With the foregoing references to some of the most venerable documents that have yet come to light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer a land of marvel and of mystery, with its past hidden as the sources of the great river of which that land is "the gift" were long hidden. For the discovery of the key to that past, and of the vast waters that feed the Nile, alike lie within the present century. Till then the veil of Isis hung over the significance of the inscriptions on coffin, sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple, and over the interpretation of characters written on papyri rolls centuries before the foundations of Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted, Death, which sweeps away man and the memory of him from his fellows, has been more than aught else—in Egypt, and indeed, all the world over, but notably in Egypt—the preserver. And this because there all that appertained to the departed was guarded with the most jealous care. The tomb, as often elsewhere, was modelled on the plan of the house, and supplied with utensils, food, and drink, or adorned with the painted representations of these things on the walls, for the needs of the ka, or double, sahn, or spirit, or some other of the eight Egyptian ontological divisions of the individual.
Like the other pictographic systems already surveyed, the Egyptian interests us because it has preserved the traces of its origin, adding its "cloud of witnesses" to the identity of the several stages of development marking the scripts of all literate peoples. Until very recently, its chief interest lay in the belief that it is the parent of the family of alphabets of the civilised world; but, as will be shown later on, the theory is no longer tenable. Although the earliest known examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Greek hieros, "sacred," and glypho, "to carve," so called in the belief that they were used solely by the priests) contain alphabetic characters, they have come down as highly elaborated types of picture-writing, the changes in which during the long period covered by the records being so slight that, to cite Professor Whitney, "it is like a language which has never forgotten the derivations of its words, or corrupted their etymological form, however much it may have altered its meaning." Therefore, although the Egyptians had developed alphabet-signs five thousand years b.c. they never advanced to the stage of their sole and independent use, partly because of the conservative instincts of the race, which, fostering veneration for the old, was reluctant to alter anything, and partly because, as Professor Flinders Petrie has pointed out, their "treatment of everything was essentially decorative, the love of form and drawing being in Egypt a greater force than amongst any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of sufficient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink into a mere string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians, on the contrary, preserved the purely pictorial and artistic character of their hieroglyphs to the end. The hieroglyphs were a decoration in themselves; their very position in the sentence was subordinate to the decorative effect. The Egyptian could not be guilty of the barbarism seen on some of the Assyrian sculpture, where inscriptions were scrawled right across the work without regard to design. So far was this idea carried that many words or ideas were represented by two distinct characters, one wide and the other narrow and deep, so that the harmony of the design should not be broken by an unsuitable element. The result was that the Egyptians were rewarded by having the most beautiful writing in the world." (Egyptian Decorative Art, p. 4.)
This writing exists in three groups of characters (Fig. 45): (a) Hieroglyphic, (b) Hieratic, (c) Demotic. The demotic is derived from the hieratic, and the hieratic from the hieroglyphic.
Fig. 45.—Hieroglyphic, Hieratic, and Demotic Signs for Man
(a) Pictogram, ideogram, and phonogram—in other words, signs representative of word, idea, and sound—make up the seventeen hundred hieroglyphs which, in the older signs, preserve the traces of their origin in rude picture-writing. They were chiselled on stone of various kinds, cut or painted on wood or plaster, and written on papyrus or skin; the characters being arranged in vertical columns.
With the quickened zeal of modern excavators discoveries come apace, so that before these words are printed, some additional find, throwing all others into the shade, may come to light. Such, for example, would be the production of epigraphic evidence as to the sojourn and oppression of the Israelites in Egypt, and their escape from that "house of bondage." For a long time the earliest known example of hieroglyphic writing which the Gizeh and Ashmodean Museums could show (each institution possessing fragments of the relic) was a mutilated stele or monumental tablet to the memory of Shera, a priest or grandson of Sent, the fifth king of the Second Dynasty, which, adopting Professor Flinders Petrie's chronology, flourished about four thousand five hundred years b.c. In this record three alphabetic characters are employed to spell that monarch's name. But in November 1897, Dr. Borchardt reported the important discovery that the royal tomb found by M. de Morgan in the spring of that year at Nagada, situated opposite Coptos, a little north of Thebes, is that of Menes, the founder of the First Dynasty, whose date Professor Flinders Petrie fixes at 4777 b.c., "with a possible error of a century." Calcined remains of the body are now in the Gizeh Museum, and, among other objects, the broken fragments of an ivory plaque which, when joined, showed the ka name of Aha (the ka being the "double" or "other self" of the deceased which abode with the mummy), and, attached thereto, the name MN = Menes, borne by the Pharaoh during his lifetime. Assuming that Dr. Borchardt's interpretation is accepted by Egyptologists, it proves that the hieroglyphic system of writing was then already fully developed. It may be remarked, incidentally, that among the remains of the pre-dynastic race discovered by Professor Flinders Petrie in 1895, in the district north of Thebes, no hieroglyphs or traces of other writing were found. There was evidence of knowledge of metals, but not of the potter's wheel. It therefore seems probable that writing came in with the First Dynasty, which, according to M. de Morgan, was descended from Chaldean Semites.
But more interesting, for the light thrown on early Egyptian thought, than inscriptions on stele or plaque are the copies of portions of the sacred literature entitled "Chapters of the Coming Forth by Day," and also the "Chapters of Making Strong the Beatified Spirit," but commonly known as the Book of the Dead. This venerable embodiment of human conceptions about an after life, and of human hope and consolation this side the grave, contains the hymns, prayers, and magic formulæ against all opposing foes and evil spirits, to be recited by the dead Osiris (the soul was conceived to have such affinity with the god Osiris as to be called by his name) in his journey to Amenti, the underworld that led to the Fields of the Blessed. It lies outside both our scope and space to give an account of the contents of the several chapters, and, fortunately, the entire text, translated by Dr. Wallis Budge, with admirable facsimiles of illustrations, is within the reach of a moderate purse. But one curious and prominent feature should have reference, because it shows the persistence of barbaric ideas about names as integral parts of things. (On this subject, see the author's Tom Tit Tot; an Essay on Savage Philosophy in Folk-Tale, 1898.) The Osiris has not only to be able to recite the names and titles of the gods, but of every part of the boat, "from truck to keel," as the nautical phrase goes, in which he desires to cross the great river flowing to Amenti. And then, before he can enter the Hall of the Two Truths—that is, of Truth and Justice, where the god Osiris and the forty-two judges of the dead are seated—the jackal-headed Anubis requires him to tell the names of every part of the doors, posts, and woodwork generally. These correctly given, the soul declares its innocence in language whose moral tone has never been surpassed, while it throws a light on the virtues and vices of old Egyptian society which makes clear how poor a guide to the past are its monuments compared with its literature.
The age of the composition of this remarkable book is unknown. But so old is it that the earliest copies we possess show that when they were made, some six thousand years ago, the exact meaning of parts of the text had become obscure to the transcribers. Fragments of it have been found in those ancient tombs, the Pyramids; chapters or long extracts were written on stone and wooden coffins; but after the expulsion of the Hyksos, or Shepherd Dynasty, by the kings of Thebes, about 1580 b.c., papyrus came more into use for the purpose.
One of the most superbly-illustrated examples is that known as the Papyrus of Ani, belonging to what is called the Theban recension of the text, which was much used from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Dynasty (1587-1060 b.c.). It will suffice, as evidence of the magical qualities attributed to the written word, to quote the following from the seventy-second chapter, as translated into sonorous English by Dr. Wallis Budge:—