Sometimes, then, in our race from day to day it is necessary to stop the headlong progress of experience, and, for an hour, to look back upon the past.  Often, before we remember to direct our mind to it, that past is already blurred, and dim.  The picture is out of focus, and turning from it in sorrow instantly the flight of our time begins again.  This should not be.  “There is,” says Emerson, “a relationship between the hours of our life and the centuries of time.”  Let us give history and archaeology its due attention; for thus not only shall we be rendering a service to all the dead, not only shall we be giving a reason and a usefulness to their lives, but we shall also lend to our own thought a balance which in no otherwise can be obtained, we shall adjust ourselves to the true movement of the world, and, above all, we shall learn how best to serve that nation to which it is our inestimable privilege to belong.

CHAPTER II.

The Egyptian empire.

“History,” says Sir J. Seeley, “lies before science as a mass of materials out of which a political doctrine can be deduced....  Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics....  Politics and history are only different aspects of the same study."[1]

    [Footnote 1:  ‘The Expansion of England.’]

These words, spoken by a great historian, form the keynote of a book which has run into nearly twenty editions; and they may therefore be regarded as having some weight.  Yet what historian of old Egyptian affairs concerns himself with the present welfare and future prospects of the country, or how many statesmen in Egypt give close attention to a study of the past?  To the former the Egypt of modern times offers no scope for his erudition, and gives him no opportunity of making “discoveries,” which is all he cares about.  To the latter, Egyptology appears to be but a pleasant amusement, the main value of which is the finding of pretty scarabs suitable for the necklaces of one’s lady friends.  Neither the one nor the other would for a moment admit that Egyptology and Egyptian politics “are only different aspects of the same study.”  And yet there can be no doubt that they are.

It will be argued that the historian of ancient Egypt deals with a period so extremely remote that it can have no bearing upon the conditions of modern times, when the inhabitants of Egypt have altered their language, religion, and customs, and the Mediterranean has ceased to be the active centre of the civilised world.  But it is to be remembered that the study of Egyptology carries one down to the Muhammedan invasion without much straining of the term, and merges then into the study of the Arabic period at so many points that no real termination can be given to the science; while the fact of the remoteness of its beginnings but serves to give it a greater value, since the vista before the eyes is wider.