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Experience.

The most needful of all acquisitions is archaeological experience. Without knowing well all the objects that are usually met with in an ancient civilisation, there is no possible insight or understanding, the meaning of what is met with cannot be grasped, and the most curious mistakes are made. A cloud is “very like a whale,” the pre-Christian cross is found everywhere, an arrow-straightener is called a ceremonial staff, an oil-press becomes a sacred trilithon, half a jackal is called a locust, and lathe chucks become “coal money.” Of course the needed experience has to be gradually built up, and those who first explore a civilisation must work through many mistakes. When I first came to Egypt Dr. Birch begged me to pack and send to him a box of pottery fragments from each great town, on the chance that from the known history of the sites some guess could be made as to the age of the objects; so complete was the ignorance of the archaeology a quarter of a century ago. But when such knowledge has been once accumulated, it is the first duty of any excavator to make himself well acquainted with it before he attempts to discover more. At present the archaeological experience that should be acquired before doing any responsible work in any country ought to cover the history of the pottery century by century, the history of beads, of tools and weapons, of the styles of art, of the styles of inscriptions, of the burial furniture, and of the many small objects which are now well known and dated, better in Egypt than perhaps in any other country.