be Egyptian.  It was plain that the newly found necropolis and the puzzling objects already in the museums belonged to the same period.  Petrie assumed that they represented the art of a foreign people—­perhaps the Libyans—­who had temporarily resided in Egypt in the time between the old and the middle kingdoms.  He gave this unknown people the name “New Race.”  But his theory met with little approval, least of all from German Egyptologists; and even at that time, an opinion was expressed that this unusual art belonged before the known beginning of Egyptian culture.  However, in spite of much discussion, the question could not then be decided.

About the same time another riddle was presented to Egyptologists by the results of the excavations made in Abydos by the French scholar Amelineau; and another hot discussion was raised.  Amelineau had excavated several large tombs and had also found objects which could not be arranged in the known development of Egyptian art.  The fortunate discoverer ascribed these to the dynasties of the demigods, who, according to Egyptian tradition, reigned before the kings; but of course this idea met with determined opposition, and indeed especially among his French colleagues.  The tomb of Abydos offered, however, on quiet consideration, more material for establishing its date than those of Ballas and Neggadeh.  In Abydos a number of inscriptions had been found which, rude as they were, showed that the people buried in the tombs had known the hieroglyphic system of writing.  The occurrence of so-called “Horus names” in these inscriptions was especially important.  For every old Egyptian king had a long list of names and titles, and among them a name surmounted by the picture of a hawk (i.e., Horus), and called on that account the “Horus name.”  As the name is, at the same time, written on a sort of standard, it is also called the “Banner name.”  Such “Horus” or “Banner names” occur, then, on the objects found by Amelineau.  Accidentally, one of these names occurs, also, on a statue in the Grizeh Museum which, according to its style, is one of the oldest statues which the museum possesses.  Thus it became evident that the Abydos objects were, in any case, to be placed in the earliest period of Egyptian history.

The discussion stood thus when, in the spring of 1897, the fortunate hand of De Morgan, the former Directeur-general des Services des antiquites egyptiennes, succeeded by renewed excavations in Neggadeh in furnishing the connections between the objects found by Petrie in Ballas and Neggadeh and those found by Amelineau in Abydos.  He discovered, not far from the necropolis, excavated by Petrie, the tomb of a king which, on the one hand, contained pottery and tablets like those found by Petrie, and on the other, objects entirely like those found by Amelineau.  Thus it was proved that both Petrie’s tombs and those of Amelineau belonged to the same period, and, indeed, the oldest period, of Egyptian history, before the third dynasty.  They were older than the most ancient objects which we had thought that we possessed.  But it was still impossible to date them exactly.