A WONDERFUL DISCOVERY IN EGYPT.
THE laborers with pick and spade among Bible lands are being richly rewarded. Recently Dr. Bliss, of the Chicago University Exploration Fund, discovered near Bagdad what he considered to be the most ancient of Hittite monuments. Mr. Theodore M. Davis, the English explorer, who unearthed the tombs of Thothmes IV. and Queen Hatshepsut at Thebes, has just made a unique discovery, in the shape of a tomb which has never been plundered or even visited since the age of the eighteenth dynasty, whose kings ruled in pre-historic times. The sepulcher is filled from end to end with most extraordinary royal treasures, belonging to the age on which great light was thrown by the discovery some years ago of the Tel-el-Amarna tablets. The newly unearthed sepulchral chamber is only thirty feet long and fifteen feet wide, by eight feet in height. It contains mummy cases encrusted with gold, huge alabaster vases of exquisite form, chairs and boxes brilliant with paint and gilding, a pleasure chariot, two great wooden sarcophagi, painted black and gold, containing mummies of a man and a woman in cases, lined with silver in one case, with gold-leaf in the other. Some of the objects in the sepulcher are the first of the kind found in Egypt. Some time ago a "bed of Osiris" was found in the tomb of Amenhotep II., and a similar pathetic relic was discovered here. It is a mat of palm fibre on which a figure of Osiris was delineated in soft mould. Seeds were then sown in the mould, and in the green grass which sprang from them after the tomb had been closed and sealed the Egyptians saw an image and earnest of the resurrection. What renders this discovery of Mr. Davis the most important ever achieved in Egypt is the light thrown on a period of which very little is known. The Tel-el-Amarna tablets proved that Egypt was in pre-historic days for a long period the California of the civilized world. Some of the foreign correspondents of the Pharaohs of that hoary time reiterate that gold in Egypt was "plentiful as dust." The newly discovered tomb furnishes a most striking illustration of that primitive luxuriousness, for the prodigal profusion with which its contents are adorned by the precious metal is amazing. There is nothing, however mean or insignificant, which is not literally plated with the gold of the desert mines.—Selected.