Note 2 — LETTER II.

The firman of the Viceroy, with the most unlimited permission to carry on all excavations that I should think desirable, with a recommendation addressed to the local governments to support me, was given to me before my departure from Alexandria. All the work-people and tools that were necessary for the formation and transportation of our collection of antiquities, were demanded for wages by the Khawass given us by the government, under the authority of the firman, from the Sheîkh of the next village, and nowhere refused. The monuments from the southern provinces were transported in government barks from Mount Barkal to Alexandria, and to them were added three tombs from the neighbourhood of the great Pyramid of Gizeh, which, with the assistance of the four workmen purposely sent from Berlin, were carefully taken to pieces, and embarked opposite Old Cairo. At my departure from Egypt, a written permission was given me to export the collection, and the articles were formally presented to his Majesty the King of Prussia by the Viceroy.

These peculiar favours, at a time when all private travellers, antiquarian speculators, and even diplomatists, were especially interdicted by the Egyptian government from obtaining and taking away antiquities, did not fail to gain our expedition some unfavourable opinions. We were particularly blamed for having a destructive energy, which, under the ascribed circumstances, would have taken for granted a species of peculiar barbarism among our company. For, as we did not, like many of our rivals, dig out and remove the monuments, which had mostly been hidden below the surface, in haste by night, and with bribed assistance, but at our leisure, and with the open co-operation of the authorities, as well as under the eyes of many travellers—every carelessness with respect to these monuments left behind us, of which they had formed a part, would have been the more reprehensible, the easier such carelessness was to be avoided. But on the value of the monuments, we might esteem ourselves to have a more just judgment than the greater number of the generality of travellers or collectors usually possess; and we were not in danger of allowing it to be dulled by self-interest, as we did not select the monuments for ourselves, but as the agents of our government, for the Royal Museum at Berlin, and therefore for the benefit of science and an inquiring public.

The collection, which, principally by its historical value, may be compared with the most extensive in Europe, was, immediately upon its arrival, incorporated with the royal collections, without my being placed in any official connection with it. It is already opened and accessible to the public. A careful examination of it will conduce more than anything to place the remarks of later tourists,—among whom there are even Germans,—in their true light; who have even gone so far, as in the case of a Herr Julius Braun, in the General Augsburg Journal (Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung), to ascribe to us the mutilation of the gods in the temple at El Kab, done 3,000 years ago! Besides, it would show a total ignorance of present Egyptian relations, or that which gives the actual interest to the monuments of antiquity, if any one did not wish to see the as precious as unestimated and daily destroyed treasures of those lands, preserved in European museums as much as possible.