So he set his diggers to work. He went over the ground systematically, digging away, picking over and casting aside the debris. His sharp eyes detected things to which previous eyes had been blind. He found pots that were not turned on the potter’s wheel, pots made before the potter’s wheel had been invented. These pots were shaped solely by hand, fashioned from the bottom upward, and they were almost as true in form as if they had been turned on a wheel. He was hot on the scent, turning back the wheels of time. He found the hitherto unknown names of four of the ancient kings of Egypt, the first men who could lay claim to rule the tribes, the men who figure before the first Dynasty. He was pushing civilization back, and yet farther back. Whereas others set the limit of the civilization of Egypt as five thousand years, he added another fifty centuries to it, doubled the life of the civilization that flourished and decayed and flourished and decayed many times in the valley of the Nile. Came a day when his eyes lit up at the unusual in a piece of pottery, not that it was so wondrously beautiful, but because the markings on it linked it up with Crete far away to the north in the middle of the Mediterranean, proving that intercourse existed between the two peoples in those dim ages. The native diggers cast casual glances at the jar. They were not particularly interested. To them it was merely an ordinary piece of pottery. If that same piece of earthenware were placed in a china shop in London to-day with the rest of the oddments of china, and marked at five shillings, no one would trouble to buy it, unless by chance he possessed expert knowledge. It seems remarkable that this piece of pottery, so fragile that a moderate blow would shatter it, should have survived for all these thousands of years. The ancient potter who shaped the soft clay and baked it until it was hard was indeed working for posterity. He little knew, as the jar grew under his nimble fingers, how many centuries would elapse and find it still as perfect as when he took it from the fire; nor could he guess how much his little jar, which he moulded so cunningly, would tell to the brilliant man who found it. Fate ordained that his handiwork should be buried in a grave, and there remain in absolute security until the centuries brought the right man along to unearth it. It was but a Cretan pot in an Egyptian grave, but that little pot for a time made scholars wonder whether the civilization of Egypt was founded on a far older civilization which came from Crete, the little island in the Mediterranean. CHAPTER IV