=Egyptologists.=—­Since Champollion, many scholars have travelled over Egypt and have ransacked it thoroughly.  We call these students Egyptologists, and they are to be found in every country of Europe.  A French Egyptologist, Mariette (1821-1881), made some excavations for the Viceroy of Egypt and created the museum of Boulak.  France has established in Cairo a school of Egyptology, directed by Maspero.

=Discoveries.=—­Not every country yields such rich discoveries as does Egypt.  The Egyptians constructed their tombs like houses, and laid in them objects of every kind for the use of the dead—­furniture, garments, arms, and edibles.  The whole country was filled with tombs similarly furnished.  Under this extraordinarily dry climate everything has been preserved; objects come to light intact after a burial of 4,000 or 5,000 years.  No people of antiquity have left so many traces of themselves as the Egyptians; none is better known to us.

THE EGYPTIAN EMPIRE

=Antiquity of the Egyptian People.=—­An Egyptian priest said to Herodotus, “You Greeks are only children.”  The Egyptians considered themselves the oldest people of the world.  Down to the Persian conquest (520[9] B.C.) there were twenty-six dynasties of kings.  The first ran back 4,000 years,[10] and during these forty centuries Egypt had been an empire.  The capital down to the tenth dynasty (the period of the Old Empire) was at Memphis in Lower Egypt, later, in the New Empire, at Thebes in Upper Egypt.

=Memphis and the Pyramids.=—­Memphis, built by the first king of Egypt, was protected by an enormous dike.  The village has existed for more than five thousand years; but since the thirteenth century the inhabitants have taken the stones of its ruins to build the houses of Cairo; what these people left the Nile recaptured.  The Pyramids, not far from Memphis, are contemporaneous with the old empire; they are the tombs of three kings of the fourth dynasty.  The greatest of the pyramids, 480 feet high, required the labor of 100,000 men for thirty years.[11] To raise the stones for it they built gradually ascending platforms which were removed when the structure was completed.

=Egyptian Civilization.=—­The statues, paintings, and instruments which are taken from the tombs of this epoch give evidence of an already civilized people.  When all the other eminent nations of antiquity—­the Hindoos, Persians, Jews, Greeks, Romans—­were still in a savage state, 3,500 years before our era, the Egyptians had known for a long time how to cultivate the soil, to weave cloths, to work metals, to paint, sculpture, and to write; they had an organized religion, a king, and an administration.