[Illustration:  Pl.  I. The mummy of Rameses ii. of Dynasty XIX. 
                      —­Cairo museum.]

[Photo by E. Brugsch Pasha.

Such information is of far-reaching value to the politician, and to those interested, as every Englishman should be, in Imperial politics.  A nation cannot alter by one jot or tittle its fundamental characteristics; and only those who have studied those characteristics in the pages of history are competent to foresee the future.  A certain Englishman once asked the Khedive Ismail whether there was any news that day about Egyptian affairs.  “That is so like all you English,” replied his Highness.  “You are always expecting something new to happen in Egypt day by day.  To-day is here the same as yesterday, and to-morrow will be the same as to-day; and so it has been, and so it will be, for thousands of years."[1] Neither Egypt nor any other nation will ever change; and to this it is the archaeologist who will bear witness with his stern law of Precedent.

    [Footnote 1:  E. Dicey.  ‘The Story of the Khedivate,’ p. 528.]

I will reserve the enlarging of this subject for the next chapter:  for the present we may consider, as a second argument, the efficacy of the past as a tonic to the present, and its ability to restore the vitality of any age that is weakened.

In ancient Egypt at the beginning of the XXVIth Dynasty (B.C. 663) the country was at a very low ebb.  Devastated by conquests, its people humiliated, its government impoverished, a general collapse of the nation was imminent.  At this critical period the Egyptians turned their minds to the glorious days of old.  They remodelled their arts and crafts upon those of the classical periods, introduced again the obsolete offices and titles of those early times, and organised the government upon the old lines.  This movement saved the country, and averted its collapse for a few more centuries.  It renewed the pride of workmanship in a decadent people; and on all sides we see a revival which was the direct result of an archaeological experiment.

The importance of archaeology as a reviver of artistic and industrial culture will be realised at once if the essential part it played in the great Italian Renaissance is called to mind.  Previous to the age of Cimabue and Giotto in Florence, Italian refinement had passed steadily down the path of deterioration.  Graeco-Roman art, which still at a high level in the early centuries of the Christian era, entirely lost its originality during Byzantine times, and the dark ages settled down upon Italy in almost every walk of life.  The Venetians, for example, were satisfied with comparatively the poorest works of art imported from Constantinople or Mount Athos:  and in Florence so great was the poverty of genius that when Cimabue in the thirteenth century painted that famous Madonna which to our eyes appears to be of the crudest workmanship,