and. If only his
imagination had been controlled by a knowledge of Egypt, the picture
might have been both true and effective.

When the mummy of Akhnaton was discovered and was proved to be that of a
man of twenty-eight years of age, many persons doubted the
identification on the grounds that the king was known to have been
married at the time when he came to the throne, seventeen years before
his death,[1] and it was freely stated that a marriage at the age of ten
or eleven was impossible and out of the question. Thus it actually
remained for the writer to point out that the fact of the king's death
occurring seventeen years after his marriage practically fixed his age
at his decease at not much above twenty-eight years, so unlikely was it
that his marriage would have been delayed beyond his eleventh year.
Those who doubted the identification on such grounds were showing all
too clearly that the manners and customs of the Egyptians of the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so many of which have come down
intact from olden times, were unknown to them.

[Footnote 1: Weigall: Life of Akhnaton, p. 56.]

Here we come to the root of the trouble. The Egyptologist who has not
resided for some time in Egypt is inclined to allow his ideas regarding
the ancient customs of the land to be influenced by his
unconsciously-acquired knowledge of the habits of the west. Men do not
marry before the age of eighteen or twenty in Europe: therefore they did
not do so in Egypt. There are streams of water upon the mountains in
Europe: therefore water may be hoisted upon the hillsides in Egypt. But
is he blind that he sees not the great gulf fixed between the ways of
the east and those of his accustomed west? It is of no value to science
to record the life of Thutmosis III. with Napoleon as our model for it,
nor to describe the daily life of the Pharaoh with the person of an
English king before our mind's eye. Our European experience will not
give us material for the imagination to work upon in dealing with Egypt.
The setting for our Pharaonic pictures must be derived from Egypt alone;
and no Egyptologist's work that is more than a simple compilation is of
value unless the sunlight and the sandy glare of Egypt have burnt into
his eyes, and have been reflected on to the pages under his pen.

The archaeologist must possess the historic imagination, but it must be
confined to its proper channels. It is impossible to exert this
imaginatio