Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 49.djvu/470

450 classify and read the cuneiform documents excavated during the last two years in Nippur. During the summer he will also complete the reorganization of the Semitic section of the Ottoman Museum.

The lectures of Miss Amelia B. Edwards, in the fall of 1889, aroused considerable interest in the subject of Egyptology. Several thousand dollars were contributed by the Archæological Association, and the work of excavation was begun by Flinders Petrie. Valuable collections of Egyptian antiquities were received in return at the end of the seasons, and Mrs. Cornelius Stevenson was elected curator of the newly formed Egyptian section.



The museum contains a historical and industrial series of Egyptian objects from the fourth dynasty down to the Ptolemaic times. A collection placed on exhibition March 30, 1896, is of the greatest interest to science. Things sunk to earth between the years 2800 and 3500, illustrating the life of the Libyan invaders of Egypt, were brought to light a year ago by Flinders Petrie, the explorer. About thirty miles from Thebes, in the oldest Egyptian tombs, a most unexpected and startling discovery was made. There were found burials of strange un-Egyptian interlopers, whose large numbers and peculiar mode of disposing of their remains, as well as the implements, pottery, stone work, etc., composing their funeral deposits, show them to be not only intruders, but intruders who had once swept over the region,