The Romance of Excavation: A Record of the Amazing Discoveries in Egypt, Assyria, Troy, Crete, Etc.

In 1923, archaeology was still a young science, and the world was刚刚 discovering that the past had secrets worth dying for. David Masters captures that golden age of excavation, when men in pith helmets hacked through desert sands seeking lost cities that had been forgotten for millennia. The book begins with the Rosetta Stone, that accidental discovery by a French soldier during Napoleon's Egyptian campaign that unlocked three thousand years of hieroglyphic silence, and then fans out across the ancient world: the tomb-riddled Valley of the Kings, the buried palaces of Assyria, the legendary walls of Troy, the palace of Minos on Crete. But this is not merely a catalog of artifacts. Masters writes about the archaeologists themselves, their rivalries and obsessions, the backbreaking labor, the moments of transcendent discovery when a lost world suddenly became real. The prose has a breathless, adventure-story quality that makes the reader feel the heat of the Egyptian sun and the weight of centuries of dust. This is archaeology as romance, before the discipline grew cautious and politicized, when every dig promised to rewrite history.