volume 2 - Robert Bedrosian's Armenian History Workshop

328 The Native Dealers.
were finally confiscated. It did not take the dealers
long to connect cause and effect, and when such agents
had produced this effect two or three times, they found
that, though the dealers professed themselves anxious
to do business with them, there was nothing to buy in
their shops. It only took a couple of winters to teach
the dealers that the Trustees of the British Museum
always paid fair prices for their purchases, and that
they did not expect their servant to deprive a native
of the last piastre of his profit. The results obtained
showed that their policy was the right one, for, from
one end of Egypt to the other, every dealer I met showed
me his possessions fearlessly.
When I arrived in Cairo in October, 1892, I found
all the natives who were interested in antiquities in a
great state of excitement because of the rumoured
resignation of M. E. Grebaut, Director of the Service of
Antiquities. When it turned out that rumour was
correct great satisfaction was felt and expressed by everyone;
they hoped that Maspero would return to Cairo
and resume his duties as Director of the Service of
Antiquities. Maspero was greatly liked by the natives,
both in Upper and Lower Egypt. Many archaeologists
said that his direction was " no' direction at all," and
that as for " systematic policy, he had none," yet no
fair-minded person can deny that from first to last he
did more for the Egyptian Museum in Cairo than any
other Director except Mariette, its founder and his
own great master. Maspero himself described his system
of dealing with the natives as "patriarchal" in character,
and it was. He petted, scolded, cursed and
punished the native dealers on both sides of the river
when he thought it necessary to do so, and the effect
was good, for he got what he wanted for his Museum,
and the natives were on the whole quite satisfied with
his decisions. It was only towards the close of his second
Directorate, when his health began to fail after a residence
of twenty-seven years in Egypt, that his firmness
wavered, and his subordinates both inside and outside
the Museum persuaded him to do, and to let them do,