EXPLANATION OF TYPOGRAPHICAL SIGNS AND SPECIAL CHARACTERS 1. The introductions to the documents are in twelve point type, like these lines. 2. All of the translations are in ten-point type, like this line. 3. In the footnotes and introductions all quotations from the documents in the original words of the translation are in italics, inclosed in quotation marks. Italics are not employed in the text of the volumes for any other purpose except for titles. 4. The lines of the original document are indicated in the translation by superior numbers. 5. The loss of a word in the original is indicated by -, two words by words by -- three words by five words by four and A word in the original is more than five by estimated at a "square" as known to Egyptologists, and the estimate can be but a very rough one. 6. When any of the dashes, like those of No. 5, are inclosed in half-brackets, the dashes so inclosed indicate not lost, but uncertain words. Thus - represents one uncertain word, '— —1 two uncertain words, and more than five uncertain words. ו. 7. When a word or group of words are inclosed in halfbrackets, the words so inclosed are uncertain in meaning; that is, the translation is not above question. 8. Roman numerals I, II, III, and IV, not preceded by the title of any book or journal, refer to these four volumes of Historical Documents. The Arabic numerals following such Romans refer to the numbered paragraphs of these volumes. All paragraph marks (§ and §§, without a Roman) refer to paragraphs of the same volume. 9. For signs used in transliteration, see Vol. I, p. xv. TANFORD LIBRARY THE DOCUMENTARY SOURCES OF EGYPTIAN 1. The general course and the gradual development of Egyptian civilization are in some respects roughly traceable in its surviving material documents, in the products of the artist and the craftsman, which we are accustomed to assign to the domain of the archæologist. With these invaluable material documents the present volumes of course do not deal. They purpose to present only those written documents from which the career of the Nile valley peoples may be drawn at the present day. A rapid survey of the materials herein presented may enable the non-Egyptologist to gain some preliminary conception of their general character. 2. Comparatively speaking, but very little of the rich and productive civilization which flourished for at least five millenniums before Christ on the banks of the lower Nile, has survived in written documents for our enlightenment. Accident has preserved but here and there the merest scrap of the vast mass of written records which the incessant political, legal, administrative, religious, industrial, commercial, and literary activities filling the life of this ancient people, were constantly putting forth. We may make one exception: the religious literature, doubtless the least instructive, as a whole, of all their literary documents, has survived in an incalculable mass of temple inscriptions and papyri, which have never even been adequately published, much less exhaustively studied. 3. It is with those documents in which the national career as a whole can be traced that we have here to deal. From the pre-dynastic age onward the kings kept a series of annals, recording in each year the great deeds and achievements of the Pharaoh which he thought worthy of perpetuation. Of such annals only two fragments have survived: the Palermo Stone, part of a record extending from the earliest times down into the Fifth Dynasty; and the annals of Thutmose III's wars, of which a few extracts were excerpted by a priestly scribe and recorded on the walls of the Karnak temple. Had we the annals of the Pharaohs in complete form, we might perhaps write almost as full a history of Egypt as it is possible to do for the Middle Ages. of European history. Without these, we are dependent upon a miscellaneous mass of documents of the most varied character and value, which chance and circumstance have preserved from destruction these thousands of years. In general, such documents show more literary character and picturesqueness than the Assyro-Babylonian records; but the latter dry and formal annals possess greater historical value, and exhibit a preciseness which indues them with a rare availability as sources. The Egyptian records which chance has preserved to us are, as a whole, so vague and indefinite in their references to peoples, localities, persons, and the character of events, that they are often tantalizing in what they do not tell us. Thus in records of whole campaigns of Thutmose III in Syria the hostile Syrian king is designated merely as "that foe" (lit. “fallen one"), and we are uncertain whether the king of Kadesh, of Mitanni, of Aleppo, or of some other realm is meant. The real excerpts from Thutmose III's Annals (II, 391 ff.), however, show that such records contained an elaboration of detail not less precise and historically available than the cuneiform annals. So much the more must we deplore their loss. 4. How hazardous was the life of such a document may be well illustrated by the great building inscription, upon a |