Prehistoric.
And all this leads us back to the Egyptian prehistoric age. There we see commonly painted on the pottery, and on walls of a tomb, the large ships then in use. Some had as many as 60 oars, yet we see the greatest of the Venetian fighting galleys had only 24 on a side. A rowing ship is useless on the Nile, except for sometimes getting down stream, as no rowing would suffice to take a large vessel continuously up against the current. But the rowing galley has been the vessel of the Mediterranean, from the French navy back to the Phoenician, and no one knows how long before. These great vessels, which bore various ensigns showing the ports from which they started, must have been concerned in important business; probably trading the oil and skins and wood one way, and the dates and corn of Egypt in return. Among their imports were probably the foreign bowls of black incised ware, filled in with white, which are found even as far back as near the beginning of the prehistoric civilisation. They clearly belong to that foreign class which is found as far apart as Spain, Bosnia, and Troy; and the original home of this pottery has yet to be found, in that Mediterranean region about which we are just beginning to discover our own ignorance.
If at present our evidence of connection between Egypt and the West, before the XIIth Dynasty, rests upon the identity of styles and fabrics, we must remember how that same class of evidence in later periods has been amply reinforced by dated objects with inscriptions, found in most unequivocal positions. And we may then at last reach the conception that after all, civilisation started at much the same time all round the Mediterranean, but advanced rather sooner in Egypt than on the northern shores.
In this study of the facts which link together the early history of Europe with that of Egypt, we have now seen the varied sources and values of the different kinds of archaeological evidence; and the modes by which the accumulation of different evidences may reinforce the conclusions, and render them more exact.
CHAPTER XIII
THE ETHICS OF ARCHAEOLOGY
Individual rights.
At first sight, ethics might not seem to have more to do with archaeology than with chemistry or astronomy. Yet even in those subjects an entire monopoly of some useful material, or the destruction of the only records of irreplaceable observations, would bring in serious questions of individual right. It is notorious what a large element of conduct is involved in biology, where species are being destroyed every year, where the rabbit and the thistle have been wantonly made the curse of a continent, and where a mixture is taking place which will efface the results of ages of segregation. In archaeology there is perhaps a greater range of ethical questions, of the individual versus the community, than in any other science. And the results of action are the more serious as the material is very limited, and perhaps no other chance of observation may ever occur. In most sciences the opportunity of experiment and observation is unlimited. If an alloy is spoiled it can be remade at once, if a star is not examined to-night it may be next night, if a plant is not grown this year it may be next year. But Theodoric’s gold armour once melted, we shall never know what it was like; the heads of the Parthenon statues once burnt to lime, are gone for ever; or the Turin papyrus once broken up, we can hardly hope ever to recover all the history it contained.
Destruction.
The destruction that has gone on, and is now going on continuously, seems as if it could leave scarcely anything for the information of future ages. Every year sees wiped out the remains which have lasted for thousands of years past. Now, in our own day, the antiquities of South Africa and of Central and South America have been destroyed as rapidly as they can be found. Elsewhere, engineers of every nation use up buildings as quarries or wreck them for the sake of temporary profit, or for more legitimate purposes as in the submersion of Philae and Nubia. Speculators, native and European, tear to pieces every tomb they can find in the East, and sell the few showy proceeds that have thus lost their meaning and their history. Governments set commissioners to look after things, who leave the antiquities to be plundered while they are living in useless ease. And the casual discoveries that are made perish in a ghastly manner. The Saxon regalia of Harold, the treasures of Thomas à Becket’s shrine, the burial of Alfred, the burial of Theodoric, and the summer palace of Pekin, have within modern memory all gone the same way as the wonders that perished in the French sack of Rome or the Greek sack of Persia. However we may deplore this, our present consideration is destruction by archaeologists, and what their responsibilities are in difficult situations. In all ages there has been destruction for gold and valuables, and in the Renascence a ruthless seizure of marbles and stone work. To that succeeded destruction for the sake of art, excavations in which everything was wrecked for the chance of finding a beautiful statue. Then in the last generation or two, inscriptions became valued, and temple sites in Greece and in Egypt, and palaces in Babylonia, have been turned over, and nothing saved except a stone or a tablet which was inscribed. At last a few people are beginning to see that history is far wider than any one of these former aims, and that, if ever we are to understand the past, every fragment from it must be studied and made to tell all it can.