As has been said, the early workers who sought for knowledge of old Egypt hunted mainly for papyri. Manuscripts were of undoubted value in throwing light on the past, and while the seekers were prepared to recover statues, jewels and similar objects, they placed the recovery of manuscripts before everything else. The fact that they could not read the papyri, in those early days when a glimmer of interest in Egypt was beginning to filter through to the outside world, was no drawback to the hunters. The rows of quaint pictures, with bird-headed men, the natives with mops of black hair, and other queer things, were attractive in themselves. They had a value to the collector for their strange writing alone. And those early collectors realized that, given the manuscripts, some brilliant men would manage to read them some day, as Young and Champollion actually did.
So those early enthusiasts spent their time hunting tombs, digging here, there and everywhere in their endeavours to locate something that was worth carrying away. When they were successful they seized on the mummy cases and eagerly opened them to see if any manuscripts were inside with the mummy. In their eagerness they overlooked much. They searched haphazard. Their knowledge was small, and they undoubtedly cast aside many things which they looked upon as so much rubbish, trifles which to the scientist of to-day would light up the past as with a searchlight.
A square inch of broken pottery is not particularly noticeable in a mound of rock and sand, and even if the eye does light on it the hand is seldom prompted to pick it up. But there are men so skilled in their knowledge of the pottery of past ages that a fragment may serve to link places thousands of miles apart, and thrust the history of mankind backward into the mists of time for several thousands of years.
A brilliant scientist like Professor Flinders Petrie is able to deduce the most amazing things from a piece of pottery, even if it be but a fragment. To him the fragment serves the purpose of a calendar. It is as though he were picking up a modern calendar on which the year stood boldly out. Of course the fragment of pottery does not date quite so exactly as that, but it easily falls within a well-defined period.
A glance would enable the famous scientist to say: “This is seven thousand years old.” And, seeing a different fragment, he would know that it was a great deal older—perhaps ten thousand years old.
How much valuable evidence of this sort has been ignorantly destroyed in the past will never be known. In the early days of last century, and even to within measurable distance of this, men were too intent on the big things to pay attention to the little things that slipped through their fingers. It is the common things that tell us the history of a period, the things that people use and wear. If we recover these fragments of common things, they serve to indicate how the people lived.
Thieves, too, have been responsible for the loss of most valuable evidence. The Egyptian natives are born pilferers. They have a natural aptitude for causing things to vanish, and when a discovery has been made the discoverer has seldom been able to preserve his find in its entirety. There have been cases where the greater part of a find has disappeared in a night, and once it is gone you might as well seek to find a particular grain of sand in the desert. Statues, vases, jewels, furniture—all have been carried off, and the finders have wakened to discover that their labour has been wasted, and that instead of enriching our knowledge of the world they have merely enriched a few native thieves.
The natives, too, often seize the opportunity of digging in places where they know they will not be disturbed. They do not go to the trouble of obtaining a permit to dig. The last thing they desire to do is to call the attention of the authorities to their work, so they run the risk and dig surreptitiously. While it is obvious they must waste a lot of energy in conducting these illegal searches, it is also obvious that they are often rewarded by finding objects of value.
The things they find, they smuggle to their huts, and in due course sell to some traveller, who places them in his private collection, where they are as completely lost to sight as if they had never existed. Then there are things that the natives stumble on accidentally. If their find is not portable, they may inform the authorities, but if it is easy to handle, there is little prospect of their discovery becoming known.
No one has the faintest idea how much material has been lost in these ways. Its scientific value must be incalculable.