Author Description

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1899 Excerpt:...testifies to the enormous labour which had been spent on it. In the subtle curving, symmetry of flaking, ripple-marking, and serration of its flint knives, Egypt has come into competition with the whole of the primitive world, and has carried off the prize unchallenged. The excavator perseveres: inscriptions have long since ceased, the art of making pottery on the wheel disappears, but copper or bronze, though rare, seems ever to be present. The beginning of the early bronze age still lies hid, and the work of neolithic man in Egypt has not yet been disentangled from that of his successor who ran metal from the furnace into the mould and invented coloured glazes and glass M itself. Far behind the later stone age again is palaeolithic man, who may have lived before the Nile valley was grooved out by the river, and whose rude implements strew the desert plateaus of Egypt and Somaliland. Thus we gain from Egypt some insight into the chronology of the ages of man in the world. At least we learn that the antiquity of even the later stages of civilization is respectable, and that probably each period was immensely longer than its successor and shorter than its predecessor. When Babylonian archaeology has been followed out on the same lines and the early chronology of the two countries fixed, we shall have the means of estimating the course and speed of the different waves of civilization that carried the metals or the knowledge of their uses from one country to another and spread them over the globe. In Egypt iron, though perhaps long known, had not begun to be in common use much before the seventh century B.C.; in Britain, probably not before the third century. The leading aim of Flinders Petrie throughout his years of excavations in Egypt has been to establish...