abitants of that country had been shut out from all
Mediterranean or European contact by a rigorous exclusion exceeding that
until recently practised in China and Japan. As from the inmates of the
happy valley, in Rasselas, no tidings escaped to the outer world, so, to
the European, the valley of the Nile was a region of mysteries and
marvels. At intervals of centuries, individuals, like Cecrops and
Danaus, had fled to other countries, and had attached the gratitude of
posterity to their memories for the religion, laws, or other
institutions of civilization they had conferred. The traditions
connected with them served only to magnify those uncertain legends met
with all over Asia Minor, Greece, Italy, Sicily, of the prodigies and
miracles that adventurous pirates reported they had actually seen in
their stealthy visits to the enchanted valley--great pyramids covering
acres of land, their tops rising to the heavens, yet each pyramid
nothing more than the tombstone of a king; colossi sitting on granite
thrones, the images of Pharaohs who lived in the morning of the world,
still silently looking upon the land which thousands of years before
they had ruled; of these, some obedient to the sun, sainted his approach
when touched by his morning rays; obelisks of prodigious height, carved
by superhuman skill from a single block of stone, and raised by
superhuman power erect on their everlasting pedestals, their faces
covered with mysterious hieroglyphs, a language unknown to the vulgar,
telling by whom and for what they had been constructed; temples, the
massive leaning and lowering walls of which were supported by countless
ranges of statues; avenues of sphinxes, through the shadows of which,
grim and silent, the portals of fanes might be approached; catacombs
containing the mortal remains of countless generations, each corpse
awaiting, in mysterious embalmment, a future life; labyrinths of many
hundred chambers and vaults, into which whoso entered without a clue
never again escaped, but in the sameness and solitude of those endless
windings found his sepulchre. It is impossible for us to appreciate the
sentiment of religious awe with which the Mediterranean people looked
upon the enchanted, the hoary, the civilized monarchy on the banks of
the Nile. As Bunsen says, "Egypt was to the Greeks a sphinx with an
intellectual human countenance."

[Sidenote: Its history: the old empire; the Hycksos; the new empire.]

[Sidenote: Openi