Egypt Exploration Society's Jubilee

Abstract

BY exhibiting two relatively small collections of objects and manuscripts from the many thousands presented to the British Museum by the Egype Exploration Society during the fifty years of its existence, the authorities of the Museum have fittingly marked the jubilee of the Society and once more reminded the public of the way in which the national collections have been enriched and the sum of the nation's wealth increased by the benefaction of private effort. Yet the objects which may be exhibited in the collections of a museum, however intrinsically valuable, priceless for their rarity, or instructive as a means of re-creating the history or the everyday life of a vanished civilisation, represent but a part of the achievement of an association of private individuals engaged in the common pursuit of the scientific exploration of the obscurer phases of the early history of mankind. A year or two ago, when the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies celebrated its jubilee, its services to the cause of classical scholarship and the study of early Mediterranean culture were duly recognised. The Egypt Exploration Society, having in view its wider appeal, may justly claim an even greater achievement. With no assistance from public funds, it has brought to light, restored, and handed over to the Egyptian Government in trust for future generations some of the most impressive of the monuments of Egypt's past, such as the temples of Deir el-Bahari, the Osireion, and the tombs of Beni Hassan, while its most recent excavations in a humbler, but historically no less instructive, sphere at Amama have revealed the material surroundings and dwelling-places of the general population of an Egyptian city.