In no country has the archæologist been more active than in Egypt during
the last half century, and the contributions which his spade and pick
have offered to history are of first-rate importance to that study as a
whole. The eye may now travel down the history of the Nile Valley from
prehistoric days to the present time almost without interruption; and
now that the anthropologist has shown that the modern Egyptians,
Mussulman and Copt, peasant and townsman, belong to one and the same
race of ancient Egyptians, one may surely judge to-day's inhabitants of
the country in the light of yesterday's records. In his report for the
year 1906, Lord Cromer, questioning whether the modern inhabitants of
the country were capable of governing their own land, tells us that we
must go back to the precedent of Pharaonic days to discover if the
Egyptians ever ruled themselves successfully.

In this pregnant remark Lord Cromer was using information which the
archæologist and historian had made accessible to him. Looking back over
the history of the country, he was enabled, by the study of this
information, to range before him the succession of foreign occupations
of the Nile Valley and to assess their significance. It may be worth
while to repeat the process, in order to give an example of the bearing
of history upon modern polemics, though I propose to discuss this matter
more fully in another chapter.

Previous to the British occupation the country was ruled, as it is now,
by a noble dynasty of Albanian princes, whose founder was set upon the
throne by the aid of Turkish and Albanian troops. From the beginning of
the sixteenth century until that time Egypt had been ruled by the
Ottoman Government, the Turk having replaced the Circassian and other
foreign "Mamlukes" who had held the country by the aid of foreign troops
since the middle of the thirteenth century. For a hundred years previous