land of Egypt

The land of Egypt still holds wonders in store for active men who are not afraid of exposing themselves to the fatigue of all kinds that excavations demand. For more than nineteen centuries that treasure seekers have had it, so to speak, cut in order, one would have believed that they had exhausted the source of valuable objects; that the monuments of Egypt had almost completely disappeared; that there remained only those indestructible masses which have tired time, – as the poet says; – and that henceforth there was no longer any hope to preserve that a happy pickaxe would bring to light new riches hidden in the bowels of the earth. Egyptian Empire, during an existence of nearly six thousand years, had accumulated so many treasures in the narrow valley of the Nile; respect for the ancient traditions bequeathed by fathers to their children, as they themselves had received from their ancestors , had been so great; the religion of the tombs so respected that, in spite of the revolutions of time and of men, in spite of the particular thefts, the looting caused by the thirst to possess antiques, the devastation produced by the swarms of tourists who fall on Egypt every year, despite of causes in a word which should have exhausted this fertile mother, the splendors buried in the secret of Egyptian soil seem inexhaustible; and in the middle of its desert lands, its uncultivable tolls (sic), its plains of sand, researchers and excavators have encountered real treasures.
(…) The last few years have above all (…) enriched humanity with documents or new data which have won their entry into the knowledge of a nature likely to enlighten the species on the history of its thought. and the progress of its civilization. Egypt, from this point of view, has a privileged position, because it arrived very early in a civilization conscious of itself and that it could preserve its memories through writing at a time when all other nations were still seeking the initial path to this progress. It is no exaggeration to say that the first king to preside over the first of the Egyptian dynasties reigned about six thousand years before our era. Sixty centuries before the Christian era, therefore, Egypt had emerged from prehistoric childhood; she knew writing, the arts of drawing, architecture, sculpture, painting; she tried her hand at them and succeeded so well that the oldest of her monuments still amaze the world; she had a primitive industry, no doubt, but she had already made the most necessary discoveries, the most useful to man, and the objects she already knew how to make suppose a marvelous ingenuity on the part of her unknown artists. “
extract from the Revue des Deux Mondes volume 130, 1895, by Émile Amélineau (1850 – 1915), French architect, archaeologist and Egyptologist, specialist in the study of Copts