilly tents, I have wished myself back in my tomb. No place is so equable in heat and cold, as a room cut out in solid rock; it seems as good as a fire in cold weather, and deliciously cool in the heat.

I lived then, as I have since in Egypt, independent of servants. The facilities of preserved provisions, and the convenience of petroleum stoves, enable one to do without the annoyance of having some one about meddling with everything. I had one of the most intelligent men of the place, Ali Gabri, to help me with the work, and his nephew and slave used to sleep in the next tomb as my guards at night. Such was my first taste of sweet independence from civilization.

The object in view for which the work was undertaken was to decisively test the various theories concerning the pyramids, which were then being widely discussed on very insufficient knowledge. If all, or any, of these theories were correct, there were some very tough questions to be picked over between different parties; but the first question to be settled was whether the theories agreed with the actual facts of the case, as if they did not there was no need of further discussion. They must pass the test of fact before they could be further considered on the grounds of their abstract probability or metaphysical coherence. One of the most obvious of all the facts, and most deeply concerned in the various theories, was the actual size of the great pyramid; yet this was not known with any accuracy, the best measurements varying by several feet. Most of the theories involved the notion of extreme accuracy of workmanship, yet we were entirely ignorant of the amount of accuracy in the form of the pyramid, and in most of its internal construction.

It may not be amiss here to point out what is the meaning of accuracy. One often hears that something is 'quite accurate.' If I ask a workman if his work is accurate, he will indignantly refer to his foot-rule to prove it; but if you were to ask if his foot-rule is accurate he would doubt your sanity. What is accuracy for one purpose is inaccuracy for another. Children build castles on the sand, and make them perhaps tidy enough; but their accuracy would not do for laying out a garden; nor would the garden bed quite do to regulate the straightness of a tennis court. When a house is planned, still further particularity is needed for the accuracy of its squareness and straightness; and yet the joiner needs a better straight edge than the bricklayer. In turn the joiner's ideas would never suffice for the accuracy of putting together a Forth bridge, with its lengths of furlongs of steel, needed to exactly fit into place. And even beyond that, the telescope maker, dividing his circles, or polishing his object glasses, must attend to quantities which are quite beyond the accuracies of the engineer. There are as many kinds of accuracy as there are of cleanliness, from the cleanness of a clean-swept path, up to the absolute lifelessness and chemical purity of some tedious preparation in the laboratory.

There is, therefore, no such thing as absolute accuracy; what is called accuracy in each business is that amount of inaccuracy which is insignificant. If we want to understand what kind of precision the ancients aimed at, our errors in examining their work must be so small as to be insignificant by the side of their errors. If they went to the nearest hundredth of an inch, we must go to the nearest thousandth, in order to know what their ideas of accuracy were.

The main work of the first season, therefore,

consisted in making a very precise triangulation all over the hill of Gizeh; including points around all the three pyramids, and on the temples and walls belonging to them. A fine theodolite was used, by which single seconds of angle could be read; and the observations were repeated so many times, that if I finished the work at a single station in one day I was well satisfied. The result of all this mass of checked observations, after duly reducing and computing, was that there was scarcely a point about which one quarter inch of uncertainty remained, and most of the points were fixed to within one-tenth of an inch. These points were, however, only arbitrary marks put on suitable spots of the rock; and it needed a good deal of less elaborate work to connect these with the traces of the ancient constructions near them. The second season I obtained permission from Prof. Maspero to search for the ancient casing and points of construction of the pyramids. Many points were found easily enough; but some required long and dangerous work. To reach the casing, which still remains at the middle of each side of the great pyramid, was a hard matter; it was heaped over with broken chips a dozen to twenty feet deep, and they lay so loosely that they soon fell into any hole that we dug. It was needful therefore to begin with a very wide space, and gradually taper the hole, walling the sides roughly with loose blocks. Thus we succeeded in finding the casing on each of the three sides, where it was as yet unknown; the north casing having been cleared by a huge excavation of Col. Vyse over forty years before. These holes were very ticklish places, make them as we would; the Arabs dared not work them, and I had to get negroes to face the business. As it was, we could not venture to knock a bit of the stone, for fear of the vibration loosening the sides; and I was all but buried once, when--just as I had come out of the bottom of the hole--many tons of stones went pouring down the pit from the loose stuff above.

At the third pyramid the difficulty was varied; there the pyramid was encumbered with loose blocks lying on a bed of sand. So soon then as we dug into the sand, the blocks came sliding down into our hole. But here the matter was settled by adding more stones, and so wedging all the blocks around into a ring; thus they balanced around the hole, and kept each other out.

The casing of the third pyramid has never been finished.

The outer sides of the granite blocks were left with an excess of stone, in order to protect them in transport from Assuan, and this was never removed by dressing down, as had been intended. Thus in some examples--as above--the stone sticks out far beyond where the face was to be. In the granite temple the same method was followed, but there the wall was dressed, and hence each stone at the corners of the chambers turns a little way round the adjacent walls, so that the corner is cut out of solid stone all the way up.

The temple of the third pyramid is the most complete, and gives the best notion of the enclosures around the cell or chamber, in which the offerings to the deceased king were presented. This view is from the top of the pyramid, looking down into it. At the end of its causeway are a few trees, and a hill on the right, with remains of another causeway leading from it to the plain.

The results of thus attacking the subject were, that on the one hand most brilliant workmanship was disclosed, while on the other hand it was intermingled with some astonishing carelessness and clumsiness. The laying out of the base of the great pyramid of Khufu is a triumph of skill; its errors, both in length and in angles, could be covered by placing one's thumb on them; and to lay out a square of more than a furlong in the side with such accuracy shows surprising care. The work of the casing stones which remain is of the same class; the faces are so straight and so truly square, that when the stones were built together the film of mortar left between them is on an average not thicker than one's thumb nail, though the joint is a couple of yards long; and the levelling of them over long distances has not any larger errors. In the inside of the pyramid the same fine work is seen: the entrance passage joints are in many cases barely visible when searched for; in the Queen's chamber, when the encrusting salt is scraped away, the joints are found with cement not thicker than a sheet of paper; while in the King's chamber the granite courses have been dressed to a fine equality, not varying more than a straw's breadth in a furlong length of blocks.

Side by side with this splendid work are the strangest mistakes. After having levelled the casing so finely, the builders made a hundred times the error in levelling the shorter length of the King's chamber, so that they might have done it far better by just looking at the horizon. After having dressed the casing joints so beautifully, they left the face of the wall in the grand gallery rough chiselled. The design was changed, and a rough shaft was cut from the side of the gallery, down through the building and the rock, to the lower end of the entrance passage. The granite in the ante-chamber is left without its final dressing. And the kernel of the whole, the sarcophagus, has much worse work in it than in the building, or than in other sarcophagi of the same period. The meaning of this curious discrepancy seems to be that the original architect, a true master of accuracy and fine methods, must have ceased to superintend the work when it was but half done. His personal influence gone, the training of his school was not sufficient to carry out the remainder of the building in the first style. Thus the base and the casing around it, the building of the Queen's chamber, and the preparation of the granite for the King's chamber, must all have had the master's eye; but the carelessness of the pupils appears so soon as the control was removed. Mere haste will not account for egregious mistakes, such as that of the King's chamber level, which the skilful architect would have remedied by five minutes' observation. This suggests that the exquisite workmanship often found in the early periods, did not so much depend on a large school or widespread ability, as on a few men far above their fellows, whose every touch was a triumph. In this way we can reconcile it with the crude, and often clumsy, work in building and sculpture found in the same ages. There were no trades union rules against 'besting one's mates' in those days, any more than in any business at present where real excellence is wanted.

The results were decidedly destructive for the theories. The fundamental length of the base of the pyramid does not agree to any of the theoretical needs: and though no doubt some comfort has been extracted from hypothetical lengths of what the pyramid base would be if continued down to levels below the pavement , yet no such bases ever existed, nor could even be guessed at or theorised on, so long as the pyramid base was intact, as the sockets were entirely covered by casing and pavement. Various other theories fare as badly; and the only important one which is well established is that the angle of the outside was such as to make the base circuit equal to a circle struck by the height as a radius. See also the account of Medum.

The second pyramid was built by Khafra. His name was first found with it on the piece of a mace-head of white stone, which I found in the temple. The form is here completed from another head of the twelfth dynasty; and drawings of maces from Medum show the head and stick entire. In accuracy Khafra's work is inferior to that of Khufu. The errors of the pyramid length are double, and of angle quadruple that found in the earlier work, and the bulk of its masonry is far rougher. But the sarcophagus in it is of much better work, without any mistakes, and generally showing more experience and ability. The third pyramid, of Menkaura, is again inferior to the second, in both its outer form and internal work. It has moreover been most curiously altered; originally intended to be of small size, it has been greatly enlarged, not by repeated coatings, but at one operation. The original entrance passage was abandoned, and the chamber was deepened, another passage cut from the inside outwards so as to emerge lower down, and another chamber excavated below the level of the first, and lined with granite.

Some very usual fallacies with regard to the

pyramids were also disposed of. The passages are commonly supposed to have been blocked up by plugs of stone; whereas in both the great and second pyramids there is proof in the passages that no such blocks ever existed. The entrances are supposed to have been concealed by the solid masonry; whereas at Dahshur, and in Strabo's account of the great pyramid, it is evident that a flap-door of stone filled the passage mouth, and allowed of its being passed. The pyramids are supposed to have been built by continuous additions during a king's life, and ended only by his death; whereas there is no evidence of this in any of them, and it is clearly disproved by the construction and arrangement of the interiors; the plan was entire originally, and the whole structure begun at once. The sarcophagi are often supposed to have been put in to the pyramids at the king's burial, with his body inside; whereas in the great and second pyramids they will not pass through the passages, and must have been built in. The casing is supposed to have been all built in the rough, and cut to its slope afterwards; whereas the remaining blocks at the base slightly differ in angle side by side, proving that they were dressed before building in.

Besides examining the pyramids, the remains of the temple of the great pyramid were cleared, and the granite temple of Khafra was thoroughly measured and planned. But perhaps the most interesting part of the subject was tracing how the work was done. The great barracks of the workmen were found, behind the second pyramid, capable of housing four thousand men; and such was probably the size of the trained staff of skilled masons employed on the pyramid building. Besides these a large body of mere labourers were needed to move the stones; and this was probably done during the inundation, when water carriage is easier, and the people have no work. Herodotos gives the echo of this, when he says that the relays of labourers only worked for three months at a time. It would be quite practicable to build the great pyramid in the time, and with the staff of labourers assigned by Herodotos.

Tools are needed as well as labour; and the question of what tools were used is now settled by evidence, to which modern engineers cordially agree. I found repeatedly that the hard stones, basalt, granite, and diorite, were sawn; and that the saw was not a blade, or wire, used with a hard powder, but was set with fixed cutting points, in fact, a jewelled saw. These saws must have been as much as nine feet in length, as the cuts run lengthwise on the sarcophagi. One of

the most usual tools was the tubular drill, and this was also set with fixed cutting points; I have a core from inside a drill hole, broken away in the working, which shows the spiral grooves produced by the cutting points as they sunk down into the material; this is of red granite, and there has been no flinching or jumping of the tool; every crystal, quartz, or felspar, has been cut through in the most equable way, with a clean irresistible cut. An engineer, who knows such work with diamond drills as well as any one, said to me, 'I should be proud to turn out such a finely cut core now;' and truth to tell, modern drill cores cannot hold a candle to the Egyptians; by the side of the ancient work they look wretchedly scraped out and irregular. That such hard cutting points were known and used is proved by clean cut fine hieroglyphs on diorite, engraved without a trace of scraping; and by the lathe work, of which I found pieces of turned bowls with the tool lines on them, and positive proof that the surface had not been ground out. The lathe tools were fixed as in modern times, to sweep regular arcs from a centre; and the work is fearless and powerful, as in a flat diorite table with foot, turned in one piece; and also surpassingly delicate, as in a bowl of diorite, which around the body is only as thick as stout card. The great granite sarcophagi were sawn outside, and hollowed by cutting rows of tube drill holes, as may be seen in the great pyramid. No doubt much hammer-dressing was also used, as in all periods; but the fine work shows the marks of just such tools as we have only now re-invented. We can thus understand, far more than before, how the marvellous works of the Egyptians were executed; and further insight only shows plainer the true skill and ability of which they were masters in the earliest times that we can trace.

TANIS.

After a year in England, for the working out and publication of the survey at the pyramids, described in the last chapter, I undertook to excavate for the Egypt Exploration Fund. And as great things were then expected from Tanis, and a special fund of ?1000 was in course of being raised for its clearance, the most desirable course was to ascertain what prospects really existed there. A preliminary exploring trip was made to several places in the Delta, in course of which I discovered Naukratis; and as soon as the marshes had somewhat dried I went in February to Tanis. It is an out-of-the-way place, inaccessible except by water during some months, twenty miles from a post or station; on three sides the marshy plains stretch away to the horizon, only a little cultivation existing on the south. When I arrived the mounds were almost impassable for the mud, and continual storms threatened my tent. But gradually I built a house on the top of the mounds, and from thence looked down over the work on one side, and over the village on the other.

Tanis is a great ring of mounds, around the wide plain in which lie the temple ruins. And the first day I went over it I saw that the temple site was worked out; the limits of the ruins had been reached, and no more statues or buildings should be hoped for, by the side of what was already known. But such were the large expectations about the site, that I had to prove the case, by a great amount of fruitless trenching in all directions. The only monuments that we unearthed were far out of the temple, in a Ptolemaic shrine; this contained a fine stele of Ptolemy II and Arsinoe, which was entirely gilt when discovered, and two or three other steles, the recess containing the large stele being flanked by two sphinxes. The main stele and sphinxes are now in the British Museum.

But though digging was not productive in the temple, yet I found two important monuments which had been exposed by Mariette's excavators, and yet were never noticed by himself, De Roug?, or others who studied the remains. One was a part of an obelisk of the thirteenth dynasty, with an inscription of a king's son, Nehesi, perhaps the son of the king Nehesi-Ra. The other was the upper part of the well-known stele of Tirhaka: this I found lying face up; and on searching every block of the same quality for the remainder of it, I turned up the lower half, which Mariette had hidden; thus the unknown led me to the known.

There was, however, plenty of work to do in examining thoroughly, and planning, all the remains, which--as we have just noticed--were but scantily attended to before. The fallen blocks of the granite pylon needed to be turned over, as they were all cut out of older sculptures; and to do this without tackle, I dug a trench on one side of the heap of blocks, and then rolled them over one by one into it, so as to turn them. In this way I examined every block, and discovered the fragments of the enormous colossus of Ramessu II in red granite, which must have been about 80 feet high, and have towered far above the temple roofs, amid the forest of obelisks which adorned the city. The toe alone is as large as a man's body. Some large statues were also found by the road leading up to the temple. And every block of the hundreds which strew the ground here was examined on all sides, by mining beneath it where needful; every fragment of inscription was copied; and finally a plan was made, showing the place of each block, with numbers affixed referring to the inscriptions. Thus any one can draw their own conclusions as to the arrangement of the place, and the positions of the monuments, better in their arm-chair than by wandering over the chaos of dilapidation in the plain of Zoan.

Finding that no great discoveries could reward me in the temple, I tried the outskirts of the town, but only found a very late cemetery of no importance. I tried also sinking pits, in hopes of reaching the early town of the Ramessides or the Hyksos; but in vain, as the accumulation of Greek and Roman remains blocked the way, after descending even thirty feet. Then the houses of the Roman period on the surface were examined. One yielded a jar in the corner of the cellar, in which the lady had hidden away a large silver chain, a necklace of fine stones, and a gold ring.

But the burnt houses were the real prize of the season, as the owners had fled and left most of their goods; and the reddened patches of earth attracted us usually to a profitable site. In one house there was a beautiful marble term, of Italian work; and the fragments of a very curious zodiac, painted on a sheet of clear glass over a foot square, each sign or month having an emblematic head to represent it; unhappily, it was broken in a hundred and fifty pieces, and as I uncovered them it was cruel to see the gold foil work which was on them peel off on to the earth, leaving the glass bare in many parts. A yet more heartrending sight was the pile of papyrus rolls, so rotted that they fell to pieces with a touch, showing here and there a letter of the finest Greek writing. The next house, also burnt, was the best of all. Here we found the limestone statuette of the owner, Bakakhuiu, inscribed in demotic on the base; a sensible, sturdy-looking, active man, who seems to have been a lawyer or notary, to judge by his documents. Many household objects of pottery and stone were found, jars, mortars, &c., and a beautiful blue-glazed jar, perhaps the largest such known, and quite perfect. The rich result, however, was in his waste; for in a recess under the cellar stairs had been five baskets of

old papyri. Though many had utterly perished by being burnt to white ash, yet one basketful was only carbonized; and tenderly undermining the precious black mass, I shifted it out and carried it up to my house with fear and reverent joy. It took ten hours' work to separate safely all the documents, twisted, crushed, and squeezed together, and all as brittle as only burnt papyrus is; a bend, or a jerk, and the piece was ruined. At last, I had over a hundred and fifty documents separated; and, each wrapped apart, and put in tin boxes, they travelled safely. They have now all been opened, and glazed; and two of them already prove to be of the greatest interest. One is a book of hieroglyphic signs in columns, followed by their hieratic equivalents, and the school-name by which they were learned: the greater part of this is preserved, and shows us, for the first time, the system on which the hieroglyphics were arranged and taught.

The other is a geographical papyrus, forestalling Brugsch's great work on the geography and the nome divisions of Egypt; though defective in part all through, it is of the greatest value. Most of the other papyri are in demotic, and still await reading, while some are in Greek. Of course, being carbonized, the whole mass is black, and it is only by reflected light that it is possible to read anything; when the illumination is properly arranged, the duller surface of the ink can be seen on the brighter face of the papyrus. It is seldom such a treasure as this basketful of knowledge is so narrowly saved from destruction; a little more air in the burning, a little less care in the unearthing, the separation, the packing, or the opening, and these documents would have disappeared. Of course, under the usual system of leaving Arab overseers to manage excavations, all such discoveries are utterly destroyed.

NAUKRATIS.

Before beginning work in the end of 1883 I visited Gizeh; and, as usual, many small antiquities were offered to me by the Arabs. Among such was the upper part of an alabaster figure of a soldier, wearing a helmet and armlets, which was plainly of archaic Greek or Cypriote work. I at once gave the man what he asked for it , and then enquired where he got it. 'From Nebireh,' was his answer, and that was somewhere near Damanhur. So, a month or two later, I took an opportunity of going down to that region, and, after some mistakes and enquiries, I at last reached the place, in course of a twenty mile walk, and having only half-an-hour to spare before going on to the train. There I met a sight which I had never hoped for,--almost too strange to believe. Before me lay a long low mound of town ruins, of which all the core had been dug out by the natives for earth, thus baring the very lowest level of the town all over the middle of it. Wherever I walked in this crater I trod on pieces of archaic Greek pottery; soon I laded my pockets with scraps of vases and of statuettes, and at last tore myself away, longing to resolve the mystery of these Greeks in Egypt. Up to that time no Greek remains earlier than the Ptolemaic age, and Alexander, had been found in the country, and to step back two or three centuries, into the days of black-figured and rosette-ornamented vases, and archaic statuettes, was quite a new departure.

That season's work was already laid out, and I was bound to go to Tanis; but the next season I returned to this curious site, determined to understand its history. The only place that I could find to live in about there was an old country house of a pasha; and, while looking at it, I noticed two blocks of dark grey stone by the side of the entrance. Turning one of them over, I there saw the glorious heading ??????????????? ...; a decree of the city of Naukratis was before me, and the unknown town now had a name; and that a name which had been sought for often, and far from this place, and which was one of the objects of Egyptian research to discover and truly assign. All that day 'Naukratis' rang in my mind, and I sprang over the mounds with that splendid exultation of a new discovery, long wished for and well found. In England, some hesitated, and some doubted, but none denied it; and after the season's work there was no longer any question. The next year I continued the excavations along with Mr. Ernest Gardner, and was soon able to leave the remainder of the clearing in his hands, while I moved on to fresh discoveries, on the east of the country.

The origin of Naukratis was evidently entirely Greek; down on the flat surface of Nile mud, which shows the level of the country when the city was founded, the earliest remains are Greek potsherds. The date of its foundation was certainly before Amasis; and the discovery of the fort of Defenneh the next year explained the origin of this city. When Psamtik I, in 665 B.C., had wrested the throne of Egypt from the dodecarchy, or local princes , he based his power on 'the brazen men from the sea,' the Karian and Ionian mercenaries. But he knew too well the temper of his countrymen to obtrude this strength needlessly; and at the same time he needed special defence from Libya and from Asia. He therefore planted his Greek troops in two great garrisons, one on his Libyan frontier at Naukratis, the other on his Asiatic frontier at Tahpanhes; at each place founding a large square fort and a walled camp around it.

These Greeks brought with them their national worship; and of the temples mentioned by Herodotos, those of Apollo, Aphrodite, and Hera, have been found, and also one to the Dioskouroi, not recorded in history. The temple of the Milesian Apollo appears to have been the oldest: it stood in the centre of the town, outside of the fort, and was first built of mud-brick, plastered over, and later on--about the fifth century--of

white stone, some pieces of which I found. The site had been nearly cleared out by the native diggers; and I only came in time to get fragments of the temple, and to open up the great rubbish trench, where all the temple refuse was thrown. Very precious this rubbish was to me, layer under layer of broken vases, from the innumerable small bowls to the great craters of noble size and design; and most precious of all were the hundreds of dedications inscribed on the pottery, some of them probably the oldest examples of Greek writing known, and altogether far outnumbering all our past material for the

archaic alphabets. The temple of Aphrodite I found the next year, and Mr. Gardner cleared it out, and unearthed three successive buildings, one over the other. Though, perhaps, as old as that of Apollo, its inscriptions are not so primitive; but it has a charm from the tale of Athenaios about the mariners from Cyprus, who had a statuette of the goddess a span high in their boat; and how they besought it in the storm, and were soon at peace, and their boat bespread with myrtle boughs; wherefore they dedicated the statuette in the temple of Aphrodite at Naukratis, and the people of the city made myrtle wreaths for many an age after. Fine vases were found here; and great quantities of a particular kind of cup, which was apparently made on purpose for offering here. It is a bowl with a very tall upright brim, deeper than the bowl itself, and covered over with a white coat, on which delicate painting in brown is sometimes added; that these were specially made here we know from the name of Aphrodite being painted on one before the baking. The temple of Hera has been entirely swept away, and we only know of its place from some pieces of dedication on bowls found by Mr. Gardner; these lay not far from the Apollo temple, in a great enclosure, which I planned the first season. The Dioskouroi had a small temple near that of Apollo; of which only some brick pillars, and flakes of brilliant red and blue stucco, were found. But several pieces of dedicated bowls showed the nature and early age of this shrine.

The greatest and most celebrated building of Naukratis was the Panhellenion, with the central altar of the Greek community in Egypt. This was in the large enclosure around the fort, as all are agreed; but the depth of earth there prevented my reaching any remains of the altar. Herodotos expressly mentions that certain Greek towns were excluded from the

common participation in the Panhellenion, and that hence arose the separate temples in the town. Now as the sanctuary and the fort were in one, it seems readily explained how the mercenaries welcomed their kinsmen and townsfolk in the camp to join at the common altar; while those traders who came from other cities would be left outside, and would found their own temples. If it were so, we may conclude that neither Miletos, Samos, nor Aegina, furnished any of the mercenaries of Psamtik. In the time of Ptolemy Philadelphos, as the old camp and Panhellenion no longer needed defence, the entrance was widened and occupied with a large building; of which the foundation deposits, consisting of models of the iron and bronze tools, of the materials, and of the libation vases, were discovered in each corner of the bed of sand which was laid beneath the foundations. An avenue led up to this from the west, and marble rams, a large granite sphinx, and a base of a figure dedicated to Zeus of Thebes , were found here.

To turn now to the town; probably one of the most important buildings in the fifth century B.C. was the palaistra, dedicated to Apollo by Kleainetos, Aristothemios, and Maiandrios, according to the beautiful marble inscription found here. Unfortunately we do not know the site of it, as the inscribed block had been re-used in later times, and was also dug up before I went to the place. It was shown to me one night in a native hut, by a glimmering lamp; I instantly copied it, for fear of any difficulty arising, and then laid down ten francs on it, and told the owner to take which he pleased, the stone or the money; with a little hesitation at having the pleasure of haggling so cut short, he picked up the unexpected price, and I walked off behind the precious block to my house. The natives had so cleared out the earth from the heart of the town that all the Roman, Ptolemaic, and Persian houses and remains were gone; and the floor of the crater thus dug out consisted of the oldest

town, underlaid by a bed of ashes, which apparently showed that the first settlement outside of the camp was a cluster of mere booths. Here I found a scarab factory, where they had made the scarabs of white and blue paste, so well known in Greek cemeteries in Rhodes and elsewhere. Hundreds of earthenware moulds and many scarabs were unearthed, and this factory is the leading point for dating the early town. The work of the scarabs is manifestly a Greek imitation of Egyptian style; and the names of the kings upon them show the dates to come down to the time of Uah-ab-ra , but not a single example of Amasis was found, proving the factory to have been extinct before his time. Probably the great defeat of the Greek troops by Amasis was a severe blow to Greek work for the time; although Naukratis reaped the benefit of the annihilation of the other Greek centres , by being tolerated and having the exclusive privilege of trade. The first autonomous coin of Naukratis yet known was found in the town; with heads of Naukratis and of the hero Alexander.

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