“Assuredly,” says Maspero, “Mariette is not a model to be blindly imitated; and the man who should imitate him to-day would run the risk of committing irreparable blunders; but let anyone who is tempted to depreciate him replace himself in spirit in the Egypt of sixty years ago, and let him ask himself how he would have acted in the midst of the difficulties which would then have assailed him on all sides; I believe that, if he is an honest man, he will be forced to admit that though perhaps he would have handled matters differently, he would not have come better out of the business. Mariette was the man who fitted the time.” CHAPTER III THE BEGINNINGS OF THE MODERN PERIOD The coming of Mariette in 1850 marked the close of the old and bad period of reckless pillage in Egypt. His thirty years of ceaseless struggle against difficulties formed the transition period, in which the foundations of the modern science of Egyptology were being laid, but in which its aims and methods were as yet but partially and imperfectly understood. With his death in 1881, and the beginning of the reign of his successor, the late Sir Gaston Maspero, we may fairly be said to reach the dawn of the modern period, in which new men and new methods have completely revolutionised the whole conception of archæology, and made it one of the most fruitful aids to the reconstruction and the comprehension of ancient history, and above all the indispensable interpreter of the life of ancient peoples. It seems fitting, therefore, that at this point we should stop for a little to consider what archæology is, and what are its aims, its methods, and its materials; for with regard to all these points there is, save in the case of those who are more or less students of the past, a very general haziness in the public mind. To the average man, archæology might be quite satisfactorily defined as the study of old stones and old bones, potsherds, and fragments of corroded metal--a study presupposing, on the part of the student, a curious and perverted taste for the dry and the dusty and a disregard for all the things which have in them the true sap and joy of life. “Your true antiquarian,” it has been said, “loveth a thing the better for that it is rotten and stinketh”; and this judgment, more pointed than polite, fairly represents the conception which most people cherish of the work of the excavator and the interpreter of his results.