To put the change of view in a word, archæology has during the modern period become human. It has learned that history never existed, and cannot be viewed, in a vacuum; and that quite as important for its right apprehension of the facts is the realisation of the medium in which the facts transpired, and which largely conditioned them. “The true function of archæological research,” says Dr. Macalister again, “is to discover the conditions amid which lived such heroes of old as we have mentioned; to show them, no longer as solitary, more or less idealised or superhuman, figures, but as men of like passions to ourselves moving with other men, in a busy world engrossed in its secular interests, and making daily use of the common things of life.” To take an illustration from a familiar figure of Egyptian history, we know, as a fact of history, that the favourite son of the mighty Ramses II was Setna-Khaemuast, that he fought in his father’s Syrian wars, that about the middle of the reign he was high-priest of Memphis, and that he died somewhere before the fifty-fifth year of Ramses; in other words, so far as the big records of the historical monuments go, he is to us “magni nominis umbra,” and no more. The real living interest of the man begins for us with the discovery of a papyrus of the Ptolemaic period, now in the Cairo Museum, which shows him studying the old inscriptions at Memphis in search of magic charms, stealing the roll of Thoth from the tomb of an earlier prince, just like a modern explorer, and getting into trouble over the theft. [Illustration: 5. TEMPLE OF EDFU--THE PYLON, AND VIEW FROM THE PYLON.] “The lofty personages,” says Maspero in the Introduction to his charming _Contes Populaires_, “The lofty personages whose mummies repose in our museums had a reputation for gravity so thoroughly established, that nobody suspected them of having ever diverted themselves with such futilities in those days when they were only mummies in expectation.” That is just the point. It is not the impassive mummies, with their reputation for gravity, thoroughly well-deserved for the last three thousand years, since they became mummies, that we want to know; it is the folk who were only “mummies in expectation,” who lived and loved, hated and fought, and made fools of themselves, like other people. And the business of archæology is to show you these people, in their habit as they lived, and in the ordinary medium which conditioned their actions. If it cannot or does not do that, then it deserves all the vivid abuse which Carlyle used to hurl at the Dry-as-dusts of the past. Now it is the supreme merit of the modern period that it has been steadily learning the importance of this aspect of its work among the treasures of the past, till now it can say “nothing human is foreign to me.” The change of view is set before us very plainly in the contrast between our modern histories of Egypt and those of our forefathers.