The treasure safe, we had to take note of the condition in which it reached us. At the first glance, two very different series were perceived: one, which comprised the jewellery and the gold or silver vases of most skilful workmanship, went back to the XIXth Dynasty; the other was composed exclusively of silver plate, the coarseness of which betrayed a much more recent period. Although it was all found at two separate times, and in two places somewhat distant from each other, did it originally form one collection? As we have seen, the whole made a heap among the débris of two or three jars which were themselves broken in the course of centuries under the continuous pressure of the earth; the objects seemed to have been heaped up irregularly, the most valuable in the middle, the others forming a bed above and below. We had even still adhering to a large fragment of pottery a stem partly of hardened mud and partly of metal, in which we recognized on a precipitate of less ancient earrings and bracelets, the remains of several Pharaonic goblets. How can it be explained that relics of such different epochs should be found in the same place? Many of them are intact, but others have purposely been clipped or broken, and the fragments melted down; they are also mixed with plates of pliant silver and with ingots coming from goldsmiths’ workshops like those that still exist. We know what happens not only in Egypt but in European countries when peasants dig up treasure while ploughing their land: they take it to a jeweller, who buys it of them by weight, throws it into the melting-pot, scarcely ever troubling about the loss thus caused to art or science, and transforms it into modern horrors. It is to some adventure of the sort that we owe the possession of our find. A fellah who lived, I imagine, during the time of the Roman domination, found in the ruins near Zagazig, if not at Zagazig itself, silver objects which he sold to a native goldsmith who destroyed some of them for the needs of his craft, and kept the others either to give to a collector or to use himself in the same way as the first lot when that should be exhausted. Did local sedition or the sack of the city by a hostile army compel him to hide his property in two different places? His goods, once hidden under the earth, were not again drawn forth, and we received them from him, almost without an intermediary, sixteen months ago. [Illustration: SILVER BRACELETS AND EARRING.] [Illustration: GOLD EARRING FROM THE TREASURE OF ZAGAZIG.] II