ON THE CAUSES OF DISHONESTY AMONG WORKMEN

One great difference between Greece and Egypt in the conditions of excavation is the prevailing dishonesty among the Egyptian workmen. Stealing in Greece and Italy is an evil rarely met with, in Egypt it is a matter of course against which the excavator must guard himself as best he can. He is between the devil and the deep sea; he may choose to insure that he gets what he finds by paying the workmen the full market value of the object; that is a snare of the devil, for so he runs a good risk of getting also what he has not found, as, from what I have seen of the conditions of digging in Egypt, particularly of tomb digging, I think it would be very hard to detect the salting of the site with objects genuine enough but coming from other excavations where “backshish” is not given. To my mind the risk of such salting is not to be borne, cutting as it does at the root of all scientific work; yet if the more scientific course is taken and the excavator trusts only to ceaseless surveillance, though he is certain about what he does get, he knows that the deep sea of Oriental subtlety will swallow half of his legitimate spoil.

The causes of this fundamental difference are not obscure. They are to be found not so much in the difference between European and Oriental ideas on the right methods of acquiring property, though the laxer notions of the East may be a contributory cause, as in the European's freedom from temptation.