Champollion, and this gentleman, together with Maury, de Saulcy and Longpérier, advised him to come to Paris, where by the kind intercession of Janron, he obtained an appointment on the staff of the Louvre in 1848. As the salary paid to the young man was not sufficient to keep him, he resolved to ask the French Government to provide him with the necessary funds to go to Egypt, where he wished to try his fortune. In his application to the Government he stated that the object of his proposed mission was to study the Coptic and Syriac manuscripts* which still remained in the monasteries of the Nitrian desert, and if possible to acquire them for the nation, and with his application he sent in an essay on Coptic bibliography. The petition was favourably received, and he set out for Egypt in the summer of 1850. Having arrived in Egypt, he found that it was not easy to obtain access to the libraries of the monasteries, for the Patriarch had insisted that they should be carefully guarded from strangers. Profiting by the delays caused by the Patriarch's orders, he began to visit the sites of ancient Egyptian buildings in the neighbourhood of Cairo. While at Sakkârah one day he discovered by accident a sphinx, on which were inscribed the names of Ausar-Ḥāpi or Osiris-Apis (Serapis), similar to one he had seen at Cairo. He remembered that the Serapeum at Memphis was described by ancient authors as standing on a sandy plain,† and he believed that he had really found the spot where it stood and its ruins. Neglecting the original object of his expedition, he collected workmen, and in 1850 set to work to dig; two months' work revealed one hundred and forty sphinxes, two chapels, a semi-circular space ornamented * The reader interested in the history of Dr. Tattam's acquisition of MSS. from the Monastery of St. Mary Deipara, in the Natron Valley, should read the article in the Quarterly Review for December, 1845, and the preface to Cureton, Festal Letters of Athanasius, London, 1848. † ̓́Εστι δὲ καὶ Σαράπιον ἐν ἀμμώδει τόπῳ σφόδρα, Strabo, xvii. i. 32. with Greek statues, etc. Through the jealousy of certain people who united the profession of politics with wholesale trading in antiquities, the Egyptian Government of the day. issued an order to suspend the excavations, and the work was stopped. Soon after, however, the French National Assembly voted 30,000 francs for excavation purposes, and towards the end of the year Mariette was enabled to enter the Serapeum, where he found sixty-four Apis bulls, stelae, etc. As the dates when the bulls were placed in the Serapeumn are stated, they afford a valuable help in fixing the chronology of Egypt as far back as the XVIIIth dynasty. The year 1852 was spent in clearing out the Serapeum, and early in 1853 he came to the Pyramids of Gizeh, where he carried on excavations for the Duc de Luynes; in the latter year he discovered a granite temple near Gîzeh. About this time he was appointed Assistant-Curator at the Louvre. In 1854, 'Abbâs Pasha, who had suspended Mariette's excavations two or three years before, died; he was succeeded by Sa'id Pasha, who at once conferred the honour of Bey upon Mariette, and commissioned him to found an Egyptian Museum at Bûlâk. Mariette proceeded to work out a plan for the complete excavation of ancient Egyptian sites, and it is said that he began to work at thirty-seven places at once; his work literally extended from "Rakoti (Alexandria) to Syene." At Tanis he brought to light valuable monuments belonging to the XIIIth, XIVth, XIXth and XXIst dynasties, among which must be specially mentioned the statues and the sphinx which he attributed to the Hyksos; he explored hundreds of mașțăbas in the cemeteries at Gizeh, Sakkârah, and Mêdûm; he opened the Maṣṭabat el-Farûn (see p. 203); at Abydos, which he practically discovered, he cleared out the temple of Seti I., two temples of Rameses II., and a large number of tombs; at Denderah, a temple of Hathor; at Thebes he removed whole villages and mountains of earth from above the ruins of the temples at Karnak, Medînet-Habû and Dêr elBahari; and at Edfû he removed from the roof of the temple a village of huts, and cleared out its interior. Mariette was appointed Commissioner of the Paris Exhibition of 1867, and upon him devolved the task of removing to Paris several of the most beautiful and valuable antiquities from the collection under his charge at Bûlâķ. In 1870 he was overtaken by severe domestic troubles, and a disease which had some years before fastened upon him now began to show signs of serious progress. Notwithstanding his infirmities, however, he continued to edit and publish the texts from the monuments which he had discovered, and remained hard at work until his death, which took place at Cairo on January 17th, 1881. His body was entombed in a marble sarcophagus which stood in the court-yard of the Bûlâk Museum, and which has since been removed to Gizeh, together with the antiquities of the Museum. The following is a list of the most important of Mariette's works: Paris, 1869-1880. Fol. Cairo, 1871. Fol. Abydos, description des fouilles exécutées sur l'emplace- Cairo, 1874. 8vo. Choix de Monuments et de dessins découverts ou exécutés pendant le déblaiement du Sérapéum de Memphis. Paris, 1856. 4to. Deir el-bahari. Leipzig, 1877. 4to. Les Mastaba de l'ancien empire. 4to. Paris, 1889. Fol. Les Papyrus Égyptiens du Musée de Boulaq. Paris, 1872. Le Sérapéum de Memphis. Paris, 1857. Fol. Mariette was succeeded as Director of the Bûlâk Museum by M. Maspero, who proved an able administrator, and who carried on many of the works which Mariette had left unfinished at his death. Mariette had formulated a theory that none of the pyramids was ever inscribed inside, and consequently never attempted to open the Pyramids of Sakkârah, although he lived at their feet for some thirty years; M. Maspero, however, dug into them, and was rewarded by finding inscribed upon the walls a series of religious texts of the greatest importance for the history of the religion of Egypt. M. Maspero was, in 1886, succeeded by M. Grébaut, who has (1892), in turn been succeeded by M. de Morgan. Jacques Jean Marie de Morgan, Ingénieur civil des Mines, was born on June 3rd, 1857, at the Château de Bion, Loir-et-Cher, and is descended from a family which came originally from Wales. For more than twenty years he has devoted himself to the study of archæology, but he is, nevertheless, a distinguished pupil of the School of Mines at Paris, and is eminent as a geologist and mathematician. To the exactness induced by the study of mathematics, and to his scientific training as a geologist and observer of nature, his works entirely owe their value, for he arranges his historical, geographical, and other facts in a logical manner, and never confounds fact with theory or assumption with evidence. In 1882 he made a tour through India for scientific purposes, and in the same year he published his Géologie de la Bohême, 8vo. In 1884 he undertook an expedition to Siam and the neighbouring countries, and in the following year he published some account of his work in Exploration dans la presqu'ile Malaisie, Rouen, 1885. In this year we also find him contributing articles to the newspaper L'Homme; and in 1886 he published in the Annales des Mines an important article entitled, Note sur la géologie et l'industrie minière du royaume de Perak. During the years 1886-1889 he was employed on a mission to Turkey-in-Asia, the Caucasus and Armenia, and he published the scientific results of his travels in two volumes, large 8vo., entitled, Mission Scientifique au Caucase. Études archéologiques et historiques, Paris, 1889. In this work M. de Morgan shows that he is well acquainted with the statements about these countries made by classical writers, that he is familiar with the best works upon general archæology, such as those of Sir John Evans, Montelius and Mourier, and also that he knows well the works of Brugsch, Maspero, George Smith, and of other scholars of Assyriology and Egyptology at first hand. From 1889 to the beginning of 1892 M. de Morgan made an expedition to Persia, Kurdistan and Luristan, and he intends to publish the results of his work in these countries as soon as possible, or as soon as his new duties at the Gizeh Museum will allow. The national Egyptian collection at Gizeh surpasses every other collection in the world, by reason of the number of the monuments in it which were made during the first six dynasties, and by reason of the fact that the places from which the greater number of the antiquities come are well ascertained. It contains also a large number of complete monuments and statues, which it owes chiefly to the fact that MM. Mariette, Maspero, E. Brugsch-Bey and Grébaut were present at the sites when they were found, and superintended their transport to the Museum. In former days the collection of scarabs was very large and nearly complete. Owing, however, to various causes, it has now dwindled in importance, and many a private |