Ancient History

GASTON MASPERO

The Dawn of Civilisation

Gaston Camille Charles Maspero, born on June 23, 1846, in Paris, is one of the most renowned of European experts in philology and Egyptology, having in great part studied his special subjects on Oriental ground.  After occupying for several years the Chair of Egyptology in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes at the Sorbonne in Paris, he became, in 1874, Professor of Egyptian Philology and Archaeology at the College de France.  From 1881 to 1886 he acted in Egypt as director of the Boulak Museum.  It was under his superintendence that this museum became enriched with its choicest antique treasures.  Dr. Maspero retired in 1886, but in 1899 again went to Egypt as Director of Excavations.  His works are of the utmost value, his skill in marshalling facts and deducting legitimate inferences being unrivalled.  His masterpiece is an immense work, with the general title of “History of the Ancient Peoples of the Classic East,” divided into three parts, each complete in itself:  (1) “The Dawn of Civilisation”; (2) “The Struggle of the Nations”; (3) “The Passing of the Empires.”

I.—­The Nile and Egypt

A long, low, level shore, scarcely rising above the sea, a chain of vaguely defined and ever-shifting lakes and marshes, then the triangular plain beyond, whose apex is thrust thirty leagues into the land—­this, the Delta of Egypt, has gradually been acquired from the sea, and is, as it were, the gift of the Nile.  Where the Delta ends, Egypt proper begins.  It is only a strip of vegetable mould stretching north and south between regions of drought and desolation, a prolonged oasis on the banks of the river, made by the Nile, and sustained by the Nile.  The whole length of the land is shut in by two ranges of hills, roughly parallel at a mean distance of about twelve miles.

During the earlier ages the river filled all this intermediate space; and the sides of the hills, polished, worn, blackened to their very summits, still bear unmistakable traces of its action.  Wasted and shrunken within the deeps of its own ancient bed, the stream now makes a way through its own thick deposits of mud.  The bulk of its waters keep to the east, and constitutes the true Nile, the “Great River” of the hieroglyphic inscriptions.  At Khartoum the single channel in which the river flowed divides, and two other streams are opened up in a southerly direction, each of them apparently equal in volume to the main stream.