From Hermopolis to Naukratis was a short distance. Naukratis was the capital of the Egyptian Greeks, and its site, which had been lost for centuries, was discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1884, when he was working for the Egypt Exploration Fund. The Fund had been formed with the primary intention of finding the sites of Pithom and Naukratis, and it had been hardly two years in existence before that intention was fulfilled. If we leave the train at Teh el-Barûd, the junction of the Upper Egyptian line of railway with that from Alexandria to Cairo, and turn our faces westward, we shall have a pleasant walk of about five miles, part of it under an avenue of trees, to a mound of potsherds which covers several acres in extent and is known to the natives as Kôm Qa’if. This mound represents all that is left of Naukratis. To the west of it runs a canal, the modern successor of the ancient Kanôpic branch of the Nile. When Professor Petrie first visited the spot, the diggers for _sebah_ had already been busily at work. _Sebah_ is the nitrous earth from the sites of old cities, which is used as manure, and to the search for it we owe the discovery of many memorials of the past. At Kôm Qa’if the larger part of the earth had been removed, and all that remained were the fragments of pottery which had been sifted from it. But the fragments were sufficient to reveal the history of the place. Most of them belonged to the archaic period of the Greek vase-maker’s art, and were such as had never before been found in the land of Egypt. It was evident that the great city whose site they covered must have been the Naukratis of the Greeks. As soon as Professor Petrie had settled down to the excavation of the mound, a few months after his discovery, the evidence of inscriptions was added to the evidence of potsherds. An inscribed stone from the mound was standing at the entrance of the country-house in which he lived, and on turning it over he found it was engraved with Greek letters which recorded the honours paid by “the city of the Naukratians” to Heliodôros the priest of Athêna and the keeper of its archives. For two winters first Mr. Petrie and then Mr. Ernest Gardner worked at the ruins, and though more excavations are needed before they can be exhaustively explored, the plan of the old city has been mapped out, the history of its growth and decline has been traced, and a vast number of archaic Greek inscriptions from the dedicated vases of its temples have been secured.