The Queen of Egyptology Amelia B. Edwards, William Copley Winslow

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Queen of Egyptology by William Coppley Winslow. Amelia Blandford Edwards,
the Honorary Secretary for Great Britain of the egypt Exploration Fund,
did her best and most enduring work as an Egyptologist.
I used this still somewhat occult designation in abroad as
well as a technical sense. Was she wonderfully versattle in

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various lines of intellectual labor. She was also many cited
as an Egyptologist when she vividly painted the many prerequisites
of the successful explorer in situ. In one of her lectures,
I inwardly said, what a queen among explorers you would
make as an incimpient Egyptologist. In eighteen seventy four, she
wriggled in through an aperture about a foot and a

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half square in Discoveries at Abu Simbel, so graphically told
by her in chapter eighteen of A Thousand Miles Up
the Nile. Yes, this woman whose face graces this number
of The American antiquarian born on June seventh, eighteen thirty one,
and actually writing for a weekly journal, an accepted poem
in eighteen thirty eight entitled The Knights of Old at

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the age of nine, winning the prize for a temperance story,
sending to George Krukshank for the Omnibus in eighteen forty five,
a tale with such deft caricature pencilings on the back
of the manuscript as to inspire him to at once
call on the rare unknown to be greeted by a
blooming maiden of but fourteen, This woman who rang out

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musical notes with such flexibility and compass at the age
of twenty that the opera would seem to be her
destined profession. Who was well known in eighteen fifty three
as a contributor to periodical literature, and as a full
blown novelist from then till eighteen sixty four, when that
still favorite romance Barber's History appeared. Who in eighteen sixty

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five produced a little volume of ballads, and then in
turn became a reviewer on the staff of the London
Morning Post, Saturday Review, Graphic Illustrated News, and other journals. Who,
as a traveler in eighteen seventy three, prepared that spirited
book on the Dolomite Mountains, with her own illustrations, untrodden
peaks and unfrequented Valleys, and who published in eighteen eighty

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that combinative novel of Travel, Scenery, Incident, Society and Plot
Lord Brackenberry translated into French, German, Italian and Russian. This woman,
I say, in entering the lists of Egyptology, must perforce
be many cited, prismatic, quick sighted, and largely sympathetic. Miss

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Edwards knew Egypt personally and its history completely. She mastered
the literature of research and exploration, and caught the freshest
news of every discovery. The late Sir Erasmus Wilson wrote
me that she is in the advance of the advanced
authorities upon the results of the latest discoveries. She was
profoundly interested in whatever cast light on philological and ethnical questions,

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or that related to the arts or sciences of contemporaneous nations,
and withal she had a fair or respectable knowledge of
the hieroglyphic text. Her talents, taste, previous training studies in
her adopted profession eminently qualified her for the post of
Honorary Secretary of the Society, which she, with Sir E.

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Wilson and Professor R. Stuart Poole, founded in eighteen eighty three. Nay,
was she not born to be an Egyptologist. For as
a child she tells us Wilkinson's manners and customs of
the ancient Egyptians. Shared my affections with the Arabian nights.
I knew every one of the six hundred illustrations by heart.
Doubtless too, her official position inspired her superabounding versatility to

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claim the boundless field is mine, so by nature and
by grace and otherwise. It came about that miss Edwards
was the best delineator that Old Egypt has ever had.
The Saturday Review thinks no other writer did so much
to render Egypt popular. Hers was preeminently the role of interpreter.
April twenty three, her lectures to American audiences, in their

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substance and expressions, most happily established my claim. Her advent
christening as an enthusiastic amateur in Egyptology may date from
eighteen seventy seven, when a thousand miles up the Nile appeared,
and her confirmation in that science from eighteen eighty one,
when she had critically mastered all the details of the
unprecedented discovery of the royal mummies at Thebes and substantially

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assisted Sir E. Wilson in preparing his book The Egypt
of the Past, which she was revising the last year
of her life. Harper's Magazine of July eighteen eighty two,
under the title Lying in State in Cairo, gives her clear, picturesque,
delightful story anent these royal mummies. Both Lady Emilia, she was,

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by the way maternally descended from the Walpoles, and Sir
Erasimus afford an interesting parallel or coincidence. Late in the
afternoon of life, he took up the study of Egypt,
preparing as a result the best word in its scope
on ancient Egypt that I know of already referred to,
and she a novelist and journalist, when entering upon middle Age,

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giving the world a most captivating, inspiring, instructive book that
has become as a pocket edition, almost another bedeker to
the Nile tourist. One of miss Edward's pamphlets is in
substance her paper read at the Congress of Orientalist held
at Leyden in eighteen eighty four, entitled on a Fragment
of a Mummy case illustrated by herself. Here I may

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exemplify the clearness and grace with which she transcribed hieroglyphs.
On page two twelve of the New England Magazine for
April eighteen ninety, I introduced a facsimile of her manuscript
that she had intended solely from my own eye. The
characters are models of elegant drawing, yet I am sure
that miss Edwards executed them with a running hand. Some

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of my readers will pleasantly recall her electric manual touches
upon the blackboard in her lecture upon the Evolution of
Egyptian Letters and Texts. Another little brochure is on the
dispersion of Egyptian Antiquities, a paper read at the Leyden Congress.
Still another at the Vienna Congress of eighteen eighty six
on the same topic emphasizes the immense importance of obtaining

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some knowledge of the numerous private collections which are being
thus rapidly enriched in Europe and America. The author ventures
to think that many a lost chapter of Egyptian history
might be recovered, at least in part, from the cabinets
of wealthy amateurs. In eighteen eighty eight, miss Edwards put
forth a paper of valuable data on the provincial collections

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such as the Peel Park Museum in Manchester and the
Mayor Collection at Liverpool. Mister R. N. Cust at the
Congress which met in eighteen eighty nine at Stockholm in Christiania,
presented her paper upon the Cypriot, Venetian and other signs
upon the potsherds found by mister Petrie in the Fayum.
The Times special correspondent, referring particularly to this paper said,

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the dates of which the character assigned to the twelfth
and eighteenth dynasties have led to the conclusion that the
Greco Phoenician alphabet was in use in Egypt at a
period antecedent to the date of the Exodus. On September eighteenth,
eighteen eighty nine, my friend wrote me from Richmond Villa
at Weston super Mare, and her usual frank vain of

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discourse as to what was doing and what she was about.
By this post, I send you parts of two Times newspapers.
I am not sure whether I did or did not
send you the article I wrote on mister Petries's closing
work in the Faeum July twentieth. I therefore sent a
copy with the one on his exhibition published last Monday.
The letter contains a brief reference to my paper written

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for the Stockholm Congress, which you may like to paragraph.
I was the first person to identify the signs by
mister Petrice Potsherds. His mother sent me his weekly letters
all the time he was in Egypt. She always does so,
and upon them I write my notices of his work
in the Times. In one or two of these letters
he gave facsimiles sketches of the Potsherd graffiti, and I

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sent him by next post numerous identifications of them, with Cypriot, Phoenician, Lycian, Theren, Phrygian, Eestruscan,
and other letters. I never told a living soul about it.
And when Pool and all of them were talking of
the wonderful rumors, I gravely kept silent, though I had
seen and identified them. And they say a woman cannot

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keep a secret. Sayce visited Petrie in the Faem weeks
after and reidentified them precisely as I had done. There
are over sixty Cypriot letters among them. It is the
discovery of our day. The fact is the subject is
of extraordinary interest and importance. The American Geographical Society, in
its bulletin of December eighteen ninety published her paper on

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Recent Discoveries in Egypt, being in part her lecture before
the Society in Chickering Hall, New York, and it also
appeared in pamphlet form. Its discussion of mister Petrie's discoveries
at Telgurub and Tell Cahoun in the Fayum is based
on her Stockholm treatise of that remarkable philological revelation. But

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two of doctor Edwards's American Magazine articles would be referred
to here. Harper's October eighteen eighty six contained the story
of Tannis Zoan, which, as an archaeological paper in a
popular magazine is as a whole without its peer, at
least in my humble opinion. Its background of study and research,
its grouping of historical data and exploration details, its dignity

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and classic finish, its imaginative play resting on ascertained conditions
and established topography, in the portrayal of Zoan in all
its glory when Rameses oppressed Israel, particularly in the description
of the scene which a stranger approaching that great northern
capital of the Pharaohs would have witnessed, when the king
of all Colossi in Egypt and all the world, towered

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in majesty above the vast temple. These and more stamped
this article as a masterpiece of archae geological and historical
verbal painting. And yet in Bubastis and historical study, the
initial contribution to the Century for January eighteen ninety there
is an equally charming delineation of that marvelous discovery by
doctor Neville, King of Hieroglyphis, albeit simpler told, and if

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anything more to the point, it is much in the
style of her lectures. Indeed, miss Edwards almost affected simplicity
of style the last two or three years of her life.
This may have been owing to her constant writing for
the Times in the Academy, and particularly because of her
latest vocation, that of a lecturer to popular audiences, when

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she became largely colloquial in her manner of speech, and
that simple manner, combined with dignity of bearing, always took
her listeners by storm. When the Fund's volume on Goshen,
that invaluable discovery appeared, I suggested to my colleague that
its style was too dry to produce the effect in
the United States that I wished an influence people to

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aid our work. It should be more in your style,
I believe, I wrote, alas, I admit all that you
say about Goshen. It is dry and too profound, she replied.
Yet how deeply interesting to us. I am astonished at
the closeness of the reasoning, How ingenious and convincing it is,
even to the identification of the water of raw with

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the Heliopolitan spring. My dear friend, it is of no
use to compare novels reports in the academy with mine
in the times. You must remember that the Egyptologists do
not write a picturesque and popular style like that of
a b E who has had thirty years of literary
work in the Romantic school, and who has especially cultivated style,

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worked at it as if it was a science, and
mastered it. I study style like a poet, calculating even
the play of vowel sounds and the music of periods.
Style is an instrument which I have practiced sedulously, and
which I can play upon. But are Egyptologists at et cetera.
What do they know of this subtle harmony. They have

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never flung themselves into the life and love of imaginary
men and women. They have never studied the landscape, painting
of scenery in words. They have no notion of the art,
the dexterity, the ear required for musical English. They have
no time for such things. It is not their vocation.
I am the only Romancist in the world who is
also an Egyptologist. We must not expect the owl of

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Athena to warble like the nightingale of Keats. Adieu, your
devoted friend, A. B. Edwards. The Britannica Encyclopedia has some
specimens of Miss Edward's good workmanship in her adopted profession,
and also a special article from her for the American
edition on the recent discoveries in Egypt. Her series of

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papers on the question was Rameses the Second, the Pharaoh
of the Oppression, or I believe gathered into a sheaf,
but I have never seen it. From the founding of
our society till the last year of her life, she
read occasionally to the Graphic and the Illustrated News, and
regularly to the Times articles upon our work in Egypt

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that were of the highest value to the cause. They
were copied into our American newspapers, and I utilized them
in various other ways. The loss of my associate to
me in this particular is simply irreparable. From her, I
got the latest news, and by her personal letters I
learned of the plans in advance of each season's campaign.

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Miss Edwards more scholarly, but never abstruse or dry journalistic
contributions on Egypt appeared in The Academy, says its editor,
mister J. S. Cotton of her work, the Academy has
suffered by her death an irreparable loss. During the past
fifteen years, she must have contributed to our columns more
than one hundred articles, many of considerable length and all

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requiring some research. We know not whether to admire in
them most the brilliancy of their narrative style, or the
accuracy with which each detail was verified. She was, in
truth a model contributor, never declining a request, punctual to
her promises, writing in a clear, bold hand, and considerate
of the convenience of the printer as well as editor.

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I wish to press home the truthful remark of mister
Cotton as to the accuracy of miss Edward's details or
special statements based on research. The Saturday Review considers that
her books are deserving of special praise for the small
percentage of error they contain. In a New York weekly journal,
the Epoch of March twenty eighth, eighteen ninety, an anonymous correspondent,

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under the caption Miss Amelia B. Edwards blunders made a
wholesale onslaught on her lectures, charging her with being ignorant
of her themes and abounding in gross misstatements. All sheer
Boschen nonsense is one of his elegant applications to the
lecture which treats of animal worship. I advise my readers
to see this reviewer's contribution and the reply of miss

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Edwards through me in the Epic of June sixth. One
citation will tell the tale. The reviewer said she made
a great deal out of an old snatch of a
threshing song, which she even mistranslated. He exclaimed, Ye, Gods
of Egypt, did ever such sounds offend your ears? Miss
Edwards's retort, so suggestive of fine thrashing qualities, is simple.

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The translation which I gave of that song Pharaohs, Fellows
and Explorers Lectures in the United States, pages two thirty
six and three o seven was made expressly for this
lecture by mister Lapage Reneuf, keeper of the Egyptian Department
in the British Museum, and successor to doctor Birch as
President of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, whose profound and

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accurate knowledge of the structure and grammar of the ancient
Egyptian language is unsurpassed. Mister Charles Dudley Warner's pithy words
in the July Harpers are a good peroration to our
claim for her painstaking accuracy. She never wrote about anything
she did not know. A letter of January twelfth, eighteen

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eighty five remarks as follows. Most nights I have been
at the desk till two and three a m. And
the Times article was a matter of the whole night long.
My eyes are suffering, and I feel ten years older
than I did three weeks ago. Enough of self, Let
me turn to your marvelous work in New York. Well,
no one but yourself, I think, could have performed that

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feat of physical and mental and diplomatic achievement. And in
the midst of it, you could actually sit down at
the Astor House and write, write that lucid, compact, decisive,
exhaustive article for the churchmen. The Churchman of December twenty eighth,
eighteen eighty four, on the site of the Biblical Zoan,
et cetera. This is wonderful to me. I cannot write

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except in my own library, at my own desk, with
everything to hand and perfect peace and quiet. If our
old gardener whistles at his work pruning or weeding in
the vegetable garden behind my library, I have actually to
send out to him to leave off. If the maid's
chatter in my hearing, I stop them. I suppose I
am very strong too, but my strength now is more

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fictitious than real, more nervous than solid. Yet not so
very long ago I walked up the highest mountain in
central France, four hours up and three hours down, and
then declared myself ready to do it again if anybody
liked to turn back with me. I could not do that. Now.
These lines are now of peculiar interest. I look now

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to Griffith and Petrie. She is referring to Englishmen to
carry on the torts of Egyptian learning in the future,
when Pool and I shall have passed away. My work will,
I hope, in a sense, go on forever. In the
limited sense of our forever, for I have made my
will and left an endowment for a professorship of Egyptology
to University College London. I wish I could spare the

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money at once and see it working before I die,
but that is impossible. They will have my Egyptian library,
collection of antiquities, et cetera. This is private. Another dated
November sixteenth, eighteen eighty five, contains these paragraphs. Your long
and most interesting and very confidential letter delighted me. There

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are some parts which I should prefer not to destroy,
as they relate to me and tell me facts which
I am very happy and humbly thankful to know. I mean,
as to the light in which my labors are viewed
in America, I do work conscientiously. I never review a book,
for instance, without carefully reading it, and I never put
anything down as facts without having first gone to every

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reference on the subject. And when I am not positively
sure of a thing, I always qualify my words with
I think or I believe. If your people find me reliable,
I rejoice that they are so convinced, because they do
me justice and it shows they know enough. I mean
the general public to discriminate on abstruse subjects between theorists

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and positivists. I am a positivist in science, and like
the elephant, I try the bridge with my trunk before
I venture to cross it. But I fear they terribly
overrate me. In other ways, I am a very indifferent hieroglyphist.
I have not time to work at texts as I
did once. My energies are diverted into the practical grooves

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of Egyptology, that is exploration and the acquisition and analysis
of all that is learned, discovered and translated in whatever
country and from whatever sources. I try to let nothing
escape me and perhaps take me all round. I know
more about Egyptian history and recent results than anybody else,

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but I am not a translator, and I fear now
I never shall be. Had miss Edward's life been spared
another decade, the world would have been the richer by
at least two or three more new books of a
caliber and merit equal to her Pharaoh's fellows and explorers.
And my earnest hope is that her revision of Wilson's
Egypt is about ready for the publisher, as it is

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the work on the History of the Dynasties and marked
epics of Egypt for the general reader and singularly useful
for reference. Her translation of Maspero's Egyptian Archaeology gives to
the English reader a most authoritative textbook on the architecture
and art of the ancient Egyptians. But this translation, with notes,

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her volume of lectures, her one Thousand Miles Up the Nile,
together with the brochures and magazine articles, reveals sufficiently to
us the structure and compass of her mind and its
capacities of expression. Broad As is that mental structure, the
ability to convey its knowledge intelligently captivatingly to others is

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almost phenomenal. Certainly so in the realm of archaeology. She
could turn her searchlight power of discernment upon points of investigation,
or announce results, and then touch her conclusions with remarkably
exact local colors and a felicitous polychrome. Shall I discriminate?
Miss Edward's genius belongs to the objective rather than the

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subjective school, and she assiduously cultivated her powers and tastes
in the direction of objects rather than subjects of thought,
or if the latter, from without rather than from within.
She splendidly illustrated what it is to see and think
through the eye rather than through pure reason. I do
not know, indeed, that she ever read Plato, Aristotle, Descartes,

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and Hamilton. And although she could aptly quote the immortal
Dogberry and other Shakespearian characters, yet I think she enjoyed
the wit more than the human philosophy of Shakespeare. She
was searching, investigating logical for a woman in her deductions,
witness her treatment of the caw question. But she lacked,

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at least in her novels that imperial philosophic element, the
subjective insight and genius of creation, which permeates and sways
the Daniel Derondas that are given the world Lord Brackenbury,
so full of life, light color and abounding and suggestions
to the imagination, and I typifies. I think the objective

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novel as distinctively as Middle March represents the subjective novel
of our day. This may explain why some people fail
to appreciate miss Edwards's novels, who praise her as an archaeologist.
But readers novelist archaeologists are not all alike, Thank Heaven,
and my associate was not a brookst a Neville, or

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a Misparrow, or any one else but herself. Among her
novels are My Brother's Wife, Half a Million of Money,
Miss carew Debenham's val in the Days of My Youth,
Monsieur Maurice Hand in Glove. Miss Edwards, as she told me,
was never satisfied with her earlier romances. She wrote an

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abridgment of French history, and her Outlines of English History
is still a text book in American schools. She was
sui generous. She knew the whole field of Egyptology better
than any man, and no one could approach her word
power to describe the field on the side of history,
art and exploration. I pray for, but I never expect

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to see another Edwards in the domain of Egyptology. The
queenly title is Hers. On November seventh, eighteen eighty nine,
was given in the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Miss Edwards's
initial lecture in America, the Reverend Doctor R. S. Stores,
making an address of welcome on behalf of the large
and distinguished audience of representative men and women of New

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York and Brooklyn up to the date to her departure
for home. On March twenty eighth. She gave in all
about one hundred and twenty public lectures in various parts
of the land, some of them under the auspices of
such institutions as Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Columbia, the Universities of
Michigan and Pennsylvania, the Peabody Institute of Baltimore, and the

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Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio. She broke her
left arm, but undaunted, she lectured that evening and fulfilled
every appointment thereafter that had been made for her. It
was over a year from that untoward accident before she
recovered even a moderate use of that arm. The following
facts illustrate her amazing pluck and endurance. Arriving in New

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York some two or three weeks after the accident and
being in much pain, the arm was reset. She then
attended a luncheon party followed by a small reception. The
afternoon was devoted to the annual meeting of the Sorosis Club,
where she was enrolled an honorary member and given a
splendid banquet. At eight o'clock, she was at the Metropolitan
Opera House to read a paper on the birth and

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growth of Romantic fiction as illustrated in Egyptian literature. Of
the two other speakers on cognate topics, one took exception
to her claim of the Egyptian origin of such and
such and so and so. It was a meeting of
the nineteenth century Club of Free Life, Lances, proclivities, and practices.
Although past ten o'clock and insufferably hot, miss Edwards, in

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an offhand but unhesitatingly clear, fluent, forcible, humorous speech of
about twenty minutes length, completely carried her audience with her.
So at least, the Tribune said, And it was my
own impression, as the memorial minutes of the Committee in
England of the Fund truly say. Of miss Edwards's lectures
on both sides of the Atlantic, she has made Egyptology

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a household word representing a new intellectual interest. No single
achievement of my life is more gratifying to me than
my successful effort to induce my friend to visit the
United States. The invitation was the fitting a vancouur to
the welcome and success that everywhere were hers, Having written
over two hundred personal notes to representative men and women

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in every department of life and work. I put out
a leaflet on March first, eighteen eighty nine, upon her
capacities to lecture and her top to which I appended
the following invitation, signed by Whittier, Lowell, Holmes, Curtis Warner,
Parkman Booth, Vanderbilt, Morton Stores, the editors of Harper's The Century,

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The Atlantic, Scribner's The Nation, The Critic, the Literary World,
About all the leading university and college presidents, etc. Some
two hundred names in all. The proposed visit of Miss
Amelia B. Edwards to the United States to see our
country and to lecture upon subjects in which she is
an acknowledged authority, if carried into effect, will be an

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event of special interests to the intelligent and cultivated people
of our land. She may be assured of a hearty welcome,
and her lectures cannot fail to prove of rare profit
and pleasure to her audiences. What I predicted, having in
mind her lectures in Great Britain was abundantly confirmed by
her tour. The picturesqueness of her style, the interest of

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her facts, and the sympathetic charm of her delivery have
evoked unwonted enthusiasm Her voice is peculiarly clear, agreeable, and
far reaching, and she possesses in a remarkable degree the
power of holding her audiences. Herself a practical archaeologist, she
relates the wonders of our inheritance in ancient Egypt and

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the stirring story of Egyptian exploration with an intelligent vividness,
which makes those far away subjects as interesting as a
sensational romance. Herself a skillful artist, she can in an
instant deftly illustrate with chalk some hieroglyphic puzzle or curious
relationship between Egyptian and Greek arts. Miss Edwards on August thirtieth,

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eighteen eighty nine, wrote me of my preparations on her behalf.
As you know, I never lectured in my life till
November third, eighteen eighty seven, and then only because mister Horsfall,
who was on the corporation committee, insisted on it that
I could, should, and must do it. It would never
have entered into my head to attempt such a thing

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had he not done this. I attribute my success in
lecturing to the training my voice had in youth, For
I was a good singer. I could have taken to
opera singing, had I wished to earn my bread and
fame in that way. My voice was of extraordinary compass
and flexibility. Also, I had considerable taste for acting, and
played a good deal in amateur theatricals when a girl

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between fifteen and twenty. I think these last experiences have
probably much to do with that clearness of utterance, et cetera,
which are essential to successful lecturing. But I should like
the American world to understand that I do none of
these things now, nor have done them for the last
thirty years. I am a very staid, quiet, hard working body. Now.

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The Egypt Exploration Fund owed an unpayable debt to miss Edwards.
That debt is now due, Will it be ever due
to her memory? Miss Edwards, as the obituary in the
Annual Report of the Funds has followed Erasmus Wilson and
James Russell Lowell. Mister Lowell was the honorary Vice President
of the Society. His successor was George William Curtis. In

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honor of their memory, we who survive have a sacred
duty to the great enterprise consecrated by their names. It
may be truly added that the archaeological bread she cast
upon the waters returned to her not after many days.
Her position as Honorary Secretary of our Society and the
discoveries in progress afforded her a unique opportunity which she

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splendidly utilized of depicting to our age old Egypt as
touched by the transforming wand of exploration. By that opportunity
she gained a scientific as well as an official status.
Her doctorates from Columbia, Smith and Bethany Colleges l h D,
l l D, and pH d were owing to it.

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Because of it, she lectured in Great Britain, followed by
an every way successful tour in the United States. It
was the sine qua non of her best journalistic and
magazine articles. Such an opportunity led up to the throne
of Egyptology upon which this sketch crowns her queen. And
in short, it is through the Society and her official position,

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and owing to the past decade of discoveries, that she
won enduring fame. Whull we mourn her untimely call from
the high mission. She so grandly performed in the promotion
of discovery and in the diffusion of knowledge acquired by it.
We are profoundly thankful for the much that she lived
to accomplish. May I add that through her personal efforts

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or influence, a large share of the funds from Great
Britain were raised for our work, and that my lamented
associate was a constant inspiration to me in my literary
and financial efforts to advance our cause in the United States.
The Archeological Survey of Egypt, advocated by mister F. L. Griffith,
now its superant tendant, was greatly promoted by doctor Edwards.

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In October last she edited a special extra report of
the survey in order, as she wrote me, to create
or increase an interest in it. Her last official act
was to issue in November a four page circular respecting
the claims and results of the survey. Her last important
word to me, dated December first, was a nine page letter,

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mostly relating to the Vicomte de Rouge's acceptance of the
results of the fund's discoveries at the sites of Pitham, Goshen,
et cetera, as contained in his recently published work Geography
Ancien de labass Egypt. The cause of this able communication
to me from miss Edwards was a sublimely impertinent letter

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addressed to the society by a notorious dabbler in Egyptology,
who relocates established sites and charges the great scholars and
explorers with ignorance of the subject. He relies, as she remarks,
on the little that is known and read in America
on Egyptian subjects, and on his own colossal effrontery to

(32:06):
carry him through. Here ends my sketch. The rest is silence.
Not so intellectual culture education may everywhere regard miss Edwards
as a generous creditor in the great exchange of knowledge.
For out of Egypt has chiefly come our knowledge of
the evolution of man during a period of five thousand

(32:27):
years b c. And among the delightful surprises of our
day is the enthusiasm, intelligence, skill, magnetism, and poetry with
which her pen and voice have invested the old old subject,
now regenerated to notice public notice by discovery and by portrayal.
Like hers, may other imaginative and scholarly souls take up

(32:50):
the burden of her song in the promotion of exploration,
to reveal and to record monumental history. By the sweet
waters of the Nile and of the Queen of Egyptology
by William Copley Winslow