EXCAVATING IN EGYPT.

Waikato Argus, Volume IV, Issue 238, 22 January 1898, Page 2 (Supplement)

EXCAVATING IN EGYPT.

appeared upon hu bre;iHt, and lie bad for ever passed from the power of his captors. -—Tho Cosmopolitan.

Professor Flinders Pktrik divides his years into two halves, and spends them in a curiously dissimilar manner. Throughout the winter he delves among the ruins of the forgotten past in Egyptian tombs, and in the summer he lectures to young England at University College. His work in Egvpt is of absorbing interest to those whose imagination is capable of being aroused by discoveries of the manners and customs of races which floutished before the dawn of history. At Tani*, a place pjjrrounded by illimitable marshes, he found trinkets of gold and precious stones, which, in the Roman period, during an attack on the town by an enemy, a lady had hidden in a jar in the corner of a cellar. What happened to the unfortunate owner is unknown, but her jewels stayed where she had hidden them until an English professor dug them up. In the same buried town it was found that thousands of years before the house of a literary man, one Bakakhuin, had been burned down, and a great store of papyri was discovered, all, unfortunately, having bein reduced to a wlrtc a?h, The professor, however, came upon one baske'ful which was only burned to carbon, and a'though burnt papyrus is one of the most brittle of substances, and these documents were twisted into all sorts of shapes, Professor Petric, after ten hours' work in a still atmosphere, had v the satisfaction of stretching out safely under glass one hundred and fifty of the documents. One was off gr. at value, showing how the hieoroglyphics were arranged and taught. All the professor's work is not of eo delicate a nature. An interviewer asked him lately what his most piioful experience had been. "Getting out Horuta's body at Hawara," he said. He had p-e----viously entered the pyramid of Hawara, after scores of men had tunnelled into the brickwork for weeks. He had slid on his -stomach alon* passages choked with mud, and had made his painful way into numerous blind corridors by which King Amehit 111., who built the pyramid more than 4000 years ago, had hoped to bjfne intruders. In Mas in a cemetery near the pyramid that Professor Petrie had his experience with the mummy of Horuta. " For nearly three months the professor's picked party laboured at some solid masoni y. They were at the bottom of a forty-foot well, in a chamber that was pitch black when their candles were not alight. When at length the sepulchre was entered it was the woik of weeks to cut through the lid of the sarcophagus, which was under water. " I spent some gruesome days," said Professor Petre, "sitting astride the coffins, and struggling to lossen them, the bitter black water up to my nose." The sarcophagus was hauled up with great difficulty, at.d proved to be worth the trouble it had cost, for the amulets found on the mummy were the richest aud most complete feries yet dhcovreed.