I
Once more chance has served us well. Workmen who were making a railway embankment on the site of ancient Bubastis discovered, on September 22, 1906, a real treasure of jewellery and Egyptian goldsmiths’ work in the ruins of a brick house. They hoped to profit by the find themselves, but one of our watchmen had seen them; he took no action, however, at the moment, for fear of being ill-treated: the next day he reported the matter to the native inspector, Mohammed Effendi Chabân, who at once put the police on their track and informed his chief, Mr. Edgar, inspector-general of the antiquities in the provinces of the delta. Investigations were made in likely places, while the police searched the workmen’s houses and recovered some of the pieces that had been carried off. Several that escaped them fell later into the hands of a dealer in Cairo: a gold strainer, three undecorated silver phials, a large chased gold ring which strengthened the neck of a silver vase, fragments of silver cups, all, except the gold ring, of no artistic value. The two most valuable, a silver vase with a goat in gold as handle and a gold goblet in the form of a half-opened lotus, were seized at the house of the fellahs, Moursi Hassaneîn and Es-Sayed Eîd, before they had sold them to a local Greek bakal. He immediately claimed them of us as his personal property that, failing our unfortunate interference, he would have acquired for ready money. As no reply was vouchsafed to his summons, he went to law with us. The affair dragged on for some weeks, during which Mr. Edgar had the railway works carefully watched. At last, on October 17th, a workman with a blow of his pick-axe laid bare several fragments of silver vases: he tried to conceal them, but our ghafirs prevented him, and the search proceeded under the protection of the police: the objects lay in a heap, gold between two layers of silver; the same evening they were in safety. The work was carried out so quickly that nothing was lost, and there was no reason for any one to contest our right to the windfall. To bring this story to an end, I may add that on November 4th the court of Zagazig found the two fellahs guilty of theft, and condemned them to imprisonment and to pay half the costs. But the bakal still persisted in his claim, and rumour soon spread among the natives that he had gained his suit in the Court of Appeal: we had been forced to deliver up to him the objects of the litigation under penalty of a considerable fine for each day of delay. The dealers never hesitate to spread lies of this sort among the people: they thereby enhance their prestige with the fellahs, and uphold them in the notion that they have nothing to fear from the “Service des Antiquités.”
The treasure safe, we had to take note of the condition in which it reached us. At the first glance, two very different series were perceived: one, which comprised the jewellery and the gold or silver vases of most skilful workmanship, went back to the XIXth Dynasty; the other was composed exclusively of silver plate, the coarseness of which betrayed a much more recent period. Although it was all found at two separate times, and in two places somewhat distant from each other, did it originally form one collection? As we have seen, the whole made a heap among the débris of two or three jars which were themselves broken in the course of centuries under the continuous pressure of the earth; the objects seemed to have been heaped up irregularly, the most valuable in the middle, the others forming a bed above and below. We had even still adhering to a large fragment of pottery a stem partly of hardened mud and partly of metal, in which we recognized on a precipitate of less ancient earrings and bracelets, the remains of several Pharaonic goblets. How can it be explained that relics of such different epochs should be found in the same place? Many of them are intact, but others have purposely been clipped or broken, and the fragments melted down; they are also mixed with plates of pliant silver and with ingots coming from goldsmiths’ workshops like those that still exist. We know what happens not only in Egypt but in European countries when peasants dig up treasure while ploughing their land: they take it to a jeweller, who buys it of them by weight, throws it into the melting-pot, scarcely ever troubling about the loss thus caused to art or science, and transforms it into modern horrors. It is to some adventure of the sort that we owe the possession of our find. A fellah who lived, I imagine, during the time of the Roman domination, found in the ruins near Zagazig, if not at Zagazig itself, silver objects which he sold to a native goldsmith who destroyed some of them for the needs of his craft, and kept the others either to give to a collector or to use himself in the same way as the first lot when that should be exhausted. Did local sedition or the sack of the city by a hostile army compel him to hide his property in two different places? His goods, once hidden under the earth, were not again drawn forth, and we received them from him, almost without an intermediary, sixteen months ago.
SILVER BRACELETS AND EARRING.
GOLD EARRING FROM THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG.