Scientific American Supplement, No. 1178, June 25, 1898 | Page 9

They all contained the same kinds of pottery and the same slate tablets mentioned above, and many other objects which did not seem to 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 Amélineau; and another hot discussion was raised. Amélineau 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 Amélineau. 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-général des Services des antiquités égyptiennes, succeeded by renewed excavations in Neggadeh in furnishing the connections between the objects found by Petrie in Ballas and Neggadeh and those found by Amélineau 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 Amélineau. Thus it was proved that both Petrie's tombs and those of Amélineau 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.
At this point, an epoch-making discovery of Dr. Sethe, privat-docent at the University of Berlin, placed the whole matter at a single stroke on a comparatively sure foundation. He pointed out that the inscriptions on a few unassuming potsherds from Abydos contained not only Banner names of old kings, but also their ordinary names. These names were not inclosed, as later, in cartouches, and even contained many unusual spellings; but they were still too clear to be misunderstood. Sethe succeeded in identifying the names of the fifth, the sixth and the seventh kings of the first Manethonian dynasty, called by the Greek authors Usaphais, Miebais and Semempses. Thus it became extremely probable that all these newly discovered objects were from the first dynasty, but still not absolutely certain; for the three names occurred only on fragments of vases, and absolutely nothing was known of how these fragments were found. The proof that they belonged to the other objects was wanting. A very skeptical investigator might still have said that the other objects were older, that the potsherds had only fallen accidentally into ruined tombs of an older period; or he might have said quite the contrary, that the potsherds were older than the tombs.
At this point occurred the possibility of finding a solution of the question in the objects found in the royal tomb of Neggadeh. For the report of the excavations at Neggadeh was more exact than that of the excavations at Abydos; and the whole contents of the tomb of Neggadeh had been kept together