The Dominon SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1919. NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE ARCHAEOLOGIST

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 140, 8 March 1919, Page 6

The Dominon SATURDAY, MARCH 8, 1919. NEW OPPORTUNITIES FOR THE ARCHAEOLOGIST

The coming yours of peace will bring great enlargement to the science of archaeology. The Ottoman Turk has been a bad ruler even over his own co-rcligionists. Tho dangerous and unsettled condition of the country surrounding the ruins of old empires made the work of the explorer often full of peril; and he ran tho. risk of having his precious spoils stolen or smashed to pieces. The defeat of Turkey will end this bad state of things. On November 7, 1918, Great Britain and Jyvance made a formal' announce''mcnt that Turkish oppression would end for ever in the Eastcrn_ Mediterranean countries. To Syria, Armenia, Mesopotamia will he granted self-government, and as these places and Egypt are the storenouses of antiquities, there will bo great opportunities for spade work, and-the explorers will have tho protection of native Governments in sympathy with their work and in touch with the Governments of tho modern civilised, world. What the ..■future may disclose with regard, to nations and civilisations that existed many thousands of years ago cannot-bo foretold. But when we recall what has been done in the past in the face of endless difficulties, it is reasonable to expect that our knowledge of ancient nations, races, and customs will be greatly increased. Tho so-called mythical ages in the history of these old Eastern peoples have been driven farther and farther back by the spado of this explorer, and the area of actual history has been immensely increased, and these_ triumphs of tho historian will certainly continue in the now era of free operation. Our Empire must put first' things fii'Bt in the great works of repatriation and reconstruction, and the vigorous pursuit of some of the sciences may rightly be delayed for a little. But the soldier in the past has often been both explorer and I archaeologist. Sir Charles Wilson, as a young officer, surveyed Jei'usalem and the Sinaitic Peninsula, and his successes led to the founding 1 of the' Palestine Exploration Society. Lord Kitchener, when a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers, did valuable exploring work \in Cyprus and in Palestine. Among our soldiers in Egypt, Syria, and Mesopotamia to-day there aro very ■likely men with a passion for exploration, and they-will not be idle and they may be making real and extensive additions' to our knowledge of the past by the. use of the spade and of the pen. The last century' was one of marvellous progress in tho regions of industry, commerce, and mechanics. Steam and electricity have wrought a revolution in tho world. To the wonders of that century must bo added the recovery of the knowledge of the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Babylon, Persia, and other nations. The story of the wonders discovered by the spade of the explorer in the sands of Egypt, among the rocks of Palestine, and in the mud of Mesopotamia fills a library of books. The manners and customs of races that lived 5000 years ago are now'made'fully known bv the Oriental scholar. The ruins of immense cities and colossal palaces .and temples have been discovered. Wc have probably more exact knowledge about the Babylonian mode of living 5000 years ago than we have of the customs of our British progenitors who lived 2000 years ago. The museums of Britain,' America, and the Continent of Europe toem with the antiquities of . Egypt, Babylonia, and Assyria, and the statues and mummies have each their own story to tell with regard to the remote past. The British Museum possesses the Rosetta slab, which proved to'be the key to the solution of the mystery of the language of ancient Egypt; and tho Louvre Gallery in Paris is made rich by the Moaoifce stone, which shows the language spoken in Palestine in tho age of King David. Every feiv years of the later Tialf of the last century brought its great find. Away in the remote desert of. .Sinai Tischendorf discovered in the Convent of St. Catherine the oldest Uode.v_ of the Bible in the world, and in 1862 a facsimile of this book was given to the scholars of Christendom. In 1881. an immense "find" of mummies was made in the Valley of Thebes, and the mummy of Rame'ses 11, the alleged .Pharaoh of the Oppression, and nearly forty others of kings, queen's, princes, and priests. These are now in the museum at Cairo, and tho visitor, can now gaze on the shrivelled facc and features of the mighty Egyptian King who lived 3200 years ago. Within the last thirty years, about 200 miles above Cairo, on the east bank of the Nile, the ruins of a city that was for a time the capital, of Egypt were discovered, and among tne ruins were found the Tell cl Amarna tablets—3oo in number—in cuneiform characters, and from these a flood of new light was thrown upon the social and political history of a period earlier than Rameses 11. The discoveries of the archaeologist in his study excel even the discoveries of his spade. There is something almost miraculous in the recovery of the knowledge of the languages of Egypt, Babylon, Assyria, and Persia. For noarly 2000 years the knowledge of these languages had died out of the earth. Now the cuneiform inscriptions of •Babylon and the hieroglyphics of Egypt are as intelligible to the specialist as Greek and Hebrew are to the students of those languages. To a son.of France the imperishable fame belongs of deciphering the hieroglyphics of Egypt in 1821, and this man—Jean Francois Champoi.lion— is now "universally acknowledged as the founder of Egyptology." The knowledge of the cuneiform inscriptions came later. Some students of ancient races said they conveyed no meaning and were the sole fancies of architects, or talismanic signs, or the works of generations of worms. Grotefend, away back in 1802, made the first real discovery by digging out of the bewildering masses of wedge-shaped figures.an alphabet. A third of a century passed, and no further progress in knowledge was made until an Englishman solved the mystery. Henry llawmnson won honour for all time by deciphering a thousand lines on a rock at Behustin, and lie thus laid a foundation on which other scholars have built a noblo superstructure.

War in tho past has opened new doors for the archaeologist.' It is an interesting fact that Napoleon's gi-cafc military expedition to Egypt in 1798 was accompanied by. a scientific commission, which included archaeologists whose researches fill several volumes. Tho antiquities collected by this commission eventually fell into the hands of Britain, and among the spoils was the priceless Rosetta stone. In the opinion of explorers those Eastern lands are. practically inexhaustible mines of antiquities, and we may expect that the horizon of our knowledge of kingdoms and races who lived in the ,early days of the human race will be much widened. There are a great many problems—such as the language and tho empire of the Hittites—to be solved, and theso will no doubt find an answer -through the scientific research of the explorer who can use the spade as well as the pen.