The daily morning journal and courier., 1898-05-27

| mously increased by the labors of | scholars and explorers; the ruins of ancient cities have been exhumed, and | the contemporary literature of Egypt and Assyria, inscribed on papyri or tablets of clay, and painted or carved on the walls of temples, palaces and | tombs, has been deciphered. What is | in some respects still more important | is that objects found in these ruins ! have thrown great light upon the daily | life of the people and their ornamental and useful arts. One of the depart
 ments of this inquiry concerns the | metals used by the different nations,
 and at the different epochs of their l history; and 1t is to this that my at- | tention will be confined this evening. The difficulty I experience is the vast amount of material; and I cannot at- tempt anything more than general view of the subject, and some of the most salient points.
 The area over which the inquiry ex- tends is that of the lands bordering on the eastern half of the Mediterranean and stretching eastward to the Persian Gulf. The time, so far as Egypt is concerned includes the whole period from the first Pharaoh, Menes, to the conquest of the country by Alexander the Great; ranging from about B. c. 4400 to B. c. 3S2 The chronology em- ployed throughout is that of pr. Wall lis Budge, of the British Museum, who has adopted in the main that of Brugsch Bey. This period of four thousand years appears to me reason able, and errs, if anything, on the side of moderation.
 If we take as our starting point Sen eferus triumphal tablet in Wady Ma ghara, in the Sinaitic peninsula, we see the king f1ourishing his battle-axe over \ the head of his enemy. This symbol l izes thu conquest of the copper and the l turuuoise mines of that region, and l implies, of course, their previous ex- | istence as a source of wealth. In the
 hieroglyphic inscription above his head there Is not only the kings name
 spelled phonetically, but in the royal titles are seen two ideographs which | bear upon our subject. One is the necklace or ornamental collar which is
 the well-known symbol for gold and | the OIIlGT dIl dACs tllS DCoet VI "AAASAA ." V l sembles rather that of copper than of
 a stone weapon. These titles have no
 reference to the metals themselves, | but mean Golden Horus' and "Benef- | icent Divinity" Before such symbols l could be used to express abstract ideas they must have been well known in their concrete form. The date as l signed to Seneferu is B. c. 3750; but the l discoveries of the last year have put in our possession the actal metals themselves, of a much greater antiqui- ty. M. de Morgan, late director general of antiquities in Egypt, has explored an enormous royal tomb at Nagada, the center chamber of which contained
 the mummy of the Pharoah. with the cartouche of King Menes, the reputed first king of Egypt. If it be really his tomb, the probable date will be B. C.. 440O. What is interesting to us is that | in two of the chambers, among null titude of articles made if ivory, quartz, | porphyry, wood, alabaster tortoise shell, mother of-pearl, obsidian, earth
 enware, comedian, glass and cloth,
 there were found small pieces of metal, | viz, two or three morsels of gold, and | a long bead of that metal Of some what crescent form, together with
 some articles of copper--a kind of but
 ton, a bead and some fine wire. The button was analysed by M. Berthelot, the well-known French chemist and politician, to whom we are indebted for the examination of a very large | number of ancient metallic objects; he states that it is nearly pure copper, without arsenic or any other metal in
 notable proportion.
 These are the oldest metallic objects in the world to which we can assign a probable date. But Professor Flinders | Petrie has discovered, three years ago, also at Nagada, a great number of ob- | iects of the same character, and among them few small copper imple- ments. Some filings from dagger, a celt and little harpoon were analysed by me, and found to consist of practi- cally pure copper, without any trace | of tin
 Of about the same period, and per- haps even earlier, are a number Of tombs at and near Abydos, which have been explored by M. Amelineau, bear ing the names of kings unknown to
 history, accompanied by hierogylphics of archaic form. In these have been found larger quantities of copper uten-
 sils, viz, pots, hatchets, needles, chis- els etc., which M. Berthelot also finds
 to be nearly pure metal, but some con- tain little arsenic.
 In the country lying between or near
 the Euphrates and the Tigris we have
 some antiquities dating, perhaps, as lN&SSSS$]S]N