106. Blue-glazed Bowls.
Besides these remains, Gurob proved to be a treasury of a later age. In the Ptolemaic period some town had existed in this neighbourhood, the inhabitants of which were buried here in the edge of the desert, apart from the earlier town. Their mummies are destitute of amulets or ornaments, and have all gone to black dust, their cartonnage coverings are without names, and of the most conventional and uninteresting kind, and their coffins are of prodigious rudeness, worthy of a savage of the Pacific; while their tombs are rude holes scooped in the sandy soil. In no respect would these burials seem worth notice, had not the cartonnage makers used up old papyri as the cheapest material for their trade. But what was worthless in the days of Philadelphos is a treasure now; the soldiers’ wills appointing as executors the sovereigns, Philadelphos and Arsinoe, the private letters, the leaves of Plato and unknown Greek plays, the accounts,—all these can be unfolded from what looks like hopeless rubbish. The cartonnage in the earlier examples was glued together, and this has not only injured the writing, but almost always served as a bait to worms, who have destroyed it; but later on the makers found that simple wetting and moulding would suffice, and we can now often peel apart sheet after sheet of writing as fresh as in the days when Cleopatra was yet unborn.
Some remains of even later times are found here; and I obtained from native diggers many Coptic embroideries, and a beautiful set of Roman glass vessels.
The essential value of Gurob is in giving us a thoroughly fixed date for the earlier stages of the civilization of Greece; in showing the races of the Mediterranean at home in Egypt; and in explaining how far they had imbibed Egyptian culture during their first sojourn on the Nile; and what they may be expected to have borrowed from thence at this early period.
107. Ivory Duck Box. 1: 2.