* These symbolical modes of adoption were first pointed out by Maspero. Legend has given examples of them: as, for instance, where Isis fosters the child of Malkander, King of Byblos, by inserting the tip of her finger in its mouth.

** The tomb of a prince of Tobui, the lesser Aphroditopolis, was discovered at Thebes by Maspero. The rock-out tombs of two Thinite princes were noted in the same necropolis. These two were of the time of Thutmosis III. I have remarked in tombs not yet made public the mention of princes of El-Kab, who played an important part about the person of the Pharaohs down to the beginning of the XXth dynasty.

Many of the old houses had become extinct, while others, owing to marriages, were absorbed into the royal family; the fiefs conceded to the relations or favourites of the Pharaoh continued to exist, indeed, as of old, but the ancient distrustful and turbulent feudality had given place to an aristocracy of courtiers, who lived oftener in attendance on the monarch than on their own estates, and whose authority continued to diminish to the profit of the absolute rule of the king. There would be nothing astonishing in the "count" becoming nothing more than a governor, hereditary or otherwise, in Thebes itself; he could hardly be anything higher in the capital of the empire.* But the same restriction of authority was evidenced in all the provinces: the recruiting of soldiers, the receipt of taxes, most of the offices associated with the civil or military administration, became more and more affairs of the State, and passed from the hands of the feudal lord into those of the functionaries of the Crown. The few barons who still lived on their estates, while they were thus dispossessed of the greater part of their prerogatives, obtained some compensation, on the other hand, on the side of religion. From early times they had been by birth the heads of the local cults, and their protocol had contained, together with those titles which justified their possession of the temporalities of the nome, others which attributed to them spiritual supremacy. The sacred character with which they were invested became more and more prominent in proportion as their political influence became curtailed, and we find scions of the old warlike families or representatives of a new lineage at Thinis, at Akhmim,** in the nome of Baalu, at Hieraconpolis,*** at El-Kab,**** and in every place where we have information from the monuments as to their position, bestowing more concern upon their sacerdotal than on their other duties.

* Rakhmiri and his son Manakhpirsonbu were both "counts "of Thebes under Thutmosis III., and there is nothing to show that there was any other person among them invested with the same functions and belonging to a different family.

** For example, the tomb of Anhurimosu, high priest of Anhuri-Shu and prince of Thinis, under Minephtah, where the sacerdotal character is almost exclusively prominent. The same is the case with the tombs of the princes of Akhmim in the time of Khuniatonu and his successors: the few still existing in 1884-5 have not been published. The stelae belonging to them are at Paris and Berlin.

*** Horimosu, Prince of Hieraconpolis under Thutmosis III., is, above everything else, a prophet of the local Horus.

**** The princes of El-Kab during the XIXth and XXth dynasties were, before everything, priests of Nekhabit, as appears from an examination of their tombs, which, lying in a side valley, far away from the tomb of Pihiri, are rarely visited.

This transfiguration of the functions of the barons, which had been completed under the XIXth and XXth dynasties, corresponded with a more general movement by which the Pharaohs themselves were driven to accentuate their official position as high priests, and to assign to their sons sacerdotal functions in relation to the principal deities. This rekindling of religious fervour would not, doubtless, have restrained military zeal in case of war;* but if it did not tend to suppress entirely individual bravery, it discouraged the taste for arms and for the bold adventures which had characterised the old feudality.

* The sons of Ramses II., Khamoisit and Maritumu, were bravo warriors in spite of their being high priests of Phtah at Memphis, and of Ra at Heliopolis.

The duties of sacrificing, of offering prayer, of celebrating the sacred rites according to the prescribed forms, and rendering due homage to the gods in the manner they demanded, were of such an exactingly scrupulous and complex character that the Pharaohs and the lords of earlier times had to assign them to men specially fitted for, and appointed to, the task; now that they had assumed these absorbing functions themselves, they were obliged to delegate to others an increasingly greater proportion of their civil and military duties. Thus, while the king and his great vassals were devoutly occupying themselves in matters of worship and theology, generals by profession were relieving them of the care of commanding their armies; and as these individuals were frequently the chiefs of Ethiopian, Asiatic, and especially of Libyan bands, military authority, and, with it, predominant influence in the State were quickly passing into the hands of the barbarians. A sort of aristocracy of veterans, notably of Shardana or Mashauasha, entirely devoted to arms, grew up and increased gradually side by side with the ancient noble families, now by preference devoted to the priesthood.*

* This military aristocracy was fully developed in the XXIst and XXIInd dynasties, but it began to take shape after Ramses III. had planted the Shardana and Qahaka in certain towns as garrisons.

The barons, whether of ancient or modern lineage, were possessed of immense wealth, especially those of priestly families. The tribute and spoil of Asia and Africa, when once it had reached Egypt, hardly ever left it: they were distributed among the population in proportion to the position occupied by the recipients in the social scale. The commanders of the troops, the attendants on the king, the administrators of the palace and temples, absorbed the greater part, but the distribution was carried down to the private soldier and his relations in town or country, who received some of the crumbs. When we remember for a moment the four centuries and more during which Egypt had been reaping the fruits of her foreign conquest, we cannot think without amazement of the quantities of gold and other precious metals which must have been brought in divers forms into the valley of the Nile.* Every fresh expedition made additions to these riches, and one is at a loss to know whence in the intervals between two defeats the conquered could procure so much wealth, and why the sources were never exhausted nor became impoverished. This flow of metals had an influence upon commercial transactions, for although trade was still mainly carried on by barter, the mode of operation was becoming changed appreciably. In exchanging commodities, frequent use was now made of rings and ingots of a certain prescribed weight in tabonu; and it became more and more the custom to pay for goods by a certain number of tabonu of gold, silver, or copper, rather than by other commodities: it was the practice even to note down in invoices or in the official receipts, alongside the products or manufactured articles with which payments were made, the value of the same in weighed metal.**

* The quantity of gold in ingots or rings, mentioned in the Annals of Tkutmosis III., represents altogether a weight of nearly a ton and a quarter, or in value some L140,000 of our money. And this is far from being the whole of the metal obtained from the enemy, for a large portion of the inscription has disappeared, and the unrecorded amount might be taken, without much risk of error, at as much as that of which we have evidence—say, some two and a half tons, which Thutmosis had received or brought back between the years XXIII. and XLII. of his reign—an estimation rather under than over the reality. These figures, moreover, take no account of the vessels and statues, or of the furniture and arms plated with gold. Silver was not received in such large quantities, but it was of great value, and the like may be said of copper and lead.

* The facts justifying this position were observed and put together for the first time by Chabas: a translation is given in his memoir of a register of the XXth or XXIst dynasty, which gives the price of butcher's meat, both in gold and silver, at this date. Fresh examples have been since collected by Spiegelberg, who has succeeded in drawing up a kind of tariff for the period between the XVIIIth and XXth dynasties.

This custom, although not yet widely extended, placed at the disposal of trade enormous masses of metal, which were preserved in the form of ingots or bricks, except the portion which went to the manufacture of rings, jewellery, or valuable vessels.*

* There are depicted on the monuments bags or heaps of gold dust, ingots in the shape of bricks, rings, and vases, arranged alongside each other.

The general prosperity encouraged a passion for goldsmith's work, and the use of bracelets, necklaces, and chains became common among classes of the people who were not previously accustomed to wear them. There was henceforward no scribe or merchant, however poor he might be, who had not his seal made of gold or silver, or at any rate of copper gilt. The stone was sometimes fixed, but frequently arranged so as to turn round on a pivot; while among people of superior rank it had some emblem or device upon it, such as a scorpion, a sparrow-hawk, a lion, or a cynocephalous monkey. Chains occupied the same position among the ornaments of Egyptian women as rings among men; they were indispensable decorations. Examples of silver chains are known of some five feet in length, while others do not exceed two to three inches. There are specimens in gold of all sizes, single, double, and triple, with large or small links, some thick and heavy, while others are as slight and flexible as the finest Venetian lace. The poorest peasant woman, alike with the lady of the court, could boast of the possession of a chain, and she must have been in dire poverty who had not some other ornament in her jewel-case. The jewellery of Queen Ahhotpu shows to what degree of excellence the work of the Egyptian goldsmiths had attained at the time of the expulsion of the Nyksos: they had not only preserved the good traditions of the best workmen of the XIIth dynasty, but they had perfected the technical details, and had learned to combine form and colour with a greater skill. The pectorals of Prince Khamoisit and the Lord Psaru,now in the Louvre, but which were originally placed in the tomb of the Apis in the time of Ramses II., are splendid examples.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the jewel in the Louvre.

The most common form of these represents in miniature the front of a temple with a moulded or flat border, surmounted by a curved cornice. In one of them, which was doubtless a present from the king himself, the cartouche, containing the first name of the Pharaoh-Usirmari, appears just below the frieze, and serves as a centre for the design within the frame. The wings of the ram-headed sparrow-hawk, the emblem of Amonra, are so displayed as to support it, while a large urseus and a vulture beneath embracing both the sparrow-hawk and the cartouche with outspread wings give the idea of divine protection. Two didu, each of them filling one of the lower corners, symbolise duration. The framework of the design is made up of divisions marked out in gold, and filled either with coloured enamels or pieces of polished stone. The general effect is one of elegance, refinement, and harmony, the three principal elements of the design becoming enlarged from the top downwards in a deftly adjusted gradation. The dead-gold of the cartouche in the upper centre is set off below by the brightly variegated and slightly undulating band of colours of the sparrow-hawk, while the urseus and vulture, associated together with one pair of wings, envelope the upper portions in a half-circle of enamels, of which the shades pass from red through green to a dull blue, with a freedom of handling and a skill in the manipulation of colour which do honour to the artist. It was not his fault if there is still an element of stiffness in the appearance of the pectoral as a whole, for the form which religious tradition had imposed upon the jewel was so rigid that no artifice could completely get over this defect. It is a type which arose out of the same mental concepts as had given birth to Egyptian architecture and sculpture—monumental in character, and appearing often as if designed for colossal rather than ordinary beings. The dimensions, too overpowering for the decoration of normal men or women, would find an appropriate place only on the breasts of gigantic statues: the enormous size of the stone figures to which alone they are adapted would relieve them, and show them in their proper proportions. The artists of the second Theban empire tried all they could, however, to get rid of the square framework in which the sacred bird is enclosed, and we find examples among the pectorals in the Louvre of the sparrow-hawk only with curved wings, or of the ram-headed hawk with the wings extended; but in both of them there is displayed the same brilliancy, the same purity of line, as in the square-shaped jewels, while the design, freed from the trammels of the hampering enamelled frame, takes on a more graceful form, and becomes more suitable for personal decoration.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a jewel in the Louvre.

The ram's head in the second case excels in the beauty of its workmanship anything to be found elsewhere in the museums of Europe or Egypt. It is of the finest gold, but its value does not depend upon the precious material: the ancient engraver knew how to model it with a bold and free hand, and he has managed to invest it with as much dignity as if he had been carving his subject in heroic size out of a block of granite or limestone. It is not an example of pure industrial art, but of an art for which a designation is lacking. Other examples, although more carefully executed and of more costly materials, do not approach it in value: such, for instance, are the earrings of Ramses XII. at Gizeh, which are made up of an ostentatious combination of disks, filigree-work, chains, beads, and hanging figures of the urseus.

To get an idea of the character of the plate on the royal sideboards, we must have recourse to the sculptures in the temples, or to the paintings on the tombs: the engraved gold or silver centrepieces, dishes, bowls, cups, and amphoras, if valued by weight only, were too precious to escape the avarice of the impoverished generations which followed the era of Theban prosperity. In the fabrication of these we can trace foreign influences, but not to the extent of a predominance over native art: even if the subject to be dealt with by the artist happened to be a Phoenician god or an Asiatic prisoner, he was not content with slavishly copying his model; he translated it and interpreted it, so as to give it an Egyptian character.

The household furniture was in keeping with these precious objects. Beds and armchairs in valuable woods, inlaid with ivory, carved, gilt, painted in subdued and bright colours, upholstered with mattresses and cushions of many-hued Asiatic stuffs, or of home-made materials, fashioned after Chaldaean patterns, were in use among the well-to-do, while people of moderate means had to be content with old-fashioned furniture of the ancient regime.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of these objects in the tomb of Ramses III.

The Theban dwelling-house was indeed more sumptuously furnished than the earliest Memphite, but we find the same general arrangements in both, which provided, in addition to quarters for the masters, a similar number of rooms intended for the slaves, for granaries, storehouses, and stables. While the outward decoration of life was subject to change, the inward element remained unaltered. Costume was a more complex matter than in former times: the dresses and lower garments were more gauffered, had more embroidery and stripes; the wigs were larger and longer, and rose up in capricious arrangements of curls and plaits.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by M. de Mertens.

The use of the chariot had now become a matter of daily custom, and the number of domestics, already formidable, was increased by fresh additions in the shape of coachmen, grooms, and saises, who ran before their master to clear a way for the horses through the crowded streets of the city.*

* The pictures at Tel el-Amarna exhibit the king, queen, and princesses driving in their chariots with escorts of soldiers and runners. We often find in the tomb-paintings the chariot and coachman of some dignitary, waiting while their master inspects a field or a workshop, or while he is making a visit to the palace for some reward.

As material, existence became more complex, intellectual life partook of the same movement, and, without deviating much from the lines prescribed for it by the learned and the scribes of the Memphite age, literature had become in the mean time larger, more complicated, more exacting, and more difficult to grapple with and to master. It had its classical authors, whose writings were committed to memory and taught in the schools. These were truly masterpieces, for if some felt that they understood and enjoyed them, others found them almost beyond their comprehension, and complained bitterly of their obscurity. The later writers followed them pretty closely, in taking pains, on the one hand to express fresh ideas in the forms consecrated by approved and ancient usage, or when they failed to find adequate vehicles to convey new thoughts, resorting in their lack of imagination to the foreigner for the requisite expressions. The necessity of knowing at least superficially, something of the dialect and writings of Asia compelled the Egyptian scribes to study to some degree the literature of Phonecia and of Chaldaea.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from photographs of the objects in the Museums of Berlin and Gizeh.

From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation, medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria and especially Astarte played the chief part. They appropriated in this manner a certain number of words and phrases with which they were accustomed to interlard their discourses and writings. They thought it polite to call a door no longer by the word ro, but the term tira, and to accompany themselves no longer with the harp bordt, but with the same instrument under its new name kinnor, and to make the salam in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, aau. They were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the country, and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a portion of the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the languages from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly. This artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into their writings, had no influence upon their method of composition. Their poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors, but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic cadence of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation of literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities in their writings which gave them popularity. A complete library of one of the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange mixture of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which were indispensable to those who were solicitous about their souls,* collections of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and philosophical treatises, letters, and legal documents.

* There are found in the rubrics of many religious books, for example that dealing with the unseen world, promises of health and prosperity to the soul which, "while still on earth," had read and learned them. A similar formula appears at the end of several important chapters of the Book of the Dead.

It would have been similar in character to the literary-possessions of an Egyptian of the Memphite period,* but the language in which it was written would not have been so stiff and dry, but would have flowed more easily, and been more sustained and better balanced.

* The composition of these libraries may be gathered from the collections of papyri which have turned up from time to time, and have been sold by the Arabs to Europeans buyers; e.g. the Sallier Collection, the Anastasi Collections, and that of Harris. They have found their way eventually into the British Museum or the Museum at Leyden, and have been published in the Select Papyri of the former, or in the Monuments Egyptiens of the latter.

The great odes to the deities which we find in the Theban papyri are better fitted, perhaps, than the profane compositions of the period, to give us an idea of the advance which Egyptian genius had made in the width and richness of its modes of expression, while still maintaining almost the same dead-level of idea which had characterised it from the outset. Among these, one dedicated to Harmakhis, the sovereign sun, is no longer restricted to a bare enumeration of the acts and virtues of the "Disk," but ventures to treat of his daily course and his final triumphs in terms which might have been used in describing the victorious campaigns or the apotheosis of a Pharaoh. It begins with his awakening, at the moment when he has torn himself away from the embraces of night. Standing upright in the cabin of the divine bark, "the fair boat of millions of years," with the coils of the serpent Mihni around him, he glides in silence on the eternal current of the celestial waters, guided and protected by those battalions of secondary deities with whose odd forms the monuments have made us familiar. "Heaven is in delight, the earth is in joy, gods and men are making festival, to render glory to Phra-Harmakhis, when they see him arise in his bark, having overturned his enemies in his own time!" They accompany him from hour to hour, they fight the good fight with him against Apopi, they shout aloud as he inflicts each fresh wound upon the monster: they do not even abandon him when the west has swallowed him up in its darkness.* Some parts of the hymn remind us, in the definiteness of the imagery and in the abundance of detail, of a portion of the poem of Pentauirit, or one of those inscriptions of Ramses III. wherein he celebrates the defeat of hordes of Asiatics or Libyans.

* The remains of Egyptian romantic literature have been collected and translated into French by Maspero, and subsequently into English by Flinders Petrie.

The Egyptians took a delight in listening to stories. They preferred tales which dealt with the marvellous and excited their imagination, introducing speaking animals, gods in disguise, ghosts and magic. One of them tells of a king who was distressed because he had no heir, and had no sooner obtained the favour he desired from the gods, than the Seven Hathors, the mistresses of Fate, destroyed his happiness by predicting that the child would meet with his death by a serpent, a dog, or a crocodile. Efforts were made to provide against such a fatality by shutting him up in a tower; but no sooner had he grown to man's estate, than he procured himself a dog, went off to wander through the world, and married the daughter of the Prince of Naharaim. His fate meets him first under the form of a serpent, which is killed by his wife; he is next assailed by a crocodile, and the dog kills the crocodile, but as the oracles must be fulfilled, the brute turns and despatches his master without further consideration. Another story describes two brothers, Anupu and Bitiu, who live happily together on their farm till the wife of the elder falls in love with the younger, and on his repulsing her advances, she accuses him to her husband of having offered her violence. The virtue of the younger brother would not have availed him much, had not his animals warned him of danger, and had not Phra-Harmakhis surrounded him at the critical moment with a stream teeming with crocodiles. He mutilates himself to prove his innocence, and announces that henceforth he will lead a mysterious existence far from mankind; he will retire to the Valley of the Acacia, place his heart on the topmost flower of the tree, and no one will be able with impunity to steal it from him. The gods, however, who frequent this earth take pity on his loneliness, and create for him a wife of such beauty that the Nile falls in love with her, and steals a lock of her hair, which is carried by its waters down into Egypt. Pharaoh finds the lock, and, intoxicated by its scent, commands his people to go in quest of the owner. Having discovered the lady, Pharaoh marries her, and ascertaining from her who she is, he sends men to cut down the Acacia, but no sooner has the flower touched the earth, than Bitiu droops and dies. The elder brother is made immediately acquainted with the fact by means of various prodigies. The wine poured out to him becomes troubled, his beer leaves a deposit. He seizes his shoes and staff and sets out to find the heart.

After a search of seven years he discovers it, and reviving it in a vase of water, he puts it into the mouth of the corpse, which at once returns to life. Bitiu, from this moment, seeks only to be revenged. He changes himself into the bull Apis, and, on being led to court, he reproaches the queen with the crime she has committed against him. The queen causes his throat to be cut; two drops of his blood fall in front of the gate of the palace, and produce in the night two splendid "Persea" trees, which renew the accusation in a loud voice. The queen has them cut down, but a chip from one of them flies into her mouth, and ere long she gives birth to a child who is none other than a reincarnation of Bitiu. When the child succeeds to the Pharaoh, he assembles his council, reveals himself to them, and punishes with death her who was first his wife and subsequently his mother. The hero moves throughout the tale without exhibiting any surprise at the strange incidents in which he takes part, and, as a matter of fact, they did not seriously outrage the probabilities of contemporary life. In every town sorcerers could be found who knew how to transform themselves into animals or raise the dead to life: we have seen how the accomplices of Pentauirit had recourse to spells in order to gain admission to the royal palace when they desired to rid themselves of Ramses III. The most extravagant romances differed from real life merely in collecting within a dozen pages more miracles than were customarily supposed to take place in the same number of years; it was merely the multiplicity of events, and not the events themselves, that gave to the narrative its romantic and improbable character. The rank of the heroes alone raised the tale out of the region of ordinary life; they are always the sons of kings, Syrian princes, or Pharaohs; sometimes we come across a vague and undefined Pharaoh, who figures under the title of Piruiaui or Pruiti, but more often it is a well-known and illustrious Pharaoh who is mentioned by name. It is related how, one day, Kheops, suffering from ennui within his palace, assembled his sons in the hope of learning from them something which he did not already know. They described to him one after another the prodigies performed by celebrated magicians under Kanibri and Snofrui; and at length Mykerinos assured him that there was a certain Didi, living then not far from Meidum, who was capable of repeating all the marvels done by former wizards. Most of the Egyptian sovereigns were, in the same way, subjects of more or less wonderful legends—Sesostris, Amenothes III., Thufcmosis III., Amenemhait I., Khiti, Sahuri, Usirkaf, and Kakiu. These stories were put into literary shape by the learned, recited by public story-tellers, and received by the people as authentic history; they finally filtered into the writings of the chroniclers, who, in introducing them into the annals, filled up with their extraordinary details the lacunae of authentic tradition. Sometimes the narrative assumed a briefer form, and became an apologue. In one of them the members of the body were supposed to have combined against the head, and disputed its supremacy before a jury; the parties all pleaded their cause in turn, and judgment was given in due form.*

* This version of the Fable of the Members and the Stomach was discovered upon a schoolboy's tablet at Turin.

Animals also had their place in this universal comedy. The passions or the weaknesses of humanity were attributed to them, and the narrator makes the lion, rat, or jackal to utter sentiments from which he draws some short practical moral. La Fontaine had predecessors on the banks of the Nile of whose existence he little dreamed.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

As La Fontaine found an illustrator in Granville, so, too, in Egypt the draughtsman brought his reed to the aid of the fabulist, and by his cleverly executed sketches gave greater point to the sarcasm of story than mere words could have conveyed. Where the author had briefly mentioned that the jackal and the cat had cunningly forced their services on the animals whom they wished to devour at their leisure, the artist would depict the jackal and the cat equipped as peasants, with wallets on their backs, and sticks over their shoulders, marching behind a troup of gazelles or a flock of fat geese: it was easy to foretell the fate of their unfortunate charges. Elsewhere it is an ox who brings up before his master a cat who has cheated him, and his proverbial stupidity would incline us to think that he will end by being punished himself for the misdeeds of which he had accused the other. Puss's sly and artful expression, the ass-headed and important-looking judge, with the wand and costume of a high and mighty dignitary, give pungency to the story, and recall the daily scenes at the judgment-seat of the lord of Thebes. In another place we see a donkey, a lion, a crocodile, and a monkey giving an instrumental and vocal concert.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

A lion and a gazelle play a game of chess. A cat of fashion, with a flower in her hair, has a disagreement with a goose: they have come to blows, and the excitable puss, who fears she will come off worst in the struggle, falls backwards in a fright. The draughtsmen having once found vent for their satire, stopped at nothing, and even royalty itself did not escape their attacks. While the writers of the day made fun of the military calling, both in prose and verse, the caricaturists parodied the combats and triumphal scenes of the Ramses or Thutmosis of the day depicted on the walls of the pylons. The Pharaoh of all the rats, perched upon a chariot drawn by dogs, bravely charges an army of cats; standing in the heroic attitude of a conqueror, he pierces them with his darts, while his horses tread the fallen underfoot; his legions meanwhile in advance of him attack a fort defended by tomcats, with the same ardour that the Egyptian battalions would display in assaulting a Syrian stronghold.



Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Lepsius.

This treatment of ethics did not prevent the Egyptian writers from giving way to their natural inclinations, and composing large volumes on this subject after the manner of Kaqimni or Phtahhotpu. One of their books, in which the aged Ani inscribes his Instructions to his son, Khonshotpu, is compiled in the form of a dialogue, and contains the usual commonplaces upon virtue, temperance, piety, the respect due to parents from children, or to the great ones of this world from their inferiors. The language in which it is written is ingenious, picturesque, and at times eloquent; the work explains much that is obscure in Egyptian life, and upon which the monuments have thrown no light. "Beware of the woman who goes out surreptitiously in her town, do not follow her or any like her, do not expose thyself to the experience of what it costs a man to face an Ocean of which the bounds are unknown.* The wife whose husband is far from home sends thee letters, and invites thee to come to her daily when she has no witnesses; if she succeeds in entangling thee in her net, it is a crime which is punishable by death as soon as it is known, even if no wicked act has taken place, for men will commit every sort of crime when under this temptation alone."

* I have been obliged to paraphrase the sentence considerably to render it intelligible to the modern reader. The Egyptian text says briefly: "Do not know the man who braves the water of the Ocean whose bounds are unknown."To know the man means here know the state of the man who does an action.

"Be not quarrelsome in breweries, for fear that thou mayest be denounced forthwith for words which have proceeded from thy mouth, and of having spoken that of which thou art no longer conscious. Thou fallest, thy members helpless, and no one holds out a hand to thee, but thy boon-companions around thee say: 'Away with the drunkard!' Thou art wanted for some business, and thou art found rolling on the ground like an infant." In speaking of what a man owes to his mother, Ani waxes eloquent: "When she bore thee as all have to bear, she had in thee a heavy burden without being able to call on thee to share it. When thou wert born, after thy months were fulfilled, she placed herself under a yoke in earnest, her breast was in thy mouth for three years; in spite of the increasing dirtiness of thy habits, her heart felt no disgust, and she never said: 'What is that I do here?' When thou didst go to school to be instructed in writing, she followed thee every day with bread and beer from thy house. Now thou art a full-grown man, thou hast taken a wife, thou hast provided thyself with a house; bear always in mind the pains of thy birth and the care for thy education that thy mother lavished on thee, that her anger may not rise up against thee, and that she lift not her hands to God, for he will hear her complaint!" The whole of the book does not rise to this level, but we find in it several maxims which appear to be popular proverbs, as for instance: "He who hates idleness will come without being called;" "A good walker comes to his journey's end without needing to hasten;" or, "The ox which goes at the head of the flock and leads the others to pasture is but an animal like his fellows." Towards the end, the son Khonshotpu, weary of such a lengthy exhortation to wisdom, interrupts his father roughly: "Do not everlastingly speak of thy merits, I have heard enough of thy deeds;" whereupon Ani resignedly restrains himself from further speech, and a final parable gives us the motive of his resignation: "This is the likeness of the man who knows the strength of his arm. The nursling who is in the arms of his mother cares only for being suckled; but no sooner has he found his mouth than he cries: 'Give me bread!'"

It is, perhaps, difficult for us to imagine an Egyptian in love repeating madrigals to his mistress,* for we cannot easily realise that the hard and blackened bodies we see in our museums have once been men and women loving and beloved in their own day.

* The remains of Egyptian amatory literature have been collected, translated, and commentated on by Maspero. They have been preserved in two papyri, one of which is at Turin, the other in the British Museum. The first of these appears to be a sort of dialogue in which the trees of a garden boast one after another of the beauty of a woman, and discourse of the love-scenes which took place under their shadow.

The feeling which they entertained one for another had none of the reticence or delicacy of our love: they went straight to the point, and the language in which, they expressed themselves is sometimes too coarse for our taste. The manners and customs of daily life among the Egyptians tended to blunt in them the feelings of modesty and refinement to which our civilization has accustomed us. Their children went about without clothes, or, at any rate, wore none until the age of puberty. Owing to the climate, both men and women left the upper part of the body more or less uncovered, or wore fabrics of a transparent nature. In the towns, the servants who moved about their masters or his guests had merely a narrow loin-cloth tied round their hips; while in the country, the peasants dispensed with even this covering, and the women tucked up their garments when at work so as to move more freely. The religious teaching and the ceremonies connected with their worship drew the attention of the faithful to the unveiled human form of their gods, and the hieroglyphs themselves contained pictures which shock our sense of propriety. Hence it came about that the young girl who was demanded in marriage had no idea, like the maiden of to-day, of the vague delights of an ideal union. The physical side was impressed upon her mind, and she was well aware of the full meaning of her consent. Her lover, separated from her by her disapproving parents, thus expresses the grief which overwhelms him: "I desire to lie down in my chamber,—for I am sick on thy account,—and the neighbours come to visit me.—Ah! if my sister but came with them,—she would show the physicians what ailed me,—for she knows my sickness!" Even while he thus complains, he sees her in his imagination, and his spirit visits the places she frequents: "The villa of my sister,—(a pool is before the house),—the door opens suddenly,—and my sister passes out in wrath.—Ah! why am I not the porter,—that she might give me her orders!—I should at least hear her voice, even were she angry,—and I, like a little boy, full of fear before her!" Meantime the young girl sighs in vain for "her brother, the beloved of her heart," and all that charmed her before has now ceased to please her. "I went to prepare my snare, my cage and the covert for my trap—for all the birds of Puanit alight upon Egypt, redolent with perfume;—he who flies foremost of the flock is attracted by my worm, bringing odours from Puanit,—its claws full of incense.—But my heart is with thee, and desires that we should trap them together,—I with thee, alone, and that thou shouldest be able to hear the sad cry of my perfumed bird,—there near to me, close to me, I will make ready my trap,—O my beautiful friend, thou who goest to the field of the well-beloved!" The latter, however, is slow to appear, the day passes away, the evening comes on: "The cry of the goose resounds—which is caught by the worm-bait,—but thy love removes me far from the bird, and I am unable to deliver myself from it; I will carry off my net, and what shall I say to my mother,—when I shall have returned to her?—Every day I come back laden with spoil,—but to-day I have not been able to set my trap,—for thy love makes me its prisoner!" "The goose flies away, alights,—it has greeted the barns with its cry;—the flock of birds increases on the river, but I leave them alone and think only of thy love,—for my heart is bound to thy heart—and I cannot tear myself away from thy beauty." Her mother probably gave her a scolding, but she hardly minds it, and in the retirement of her chamber never wearies of thinking of her brother, and of passionately crying for him: "O my beautiful friend! I yearn to be with thee as thy wife—and that thou shouldest go whither thou wishest with thine arm upon my arm,—for then I will repeat to my heart, which is in thy breast, my supplications.—If my great brother does not come to-night,—I am as those who lie in the tomb—for thou, art thou not health and life,—he who transfers the joys of thy health to my heart which seeks thee?" The hours pass away and he does not come, and already "the voice of the turtle-dove speaks,—it says: 'Behold, the dawn is here, alas! what is to become of me?' Thou, thou art the bird, thou callest me,—and I find my brother in his chamber,—and my heart is rejoiced to see him!—I will never go away again, my hand will remain in thy hand,—and when I wander forth, I will go with thee into the most beautiful places,—happy in that he makes me the foremost of women—and that he does not break my heart." We should like to quote the whole of it, but the text is mutilated, and we are unable to fill in the blanks. It is, nevertheless, one of those products of the Egyptian mind which it would have been easy for us to appreciate from beginning to end, without effort and almost without explanation. The passion in it finds expression in such sincere and simple language as to render rhetorical ornament needless, and one can trace in it, therefore, nothing of the artificial colouring which would limit it to a particular place or time. It translates a universal sentiment into the common language of humanity, and the hieroglyphic groups need only to be put into the corresponding words of any modern tongue to bring home to the reader their full force and intensity. We might compare it with those popular songs which are now being collected in our provinces before the peasantry have forgotten them altogether: the artlessness of some of the expressions, the boldness of the imagery, the awkwardness and somewhat abrupt character of some of the passages, communicate to both that wild charm which we miss in the most perfect specimens of our modern love-poets.

END OF VOL. V.