But now the period of superficial survey of the wealth of material which Egypt offers to the student was drawing to a close, and was to be succeeded by the period in which excavation, conducted with constantly growing skill and attention to the most minute details, was to do, as it is still doing, what no amount of superficial cataloguing of the monuments of the land could ever do, and to give us back, not only pictures of the life of these ancient days, but the tools and weapons with which the Egyptian worked, fought, and hunted, the vessels which he used for all the purposes of life, the jewels with which he and his women-kind adorned themselves, the books which they read, and the songs which they sang; all the material from which, if we have the vision and the insight, we may reconstruct the life of those far-off days; and to crown its gifts by calling up from the tomb the very men themselves who ruled and warred in the land of the Nile in the great days when Egypt was the first of all empires, and her Pharaoh a god incarnate, before whose golden sandals all the lesser kings of the world bowed in the dust “seven times and seven times.” The pioneer of this work, surely the most romantic and interesting, as it has proved not the least fruitful, in the whole realm of scientific research, was the brilliant Frenchman, Auguste Mariette. CHAPTER II MARIETTE AND HIS WORK The story of the life-work of the man who, more than any other, was responsible for the creation of a genuine interest in the great works of ancient Egypt, as distinguished from the aimless or sordid antiquity-grubbing which has been described in the preceding chapter, is one of the romances of science. Mariette was one of those men who, in the words of Cromwell, never go so far as when they do not know whither they are going, and in his early connection with Egypt he was like Saul the son of Kish, who went out to look for his father’s asses and found a kingdom. Born in 1821, at Boulogne, and employed as a teacher in the college of his native town, he was drawn to the study of ancient Egypt by the fact that the town museum had acquired a fine Egyptian sarcophagus from the collection of Denon, one of the savants who had accompanied Napoleon’s Army of Egypt. [Illustration: 3. DETAIL OF DECORATION, TOMB OF SETY I.] In 1849 he was appointed assistant in the Egyptian Department of the Louvre, and in the following year he was sent out to Egypt for the purpose of buying Coptic manuscripts. The mission, a comparatively trifling one in itself, was one of those trifles which often prove turning-points in a man’s life; and from the moment when he set foot on Egyptian soil, Mariette’s future career was marked out for him.