A Child's History of the World

by V. M. Hillyer

One day a man was digging nearby this Rosetta Mouth when he dug up a stone something like a tombstone with several kinds of writing on it. The top writing was in pictures which we now call hieroglyphics, and no one understood what it meant. Below this was written what was supposed to be the same story in the Greek language, and a great many people do understand Greek. All one had to do, therefore, to find out the meaning of the hieroglyphics, was to compare the two writings. It was like reading secret writing when we know what the letters stand for. You may have tried to solve a puzzle in the back of your magazine, and this was just such an interesting puzzle, only there was no one to tell the answer in the next number.

The puzzle was not so easy as it sounds, however, for it took a man almost twenty years to solve it. That is a long time for any one to spend in trying to solve a puzzle, isn’t it? But after this “key” to the puzzle was found, men were able to read all of the hieroglyphics in Egypt and so to find out what happened in that country long before Christ was born.

This stone is called the Rosetta Stone, from the Rosetta Mouth of the Nile where it was found. It is now in the great British Museum in London and is very famous, because from it we were able to learn so much history which we otherwise would not have known.

Egypt was ruled over by a king who was called a Pharaoh. When he died his son became the Pharaoh and so on. All the other people were divided into classes, and the children in each class usually became just what their fathers had been. It was very unusual for an Egyptian to start at the bottom and work up to the top, as a poor boy in this country may do, though once in a great while this happened even in Egypt, as we shall see by and by.

The highest class of people were called priests. They were not like priests or ministers of the church nowadays, however, for there was no church at that time. The priests made the religion and rules, which every one had to obey as everybody does the laws of our land.

But the priests were not only priests; they were doctors and lawyers and engineers, as well. They were the best-educated class, and they were the only people who knew how to read and write, for it was very difficult, as you might suppose, to learn how to read and write hieroglyphics.

The next highest class to the priests were the soldiers, and below these were the lower classes—farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, merchants, mechanics, and last of all the swineherds.

The Egyptians did not worship one God as we do. They believed in hundreds of gods and goddesses, and they had a special god for every sort of thing, who ruled over and had charge of that thing—a god of the farm, a god of the home, and so on. Some of their gods were good and some were bad, but the Egyptians prayed to them all.

Osiris was the chief god, and Isis was his wife. Osiris was the god of farming and judge of the dead. Their son Horus had the head of a hawk.

Many of their gods had bodies of men with heads of animals. Animals they thought sacred. The dog and the cat were sacred animals. The ibis, which was a bird like a stork, was another. Then there was the beetle, which was called a scarab. If any one killed a sacred animal he was put to death, for the Egyptians thought it much worse to kill a sacred and holy creature than to kill even a human being.