same colossal proportions are preserved. He and his horses are ten times the size of the rest of the army. Alike in battle and in worship, he is of the same stature as the gods themselves. Most striking is the familiar gentleness with which-one on each side-they take him by each hand, as one of their own order, and then in the next compartment introduce him to Ammon and the lion-headed goddess. Every distinction, except of degree, between divinity and royalty, is entirely levelled, and the royal majesty is always represented by making the king, not like Saul or Agamemnon, from the head and shoulders, but from the foot and ankle upwards, higher than the rest of the people.

"It carries one back to the days when there were giants on the earth.' It shows how the king, in that first monarchy, was the visible God upon earth. No pure Monotheism could for a moment have been compatible with such an intense exaltation of the conquering king."

THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS OF EGYPT.

THE hopes and fears of the Egyptians with reference to the world beyond the grave are revealed to us in various books or collections of writings which have been preserved to us by the tombs.

Most of the evidence upon which the preceding Lectures are based has been taken from inscriptions sculptured or painted upon monuments of stone. But from the very earliest times to which it is possible to go back, the Egyptians were acquainted with the use of the pen and of papyrus as a material for writing upon. Leather skins are also recorded to have been used for certain documents, and some of these have actually been preserved. But the durability and other qualities of the papyrus recommended it for ordinary use beyond all other writing materials. The age of some of the papyri now in our museums must necessarily seem fabulous to those whose experience has been limited to Greek or Latin manuscripts, which are considered as of most venerable antiquity if they were written in the

fourth or fifth century after Christ, and, unless like the rolls of Herculaneum they can plead special reasons, are justly liable to suspicion if they lay claim to higher antiquity. There is probably not a Hebrew manuscript of the Old Testament which is a thousand years old. The oldest existing Sanskrit manuscripts were written only a few centuries ago. Some of our Egyptian papyri are not less than four thousand years old. You must bear in mind the difference of the conditions under which the oldest manuscripts of each country have been preserved. The climate and the insects of India are absolutely destructive of all organic substances. The Hebrew Biblical manuscripts of olden times have been intentionally destroyed, either out of reverence for a roll which was no longer in a condition suitable for use, or because the text of it, as being at variance with the Masoretic recension, was considered to be erroneous. The causes which have led to the destruction of Greek and Latin manuscripts, especially of the classical literature, are so obvious, that we can only wonder and be thankful that so much has been preserved. But the Egyptian manuscripts which we now possess very few, alas! in comparison with the myriads which have perished-have been preserved by being kept from the air and damp in a perfectly dry climate, hermetically sealed in earthen or wooden vessels or under mummy coverings, sometimes at a depth of ninety feet within the living rock, and still

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further protected by a thick covering of the pure, dry sands of the desert.

The literature which has thus been preserved and recovered is naturally for the most part of a religious

character.

It is perhaps necessary that I should apologize for using the term literature in speaking of compositions written in the hieroglyphic character. It is, I know, hard to make strangers to the writing understand that signs representing birds or beasts may be and are as purely alphabetic letters as our A, B, C. Such, however, is the fact, and every simple sound in the language, whether vowel or consonant, had its corresponding letter.1 The language had no medial sounds, so that if a g or a d had to be transcribed from a foreign language, a k or a t had to be substituted. But it was from the alphabetic signs of the Egyptians that the Phoenicians derived their own, and from the Phoenician alphabet all those of Europe and Asia were derived: Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Sanskrit and Zend. The Egyptian writing, it is true, was not confined to alphabetic characters. Some signs are syllabic, but these might at will be exchanged for

1 This is the case with the most ancient hieroglyphic writing known to us. If some scholars, like Dr. Hincks, have maintained that all the alphabetic signs were formerly syllabic, this is pure speculation, and may be true or false without interfering with the fact stated in the text.

the equivalent combination of alphabetic ones, just as the Greek abbreviations which are so puzzling to some persons, either in the manuscripts or in the Aldine and other old editions of the classics, give place at the present day to the simple letters. And just as some persons saw considerable advantage in the use of Greek abbreviations, every Egyptologist will tell you that, each syllabic character being necessarily confined to a limited number of words, he is able to detect at a glance over a page the presence of a word he is looking for. But syllabic signs were not used, any more than Greek abbreviations, in consequence of a want of signs to express purely alphabetic values. In this matter Egyptian orthography differs essentially from Chinese or Assyrian. It may, however, be objected that Egyptian writing admits a certain number of ideographic signs commonly called determinatives, which are not pronounced; a sign, for instance, representing two legs is placed after words signifying motion. But if we compare our own writing either with Sanskrit or with ancient Greek or Latin manuscripts, we shall find plenty of ideographic signs in it. What else are notes. of exclamation or of interrogation? What are inverted commas and vacant spaces between the words? Capital letters are to this day determinatives of proper names in English and French, and of substantives in German orthography. Our ideography is undoubtedly much simpler than the Egyptian, but it is quite as real. An