The discovery of the Cyprus treasure by General Di Cesnola, * romantic as it was, bears no comparison in point of dramatic interest with the revelation which awaited the Boolak officials at Dayr-el-Baharee. Slowly and with difficulty the one burrowed onward from chamber to chamber, entering gradually into possession of successive hoards of bronze and silver and gold. The others, threading their way among desecrated tombs, and under the shadow of stupendous precipices, followed their trembling guide to a spot unparalleled even in the desert for gaunt solemnity. Here, behind a huge fragment of fallen rock, perhaps dislodged for that purpose from the cliffs overhead, they were shown the entrance to a pit so ingeniously hidden that, to use their own words, one might have passed

The

it twenty times without observing it." Into this pit they were lowered by means of a rope. shaft, which was two metres square by eleven and a half metres in depth, ended in a narrow subterraneous passage trending westward. This passage, after pursuing a straight direction for a distance of rather more than seven metres, turned off abruptly to the right, and stretched away northward into endless night.

Now stooping where the roof was low, now stumbling where the floor was uneven, now descending a flight of roughly-hewn stairs, and with every step penetrating deeper and further into the heart of the mountain, the intruders groped their way, each with his flickering candle in his hand. Pieces of broken mummy-cases and fragments of linen bandages strewed the floor. Against the walls were piled boxes filled with porcelain statuettes, libation jars of bronze and terra cotta, and canopic vases of precious Lycopolitan alabaster. In the corner to the left, where the long passage branched northward, flung carelessly down in a tumbled heap, perhaps by the hand of the last officiating priest, lay the funeral canopy of Queen Isi-emKheb.

Then came several huge sarcophagi of painted wood; and further on still, some standing upright, some laid at length, a crowd of mummy-cases fashioned in human form, with folded hands and solemn faces and ever-wakeful eyes, each emblazoned with the name and titles of its occupant. Here lay Queen Hathor Honttauï, wife of Pinotem I.; yonder stood Seti I.;

* Pr. Dee Chesnōla. An account of his discoveries will be given further on.

then came Amenhotep I. and Thothmes II.; and further still, Ahmes I., and Sekenen-Ra, and Thothmes III., and Queen Ahmes Nofretari, and Ramses, surnamed the Great.

The men of to-day, brought face to face with the greatest kings of Pharaonic Egypt, stood bewildered, and asked each other if they were dreaming. They had come hither expecting at most to find the mummies of a few petty princes of the comparatively recent Her-Hor line. They found themselves confronted by the mortal remains of heroes who, till this moment, had survived only as names far echoed down the corridors of Time.

A few yards further still, and they stood on the threshold of a sepulchral chamber, literally piled to the roof with sarcophagi of enormous size. Brilliant with gilding and color, and as highly varnished as if but yesterday turned out from the workshops of the Memnonium, the decorations of these coffins showed them to belong to the period of the Pinotems and Piankhis.*

To enumerate all the treasures found in this chamber would be to write a supplement to the catalogue of the Boolak Museum. Enough that each member of the Amenide family was buried with the ordinary mortuary outfit, consisting of vases, libation jars, funereal statuettes, etc. Richer in these other-world goods than any of the rest was Queen Isi-em-Kheb. Besides statuettes, libation jars, and the like, she was provided with a sumptuous funereal repast, consisting of gazelle haunches, trussed geese, calves' heads, dried grapes, dates, dôm-palm nuts, and the like, the meats being mummified and bandaged, and the whole packed in a large rush hamper, sealed with her husband's unbroken seal. Nor was her sepulchral toilet forgotten. With her were found her ointment bottles, a set of alabaster cups, some goblets of exquisite variegated glass, and a marvellous collection of huge full-dress wigs, curled and frizzed, and enclosed each in a separate basket. As the food was entombed with her for her refreshment, so were these things deposited in the grave for her use and adornment at that supreme hour of bodily resurrection when the justified dead, clothed, fed, perfumed, and anointed, should go forth from the sepulchre into everlasting day.

And now a startling incident, or series of incidents, took place. Carried from lip to lip, from boat to boat, news flies * These antiquities would thus be nearly three thousand years old.

fast in Egypt. Already it was known far and wide that these kings and queens of ancient time were being conveyed to Cairo, and for more than fifty miles below Thebes the villagers turned out en masse, not merely to stare at the piled decks as the steamers went by, but to show respect to the illustrious dead. Women with dishevelled hair running along the banks and shrieking the death-wail, men ranged in solemn silence, and firing their guns in the air, greeted the Pharaohs as they passed. Never, assuredly, did history repeat itself more strangely than when Ramses and his peers, after more than three thousand years of sepulture, were borne along the Nile with funeral honors. Contributed to Harper's Magazine," 1882.

66

CLEOPATRA'S PROGRESS DOWN THE CYDNUS.

The barge she sat in, like a burnished throne,

Burnt on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that

The winds were love-sick with them: the oars were silver;

Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made

The water which they beat to follow faster,

As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggared all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth of gold, of tissue),
O'er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colored fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid, did......

Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,

So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes,
And made their bends adornings: at the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned in the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,

And made a gap in nature.

SHAKSPEARE: Antony and Cleopatra, act ii., scene 2.

THE LITERATURE AND THE MECHANICAL ACHIEVEMENTS OF ANCIENT EGYPT.

REV. GEORGE RAWLINSON, M.A. (b. 1815).

(Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford, Canon of Canterbury, etc., etc.)

1. Literature of Ancient Egypt.

Intellectually, the Egyptians must take rank among the foremost nations of remote antiquity, but cannot compare with the great European races, whose rise was later, the Greeks and Romans. Their minds possessed much subtlety and acuteness; they were fond of composition, and made considerable advances in many of the sciences; they were intelligent, ingenious, speculative. It is astonishing what an extensive literature they possessed at a very early date-books on religion, on morals, law, rhetoric, arithmetic, mensuration, geometry, medicine, books of travels, and, above all, novels! But the merit of the works is slight. The novels are vapid, the medical treatises interlarded with charms and exorcisms, the travels devoid of interest, the general style of all the books forced and stilted. Egypt may in some particulars have stimulated Greek thought, directing it into new lines, and giving it a basis to work upon; but otherwise it cannot be said that the world owes much of its intellectual progress to this people, about whose literary productions there is always something that is weak and childish.

Another defect in the Egyptian character was softness and inclination to luxurious living. Drunkenness was a common vice among the young; and among the upper class generally sensual pleasure and amusement were made ordinarily the ends of existence. False hair was worn; dyes and cosmetics were used to produce an artificial beauty; great banquets were frequent; games and sports of a thousand different kinds were in vogue ; dress was magnificent; equipages were splendid; life was passed in feasting, sport, and a constant succession of enjoyments. It is true that some seem not to have been spoiled by their self-indulgence, or at any rate to have retained in old age a theoretic knowledge of what was right; but the general effect of such a life cannot but have been hurtful to the character ; and the result is seen in the gradual decline of the Egyptian power, and the successive subjections of the country by hardier

and stronger races, Ethiopians, Assyrians, Persians, and Macedonian Greeks.

A general feature of Egyptian writing, in its more ambitious flights, is a frequent and abrupt change from the first or second to the third person, with as sudden a return from the third to the first or second, and an equally abrupt change of tense. It is supposed that these startling transitions, for which there is no discernible reason and no discoverable, or, at any rate, no discovered law, were viewed as elegances of style under the Egyptian standard of taste, and were thus especially affected by those who aspired to be considered "fine writers."

Example of Egyptian Lyrical Poetry.

From the "Song of the Harper" (written between 1703 and 1462 B.C.). “Take thy pleasure to-day;

Mind thee of joy and delight!

Soon life's pilgrimage ends,

And we pass to silence and night.

Patriarch, perfect and pure,

Neserhotep, blessed one, thou
Didst finish thy course upon earth,

And art with the blessed ones now.

Men pass to the Silent Shore,

And their place doth know them no more.

'They are as they never had been

Since the sun went forth upon high;

They sit on the banks of the stream
That floweth in stillness by.
Thy soul is among them; thou
Dost drink of the sacred tide,

Having the wish of thy heart—

At peace ever since thou hast died.

Give bread to the man who is poor,

And thy name shall be blest evermore."

The Egyptian novels or romances have attracted more attention than any other portion of their literature. They are full of most improbable adventure, and deal largely in the supernatural. The doctrine of metempsychosis is a common feature in them; and the death of the hero or heroine, or both, causes no interruption of the narrative. Animals address men in speech, and are readily understood by them. Even trees have the same power.

The dead constantly come to life again; and