by F. Legge

... isms and the story

As those who have followed the subject will no doubt have gathered from the title of this Paper, its object is to bring to the Society's notice the overthrow of the system of dating what are generally called : "prehistoric" graves in Egypt by the pottery found in them. This was first introduced by Professor Petrie about 12 years ago, and has since been used by several well-known Egyptologists who began their studies as his assistants. Neither M. Maspero, nor any foreign excavators, so far as I am aware, have ever employed it; and Dr. Reisner, in his very careful and detailed examination of prehistoric burials of Naga ed-Der, mentions but does not adopt it. Within the last 2 years, Dr. Naville's investigations at Abydos have shown that the system is founded on a fallacy, and M. Maspero, in an article in the Revue Critique which will be presently quoted, has given that view his approval.

Before coming to that, however, I should like to say something as to the attitude in which I venture to think every archaeologist, however humble, ought to approach such subjects. Since I read my first Paper to this Society nearly 15 years ago I have been sometimes praised, but more often blamed, for what is generally called my skepticism. The inconsistency does not surprise me, because I have noticed that my critics usually reprobate my skepticism, when it is applied to their own theories, but think it praiseworthy when applied to their opponents'. Skepticism, as the negation of Dogmatism, or the belief that you can attain absolute certainty on any matter, was once a respectable philosophy enough; and in its time has done such good service that I do not know that anybody should object to being taxed with it. But most people, nowadays, when they call anyone a skeptic, have in their mind's eye a man who believes only in what he sees. This does not seem entirely applicable to myself, for I believe in a good many things I do not see. The x-rays for instance, and the Hertzian waves, I have never seen nor am ever likely to see; but I believe in them with a good deal more confidence that I should dream of putting in any archaeological theory whatever.

If, on the other hand, my friends were to call me a destructive critic, I think I might possibly plead guilty. It seems to me, after some little experience of archaeological matters from the literary side, that any criticism of them to be effective must be largely destructive. It has been my lot, for the last ten years, to read all the periodicals and most of the books which have been published on such subjects, and I think I may say that some new theory is advanced in them on the average of about twice a week. Therefore something like 100 theories are put forward on the course of a year. But when the year has gone by one generally finds that 99 of these theories have either been refuted or have passed absolutely unnoticed, and that not many more than 1 or 2 have survived. The reason, for anyone who likes to go into the causes of things, is perhaps that in archaeology, unlike more positive sciences, we are dealing with relatively few facts. The destruction that has taken place among the documents of antiquity has been so enormous and so thorough, that only a little wreckage has been left for us to pick up. As someone has said, we are in such matters like children gathering shells on the seashore.

The Size of It All

This, too, is especially the case with regard to Egyptology. The recorded history of Egypt goes back, without any break worth notice, for a period of something like 5000 years (conv.) before our era, and the soil of Egypt practically preserves anything that is put into it. Yet how many are the actual documents - statues, inscriptions, MSS., mummies, and smaller objects - which have been recovered from it? The great museum at Cairo, which certainly contains more Egyptian antiquities than any other, is not nearly so large as our own at Kensington. Prof. Petrie, who occasionally has very large ideas, once talked to the British Association of National Repository of archaeological treasures covering a square mile of ground. If such a building ever came into existence, it would probably hold all the Egyptian antiquities - other, of course, than buildings - yet excavated, and leave some space over in addition. If we consider the very small proportion that this number of documents bears to the length of time for which we have to account, we see, I think, that all Egyptological theories must rest on a very slender basis of fact indeed. yet I do not think there is any branch of archaeology where the criticism is more hotly resented, or where controversies on matters of opinion are more bitter. It reminds one of the scene in Scott's `Antiquary', where Sir Arthur Wardour and Mr. Oldbuck quarrel nearly to death over the origin of the Pictish language, of which they both admit the only relic is one word.

Now, the objections of Egyptologists to criticism of their theories seem divisible into two heads. The first, which is the favourite one in Germany, is that no one has the right to criticize anything unless he is an `expert'. Formerly, one hardly ever read anything proceeding from the adherents of the Berlin School which did not contain some remarks, directed against those whom they called dilettanti, or amateurs, who meddle with Egyptology because they like it and without being paid to do so. Nowadays, the same objection is, I think, maintained by ignoring remarks and criticisms of all who do not possess this qualification. Taken by this test, the only persons who would have a right to say anything about Egyptian antiquities are curators of museums, University Professors of Egyptology, and excavators who work, as do most of them, on funds provided by others. Did the defenders of this objection claim that no one except professional Egyptologists should put forth Egyptological theories, I do not know that something might be said for the proposition, because it would at any rate much narrow the field of controversy. But as to criticism, the amateurs, or, in other words, the general body of mankind left after taking out the experts, are the people who, in the long run, have to decide on the truth or falsehood of all scientific theories. As Prof. Karl Pearson says in his Grammar of Science, "the final touchstone" of every scientific theory is "its equal validity for all normally-constituted minds.".

The other objection to criticism is, I think, much more English, and is not unknown in this Society. This is that when a theory has once been put forward by a professional Egyptologist, it should be accepted without further inquiry, and must never again be questioned. Thus only last year, I annoyed my friend Mr. Hall by suggesting that the real king whose hawk-name is Den was not Hesepti, or, as he writes the name, Semti. His final argument was briefly - I hope he will correct me if I am unconsciously misrepresenting it - that the identity of Den with Semti had been settled, and that therefore it could not be challenged without something like absolute proof. But this seems to me, - slightly vary the remarks of the lady in Punch, - to be worse than wrong, it is old-fashioned. Years ago, it was the rule in the natural sciences that, when anyone made an accepted generalization from a more or less great body of correlated facts, he was said to have enunciated a law often called after his name and held to be unbreakable. Thus, we had the Law of Avogadro, the Law of Dulong and the Conservation of Energy. Fortunately or unfortunately, the discovery of radium, which, by producing heat without taking it from any source external to itself, sins against more than one of these laws, knocked his idea on the head; and since then all physicists, whether they like it or not, are compelled to regard all theories as what are called "working hypotheses." This means that they are treated as convenient ways of co-ordinating and arranging our ideas, but as having no particular sanctity of their own, and liable to be questioned, abandoned, and flung aside at any moment if more convenient ones present themselves. I have not any doubt that as Egyptology becomes more and more like a regular science - it is a fairly long way off being so at present - the theory of "working hypotheses" will be adopted there also. Until it is, and perhaps even afterwards, it seems to me that the more destructive criticism we have the better.

This is not to say that the destructive critic should feel no respect either for the theories of his predecessors or for their authors. On the contrary, every fair-minded man must admit that many Egyptological theories, now obsolete from lapse of time and the discovery of new facts, have done excellent service in their day, and have been of the greatest use to students in enabling them to clarify their ideas and to marshal their facts. Even the notions which now sound ridiculous enough - that the Pyramids were the barns in which Joseph stored Pharaoh's corn in view of 7 years' famine, or that they covered a maze of subterranean chambers intended for the secret celebration of "mysteries" which probably never existed, have done good by leading to the Pyramids themselves being examined, measured, and their true purpose shown. Thus in Egyptology, as in other branches of knowledge, we only draw near to truth by successive approximations, and not doubt our own theories will seem as antiquated to the scholars of the 21st century as those of a hundred years ago already do to us. Meanwhile, it seems to me no bad plan to occasionally overhaul our hypotheses, and to clear the decks by jettisoning those which can be shown to be faulty. By so doing we can best fulfill the precept in the Gospel according to the Egyptians, "Be ye approved money-changers", which means, I take it, "Keep the good coins; give back the bad."

Sequence Dating

After this introduction - for the length and egotism of which I humbly apologize - we come to the sequence-dates which we have to consider. These are set out by Prof. Petrie in the`Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund' called Diospolis Parva, and published in 1901. Now Prof. Petrie has rendered great services to Egyptology, and none greater, perhaps, than in rescuing from the hands of the Arabs so many small or portable objects which, in the absence of historical inscriptions which is so marked a feature of Egyptian culture, often form our only material for making a guess at the order of such historical events as the crowning of kings and their relationship to one another. He has moreover done a great deal towards showing us the importance of these smaller objects, and, by the enthusiasm he has never failed to show with regard to Egyptian exploration, has done much to interest in it the general public. Unfortunately, most of us have the defects of our qualities, and it is probably this enthusiasm which has led Prof. Petrie more than once into the logical error of no inductively verifying the premises n which he founds his hypotheses, or, in other words, of jumping to conclusions. Thus, you may remember that when he found the first (and greatest) "prehistoric" or early dynastic cemetery, at Naqada, he declared that the graves there belonged to a "New Race" of foreign invaders who "entered Egypt between the Old and Middle Kingdoms", and that he declared that "in every possible detail of arrangements and objects there is not one common point of similarity between the Egyptians and the New Race; and no connection with Egypt would have been suspected if the cemeteries had been found in any other country." [100] Of course it turned out later, as I am sure he would now admit, that those graves not only belonged to Egyptians but to the aborigines of the country. In like manner, after he had been a short time at work on the site of M. Amelineau's finds at Abydos, Prof. Petrie wrote to our late Secretaty, Mr. Rylands, that he had identified the whole of the 1st dynasty of Manetho with the hawk-names found there, although, as I have pointed out at great length in our Proceedings, all these identifications were based on the single assumption that Aha is Menes. As it has now been shown by the new fragment of the Palermo Stone, that the king whose hawk-name is read Aha is not Menes, but the third king of the 1st dynasty called by Manetho Atothis, it follows that all Prof. Petrie's identifications fall to the ground, and this I suppose he admits by transferring in his latest publications the name Menes to the king sometimes called Narmer.

Description of a Pattern

I mention these facts because it seems to me they throw light upon the way in which the table of sequence-dates given to us in 1901 were constructed. In Diospolis Parva, Prof. Petrie tells us that he has stated "the general principles" of arrangement in a Paper in the "Anthropological Journal (sic!), Vol. XXIX", and in the Journal of the Anthropological Institute for 1900 we find a Paper by him on "Sequences in Prehistoric Remains", in which he tells us much about the advantages of a system of relatively dating objects which, by definition, cannot be absolutely dated by reference to any era known to us. This will probably be denied by no one, and he then goes on to say that "the most practical scale of sequence-dates in Egypt, and perhaps in most other prehistoric civilizations, is the proportion of burials .... For the period covered by a series of overlapping cemeteries, the number of tombs may be taken as a most rational basis of sequence-dates. Thus each unit of dating represents an equal number of persons above a certain low standard of wealth and culture. If, then, we could treat a large number of tombs - 1000 or more - which had no blank periods between them and arrange them in their original order, we should have a rational basis for sequence-dates."

He then describes how a scale of sequence-dates should be constructed, thus: -

"The first step is to form a corpus of drawings, each class of objects themselves. For practical purposes it is well to work only from pottery to begin with; for it is less likely to be intentionally copied from earlier examples than work which is in more valuable material, and it is much less likely to be handed down from generation to generation than are the weapons of metal or carving in hard stone."

Then he discusses the details of the construction of his scale, and says, perhaps rather fantastically, that it should begin at 30, so as to leave room for addition of 29 more numbers if yet earlier monuments than these we know should at any time be discovered, while it should stop at 99, so as to avoid running into three figures. But when he wrote Diospolis Parva (p. 5) the year after, he found it well to end his scale, not at 99, but at 80, so as to leave 20 numbers blank for an intermediate period, should there turn out to have been one, occurring between sequence date 80 and the point where the history of Egypt begins with the 1st Dynasty. Prof. Petrie's scale of sequence-dates therefore extends over 50 numbers, of which the earliest is 30 and the latest is 80. These 50 numbers he divides into seven series or divisions, which he shows in the Plate which he appends to his Paper in the J.A.I. This is practically identical with the scale in Plate II of Diospolis Parva [200], except that in Disopolis Parva he omitted the small vertical lines linking one row of pots to the other in certain cases.

Weaknesses

I have given, as briefly as I can, the actual words used by Prof. Petrie in describing, as he says, the "general principles" of his scheme, because I confess that while they show the method, they seem to me to leave us entirely in the dark as to the evidence on which his scale is constructed. I can find nothing in them to tell me why he thinks his first division, for instance, earlier than his seventh. It may be my own stupidity, but what he says about the number of tombs forming a rational basis for dates seems to me to have no meaning whatever in this connection. From something that appears afterwards, there is some reason to think that he really dated his divisions - that is, gave them their relative order - by comparing the different levels of soil at which the prehistoric graves were found, which would of course form a rough standard of comparison, if we could believe them - and it would be a hard thing to do - to have all started at the same height above sea-level, and to have been made in otherwise undisturbed ground. This, however, is merely a guess of mine, and it may be that Prof. Petrie really arranged his divisions in their present order on some different theory altogether. From his remarks in Diospolis Parva [300], for instance, it would seem as if he had made his scale on the basis of what he calls the degradation of the "wavy-handled" jars which you find at the left of his five later divisions. This is partly borne out by what he says as to their contents (p. 5), which were scented fat in the earlier cases and only clay in the later. This, however, gives us no hint as to his reason for putting in his first division rather than in any other the black-topped red pottery (Kerma Ware[325]) which is, as we see, the coping-stone of his system. But, whatever his reason, the Plate in the J.A.I. speaks for itself. There we have, five black-topped red pots of different forms appearing in the first called S.D. 30. In the next, we have three similar pots set against the sequence-dates which follow, numbered 31 to 34. In the third division we have three more, corresponding to sequence-dates 35 to 42, and in the fourth division only two black-topped red pots, corresponding to sequence-dates 43 to 50, after which they are absent from the scale altogether. Otherwise, therefore, Prof. Petrie looks upon the black-topped red pottery as the oldest yet found in Egypt. It is also a fair inference that he supposes it to disappear after sequence-date 50 or thereabouts, and this is born out by the surprise that he expresses in Abydos I, where he says (p. 6) "The survival of black-topped pottery ... under Zer is unexpected, as few forms last beyond 60 and scarcely any after 70 sequence-dates", and he goes on to argue that Zer's pots differ in shape from the prehistoric, wherein I am bound to say that I do not agree with him.

The Pottery Hinges

There can, therefore, be little doubt that Prof. Petrie's scale of sequence-dates hinges, so to speak, upon the black-topped red pottery, which he considers to have died out entirely in what he would call 70 S.D. This is confirmed by Mr. Mace, his assistant as the time, who says in El Amrah and Abydos (p. 68) "The two most marked characteristics of ... the prehistoric ... peoples, black topped pottery and contracted burials are" (at the cemetery on which he was working) "in the former case non-existent ... In Prof. Petrie's `sequence-dating', black-topped pottery practically drops out at about 60, one of the later prehistoric cemeteries at Hu not furnishing a single example."

Now Prof. Petrie says in the JAI (p. 30) with regard to his own scale: "It will be readily seen how impossible it would be to invert the order of any of these stages without breaking up the links between them."

Evidently, therefore, if we can show that the black-topped red pottery is not peculiar to sequence-dates 30-50 or 70, the system of sequence-dating breaks down altogether.

Faint Hints - Don't Ignore Them

Now even before Prof. Petrie left Diospolis Parva he had a hint that this black-topped red pottery might not always be prehistoric. At Abadiyeh and also at Hu, if I read him correctly, Mr. Mace found what he calls "Pan Graves", consisting of very shallow circular or oval pits containing bodies in the contracted position, which graves are to be dated, according to Prof. Petrie, at some time between the 12th and the 18th dynasties, or, in other words, somewhere about the time of the Hyksos invasion. In these graves were found together with pots which Prof. Petrie thinks typical of Egyptian ware of the period, some beautifully made black-topped red pots of very thin and highly-glazed clay. These are all of the same shape, being that of an open vase nearly as broad as it is high with the upper edge or lip curved outwards. Since then they have been found in a variety of places, including Cyprus. Not to go through the whole list, I will merely say that while working with Prof. Garstang at Abydos in 1909-1910, I myself came across several beautiful specimens which are now in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and the next year when with Prof. Naville at the same place, we found others, mostly broken, which I hope have now joined those of the year before. Capt. Lyons, too, when clearing the site for the Assuan Dam, found yet other perfect specimens which I saw at the Royal Society's Soirée in, I think, 1911. One of these had had a curved spout added to it leading from the base, so as to tansform it into a kind of teapot shape. Where this has got to I have not yet been able to ascertain.

How They Were Made

It was, however, Dr. Randall MacIver who first showed us where the black-topped red pots in general originally came from, and how they were made. Prof. Petrie says of them that, like all the prehistoric pottery, they were made by hand of a fine-grained and micaceous [350] clay mixed with sand, and the outside smoothed with a coating of haematite - which he calls burnt ochre - highly burnished up and down. "All these pots", he says, "were baked mouth down in a fire, the ashes of which formed a bed a couple of inches deep, and so deoxidized the haematite around the mouth of the jar." In Areika, the volume which Dr. MacIver published in 1909 after his first expedition to Nubia, Dr. MacIver gives a different account of the affair. He tells us that he there found the same pots made by the women in the villages a little south of Aswān. They were made of clay mixed with sand to prevent cracking in firing., hand-made, rubbed with haematite and then polished with pebbles, and afterwards burned, not in a kiln, but in an open fire. As he says [400] "the haematite bowls manufactured by the women at such villages as Umm Barakāt in Lower Nubia are indistinguishable except by their greater thickness from the polished red bowls found in cemeteries of the Naqada type."

But also discovered the secret of producing the black top to these red pots, which he considers especially of Nubian origin.

"Mere red-washed haematite pots", he says [500] "have been produced in many parts of the world, but nowhere else than in Egypt and Nubia (Except in Cyprus under Egyptian influence) has this beautiful pottery been produced which has a lustrous black border to the red. It was a work of genius, The process by which this remarkable result was obtained has hitherto been wrongly explained. Mr. H.L. Mercer, who discovered the secret, describes the true genesis of the art in his notes below."

Mercer's Take on It

In the notes referred to [600], Mr. Mercer, who seems to be the proprietor of some pottery works at Doylestown, Pennsylvania, describes the process. After making a pot of clay which in a clear fire would burn red, "I rubbed red ochre diluted in water upon it with the hand when half dry. Immediately polishing the surface by rubbing with the circumference of a brown glass bottle in lieu of a pebble, I next thoroughly dried the pot, and then stood it upside down with the rim buried an inch deep in a layer of rather fine white pine sawdust, in the center of which, immediately under the vessel, I placed a piece of resin of the size of a chestnut. Over the bowl thus arranged, I so bent a piece of common wire netting ... as to entirely surround and overreach the pot at a distance of about two inches. Both wire and sawdust stood within a circle of about 3 feet in diameter of loosely piled stones about 1 foot high. Upon this I threw about a bushel of finely chopped rye straw so as to fill the stone circle to the brim and entirely cover the bowl and wire. The straw when ignited burnt about three quarters of an hour, leaving the pot when cool a good duplicate of the original specimen, even to the waving buff-grey zone below the black."

Of course the ancient, no more than the modern Nubians, used wire netting to keep the inside core of the flame from touching the pot. What they did use, I believe I saw at Abydos in what seemed to have been a potter's yard just outside the Royal Tombs. But of course it would be quite easy to find many other means of keeping the heart of the flame clear. The rest of the process is, as you will see, the exact reverse of that imagined before the publication of Dr. MacIver's Areika. The pot was not left in the ashes which were the first products of combustion, in order to produce the black top. On the contrary, the bottom of the pot was fired first, and it was only when this had been exposed to an intense heat, that the rim was treated with a smoky flame of far less intensity. As Mr. Mercer says in his notes: "When the pot becomes red hot, the sawdust igniting last, and smothering its own flame, ends the baking in a smoky heat which carbonizes the rim of the vessel, already enough heated by the flame from above to fully absorb the blackness of the smoke before the fire goes out." As neither the ancient nor the modern Nubians are likely to have had sawdust in any quantities at their disposal, it is likely, as he suggests, that they used instead dried manure or perhaps tibbin, the first of which he found would have the same effect.

Thus Mr, MacIver shows that the making of black-topped red pottery was essentially a Nubian art, and bears out his contention, advanced on other ground, that the Pan Graves were those of a negroid people coming into Egypt during the disturbances of the Hyksos period, and bringing their native arts with them. If this were so, it would seem that there was a considerable admixture or even a preponderance of Nubian and negroid blood among the "prehistoric" or early population of Abydos, Mahasna, Abadiyeh, Hu, and so on, on the edge of the desert, where the black-topped red pots have mostly been found.

Nubian Skills

Was there now any particular reason why these Nubians and perhaps the Egyptian population among whom they dwelt should bury these black-red pots in their tombs sometimes to the exclusion of any other? I think there was, and the clue to it is supplied by Dr. Naville's researches at Deir el-Bahari. On the reliefs adorning the princesses' shrines in the 11th dynasty Temple there, are to be found representations of the king drinking out of a pot of red ware with a black top, which led M. Naville to think that these pots were generally useful to the dead in the next world; and, as in all matters relating to funerals, fashions change very slowly, I have no doubt these pots were buried with the dead rather than any other whenever they could be obtained from the Nubian potters either settled in Egypt or beyond the frontier. We do not know whether the Metuhotep in question had Nubian blood in his veins; but, as one of the princesses is represented as a negress, the idea of black-topped funeral vases would no doubt be familiar to her.

Naville's Take on It

With regard to dating by pots generally, M. Naville is inclined to get a great deal further on this. As he tells us in an article in L'Anthropologie', on "Primitive Pottery in Egypt"[600], he found the Suk, or weekly market at El Arabāt, full of hand-made pottery of different forms which he was told was the work of the women. Afterwards he visited the neighboring village of Beni Mansūr, and saw these pots made on a different system to those of Girgeh, which is not very far off. He gathers from this and from some other facts, which I will not now go into, that the shape and even the material of the pots in Egypt, now as always, change, not with time, but with locality; and it would be therefore quite possible to have black-topped red pots - were there any demand for such things nowadays - made in one village, and cylinders with a cord pattern, to take the other end of Prof. Petrie's scale, in the next. Moreover, in the tombs, the local pottery, made as we have seen by women, would be almost certain to be mixed up with the more elaborate and more highly decorated ware, not always or necessarily wheel-made, but fashioned by men, and any attempt to form a regular scale must therefore be doomed to failure. "The one true classification of Egyptian pottery", he concludes, "is the classification by locality which studies that which is made in each spot, and the modifications which the industry may have undergone in that locality. Formerly, as now, the potter of Edfu made his pots without troubling himself much as to what the denizen of Thebes or Memphis was making. What governed his work was what he had himself learned, or the suggestions of local circumstances and the tastes and customs of the spot."

Maspero's Input

M. Maspero, to whom if to anybody there should, I think, be conceded the right to "pontify", or to speak as an expert whose pronouncements are to be received without criticism, entirely agrees with this. In a review, in the Review Critique, of M. Naville's Paper from which I have just quoted, he warmly approves of M. Naville's conclusions, and says that he has been of this opinion, ever since his first study of the Earliest Dynasties and their monuments, that "the make, the colour, and the form of Egyptian pottery are not linked exclusively to each period of the history of Egypt, but that they are independent of them, and their presence in a tomb does not bind us to refer it to one period or another." He says that the first black-topped red pots were discovered by himself at Gebelźn and elsewhere in burials of the 11th dynasty and a chapel of the 6th, and that from the first he thought they belonged to the end of the Memphite Empire and the beginning of the Theban. Afterwards, "when first M. de Morgan and then Prof. Petrie, finding them in archaic cemeteries, wished to make them the property of the times before Menes and the Thinite Age, their discovery did not lead me to recant the opinion to which my own finds had brought me, but induced me to extend it, and to declare that this style of pottery was perpetuated through the centuries even under the 18th dynasty at least in some parts of the valley." His other remarks on the mistake of founding a chronology upon such objects, and the regrettable results of hasty generalizations in Egyptology, I leave everybody to read for themselves.

It Follows Then ...

It follows then, I think, from what I have said, that the black-topped red pot has fallen from its high place as the earliest type of Egyptian ceramics, and as the certain test of "prehistoric" date. With this must go the whole scale of sequence-dates which, as I have said, depends on its antiquity, and I am afraid we must see this vanish into the limbo of discarded theories into which the "New Race" and the identifications of the Abydos Kings with Manetho's First Dynasty based on the equation Aha = Menes, have already disappeared. Yet at the risk of repeating myself, I would again remind the Society that, although it is always dangerous to jump to conclusions, there are cases in science - I do not say that these were such - where a working hypothesis, even if it turns out to be false, is better than none at all; and that if the theories founded on them vanish, the monuments remain. For this, I think, we should always be grateful. [700]

Notes & References

[100] Prof. Petrie, Naqada and Ballas, London, 1896, p. 18.
[200] See Plate XXVIII in Journal of Anthropological Institute - (JAI), 1900.
[300] Ibid., p. 4 and 5.
[325] For a good, recent example of Kerma Ware see Bob Partridge, Sudan: Ancient Treasures in Ancient Egypt', Oct/Nov 2004, p. 30.
[350] `Micaceous' means containing mica, a common form of mineral mix.
[400] Dr. MacIver, Areika, 1909, p. 14.
[500] Ibid., p. 16.
[600] Ibid., p. 17.
[700] Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology (PSBA), April 9, 1913, p. 101-113.