T Eric Peet

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

Eric Peet (1882–1934) is better known as an Egyptologist, but this, his 1909 first published work, remained the standard reference on its subject for many years. Gaining a Craven Scholarship from Oxford, he spent three years exploring Italian and Maltese sites, but later found work on Egyptian excavations (his co-authored publication on The Cemeteries of Abydos is also reissued in this series). This book is organised chronologically from the palaeolithic period to the Bronze Age, and, as Peet points out in his preface, pulls together not only his own research but the earlier work of Italian archaeologists, mostly published in scattered form in journals. From the finds in early cave shelters to the sophisticated metal and ceramic wares found in Bronze Age settlements and burials, this highly illustrated work demonstrates the development of prehistoric society in a region generally much better known for the later achievements of the Romans.

Originally published between 1913 and 1914 for the Egypt Exploration Fund, these three excavation reports relating to the necropolis at Abydos are now reissued together in one volume. Following the important work carried out by Flinders Petrie - his two reports on The Royal Tombs (1900–1) and the three-part Abydos (1902–4) are also reissued in this series - Édouard Naville (1844–1926) began further excavation and recording of the site's cemeteries with Thomas Eric Peet (1882–1934) and others. Each report contains a section of valuable illustrative material, such as photographs and drawings of the discovered artefacts. Part 1, covering the 1909–10 season, includes chapters on pottery and mummified dogs. Part 2, written up by Peet, covers all the tomb work carried out between 1909 and 1912. Part 3, co-authored with W. L. S. Loat, covers the 1912–13 season, notably the discovery of an ibis cemetery.

During the last hundred years scholarship has revealed the existence of two other eastern literatures which are not only as old as that of the Hebrews but very much older, namely those of Egypt and Babylonia. . . . Although much of Babylonian literature is know to us mainly from the Assyrian versions found in Assurbanipal's library, recent discoveries have shown that many of its best epic and lyric productions go back at least two thousand years further, and have their roots in the Sumerian civilization. In Egypt, too, religious literature is found in a highly developed state as early as the Pyramid Texts, which, in the form in which we have them, are as old as 2500 B. C., and possibly go back in part to much earlier originals. These discoveries make it no longer possible to regard the literature of the Hebrews as an isolated phenomenon in the ancient East, and they furnish a host of new criteria which must be applied to any attempt to explain and to appraise the Old Testament. --from the Preface