Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 46, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1886 — Egyptian Progress. [ARTICLE]

Egyptian Progress.

Egypt is not at a standstill at present; it is moving faster, for better or for worse, than it ever moved before. And this is true of its antiquities ag well as of other things; the ancient cities are being in the present day dug away and their earth spread on the ground as a fertilizer; and this is going on at such a rate that some have almost entirely disappeared already, and the fields of -corn have taken their place, others have diminished to half the size they were a generation or two back, and are still diminishing every day. And the time does not seem very far distant when scarcely a site of a city will be able to he identified. Certainly Egypt will have exhausted its antiquity fields before England exhausts its coal fields. And up the Nile tombs are opened every year, and fewer left to be discovered. In one sense we are only just beginning to explore Egypt, and the treasure seems to ns inexhaustible, but that is only because of the puny scale of our attack from the scientific side; in another and terribly true sense Egypt is exhausting itself, the natives are ceaselessly digging, and unless we look to it pretty quiokly, the history of tho country will have perished before our eyes, by the destructive activity of its inhabitants. Never before has land of monuments been so fiercely worked on; daily and hourly the spoils of ages past are ransacked, and if of marketable value are carried off; but whether preserved or not is a small matter compared with the entire loss of their connection and history which always results in. this way. If we are not to incur the curse of posterity for our vandalism, and inertness, we must be up and doing in the right way.