The following volumes are not put forward as a substitute for the monographs, which Egyptologists and other specialists still hesitate to produce, because of the gaps alike in their material and their knowledge. The object is rather to enable the economic student to utilize the crumbs that have fallen already from the explorers' table. If, in bringing the fragments together, any acceptable light is cast upon the bearing of original documents, it will be a small return for great obligations.

The comparative scarcity of notes and references must be attributed solely to considerations of space; references to a number of conflicting authorities, without any discussion of the inferences drawn from them, are useless or misleading; and full discussion, with an apparatus of piéces justificatives, has a tendency to produce notes as long as the text, or even (as in the case of some admirable German monographs) considerably longer. In the second volume particularly, where it has sometimes been necessary to condense the history of half a century into three lines, the multiplication of references seemed as much out of place as in any equally condensed School History. In the later chapters, when no authority is quoted, it is because the statements made can be verified in any one of half a dozen accessible books of reference.

All actual citations have been acknowledged, but, as the notes do not profess to supply a bibliography, the references given are sometimes, out of gratitude, to the earliest, and sometimes, for convenience, to the most accessible, instead of always to the last or best version of a text.