CHAPTER VI—THE DECIPHERMENT OF THE HIEROGLYPHS*
*The early portion of this chapter is selected, by kind
permission of Dr. Henry Smith Williams, from his “History
of the Art of Writing,” Copyright, 1902 and 1903.
The Rosetta Stone: The Discoveries of Dr. Thomas Young: The Classification of the Egyptian Alphabet by Champollion: Egyptian Love-songs and the Book of the Dead
Conspicuously placed in the great hall of Egyptian antiquities, in the British Museum, is a wonderful piece of sculpture known as the Rosetta Stone. A glance at its graven surface suffices to show that three sets of inscriptions are recorded there. The upper one, occupying about one-fourth of the surface, is a pictured scroll, made up of chains of those strange outlines of serpents, hawks, lions, and so on, which are recognised, even by the least initiated, as hieroglyphics. The middle inscription, made up of lines, angles, and half-pictures, one might suppose to be a sort of abbreviated or shorthand hieroglyphic. The third, or lower, inscription, is manifestly Greek, obviously a thing of words. If the screeds above be also made of words, only the elect have any way of proving the fact.
Fortunately, however, even the least scholarly observer is left in no doubt as to the real import of the thing he sees, for an obliging English label tells us that these three inscriptions are renderings of the same message, and that this message is a “decree of the Priests of Memphis conferring divine honours on Ptolemy V., Epiphanes, King of Egypt, B.C. 195.” The label goes on to state that the upper transcription (of which, unfortunately, only parts of the last dozen lines or so remain, the slab being broken) is in “the Egyptian language, in hieroglyphics, or writing of the priests”; the second inscription in the same language, “in demotic, or the writing of the people”; and the third “in the Greek language and character.”
Then comes a brief biography of the Rosetta Stone itself, as follows: “This stone was found by the French in 1798 among the ruins of Fort St. Julian, near the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. It passed into the hands of the British by the treaty of Alexandria, and was deposited in the British Museum in the year 1801.” There is a whole volume of history in that brief inscription, and a bitter sting thrown in, if the reader chance to be a Frenchman. Yet the facts involved could scarcely be suggested more modestly. They are recorded much more bluntly in a graven inscription on the side of the stone, which runs: “Captured in Egypt by the British Army, 1801.” No Frenchman could read those words without a sinking of the heart.
The value of the Rosetta Stone depended on the fact that it gave promise, even when originally inspected, of furnishing a key to the centuries-old mystery of the hieroglyphics. For two thousand years the secret of these strange markings had been forgotten. Nowhere in the world—quite as little in Egypt as elsewhere—had any man the slightest clue to their meaning; there were even those who doubted whether these droll picturings really had any specific meaning, questioning whether they were not merely vague symbols of esoteric religious import and nothing more. And it was the Rosetta Stone that gave the answer to these doubters, and restored to the world a lost language and a forgotten literature.
The trustees of the British Museum recognised that the problem of the Rosetta Stone was one on which the scientists of the world might well exhaust their ingenuity, and they promptly published a carefully lithographed copy of the entire inscription, so that foreign scholarship had equal opportunity with British to try to solve the riddle. How difficult a riddle it was, even with this key in hand, is illustrated by the fact that, though scholars of all nations brought their ingenuity to bear upon it, nothing more was accomplished for a dozen years than to give authority to three or four guesses regarding the nature of the upper inscriptions, which, as it afterwards proved, were quite incorrect and altogether misleading. This in itself is sufficient to show that ordinary scholarship might have studied the Rosetta Stone till the end of time without getting far on the track of its secrets. The key was there, but to apply it required the inspired insight—that is to say, the shrewd guessing power—of genius.
The man who undertook the task had perhaps the keenest scientific imagination and the most versatile profundity of knowledge of his generation—one is tempted to say, of any generation. For he was none other than the extraordinary Dr. Thomas Young, the demonstrator of the vibratory nature of light.
Young had his attention called to the Rosetta Stone by accident, and his usual rapacity for knowledge at once led him to speculate as to the possible aid this tri-lingual inscription might give in the solution of Egyptian problems. Resolving at once to attempt the solution himself, he set to work to learn Koptic, which was rightly believed to represent the nearest existing approach to the ancient Egyptian language. His amazing facility in the acquisition of languages stood him in such good stead that within a year of his first efforts he had mastered Koptic and assured himself that the ancient Egyptian language was really similar to it, and had even made a tentative attempt at the translation of the Egyptian scroll. His results were only tentative, to be sure, yet they constituted the very beginnings of our knowledge regarding the meaning of hieroglyphics. Just how far they carried has been a subject of ardent controversy ever since. Not that there is any doubt about the specific facts; what is questioned is the exact importance of these facts. For it is undeniable that Young did not complete and perfect the discovery, and, as always in such matters, there is opportunity for difference of opinion as to the share of credit due to each of the workers who entered into the discovery.
Young’s specific discoveries were these: (1) that many of the pictures of the hieroglyphics stand for the names of the objects actually delineated; (2) that other pictures are sometimes only symbolic; (3) that plural numbers are represented by repetition; (4) that numerals are represented by dashes; (5) that hieroglyphics may read either from the right or from the left, but always from the direction in which the animals and human figures face; (6) that proper names are surrounded by a graven oval ring, making what he called a cartouche; (7) that the cartouches of the preserved portion of the Rosetta Stone stand for the name of Ptolemy alone; (8) that the presence of a female figure after such cartouches, in other inscriptions, always denotes the female sex; (9) that within the cartouches the hieroglyphic symbols have a positively phonetic value, either alphabetic or syllabic; and (10) that several different characters may have the same phonetic value.
Just what these phonetic values are, Doctor Young pointed out in the case of fourteen characters, representing nine sounds, six of which are accepted to-day as correctly representing the letters to which he ascribed them, and the three others as being correct regarding their essential or consonantal element. It is clear, therefore, that he was on the right track thus far, and on the very verge of complete discovery. But, unfortunately, he failed to take the next step, which would have been to realise that the same phonetic values given the alphabetic characters within the cartouches were often ascribed to them also when used in the general text of an inscription; in other words, that the use of an alphabet was not confined to proper names. This was the great secret which Young missed, but which his French successor, Jean François Champollion, working on the foundation that Young had laid, was enabled to ferret out.
Young’s initial studies of the Rosetta Stone were made in 1814; his later publications bore date of 1819. Champollion’s first announcement of results came in 1822; his second and more important one in 1824. By this time, through study of the cartouches of other inscriptions, he had made out almost the complete alphabet, and the “Riddle of the Sphinx” was practically solved. He proved that the Egyptians had developed a relatively complete alphabet (mostly neglecting the vowels, as early Semitic alphabets did also) centuries before the Phoenicians were heard of in history.
Even this statement, however, must in a measure be modified. These pictures are letters and something more. Some of them are purely alphabetical in character, and some are symbolic in another way. Some characters represent syllables. Others stand sometimes as mere representatives of sounds, and again, in a more extended sense, as representatives of things, such as all hieroglyphics doubtless were in the beginning. In a word, this is an alphabet, but not a perfected alphabet such as modern nations generally use.
The word “hieroglyphic” is applied, as we have seen, to various forms of picture writing; but the original interpretation which the Greeks, who invented it, put upon the word was the “holy writing” of the Egyptians. The earliest Greek travellers who went to Egypt, when that country was finally opened up to the outside world, must have noticed the strange picture scrolls everywhere to be seen there on the temple walls, on obelisks, on statues, and mummy-cases, as well as on papyrus rolls, which were obviously intended to serve the purpose of handing down records of events to future generations.
It is now known that this writing of the Egyptians was of a most extraordinary compound character. Part of its pictures are used as direct representations of the objects presented. Here are some examples:
Again the picture of an object becomes an ideograph, as in the following instances:
Here the sacred ibis or the sacred bull symbolises the soul. The bee stands for honey, the eyes for the verb “to see.” Yet again these pictures may stand neither as pictures of things nor as ideographs, but as having the phonetic value of a syllable. Such syllabic signs may be used either singly, as above, or in combination, as illustrated below.
But one other stage of evolution is possible, namely, the use of signs with a purely alphabetical significance. The Egyptians made this step also, and their strangely conglomerate writing makes use of the following alphabet:
In a word, then, the Egyptian writing has passed through all the stages of development, from the purely pictorial to the alphabetical, but with this strange qualification,—that while advancing to the later stages it retains the use of crude earlier forms. As Canon Taylor has graphically phrased it, the Egyptian writing is a completed structure, but one from which the scaffolding has not been removed.
The next step would have been to remove the now useless scaffolding, leaving a purely alphabetical writing as the completed structure. Looking at the matter from the modern standpoint, it seems almost incredible that so intelligent a people as the Egyptians should have failed to make this advance. Yet the facts stand, that as early as the time of the Pyramid Builders, say four thousand years B.C.,* the Egyptians had made the wonderful analysis of sounds, without which the invention of an alphabet would be impossible.
* The latest word on the subject of the origin of the
alphabet takes back some of the primitive phonetic signs to
prehistoric times. Among these prehistoric signs are the
letters A, E, I, O, U, (V), F and M.
They had set aside certain of their hieroglyphic symbols and given them alphabetical significance. They had learned to write their words with the use of this alphabet; and it would seem as if, in the course of a few generations, they must come to see how unnecessary was the cruder form of picture-writing which this alphabet would naturally supplant; but, in point of fact, they never did come to a realisation of this seemingly simple proposition. Generation after generation and century after century, they continued to use their same cumbersome, complex writing, and it remained for an outside nation to prove that an alphabet pure and simple was capable of fulfilling all the conditions of a written language.
Thus in practice there are found in the hieroglyphics the strangest combinations of ideographs, syllabic signs, and alphabetical signs or true letters used together indiscriminately.
It was, for example, not at all unusual, after spelling a word syllabically or alphabetically, to introduce a figure giving the idea of the thing intended, and then even to supplement this with a so-called determinative sign or figure:
Here Queften, monkey, is spelled out in full, but the picture of a monkey is added as a determinative; second, Qenu, cavalry, after being spelled, is made unequivocal by the introduction of a picture of a horse; third, Temati, wings, though spelled elaborately, has pictures of wings added; and fourth, Tatu, quadrupeds, after being spelled, has a picture of a quadruped, and then the picture of a hide, which is the usual determinative of a quadruped, followed by three dashes to indicate the plural number.*
* Another illustration of the plural number is seen in the
sign Pau, on page 298, where the plural is indicated in the
same manner.
These determinatives are in themselves so interesting, as illustrations of the association of ideas, that it is worth while to add a few more examples. The word Pet, which signifies heaven, and which has also the meaning up or even, is represented primarily by what may be supposed to be a conventionalised picture of the covering to the earth. But this picture, used as a determinative, is curiously modified in the expression of other ideas, as it symbolises evening when a closed flower is added, and night when a star hangs in the sky, and rain or tempest when a series of zigzag lines, which by themselves represent water, are appended.
As aids to memory such pictures are obviously of advantage, but this advantage in the modern view is outweighed by the cumbrousness of the system of writing as a whole.
Why was such a complex system retained? Chiefly, no doubt, because the Egyptians, like all other highly developed peoples, were conservatives. They held to their old method after a better one had been invented. But this inherent conservatism was enormously aided, no doubt, by the fact that the Egyptian language, like the Chinese, has many words that have a varied significance, making it seem necessary, or at least highly desirable, either to spell such words with different signs, or, having spelled them in the same way, to introduce the varied determinatives.
Here are some examples of discrimination between words of the same sound by the use of different signs:
Here, it will be observed, exactly the same expedient is adopted which we still retain when we discriminate between words of the same sound by different spelling, as to, two, too; whole, hole; through, threw, etc.
But the more usual Egyptian method was to resort to the determinatives; the result seems to us most extraordinary. After what has been said, the following examples will explain themselves:
It goes without saying that the great mass of people in Egypt were never able to write at all. Had they been accustomed to do so, the Egyptians would have been a nation of artists. Even as the case stands, a remarkable number of men must have had their artistic sense well developed, for the birds, animals, and human figures constantly presented on their hieroglyphic scrolls are drawn with a fidelity which the average European of to-day would certainly find far beyond his skill.
Until Professor Petrie* published his “Medum,” and Professor Erman his “Grammar,” no important work on Egyptian hieroglyphic writing had appeared in recent years.
* The information as to the modern investigation in
hieroglyphics has been obtained from F. L. Griffith’s paper
in the 6th Memoir of the Archaeological Survey on
Hieroglyphics from the collections of the Egypt Exploration
Fund, London, 1894-95.
Professor Petrie’s “Medum” is the mainstay of the student in regard to examples of form for the old kingdom; but for all periods detailed and trustworthy drawings and photographs are found among the enormous mass of published texts.*
*To these may now be added the 105 coloured signs in Beni
Hasan, Part III., and still more numerous examples in the
Memoir of the Egypt Exploration Fund (Archaeological
Survey), for the season 1895-96.
There is an important collection of facsimiles at University College, London, made for Professor Petrie by Miss Paget. A large proportion of these are copied from the collections from Beni Hasan and El Bersheh; others are from coffins of later periods, and have only paleographical interest; and others are from earlier coffins in the British Museum. But the flower of the collection consists in exquisite drawings of sculptured hieroglyphics, sometimes with traces of colour, from the tomb of Phtahhotep at Saqqâra, supplemented by a few from other tombs in the same neighbourhood, and from the pyramid of Papi I. These were all copied on the spot in 1895—96.
The only critical list of hieroglyphics with their powers published recently is that of Erman, printed in his “Grammar.” The system by which he classifies the values—obscured in the English edition by the substitution of the term of “ideograph” for Wortzeichen (word-sign)—displays the author’s keen insight into the nature of hieroglyphic writing, and the list itself is highly suggestive.
In the case of an altogether different system of ancient writing that has come down to us,—the old cuneiform syllabary of the Assyrians,—dictionaries, glossaries, and other works of a grammatical character have been preserved to the present day. Documents such as these are, of course, of material aid in regard to obscure texts, but in the case of the Egyptian writing the only surviving native word-list is the Sign Papyrus of Tanis,* which is, unfortunately, of the Roman Period, when the original meanings of the signs had been well-nigh forgotten.
* Egypt Exploration Fund, Ninth Memoir, 1889-1890. This is
an extra volume, now out of print.
It has its own peculiar interest, but seldom furnishes the smallest hint to the seeker after origins. The famous “Hieroglyphics of Horapollo” occasionally contains a reminiscence of true hieroglyphics, but may well be a composition of the Middle Ages, embodying a tiny modicum of half-genuine tradition that had survived until then.
Scattered throughout Egyptological literature there are, as may be imagined, many attempts at explaining individual signs. But any endeavour to treat Egyptian hieroglyphics critically, to ascertain their origins, the history of their use, the original distinction or the relationship of signs that resemble each other, reveals how little is really known about them. For study, good examples showing detail and colouring at different periods are needed, and the evidence furnished by form and colour must be checked by examination of their powers in writing.
In investigating the powers of the uses of the signs, dictionaries give most important aid to the student. The key-words of the meanings, viz., the names of the objects or actions depicted, are often exceedingly rare in the texts. Doctor Brugsch’s great Dictionary (1867-82) frequently settles with close accuracy the meanings of the words considered in it, supplying by quotations the proof of his conclusions.*
* There has been in preparation since 1897 an exhaustive
dictionary, to be published under the auspices of the German
government. The academies of Berlin, Gottingen, Leipsig and
Munich have charge of the work, and they have nominated as
their respective commissioners Professors Erman, Pietsch-
mann, Steindorff, and Ebers (since deceased). This colossal
undertaking is the fitting culmination of the labours of a
century in the Egyptian language and writing. The collection
and arrangement of material are estimated to occupy eleven
years; printing may thus be begun about 1908.
Despite its uncritical method of compilation, Levy’s bulky
Vocabulary (1887-1804), with its two supplements and long
tables of signs, is indispensable in this branch of
research, since it gives a multitude of references to rare
words and forms of words that occur in notable publications
of recent date, such as Maspero’s excellent edition of the
Pyramid Texts. There are also some important special
indices, such as Stern’s excellent “Glossary of the Papyrus
Ebers,” Piehl’s “Vocabulary of the Harris Papyrus,” Erman’s
“Glossary of the Westcar Papyrus,” and Doctor Pudge’s
“Vocabulary” of the XVIIIth Dynasty “Book of the Dead.”
Schack’s Index to the Pyramid Texts will prove to be an
important work, and the synoptic index of parallel chapters
prefixed to the work is of the greatest value in the search
for variant spellings.
In 1872, Brugsch, in his “Grammaire Hiéroglyphique,” published a useful list of signs with their phonetic and ideographic values, accompanying them with references to his Dictionary, and distinguishing some of the specially early and late forms. We may also note the careful list in Lepsius’ “Ægyptische Lesestucke,” 1883.
Champollion in his “Grammaire Egyptienne,” issued after the author’s death in 1836, gave descriptive names to large numbers of the signs. In 1848, to the first volume of Bunsen’s “Egypt’s Place in Universal History,” Birch contributed a long list of hieroglyphics, with descriptions and statements of their separate phonetic and ideographic values. De Rougé, in his “Catalogue des signes hiéroglyphiques de l’imprimerie nationale,” 1851, attached to each of many hundreds of signs and varieties of signs a short description, often very correct. He again dealt with the subject in 1867, and published a “Catalogue Raisonné” of the more usual signs in the first livraison of his “Chrestomathie Egyptienne.” Useful to the student as these first lists were, in the early stages of decipherment, they are now of little value. For, at the time they were made, the fine early forms were mostly unstudied, and the signs were taken without discrimination from texts of all periods; moreover, the outlines of the signs were inaccurately rendered, their colours unnoted, and their phonetic and ideographic powers very imperfectly determined. Thus, whenever doubt was possible as to the object represented by a sign, little external help was forthcoming for correct identification. To a present-day student of the subject, the scholarly understanding of De Rougé and the ingenuity of Birch are apparent, but the aid which they afford him is small.
As a result of recent discoveries, some very interesting researches have been made in Egyptian paleography in what is known as the signary.* We reach signs which seem to be disconnected from the known hieroglyphs, and we are probably touching on the system of geometrical signs used from prehistoric to Roman times in Egypt, and also in other countries around the Mediterranean.
* The information regarding the alphabet here given is
derived from the Eighteenth Memoir of the Egypt Exploration
Fund, 1899-1890.
How far these signs are originally due to geometrical invention, or how far due to corruption of some picture, we cannot say. But in any case they stood so detached from the hieroglyphic writing and its hieratic and demotic derivations, that they must be treated as a separate system. For the present the best course is to show here the similarity of forms between these marks and those known in Egypt in earlier and later times, adding the similar forms in the Karian and Spanish alphabets. The usage of such forms in the same country from about 6000 B.C. down to 1200 B.C., or later, shows that we have to deal with a definite system. And it seems impossible to separate that used in 1200 B.C. in Egypt from the similar forms found in other lands connected with Egypt from 800 B.C. down to later times: we may find many of these also in the Kretan inscriptions long before 800 B.C. The only conclusion then seems to be that a great body of signs—or a signary—was in use around the Mediterranean for several thousand years. Whether these signs were ideographic or syllabic or alphabetic in the early stages we do not know; certainly they were alphabetic in the later stage. And the identity of most of the signs in Asia Minor and Spain shows them to belong to a system with commonly received values in the later times.
What then becomes of the Phoenician legend of the alphabet? Certainly the so-called Phoenician letters were familiar long before the rise of Phoenician influence. What is really due to the Phoenicians seems to have been the selection of a short series (only half the amount of the surviving alphabets) for numerical purposes, as A = 1, E = 5, I = 10, N = 50, P = 100.
This usage would soon render these signs as invariable in order as our own numbers, and force the use of them on all countries with which the Phoenicians traded. Hence, before long these signs drove out of use all others, except in the less changed civilisations of Asia Minor and Spain. According to our modern authorities this exactly explains the phenomena of the early Greek alphabets; many in variety, and so diverse that each has to be learned separately, and yet entirely uniform in order. Each tribe had its own signs for certain sounds, varying a good deal; yet all had to follow a fixed numerical system. Certainly all did not learn their forms from an independent Phoenician alphabet, unknown to them before it was selected.
The work of Young and Champollion, says Doctor Williams,* gives a new interest to the mass of records, in the form of graven inscriptions, and papyrus rolls, and cases and wrappings, which abound in Egypt, but which hitherto had served no better purpose for centuries than to excite, without satisfying, the curiosity of the traveller.
* History of the Art of Writing, Portfolio I., plate 8.
Now these strange records, so long enigmatic, could be read, and within the past fifty years a vast literature of translations of these Egyptian records has been given to the world. It was early discovered that the hieroglyphic character was not reserved solely for sacred inscriptions, as the Greeks had supposed in naming it; indeed, the inscription of the Rosetta Stone sufficiently dispelled that illusion. But no one, perhaps, was prepared for the revelations that were soon made as to the extent of range of these various inscriptions, and the strictly literary character of some of them.
A large proportion of these inscriptions are, to be sure, religious in character, but there are other extensive inscriptions, such as those on the walls of the temple of Karnak, that are strictly historical; telling of the warlike deeds of such mighty kings as Thûtmosis III. and Ramses II. Again, there are documents which belong to the domain of belles-lettres pure and simple. Of these the best known example is the now famous “Tale of Two Brothers”—the prototype of the “modern” short story.
Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, no Egyptologist had discovered that the grave-faced personages who lie in their mummy-cases in our great museums ever read or composed romance. Their literature, as far as recovered, was of an eminently serious nature,—hymns to the divinities, epic poems, writings on magic and science, business letters, etc., but no stories. In 1852, however, an Englishwoman, Mrs. Elizabeth d’Orbiney, sent M. de Rougé, at Paris, a papyrus she had purchased in Italy, and whose contents she was anxious to know. Thus was the tale of the “Two Brothers” brought to light, and for twelve years it remained our sole specimen of a species of literature which is now constantly being added to.
This remarkable papyrus dates from the thirteenth century B.C., and was the work of Anna, one of the most distinguished temple-scribes of his age. Indeed, it is to him that we are indebted for a large portion of the Egyptian literature that has been preserved to us. This particular work was executed for Seti II., son of Meneptah, and grandson of Ramses II. of the nineteenth dynasty, while he was yet crown prince.
The tale itself is clearly formed of two parts. The first, up to the Bata’s self-exile to the Valley of the Cedar, gives a really excellent picture of the life and habits of the peasant dwelling on the banks of the Nile. The civilisation and moral conditions it describes are distinctly Egyptian. Were it not for such details as the words spoken by the cows, and the miraculous appearance of the body of water between the two brothers, we might say the ancient Egyptians were strict realists in their theory of fiction. But the second part leads us through marvels enough to satisfy the most vivid of imaginations. It is possible, therefore, that the tale as we have it was originally two separate stories.
The main theme of the story has occupied a great deal of attention. Its analogy to the Biblical narrative of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife comes at once into the reader’s mind. But there is just as close a similarity in the Greek tales, where the hero is killed or his life endangered for having scorned the guilty love of a woman, as in the stories of Hippolytus, Peleus, Bellerophon, and the son of Glaucus, not to mention the extraordinary adventure of Amgiad and Assad, sons of Prince Kamaralzaman, in the Thousand and One Nights.
The religions of Greece and Western Asia likewise contain myths that can be compared almost point for point with the tale of the two brothers. In Phrygia, for example, Atyo scorns the love of the goddess Cybele, as does Bata the love of Anpu’s wife. Like Bata, again, he mutilates himself, and is transformed into a pine instead of a persea tree. Are we, therefore, to seek for the common origin of all the myths and romance in the tragedy of Anpu and Bata that was current, we know not how long, before the days of King Seti?
Of one thing we may be sure: of this particular type the Egyptian tale is by far the oldest that we possess, and, if we may not look to the valley of the Nile as the original home of the popular tale, we may justly regard it as the locality where it was earliest naturalised and assumed a true literary form.
Analogies to the second part of the tale are even more numerous and curious. They are to be found everywhere, in France, Italy, Germany, Hungary, in Russia and all Slavonic countries, Roumania, Peloponnesia, in Asia Minor, Abyssinia, and even India.
Of late years an ever-increasing accumulation of the literature of every age of Egyptian history has either been brought to light or for the first time studied from a wider point of view than was formerly possible. In making a few typical selections from the mass of this new material, none perhaps are more worthy of note than some of the love-songs which have been translated into German from Egyptian in “Die Liebespoesie der Alten Ægypten,” by W. Max Muller. This is a very careful edition of the love-songs on the recto (or upper surface) of the Harris Papyrus 500, and of similar lyrics from Turin, Gizeh, and Paris. The introduction contains an account of Egyptian notions of love and marriage, gathered from hieroglyphic and demotic sources, and a chapter is devoted to the forms of Egyptian verse, its rhythm and accent. The interesting “Song of the Harper,” which is found on the same Harris Papyrus, is also fully edited and collated with the parallel texts from the Theban tombs, and compared with other writings dealing with death from the agnostic point of view. The following extracts are translated from the German:
LOVE-SICKNESS
I will lie down within doors
For I am sick with wrongs. T
hen my neighbours come in to visit me.
With them cometh my sister,
She will make fun of the physicians;
She knoweth mine illness.
THE LUCKY DOORKEEPER
The villa of my sister!—
Her gates (are) in the midst of the domain—
(So oft as) its portals open,
(So oft as) the bolt is withdrawn,
Then is my sister angry:
O were I but set as the gatekeeper!
I should cause her to chide me;
(Then) I should hear her voice in anger,
A child in fear before her!
THE UNSUCCESSFUL BIRD-CATCHER
The voice of the wild goose crieth,
(For) she hath taken her bait;
(But) thy love restraineth me,
I cannot free her (from the snare);
(So) must I take (home) my net.
What (shall I say) to my mother,
To whom (I am wont) to come daily
Laden with wild fowl?
I lay not my snare to-day
(For) thy love hath taken hold upon me.
The most ardent interest that has been manifested in the Egyptian records had its origin in the desire to find evidence corroborative of the Hebrew accounts of the Egyptian captivity of the Jewish people.* The Egyptian word-treasury being at last unlocked, it was hoped that much new light would be thrown on Hebrew history. But the hope proved illusive. After ardent researches of hosts of fervid seekers for half a century, scarcely a word of reference to the Hebrews has been found among the Egyptian records.
* The only inscription relating directly to the Israelites
will be found described in Chapter VII.
If depicted at all, the Hebrew captives are simply grouped with other subordinate peoples, not even considered worthy of the dignity of names. Nor is this strange when one reflects on the subordinate position which the Hebrews held in the ancient world. In historical as in other matter, much depends upon the point of view, and a series of events that seemed all-important from the Hebrew standpoint might very well be thought too insignificant for record from the point of view of a great nation like the Egyptians. But the all-powerful pen wrought a conquest for the Hebrews in succeeding generations that their swords never achieved, and, thanks to their literature, succeeding generations have cast historical perspective to the winds in viewing them. Indeed, such are the strange mutations of time that, had any scribe of ancient Egypt seen fit to scrawl a dozen words about the despised Israelite captives, and had this monument been preserved, it would have outweighed in value, in the opinion of nineteenth-century Europe, all the historical records of Thûtmosis, Ramses, and their kin that have come down to us. But seemingly no scribe ever thought it worth his while to make such an effort.
It has just been noted that the hieroglyphic inscriptions are by no means restricted to sacred subjects. Nevertheless, the most widely known book of the Egyptians was, as might be expected, one associated with the funeral rites that played so large a part in the thoughts of the dwellers by the Nile. This is the document known as “The Chapters of the Coming-Forth by Day,” or, as it is more commonly interpreted, “The Book of the Dead.” It is a veritable book in scope, inasmuch as the closely written papyrus roll on which it is enscrolled measures sometimes seventy feet in length. It is virtually the Bible of the Egyptians, and, as in the case of the sacred books of other nations, its exact origin is obscure. The earliest known copy is to be found, not on a papyrus roll, but upon the walls of the chamber of the pyramid at Saqqâra near Cairo. The discovery of this particular recension of “The Book of the Dead” was made by Lepsius. Its date is 3333 B.C. No one supposes, however, that this date marks the time of the origin of “The Book of the Dead.” On the contrary, it is held by competent authority that the earliest chapters, essentially unmodified, had been in existence at least a thousand years before this, and quite possibly for a much longer time. Numerous copies of this work in whole or in part have been preserved either on the walls of temples, on papyrus rolls, or upon the cases of mummies. These copies are of various epochs, from the fourth millennium B.C., as just mentioned, to the late Roman period, about the fourth century A.D.
Throughout this period of about four thousand years the essential character of the book remained unchanged. It is true that no two copies that have been preserved are exactly identical in all their parts. There are various omissions and repetitions that seem to indicate that the book was not written by any one person or in any one epoch, but that it was originally a set of traditions quite possibly handed down for a long period by word of mouth before being put into writing. In this regard, as in many others, this sacred book of the Egyptians is closely comparable to the sacred books of other nations. It differs, however, in one important regard from these others in that it was never authoritatively pronounced upon and crystallised into a fixed, unalterable shape. From first to last, apparently, the individual scribe was at liberty to omit such portions as he chose, and even to modify somewhat the exact form of expression in making a copy of the sacred book. Even in this regard, however, the anomaly is not so great as might at first sight appear, for it must be recalled that even the sacred books of the Hebrews were not given final and authoritative shape until a period almost exactly coeval with that in which the Egyptian “Book of the Dead” ceased to be used at all.
A peculiar feature of “The Book of the Dead,” and one that gives it still greater interest, is the fact that from an early day it was the custom to illustrate it with graphic pictures in colour. In fact, taken as a whole, “The Book of the Dead” gives a very fair delineation of the progress of Egyptian art from the fourth millennium B.C. to its climax in the eighteenth dynasty, and throughout the period of its decline; and this applies not merely to the pictures proper, but to the forms of the hieroglyphic letters themselves, for it requires but the most cursory inspection to show that these give opportunity for no small artistic skill.
As to the ideas preserved in “The Book of the Dead,” it is sufficient here to note that they deal largely with the condition of the human being after death, implying in the most explicit way a firm and unwavering belief in the immortality of the soul. The Egyptian believed most fully that by his works a man would be known and judged after death. His religion was essentially a religion of deeds, and the code of morals, according to which these deeds were adjudged, has been said by Doctor Budge, the famous translator of “The Book of the Dead,” to be “the grandest and most comprehensive of those now known to have existed among the nations of antiquity.”
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