archaeologists-from-england

"He found archaeology in Egypt a treasure hunt; he left it a science."

"Our knowledge of how men lived and thought in the Valley of the Nile five or six thousand years before the Christian era is ever on the increase. It keeps pace with the march of , and that march extends every year over a wider area. Each season beholds the exploration of new sites, and each explorer has some new thing to tell."

"In few kinds of work are the results so directly dependent on the personality of the worker as they are in excavating. The old saying that a man finds what he looks for in a subject, is too true; or if he has not enough insight to ensure finding what he looks for, it is at least sadly true that he does not find anything that he does not look for. Whether it be , , , or that excavators have been seeking, they have seldom preserved or cared for anything but their own limited object. Of late years the notion of digging merely for profitable spoil, or to yield a new excitement to the jaded, has spread unpleasantly—at least in Egypt. A concession to dig is sought much like a grant of a monastery at the : the man who has influence or push, a title or a trade connection, claims to try his luck at the spoils of the land. Gold digging has at least no moral responsibility, beyond the ruin of the speculator; but spoiling the past has an acute moral wrong in it, which those who do it may be charitably supposed to be too ignorant or unintelligent to see or realise."

"To the Egyptian the gods might be mortal; even , the sun-god, is said to have grown old and feeble, was slain, and , the great hunter of the heavens, killed and ate the gods. The mortality of gods has been dwelt on by ('), and the many instances of tombs of gods, and of the slaying of the deified man who was worshipped, all show that immortality was not a divine attribute. Nor was there any doubt that they might suffer while alive; one myth tells how Ra, as he walked on earth, was bitten by a magic serpent and suffered torments. The gods were also supposed to share in a life like that of man, not only in Egypt but in most ancient lands. Offerings of food and drink were constantly supplied to them, in Egypt laid upon the altars, in other lands burnt for a sweet savour."

"The first consideration on reaching Egypt was where to be housed. In those days there was no luxurious close to the ; if any one needed to live there, they must either live in a tomb or in the Arab village. As an English engineer had left a tomb fitted with door and shutters I was glad to get such accommodation. When I say a tomb, it must be understood to be the upper chamber where the Egyptian fed his ancestors with offerings, not the actual sepulchre. And I had three rooms, which had belonged to separate tombs originally ; the thin walls of rock which the economical Egyptian left between his cuttings, had been broken away, and so I had a doorway in the middle into my living-room, a window on one side for my bedroom, and another window opposite for a store-room. I resided here for a great part of two years; and often when in draughty houses, or chilly tents, I have wished myself back in my tomb. No place is so equable in heat and cold, as a room cut out in solid rock ; it seems as good as a fire in cold weather, and deliciously cool in the heat."

"In 1893-1894 I went to to search for remains of the dynastic race, which presumably had entered Egypt at that point from the Red Sea. In the lowest part of the temple foundations we found parts of three colossal figures of the local god , each with surface carvings of animals, &c. They obviously belonged to a far earlier art than anything known in Egypt, and all later discoveries confirm their being placed as the earliest works of the , long before the establishment of the . One figure is at Cairo, and two are in the Asmolean Museum at Oxford."

"Greek and Roman religion depended on images, quite literally: there were no sacred laws or scripture and certainly no organised church or priesthood to police practice and correct error. It was in their images and their names that the gods persisted for at least two thousand years from the Bronze Age to the purges organised by monotheist emperors."

"Jaguars are very common on the cattle plains, and the great sport is not to shoot them, but to lasso them on horseback. Two men take part, keeping the roped beast between them. It requires good mounts and considerable dexterity with the lasso, but given these it is not nearly so dangerous a sport as it sounds."

"No Government inspector who valued his skin would venture into the rubber country and send back an honest report. The arm of vengeance was long, and in the Montaña life was very cheap. For instance, a judge was sent to the Acre to get evidence of the particularly brutal murder of an Austrian, and found that powerful people on the rivers were involved. Had he told what he knew, he would never have left there alive. It was prudent to say nothing, to return safely to the Altiplano with a nice gift of 'hush money' and to close the case by paying a small compensation to the relatives. Who can blame him?"

"The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)"

"Archreological evidence ... both in Iran and India and Pakistan...indeed it almost always lacks any clear hallmarks to establish its originators as Indo-Europeans."

"No support for the entry of ‘Aryan’ populations [in India] is found in physical anthropological data (Petraglia & Allchin 2007)"

"Bridget and Raymond Allchin inform us about the early phase of Mundigak I: "Some characteristic painted designs are similar to those of Kili Ghul Mohammad II [north Baluchistan] and Anj ira I [upper south Baluchistan].""

"Such "ritual hearths" are reported from the beginning of the Harappan period itself. It has been suggested that they may have been fire altars , evidence of domestic, popular and civic fire-cults of the Indo-Iranians, which are de- scribed in detail in the later Vedic literature. It may then be an indication of culture contact between an early group of Indo-Aryans and the population of the still-flourishing Indus civilization."

"The orientation of port-holes and entrances on the cist graves is frequently towards the south. [...] This demands comparison with later Indian tradition where south is the quarter of Yama. Among the grave goods, iron is almost universal, and the occasional iron spears and tridents (trisulas) suggest an association with the god Siva. The discovery in one grave of a trident with a wrought-iron buffalo fixed to the shaft is likewise suggestive, for the buffalo is also associated with Yama, and the buffalo demon was slain by the goddess Durgà, consort of Siva, with a trident. [...] The picture which we obtain from this evidence, slight as it is, is suggestive of some form of worship of Siva."

"Their [the Aryans] presence should therefore be in evidence archaeologically… But as yet it is scarcely attested in the archaeological record presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already indistinguishable from those of the existing population."

"From early historical times forward we know that horses have been regularly imported to South Asia. We also know the Indus had a long tradition of trade with centres to the west and north. Would it be surprising therefore if horses were occasionally acquired through trade, ultimately reaching the Indus world by land or sea? This would account for the occurrence of a small number of their bones in various contexts without the need to assume their presence must necessarily be associated with profound cultural change."

"Nomadic herdsmen form an important element of rural life in India and Pakistan today, including the old province of Harappan culture. There is every reason to suppose that they did so in Harappan times, and that they played an important part in the economy and organization of the Harappan world."

"... In the literary age of Greece and Rome the ancient religions of Babylonia and Egypt had passed into their dotage, and the conceptions on which they were founded had been transformed or forgotten. What was left of them was little more than an empty and unintelligible husk, or even a mere caricature. The gods, in whose name the kings of had gone forth to conquer, and in whose honour had reared the temples and palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into the patrons of a system of magic; the priests, who had once made and unmade the lords of the East, had become “Chaldæan” fortune-tellers, and the religion and science of Babylonia were remembered only for their connection with astrology. The old tradition had survived in Egypt with less apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of religious belief and teaching was more apparent than real, external rather than internal; and though the ... and early s rebuilt the temples on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted in the dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods whose very names they could not have pronounced, it was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing up, as it were, in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit and life had fled."

"In the early spring of 1859 I saw London for the first time. My father introduced me to all the chief sights of the metropolis, including, of course, the with its diving-bell, as well as the , which were closed shortly afterwards. I spent hours in the , more especially in the Egyptian and Assyrian rooms; the spell of the East became more potent than ever, and I still have a small note-book in which I endeavoured to copy the strange characters on one of the tablets in the glass cases."

"During the last half-century a new world has been opened out before us by the excavators and decipherers of the ancient monuments of the East, the great civilisations of the past have risen up, as it were, from their grave, and we find ourselves face to face with the contemporaries of and , of Moses and of Abraham. Pages of history have been restored to us which had seemed lost for ever, and we are beginning to learn that the old empires of the Orient were in many respects as cultured and literary as is the world of to-day. The Old Testament has hitherto stood alone; the literature which existed by the side of it in the oriental world seemed to have perished, and if we would test and verify, illustrate or explain its statements, we had nothing to fall back upon except a few scattered fragments of doubtful value, which had come to us through Jewish and Christian apologists, or the misleading myths and fables of Greek writers. The books of the Old Testament Scriptures could be explained and interpreted only through themselves; they were what the logicians would call “a single instance”; there was nothing similar with which they could be compared, no contemporaneous record which could throw light on the facts they contained."

"... The Hittites were a very real power. Not very many centuries before the age of they had contested the empire of Western Asia with the Egyptians, and though their power had waned in the days of they were still formidable enemies and useful allies. They were still worthy of comparison with the divided kingdom of Egypt, and infinitely more powerful than that of . But we hear no more about them in the subsequent records of the Old Testament. The age of Hittite supremacy belongs to an earlier date than the rise of the monarchy in Israel; earlier, we may even say, than the Israelitish conquest of ."

"The nearer a language is to its primary centre, the less alteration we are likely to find in it. Now of all the Aryan dialects, Sanskrit and Zend may, on the whole, be considered to have changed the least."

"The Hittites were a people with yellow skins and ‘mongoloid’ features whose receding foreheads, oblique eyes, and protruding upper jaws, are represented as faithfully on their own monuments as they are on those of Egypt, so that we cannot accuse the Egyptian artists of caricaturing their enemies... We have seen that the Hittites were a northern race. Their primitive home probably lay on the northern side of the Taurus. What they were like we can learn both from their own sculptures and from the Egyptian monuments, which agree most remarkably in the delineation of their features. The extraordinary resemblance between the Hittite faces drawn by the Egyptian artists and those depicted by themselves in their bas-reliefs and their hieroglyphs, is a convincing proof of the faithfulness of the Egyptian representations, as well as of the identity of the Hittites of the Egyptian inscriptions with the Hittites of Carchemish and Kappadokia. It must be confessed that they were not a handsome people. They were short and thick of limb, and the front part of their faces was pushed forward in a curious and somewhat repulsive way. The forehead retreated, the cheek-bones were high, the nostrils were large, the upper lip protrusive. They had, in fact, according to the craniologists, the characteristics of a Mongoloid race. Like the Mongols, moreover, their skins were yellow and their eyes and hair were black. They arranged the hair in the form of a 'pig-tail,' which characterizes them on their own and the Egyptian monuments quite as much as their snow-shoes with upturned toes. In Syria they doubtless mixed with the Semitic race, and the further south they advanced the more likely they were to become absorbed into the native population."

"Probably the first settlers arrived in the region around 1750–1600 BC and their numbers grew steadily during the following centuries. We would expect this early Vedic period to come to an end around 1500 BC and the first compilation of the Rigveda Sayhita, i.e. Majjals II–VII, to be made during the next two or three centuries."

"Even respected archaeologists of the old school of thought, such as Raymond and Bridget Allchin, now admit that the arrival of Indo-Aryans in Northwest India is "scarcely attested in the archaeological record, presumably because their material culture and life-style were already virtually indistinguishable from those of the existing population.""

"The Allchins, in their archeological capacity, have consistently emphasized the continuity that links the residues of the Indus civilization with those of the later classical India in the Ganges basin and further south. Furthermore, they repeatedly emphasized that archeology provides no clear evidence of any mass movement of peoples from Central Asia into northern India. So why do they continue to pay deference to the “racist” notions of nineteenth-century philologists in this way? (Incidentally, there is no “general agreement that the Indo- Iranian languages . . . were originally spoken in the steppes of Eurasia”)"

"Their [the Aryans] presence should therefore be in evidence archaeologically… But as yet it is scarcely attested in the archaeological record presumably because their material culture and lifestyle were already indistinguishable from those of the existing population."

"These three contexts suggest that fire-rituals formed a part of the religious life of the town, at a civic, domestic and popular level... They are highly suggestive of an Indo-Iranian, if not more specifically Indo-Aryan, element in the culture of the period covered by these excavations."

"...In the contemporary world, it is worrying trying to create cultural groups, because it is always motivated from an interest-position. Trying to define cultures in the past is always, as we know, part of a motivated attempt to find one's nostalgic origins or to create a sense of continuity."

"One of the things I thought was very important during the 1980s was the idea that culture is meaningfully constituted. I still think that is right. But now, I put the emphasis on the "meaningful constitution"rather than the "cultural"bit. I have had arguments with my colleagues in Stanford about this. I take the view that culture is not a helpful term. It tends to be reifying and dangerous. I prefer to break it down and talk about the various processes that constitute it."

"I think that it is wrong that Archaeology should be located within Anthropology because archaeologists have equally strong links to History and the natural sciences."

"Where Church pastors had the trust of their people, this sense of personal involvement on the part of the individual believer need not be absent even from an intercessory ministry: The shepherd led his flock and did not drive them, and they appeared together before the Throne of Grace. When the Church through its history has sought to dictate its authority, suppress individualism, and impose humiliation rather than preach humility, the ancient genius of the faith has exerted itself in revolt, and the faithful have exercised their right to seek their own way to their heavenly Father and realize their true selves."

"From the religious books of ancient Egypt we learn that the power possessed by a priest or man who was skilled in the knowledge and working of magic was believed to be almost boundless. By pronouncing certain words or names of power in the proper manner and in the proper tone of voice he could heal the sick, and cast out the evil spirits which caused pain and suffering in those who were diseased, and restore the dead to life, and bestow upon the dead man the power to transform the corruptible into an incorruptible body, wherein the soul might live to all eternity. His words enabled human beings to assume divers forms at will, and to project their souls into animals and other creatures; and in obedience to his commands, inanimate figures and pictures became living beings and things which hastened to perform his behests. The powers of nature acknowledged his might, and wind and rain, storm and tempest, river and sea, and disease and death worked evil and ruin upon his foes, and upon the enemies of those who were provided with the knowledge of the words which he had wrested from the gods of heaven, and earth, and the underworld."

"Neither from the intrinsic evidence of indigenous literature, nor from the facts of recorded history, is it permissible to infer the simultaneous existence in the country of an alien-speaking race at any period"

""The existence of such a race is simply assumed by those who find it convenient to represent as non-aryan any formation which their acquaintance with unwritten Aryan speech in its growth and decay is too superficial to enable them at once to identify" (320). He further complained that "a derivation from Sanskrit by the application of well-established but less popularly known phonetic and grammatical laws, is stigmatized as pedantic" (320)."

""So many names that at a hasty glance appear utterly unmeaning can be traced back to original Sanskrit forms as to raise a presumption that the remainder, though more effectively disguised, will ultimately be found capable of similar treatment: a strong argument being thus afforded against those scholars who hold that the modern vernacular is impregnated with a very large non-Aryan element" (Growse 1883, 353)."

"The four temples, commenced in honour of this event,, still remain, though in a ruinous and hitherto sadly neglected condition. They hear the titles of GoLind Deva, Gopi-nath, Jngal-Hishor and Madan Mohan. The first named is not only the finest of this particular series, hut is the most impressive religions edifice that Hindu art has ever produced, at least in Upper India."

"...The sacrarium has been utterly razed to the ground,t the chapel toners were never completed, and that over the choir, though the most perfect, has still lost several of its upper stages. This last was of slighter elevation than the others, occupying the same relative position as the spirelet over the sanetus bell in western ecclesiology., The loss of the towers and of the lofty arcaded parapet that surmounted the walls has terribly marred the effect of the exterior and given it a heavy stunted appearance ; while, as a further disfigurement, a plain masonry wall had been run along the top of the centre dome. It is generally believed that this was built by Aorangzeb for the purpose of desecrating the temple, though it is also said to have been put up by the Hindus themselves to assist in some grand ill ami- nation. It either case it was an ugly modern excrescence, and its removal was the very first step taken at the commencement of the recent repairs."

"In his Mathura: A District Memoir, Growse has recorded his exhaustive survey and research about Brajbhoomi. He was so overhelmed by the vandalism that visited the area repeatedly, that he wrote feelingly, although his home was in far away England. To quote: thanks to Muhammadan intolerance, there is not a single building of any antiquity either in the city itself or its environs.Its most famous temple - that dedicated to Kesava Deva (Krishna) - was destroyed in 1669, the eleventh year of the reign of the iconoclast Aurangzeb (Alamgir was also his name). The mosque (idgah) erected on its ruins is a building of little architectural value. Mahmud Ghazni was however the first iconoclast to vandalise Mathura. That was in 1017 AD about which Growse wrote: If any one wished to construct a building equal to it, he would not be able to do so without expending a hundred million dinars, and the work would occupy two hundred years, even though the most able and experienced workmen were employed. Orders were given that all the temples should be burnt with naphtha and fire and levelled with the ground. The city was given up to plunder for twenty days. Among the spoils are said to have been five great idols of pure gold with eyes of rubies and adornments of other precious stones, together with a vast number of smaller silver images, which, when broken up, formed a load for more than a hundred camels. The total value of the spoils has been estimated at three millions of rupees; while the number of Hindus carried away into captivity exceeded 5,000.... To go back to Aurangzeb, over two centuries after the desecration, Growse felt that: of all the sacred places in India, none enjoys a greater popularity than the capital of Bra}, the holy city of Mathura. For nine months in the year, festival follows upon festival in rapid succession and the ghats and temples are daily thronged with new troops of way-worn pilgrims. So great is the sanctity of the spot that its panegyrists do not hesitate to declare that a single day spent at Mathura is more meritorious than a lifetime passed at Benares. All this celebrity is due to the fact of it being the birthplace of the demi-god Krishna. In his chapter entitled The Bra} Mandai, the Ban Yatra and the Holi as Growse puts it: Not only the city of Mathura, but with it, the whole of the western half of the district has a special interest of its own as the birthplace and abiding home of Vaishnava Hinduism. It is about 42 miles in length with an average breadth of 30 miles and is intersected throughout by the river Jamuna. In the neighbourhood is Gokul and Brindaban, where the divine brothers Krishna and Balaram grazed their herds. He continues: Almost every spot is traditionally connected with some event in the life of Krishna or of his mythical mistress Radha."

"A British civil servant had a great deal to say about Mathura in the 1870s. F.S. Growse belonged to the Bengal Civil Service and was the Collector of Mathura district. I quote from his 'Mathura: A District Memoir,' Bulands hahr 1882: The neighbourhood is crowded with sacred sites, which for many generations have been reverenced as the traditionary scenes of Krishna's adventures; but thanks to Muhammedan intolerance, there is not a single building of any antiquity either in the city itself or its environs. Its most famous temple - that dedicated to Kesava Deva- was destroyed, as already mentioned, in 1669, the eleventh year of the reign of the iconoclastic Aurangzeb. The mosque erected on its ruins is a building of little architectural value, but the natural advantages of its lofty and isolated position render it a striking feature in the landscape."

"We need to be absolutely clear. We will not be dictated to by the rich, the Tories, and the police. We will not have our health workers put at risk. We will not have our loved ones killed to protect big business. We will not tolerate their lies, cover-ups and negligence. We will not let them use this crisis to smash democracy so they can continue to siphon wealth to the top. The time has come to put an end to neoliberalism. This crisis is a radical opportunity. Another system is possible. Another system is a necessity."

"The new measures involve a lockdown on borders and wide powers to arrest people in the streets who are deemed a virus threat. It also includes new powers against "terrorism" and "subversion", giving it the right to detain people without trial for an unlimited period. The government is going to propose that their new law lasts for a two-year period. The closest parallels are powers in the United States in the and the 1967 Terrorism Act in apartheid South Africa. Section 6 of that Act allowed someone suspected of involvement in "terrorism" — defined as any opposition to the system which might "endanger the maintenance of " — to be detained for a 60-day period (which could be renewed) without trial on the authority of a senior police officer. Since there was no requirement to release information on who was being held, people subject to the act tended to disappear, and of course many of them were tortured and murdered. Why would they want such a draconian law at this time? Until now, the government has come under repeated and sustained attack because of its herd immunity strategy, its staggering incompetence and negligence and its kowtowing to big business at the expense of working people and public health. But things are set to get much worse on several fronts. As the world financial system comes tumbling down and bankruptcies and redundancies begin to sweep the world, we are almost certainly heading for mass unemployment on the scale of the 1930s."

"In the immediate period, millions in the , in leisure and tourism, in retail and services, and in aviation are being laid off without pay or fired outright. But the entire edifice of global finance is crumbling and we could easily see a generalised across the entire system. Talk of the irrationality of capitalism is being posted everywhere. Extensive industrial collapse could create millions of unemployed. A banking collapse would impoverish millions more at a stroke. This is what the government's authoritarian new bill is preparing for — a repetition in Britain and on a global scale of the kind of economic and that happened in Argentina in 2001–2, when most working-class and middle-class people lost all their savings and millions lost their jobs. Mass social and political anger could shake the system to its foundations, and those in power are preparing for emergency measures against radical "" — left-wing activists, trade unionists, social activists — liable to lead mass resistance. This, it seems, could take the form of mass detention without trial."

"The utterly shambolic response of ruling elites to the coronavirus crisis in both Britain and the US is symptomatic of neoliberalism — of 40 years of profiteering, of grotesque greed, of privatisation of public services, of contempt for ordinary people and their needs. The Tories, presiding over this travesty, will not only try to ride out the storm; they will seek to use the crisis to strengthen the wealth and power of the very people who are responsible for it. This is what happened in 2008. It must not happen again."

"The Tories and have created a casualised, insecure, low-wage economy in which the bosses rule and workers are forced to take what they can get. Millions will find themselves with no income. When they try to claim benefits, they will find in place a ruthless regime of cuts, sanctions and suicidal despair — another achievement of Tory austerity. The most that Johnson has said about this so far is that claimants will not need to attend job-centre interviews any more. And what of expenditure? There is vague talk of a "mortgage holiday" and even vaguer talk of renters not being evicted during the crisis. But no talk of all the other payments that should be suspended, including, of course, utilities bills and other fixed household charges. Meanwhile, the profiteers are marking up the prices on goods in short supply — hand sanitiser, paracetemol, toilet roll, etc — and, needless to say, the Tories have done absolutely nothing to control prices."

"Without mass testing, tracing, and isolating, you cannot contain. So everything else — the ban on mass gatherings, the school closures, the lockdown measures — all of it, of course, too late — amount to only half a strategy. In fact, all the signs are that they haven't really let go of their callous notion that people with "underlying" health conditions should be treated as expendable. But that is not just a few old people. About 43% of adults are reckoned to have at least one long-term health condition — disproportionately, of course, poorer people."

"In any case, there is no evidence that the Tories have any intention of doing any of the things they say they will do. The "do everything necessary" rhetoric is bullshit. It’s just a mantra to hide the absence of concrete action and any enforcement mechanism. This can only get much worse, as the entire world economy nosedives, millions more are laid off, and we enter a period of catastrophic comparable with the Great Depression. The Tories know this is coming. They are preparing for it."

"Those in power are afraid the crisis will expose the reality of NHS under-resourcing and creeping privatisation. Because of Tory underfunding there are not enough testing kits, not enough protective suits, not enough ventilators, not enough staff, not enough, not enough — even though they have known for a quarter of a century that a major pandemic was a clear and present danger. Even now, if they chose, a government invoking near-wartime powers could fix these shortages rapidly by requiring companies to shift production to the needs of fighting the virus. [...] But it involves massive resources, a society-wide strategy to defeat the virus, and that is something the government is not prepared to envisage. The Tories are terrified by any kind of from below — because it would marginalise elites and empower ordinary people."

"The Tories have proposed a huge economic package to help companies, but their support for working people sacked, laid off, or forced to self-isolate is pitiful. [...] Nothing is being offered to workers who are simply sacked or forced to take unpaid leave. This includes around 5 million "gig economy" workers, many of them subject to phoney "self-employed" scams, many with "zero hours" contracts. And there are firms like delivery company DPD, which is insisting that employees who self-isolate will still have to pay the costs of renting their vans and equipment. This is the bitter fruit for working people of 40 years of neoliberal attacks on their unions, their employment rights, their terms and conditions of service."