THE

HE Harvard-Boston Egyptian Expedition was begun in 1905, under an agreement between President Eliot of Harvard College and Gardiner Martin Lane, President of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The expedition is still in the field, and has now completed sixteen years of archaeological research in the Nile Valley. During these years, the primary interest has always been the recovery of his torical material, and the greatest attention has been devoted to the development of scientific methods of excavating and of recording the excavations. At the same time, a well-coördinated staff of native foremen and skilled diggers has been organized; and the expedition has become noted among foreign scholars both for its scientific methods and for its organization. The expedition has frequently supplied groups of skilled men or even a complete nucleus staff to other expeditions-American, English, German, and Austrian. The most conclusive evidence of the reputation of the expedition for scientific method is the fact that it was selected by the Egyptian Government to carry out the archaeological survey of Lower Nubia when the Assuan dam was raised to lay that country under water.

The following greater pieces of excavation have been carried out:

(1) The pyramid temples of King Mycerinus, who built the Third Pyramid at Giza (about 2,750 B. C.), 1908, 1910.

(2) About half of the great cemetery of princes, courtiers, and officials beside the Giza Pyramids, 1905-07, 1912-16.

(3) The rock-cut tombs of the feudal lords of the Hare-nome at Bersheh, 1915. (4) The Nubian archaeological survey for the Egyptian Government, 1907, 1908.

(5) The excavation of the palaces of the Israelite kings at Samaria, for the

Harvard Palestinian Expedition, 1909, 1910.

(6) The excavation of the fort and cemetery of the Egyptian administration of Ethiopia at Kerma, in the Sudan, (1900-1600 B. C.), 1913, 1914, 1915, 1916.

(7) Excavations at Napata, the capital of Ethiopia (Sudan), 1916-1920: (a) Temples at Gebel Barkal; (b) Royal cemetery of the Egyptian XXVth Dynasty at El-Kur'uw; (c) Royal cemetery of Tirhaqa and the later kings of Ethiopia at Nuri.

(8) Excavation of the pyramids of Me. roe, the later and southern capital of Ethiopia, which was begun in March, 1920, and is still in hand.

The bare record of sites excavated conveys no idea of the months and years of patient work, of the mechanical difficulties overcome, of the stirring discoveries of great works of art, or of the adventures on which the expedition has embarked, often at the risk of its whole future. Over 20,000 photographs have been taken; forty folios have been filled with the register of objects found; fifty diaries have been written; and card catalogues, tomb cards, drawings, plans, and maps have accumulated in similar quantities.

At the Pyramid Temple of Mycerinus we unexpectedly found the inner sanctuary covered with a tangled mass of great granite blocks; and with bare hands and simple implements hardly more elaborate. than those of the ancient Egyptians, we were set the task of lifting several hundred pieces of granite weighing from one to eleven tons out of a hole and of carrying them fifty yards away. A distinguished British General gave me the vain advice that I should get a steam crane. We removed the whole mass at about the cost of the freight on such a crane and in less

time than it would have taken to get one out from England. When we had finished, one of the Egyptian foremen said in his pride, "If there is an order, we will build a pyramid."

Another great difficulty was encountered during the excavation of the pyramids at Nuri, where the burial-chambers were cut in a water-logged muscovite schist and the roofs were in a collapsed condition. This was in 1917, during the war, when timbers could not be had for love or money. But we purchased logs of the döm-palm (which grow locally) and propped the roofs with a forest of these stems. At one of the Barkal temples, the overhanging cliffs had fallen on the back rooms, and we had to break up over a hundred tons of stone before we exposed the beautiful granite altar dedicated to Amon-Ra by one of the kings of Ethiopia. Many other me chanical difficulties have met us and have been overcome in some simple way. The expedition has never permitted itself to be turned from its purpose by mere earth and

stone.

Some of our greatest ventures have been taken in the search for the answer to definite historical questions. The most im portant contribution to human knowledge which we have made has been the recovery of the history of Ethiopia, that part of the Nile valley which lies south of Egypt proper between the First Cataract and the head waters of the Nile. During the Archaeological Survey of Lower Nubia (the northern end of Ethiopia), which we made in 1907-1912, we had found a strange race and a new culture which, being of the period of about 2000 B. C., was neither Egyptian nor negro. The explanation of the origin of this race and this culture seemed to lie in the South, and so in January, 1913, I took a gang of my workmen south by steamer and rail to Kerma, in Dongola Province, Sudan, about 1,500 miles south of Cairo, to hunt for further historical material concerning this question.

I had intended to reconnoitre about two hundred miles of the Nile Valley from the

Third to the Second Cataract, an utterly desolate region now called Batn-el-Hagar, or "The Belly of the Rock." But at the outset, at Kerma itself, I found some important fragments of Egyptian inscription of a still earlier period, and as this place was about to be laid under water by a new irrigation scheme, I stopped at Kerma to rescue the historical material at that place. For four weeks the expedition applied its usual painstaking methods of work, and the objects found had a value about equivalent to our expenditure for postage stamps. But the historical results were startling. We had uncovered a fortified administrative centre occupied by an Egyptian armed force and an Egyptian colony during the period 1900-1600 B.C., a period in which all the history books taught us that Egypt ended just above the Second Cataract. Under this fortress we had also discovered an old trading station of the Old Empire (about 2500 B. C.).

In the next two weeks, however, we found the cemetery of this Egyptian colony two miles away across the plain, and a series of very remarkable objects was formed for the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.

It was not, however, until we returned for the second campaign (1913-1914) that the greatest "find" was made, the beautiful life-sized statue of the Lady Sennuwy, the wife of Prince Hepzefa of Assiut (in Middle Egypt), who had been sent by King Sesostris III to act as Governor of Ethiopia and had died at Kerma. Many remarkable objects from Kerma are now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, -carved wooden beds inlaid with ivory figures of animals and gods, bronze swords with tortoise-shell grips and ivory butts, ostrich feather fans, the finest pottery ever made in the Nile Valley, blueglazed stones and pastes, etc. No positive information was obtained as to the strange race of Lower Nubia, but a new chapter was opened in the history of Egypt and the Sudan (Ethiopia), and a new aspect of the Egyptian character was revealed in the curious Kerman culture created by

Egyptians steeped in Egyptian traditions, but cast by political action in a far land filled with strange forms and presenting new conditions as well as unwonted materials.

It was, no doubt, local influences, for example, which led the Egyptian officers and officials at Kerma to revive the old custom of burying a man's wives and servants alive in his grave in order that their spirits might accompany his in the after life. This custom had been practiced by the archaic Egyptians before the First Dynasty, but for many centuries before Hepzefa came to Kerma statuettes of the family had been placed in the tomb of the dead man instead of the actual per

sons.

These discoveries at Kerma opened to the expedition the possibilities of research in Ethiopia. Through the goodwill and courtesy of Mr. J. W. Crowfoot, Director of Education of the Sudan, the site of Napata, the ancient capital of Ethiopia, was offered to us. We were further attracted

by the extensive field of pyramids, supposed to be royal tombs, which were of unknown construction. Several expeditions had attempted to find the burial chambers and had failed. Thus in January, 1916, we began the search for the entrances to the pyramids at Gebel Barkal, the religious centre of the city of Napata. We found our way by the structural entrance into the first Ethiopian pyramid by ten o'clock in the morning of the first day of work; and we excavated this field of twenty-five pyramids in six weeks. A beautiful gold bracelet with the surface enamelled in colors showing Isis seated is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts as a result of those six weeks.

This success led in later years to the excavation of the pyramids at Nuri on the south and at El-Kur'uw on the north of Napata. In these we found the tombs. of all the kings and all the queens of Ethiopia and six generations of their ancestors from about 900 to 300 B. C.,-six centuries of the royal family of Ethiopia.

Among them were the five greatest kings who, as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, ruled Egypt from about 750 to 661 B. C. At Gebel Barkal, the temples built by these kings to Amon-Ra, and those underlying temples built by the kings of the Egyptian New Empire (1550-1200 B. C.) were also excavated. During this work, we found

Magical Figure of Tirhaqa from his Pyramid at Nuri.

a long series of royal sculptures made by Egyptian artists, including statues, altars, stelae, and sphinxes, a number of remarkable works of the gold- and silversmiths of Napata, many stone vessels and Canopic jars, many hundreds of funerary figures in stone and blue faience, and other objects which, being royal works, can never be duplicated. But the greatest achievement was the recovery of the lost names of twelve kings of Ethiopia, and

the arrangement of the whole twenty-six kings in chronological order. The expedition has now at last written the first outline of the history of Ethiopia.

Homer mentions Ethiopia as the land of the care-free Ethiopians whither the Olympian gods retired at times for a holiday. To the later classical writers, it was a land of wonders and fabulous races of men. We now know that it was a land of roads leading to the mine-lands which supplied Egypt with gold, and to the markets of the southern countries whence came the ivory, the ebony, the ostrich feathers, the leopard skins, the resins, the myrrh, the incense, and the black slaves demanded by the Egyptians. The roads were opened by the royal trading caravans of the Old Empire (3000-2400 B.C.). In the Middle Empire (2200-1600 B. C.), a series of forts was built, beginning at the First Cataract and ending with the fort at Kerma (called "The-Walls-of-Amenemhat"), where an Egyptian governor lived and administered Northern Ethiopia. During the New Empire, from 1549 to 1100 B. C., Ethiopia was governed in succession by twenty-three Egyptian viceroys, all of whose names are now known to us, and became thoroughly Egyptianized.

About 900 B. C., a tribe of Libyan nomads settled at Napata, coming in from the western desert, probably by way of the Selima Oasis. They mastered the country with its control of the gold supply of Egypt and of the trade routes to the South, became Egyptianized, and about 750 B. C. obtained possession of Southern Egypt as far as Thebes. In 720 B. C., or thereabouts, Piankhy, King of Ethiopia, conquered Northern Egypt, and he with four of his successors ruled Egypt as a province of Ethiopia. Living far to the south in Napata, a sun-baked town in a poverty-stricken land, these men ruled two thousand miles of the Nile Valley and sent their ambassadors to the courts of Assyria and the other powers of Western Asia. A letter of King Shabaka, the successor of Piankhy, was found in the archives of Nineveh.