RELICS OF THE PAST

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 13739, 21 May 1910, Page 7

RELICS OF THE PAST

EXPLORATIONS IN TEMPLES AND TOMBS. The "Call of the East" manifests itself in many ways; in none more clearly or with greater insistence than when it summons men to dig and delve amid the ruined temples mid tombs .>f past ages to discover relics which reveal the manner of life of tho peoples of bygone days, which mako clear dark passages in history, or which bring into the region of fact what has hitherto been regarded as tradition, ;f not myth. Tho -irclueologist who penetrates into the- hidden and unriflrd tomb of a Pharaoh, or excavates on tho site of some half-buried, half-forgotten temple in Greece or Asia Minor, has before him perpetually tbo hopo and the possibility of finding something of surpassing interest, which shall illumine the past. This work of scientifically exploring cl-o ruins of old-time civilisations hss been going on for many years iv Egypt, Greece, It.ily. Asia .Minor. Crete and Palestine. The results have added enormously to our knowledge of the ancients. There is not a musoum in the world that does not possess some trophies of the antiquary".*, work in.this direction, and history, literature, and art. havo :iil benefited by the labours of .those who have del veil so patiently a •-, low the- accumulate*:! dust of nianv centtiries. Tho antiquarian a relueologist i. mostly a .scientific worker, rarely a writer, and it is. therefore, with peculiar pleasure that ono opens Mr D. G. Hogartii's latest book, "Accidents nt an Antiquary's Life." For Mr Hogarth, as his former book, "A Wandering Scholar in tho Levant," showed, brings to tho description of his experience not merely a deep knowledge of the work that Ik* h.'-.s under- [" Accident* of -n Ar-tiqimry's Li**." '*y D. G. llogartb. ilacaiiilmi and Co., Tg 01.]

taken, but literary ability far above the average, an atmosphere of true scholarship, and a flavour of delicate humour. Of his qualifications to write as an antiquary there is no doubt. He hr_s travelled aud toiled in rain and iiuishino iv Greece, Crete, the Fayoum, and Northern Africa, for a period extending over twenty years, and in this latest book he gives some of his experiences. The digger for buried relics resembles tho digger for gold in that h<-. never knows what fortune may have in store lor him. Long weeks of wearisome and monotonous excavation may bring him nothing; ou the other hand they may end in discoveries that compensate for all the labour that they have cost. Witness Mr Hogarth's description of his experiences at Ephesus, from which we give some extract..:—

"Wood,-tho discoverer of the site of tho great Artemisium at Ephesus. achieved the all but impossible in lighting on its pavement, which had been buried under twenty feet of silt, and performed a feat not less_ to his credit in opening out thereafter an area as large as the floor-space of a great cathedral. But when ho left the site- in 1874. he had manifestly not found all that remained of the most famous of ancient temples: nor of what he did indeed find would he ever compose a sufficient record. For thirty years' doubts remained which the first Museum in the world, owner ot the site, could not well refuse to resolve; and to resolve them I was sent to Ephesus in the last days of September, 1904. The site looked then as hopeless ns an ancient site ran look—an immenso water-logged pit chocked with a tangled brake of thorns and reeds; and when axe and billhook and fire had cleared the jungle, it looked, if possible, more hopeless still. Tho shallow surface waters, however, when no longer sheltered by leafy canopies, dried quickly tinder the early October sun, and I got to work with little delay on the platform of the temple which King Croesus had helped to build. A hundred men were enrolled, and every local means of carriage was pressed into their service."

For two or three months the work went on practically without reward, though now and then some trivial discovery encouraged the searchers. All this time they wero excavating in ground that had previously been gone over, the platform of tho temple had been cleared, and several shafts had been sunk through its massive foundations. Then ona day, as tho topmost marble slabs were being lifted off the remains of what was believed to have been tho great altar, Mr Hogarth saw iying on the mud-mortar, a little plate of impure gold, stamped with lonian pattern, and pierced at the corners. "I thought of the goddess who had stood in effigy on this pedestal, of her plated diadem and gold-encrusted robe, and sent for sieves."

"For the rest of that day hours passed as minutes. Every handful of mad mortar washed through the meshes loft treasure behind —women's gauds foT the most part, earrings of all patterns and weights, beads of sundered neck-lace-strings, pins for the bair, and brooches for tho shoulder or throat, somo of these last fashioned after the likeness of hawks in the finest granular work of lonian smiths. With them appeared primitive electrum coins, fresh from the mint. I . was as puzzled as pleased. How had delicate ■jewels come to lurk there, fresh and unspoiled? When tho first specimens appeared, I thought them accidents of ruin—precious trappings of the statue carried down by water, through chinks of its pedestal, or perhaps, contents of some cherished casket. But such possibilities." became impossible as the jewels continued to be found. in each successive bed of mortar. It grew clear that wo had chanced on some sort of' foundation deposit—on objects hidden with a purpose when the first builders were laying oourse on course of the pedestal, and that we had the niost desired of treasures, fine work of the lonian springtime of Greece. Perhaps, also, we had solved at last tho mystery of Greek foundation-deposits. Under Egyptian temples Petrie lias found many such deposits, whether beneath corner-stones or the main threshold, .or in the central axis of a building; but under Greek shrines the hiding-place of foundation records had never yet been divined. Yet what spot more fitting than the pedestal of the most sacred statue at tho very heart of the sacred -nlan?" •

Mr Hogarth then describes how the winter <i;ains came on after the explorers had dug out only a small part of the vein of treasure, and how all work had to be ppstponed until spring. Then pumping machinery had to be installed to pump the water out of tho excavations.

"Thus it was not till May was half gone out that wo couH hunt again for jewels. , They appeared, one after another; in the sieves just as they had done five months before; and when the clean bottom sand had been scraped out of the four comers of the pedestal, we had added nearly five hundred trinkets. Before the ricdestnl was exhausted \ve had begun to probe the mud about it, and there find ruins of throe small shrines, one> Iwlow the other, and many precious brfrken things in the- slimy bottom of the lowest and earliest. These were rarely jewels and articles of personal wear like, those that made. u;> the Pedestal Treasure, but chiefly things used in worship, and fragments of votive offerings. These had not been hidden of set purjio.se whore we found them, but worn lost and forgotten, thiugs, sucked into the bottom ooze, or trodden under foot in some wild hour or ruin or sack. Since the earliest shrine on the site must be supposed founded not later than 700 n.c , ., it may well bo wo dredged from its nether slime treasures unseen since the sanctuary was violated by a rude Cimmerian horde-in the reign of Ardys 11. of Lydia. . . . Wp got statuettes whole or unbroken, by the score, whether in ivory—priceless treasures these of early lonian ai"t—-or in bronze, or in terra-eotta, or even in wood. We ;*ot vessels in ivory and vessels in clay. We gcot much gold and electrum. which had been used tor casing or adorning thing* decayed: vro got some silver, and. best prize of all. a nlato engraved on both faces, in the oldest lonic character, with a, record of contributions towards a rebuilding of the shrine. Wo yot many another object, broken or imperfect, but not less precious. in crystal and paste and amber and bronze. In sum, when all the ground had been searched, we had recovered from the treasures of- the first House of Artemis in the Ephesian plain hard on three thousand objects, one with :»not her and greater with less. I took them all to Constantinople, ns in honour bound, for we had subscribed to the Ottoman Law and made no bargain with the Turk. Rut in return for our' yood faith, all the objects were suffered to go for a wnsnn to England, to be ordered and studied. I wanted nothing loss than to see them again when I left Stambul, ;uk! nothinc more than to keep them for ever in London, when, a year,later, they had to return." IN THE TOMBS OF KINGS. In the .-3IEC chanter Mr Hogarth deals with excavating in Ecypt. the "body-snatching *ort. which Science approves and will doubtless justify to the Anjjwl of the Resurrection by pleading a statute of limitations. To rob n tomb apnears," ho says, "to .be hold dastardly or laudable according as the tenancv'of the corpse has been long: or short." He had been commissioned to M>arcli the tombs in the hill behind Siut. whoso soft calcareous cliffs are honeycombed with graves of every ape. The vast cemetery, lying near a largo

town, had been ransacked over and over again, chiefly for wooden statuettes and models, and he had been warned that he could hope for no untouched burials, but must content himself with raking over the leavings of hastier robbers. "Tho event," he says, "belied the warning. First and last wo had the fortune to find nearly thirty sealed graves, many poor enough, and some re-used for second and humblo burials, but a few of the Old Empire period, whose furniture adorns even the rich collections in Bloomsbury. But it was with all the pain in the world, amid recurring failures, and after weeks of fruitless toil, that we found those. I" or every profitable tomb at least twenty profitless had to be opened, and. moreover, examined scrupulously, since it was hardly ever possible to be sure it the dead "man had been wholly robbed till we reached his chamber itself, ten to thirty fee:, below the surface. Ihe deep shaft of entry would often seem as the masons had left it in the distant days of the Twelfth Dynasty, filled to its brim with their clean limestone chips; but none the less the coffins would bo found at the last smashed or removed, tho best of the furniture withdrawn, and the rest heaped p-ell-mell in utter ruin, after the eh am bit had been entered from below by a passage rudely hewn from a neighbour grot. Yet even then it could not be. abandoned unsearelied ; and for other and mauv days the men must turn over the pile of earth and bones and scraps in faint hope that something of value had been overlooked or despised by earlier robbers. Doing this slow, blind work, they must needs be watched by the dim light of smoky candles in the choking dust-laden air of a narrow cell, which reeked of mummy clothes and the foul rags of 'fellahin.' .... Dealers waited for my men at sunset below the hill, and beset them all tha way to the town, and one digger, a youth of brighter wit and face than most—ho was half a Bodawi—-gained so much in th-** few weeks before I turned him off, that he bought him a camel, a donkey, and a wife. The order of his (purchases was always stated thus, whoever told the tale.

"Tho most bitter disappointment was caused by a great collapsed grotto through whose choked portal we bad quarried our way to find tho central grave-nit still covered with its lid of ancient .palm-trunks. We lifted these and dug into tho clean chi.pts below with ever brighter hopes; for the shaft was so virgin that the white dust made by the original chiselling hung still on its walls. Down and down the men delved, keen as their masters, and for five-and-twentv feet into tho depths'of the hill thc filling was pure of all sign of disturbance. Then at last the chamber appeared', doorless, jprure, and empty as the shaft. The tomb had never been used for burial at all.

"So success seemed to flee before us, and to pursue it was dangerous, whero rock was rotten and scree of loose chips, thrown out from plundered tombs above, might sli,-p» at any moment over the only channels of air and bsoape. and condemn ns to the death of trapped rats in a most unworthy cause anel most unpleasant company. Crawling on all-fours in tlio dark, one often found the .passage barred by a heap of dim swaddled mummies turned out of their coffins by some earlier snateher of bodies; and over these one had to go, feeling their breast-bones crack under one's knees, and their swathed heads shift horribly this way or that under one's hands. And having found nothing to loot hi a thrice plundered charnel-house, one crawled back by the same grisly path to the sunlight, choked with mummy dust and redolent of more .rotten grave clothes than the balms of Arabia could sweeten." During the time spent at Suit, the explorers lived in a huge grotto with storied walls, "because the lower Nile Valley is a thoroughfare of furious, winds all the winter long, and- tent life, a constant misery in Egypt, would have been most miserable on the face of ihe Siut bluff, which stands out in the winds' track, and is buffeted by all the storms." "-Warmth after the days toil wo never felt from December to February, oven when sitting closest to tho fire which we kindled nightly with unpainted slats of ancient coffins on a hearth, of Old Empire bricks. Tha dead wood, seasoned by four thousand years of drought, threw off an ancient and corpse-like smell, whioh left its faint savour on thc toast which wo scorched at the embers; and a clear, smokeless light fell fitfully on serried coffins, each hiding a gaunt tenant swathed and bound, to whoso quiet presenco we grew so little sensitive that we ranged our store:, and bottles, our pans and our spare garments on Jiis convenient lid.

"None the loss I used to put all these ills, thc disappoint-moms aud discomforts of the work and life to the account ol things that matter not at all every time that I watched tho clearance of a sealed tomb-door. I have dug for twenty years and set next foot after the sexton's in very many ancient sepulchres; but I still fool, as at first, the flutter of poignant hope that tho tomb may bo virgin, and an indescribable thrill at ihe sight of grave furniture undisturbed since thousands of years. There lie the dead man's bow, and arrows in their place on his coffin-lid, string snapped and plumes in tiie dust, and there his stout staff and his boomcrand: the little Nile boats are propped fully manned by his side; the wooden servants who answer his call in the under-world aro at their several businesses: and his offigv, with his wife's, stands at his head. I know full well that, in Egypt at least, ono hardly ever oikms a." perfectly virgin sepulchre. Someone rohb:.d it on the night of tho burial ere thc door was scaled. Somo malign intruder has rumpled those grave clothes down to the waist, in quest of the jewels on nock and breast, and has trampled or overturned in his guilty haste the furniture beside the coffin. But since he withdrew with his accomplices and .sealed tlio door, all has l«.en silence and fino rain of dust from tho roof, until, aftoi four thousand year, you come. You may talk of scio.ice and think of loot, while tho chattcrins diggers ar working like fiends to lift tho iast of the filling from the shaft; but the first look into th*? dimness of the sepulchre itself will silence them, hardem-d robbers though they bo, and, will silence you. Science and your v. on glory and the lust of loot aro all forgotten in tho awe which falls as in fairy talcs on adventurers in underground chambers, whore kirgs of old time sit asleep."