Here, as an example, we will trace how the various links of the History of Egypt have been recovered, from ihe ages before Alexander brought Egypt into European history, and how we discover 1,000 years of continuity before his time.
1n 1884 an Arab in Cairo showed me an alabaster figure, which I saw was that of an early Greek warrior. I bought it and then asked where it come from; until a thing is secured and paid for, a fictitious origin may be invented to increase the value. I was told Nebireh, and that was near Damanhur. So I went to Damanhur and began enquiry. After tramping for several hours, I reached a low mound with the heart of it dug out for the field dressing. There I walked over smashed Greek vases and charming painted fragments, but had to leave them, till I could undertake the site. So soon as excavation at Tanis was finished, I returned to my Tell, and found an empty house where could get rooms. At the door lay a horsing block of black stone. I turned it round and there saw a decree of the people of Naukratis, the first home of the Greeks in Egypt, long sought for and now safely identified. "That gave us much of the seventh and sixth centuries &c. in ruins of the temples of Apollo Aphrodite and other gods.
When I was at Tanis, men pointed out a distant speck on the horizon seventeen miles away, saying it was Tell Defneh. Having worked Naukrates for a season, 1884-5, 1 left it in the safe hands of Ernest Gardner, and went there for the season 1885-0, for I guessed that Defneh was no less than Daphnae, the other Greek settlement. At the best site on the way there, I settled and recruited workers, and after some weeks of drilling them in digging a ruined city, I said that I was going into the open desert to Tell Defneh, and asked for volunteer Of we went, a merry party of forty men, girls and boys, and tramped to our Tell.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.