At the mouth of the Fayum, on the opposite side to Illahun, stood in later times another town, founded by Tahutmes III, and ruined under Merenptah; thus its history falls within about two-and-a-half centuries. While I was working at Hawara some beads and ornaments were brought to me from this place; I soon went to see it, and found that it was an early site unmixed with any later remains. In the beginning of 1889 I worked out part of the town, and the rest of it was cleared by Mr. Hughes-Hughes in the end of that year, while I worked at Illahun. The general arrangement of it was a large walled enclosure, within which were two other enclosures side by side, one containing the temple, the other a small town. The temple had been founded by Tahutmes III, and had lasted through Khuenaten’s changes only to be destroyed soon after, probably by Ramessu II, when he carried away the temples of Illahun. That the town was ruined early in the reign of Merenptah is indicated by the sudden end of the previous abundance of scarabs and rings with the kings’ names at this point; of later times only one or two objects of Ramessu III have been found.

Of purely Egyptian objects many were discovered, but the main interest of the place is in the remains of foreigners from the Mediterranean who lived here. Of Egyptian work we may mention two funeral tablets (one now at Gizeh); a lion’s head, probably the terminal to the side of a staircase; two splendid bronze pans (Group 96), still bright and fresh and elastic, most skilfully wrought (now at Gizeh); a beautiful wooden statuette of a lady named Res, clad in the ribbed drapery of the Ramesside age (also at Gizeh); a statuette of a priestess, and a figure of a girl swimming holding a duck, carved in wood (at Gizeh); a wooden box for papyri, inscribed (at Gizeh); and some necklaces found in the town. Some bronze hinges, hatchets, chisels, and knives were also found, one by one, in different rooms.

The foreign inhabitants, although conforming to Egyptian ways in some respects, have left many

traces here. Foremost is the coffin of a high official who was of the Tursha race, the Turseni, probably, of the northern Aegean. The ushabti figure of a Hittite, Sadi-amia, was found in an adjoining grave. A wooden figure of a Hittite harper, wearing the great pigtail of his race, was picked up in the town. A bronze mirror, with a Phoenician Venus holding a dove as the handle of it, was found in a tomb. While constantly Aegean vases, such as those of the first period of Mykenae, are found in both the town and in tombs. The Greek custom of a funereal pyre remained here in a modified form; although the body appears to have been buried in Egyptian fashion (as I found light hair on some of the mummies here), yet the personal articles were all burnt. Apparently on the death of the owner a hole was dug in the floor of the room; into this were placed the chair, the clothing, the mirror, combs, necklaces and toilet articles, the glass bottles, the blue-glazed bowls and vases, the alabaster dishes, the knife and other implements, and the best pottery of the deceased.

All these were burnt; the fire was smothered with potsherds laid over it; earth was then filled in, and the brick floor of the room was relaid. No such custom is ever known among Egyptians, and this shows again the foreign occupation of the place. We know from inscriptions how the Mediterranean races, Libyans, Akhaians, Turseni, and others had pushed into Egypt from the west, and that they had settled in the Nile valley to even somewhat south of the Fayum. This place was evidently then one of their settlements, and its sudden fall under Merenptah just agrees to his expulsion of all these foreigners in the fifth year of his reign. We have here then before our eyes the remains of that great invasion which has always hitherto been a literary shadow without material substance.

As before mentioned, the marks on pottery so often found in the town of the twelfth dynasty at Illahun, are also found at Gurob. The list of signs used is somewhat different, but the greater part may be identified; and it is impossible to deny that they are the same as a whole, though naturally modified by alteration, addition, and omission, in the course of a thousand years. Having now, therefore, this body of signs in use in 1200 B.C. in a town occupied by people of the Aegean and Asia Minor, Turseni, Akhaians, Hittites, and others, it will require a very certain proof of the supposed Arabian source of the Phoenician alphabet, before we can venture to deny that we have here the origin of the Mediterranean alphabets.

Besides these remains, Gurob proved to be a treasury of a later age. In the Ptolemaic period some town had existed in this neighbourhood, the inhabitants of which were buried here in the edge of the desert, apart from the earlier town. Their mummies are destitute of amulets or ornaments, and have all gone to black dust, their cartonnage coverings are without names, and of the most conventional and uninteresting kind, and their coffins are of prodigious rudeness, worthy of a savage of the Pacific; while their tombs are rude holes scooped in the sandy soil. In no respect would these burials seem worth notice, had not the cartonnage makers used up old papyri as the cheapest material for their trade. But what was worthless in the days of Philadelphos is a treasure now; the soldiers’ wills appointing as executors the sovereigns, Philadelphos and Arsinoe, the private letters, the leaves of Plato and unknown Greek plays, the accounts,—all these can be unfolded from what looks like hopeless rubbish. The cartonnage in the earlier examples was glued together, and this has not only injured the writing, but almost always served as a bait to worms, who have destroyed it; but later on the makers found that simple wetting and moulding would suffice, and we can now often peel apart sheet after sheet of writing as fresh as in the days when Cleopatra was yet unborn.

Some remains of even later times are found here; and I obtained from native diggers many Coptic embroideries, and a beautiful set of Roman glass vessels.

The essential value of Gurob is in giving us a thoroughly fixed date for the earlier stages of the civilization of Greece; in showing the races of the Mediterranean at home in Egypt; and in explaining how far they had imbibed Egyptian culture during their first sojourn on the Nile; and what they may be expected to have borrowed from thence at this early period.