Many things have turned up under the spade in Egypt, wonderful stone vases, jars with faint traces of perfume still pervading them, slate palettes on which the people mixed the paints with which they touched up their eyes and faces. While the Ancient Britons were painting themselves with woad, the Egyptian ladies were sitting at their dressing-tables making up their eyes in quite the modern fashion, the Egyptian children were playing with toys such as the children play with to-day. The Egyptian forerunner of Pepys carved his diary on a piece of ebony, one page to a whole year! Glass was in use in Egypt thousands of years before it was heard of in Europe; Egypt taught the world the use of bronze; and the flint implements found on the banks of the Nile are finer than any others so far discovered in the world. Some of the knives of the best period are simply marvellous and disclose extraordinary skill on the part of the Egyptian flint workers. There are stone knives in the British Museum with teeth as regular and as fine as those of a modern, machine-cut fret saw, teeth so minute as to be almost invisible to the naked eye. One masterpiece of a flint knife, cleverly flaked in the most remarkable manner, has about fifty tiny teeth to the inch, and it is astounding to think that such amazing hand work was performed by the Egyptians of the Stone Age. Probably there is not a living man who could duplicate such work. Now the treasures of Tutankhamen grip the imagination and dazzle the eye. Tutankhamen made a priceless, a magnificent gift to posterity, yet it is to Ptolemy v. that we owe the greatest gift of all. The gift is merely that broken stone in the British Museum, the stone which was dug out of the ruins of Fort St. Julian in 1798. In causing that stone to be carved, Ptolemy presented us with the key to the knowledge of ancient Egypt. [Illustration: _By courtesy of the British Museum_ THE FAMOUS INSCRIPTION OF KING DARIUS AT BEHISTUN, IN PERSIA, FROM WHICH SIR HENRY RAWLINSON WRESTED THE LONG-LOST SECRET OF CUNEIFORM WRITING. AT THE EDGE OF THE NARROW LEDGE ON WHICH THE ARAB STANDS, THE ROCK DROPS SHEER FOR 300 FEET TO THE BOULDER-STREWN FOOT OF THE CLIFFS] CHAPTER IX Countless caravans wended their way from the parched plains of Mesopotamia eastwards over the Persian border, past Kermanshah, winding along the road that skirts the range of hills rising to the left, and so through Behistun, a mere collection of huts with a name that is famous throughout all the seats of learning in the world. Here the caravans halted while men and beasts slaked their thirst in the pool, but few of the travellers troubled to look a second time at the great stone of Behistun rising above the plain. Users of the road were ever more interested in the spring than in the figures sculptured in the rock.