ho receives the setting sun into her arms; and Osiris, the
judge of the dead. The granite statues have outlived the gods!

[Sidenote: The hieroglyphics.]

Moreover, the hieroglyphics furnish intrinsic evidence that among this
people arose the earliest attempts at the perpetuation and imparting of
ideas by writing. Though doubtless it was in the beginning a mere
picture-writing, like that of the Mexicans, it had already, at the first
moment we meet with it, undergone a twofold development--ideographic and
phonetic; the one expressing ideas, the other sounds. Under the
Macedonian kings the hieroglyphics had become restricted to religious
uses, showing conclusively that the old priesthood had never recovered
the terrible blows struck against it by Cambyses and Ochus. From that
time forth they were less and less known. It is said that one of the
Roman emperors was obliged to offer a reward for the translation of an
obelisk. To the early Christian the hieroglyphic inscription was an
abomination, as full of the relics of idolatry, and indicating an
inspiration of the devil. He defaced the monuments wherever he could
make them yield; and in many cases has preserved them for us by
plastering them over to hide them from his sight.

In those enigmatical characters an extensive literature once existed, of
which the celebrated books of Hermes were perhaps a corruption or a
relic; a literature embracing compositions on music, astronomy,
cosmogony, geography, medicine, anatomy, chemistry, magic, and many
other subjects that have amused the curiosity of man. Yet of those
characters the most singular misconceptions have been entertained almost
to our own times. Thus, in 1802, Palin thought that the papyri were the
Psalms of David done into Chinese, Lenoir that they were Hebrew
documents; it was even asserted that the inscriptions in the temple of
Denderah were the 100th Psalm, a pleasant ecclesiastical conceit,
reminding one who has seen in Egyptian museums old articles of brass and
glass, of the stories delivered down from hand to hand, that brass was
first made at the burning of Corinth, and glass first discovered by
shipwrecked mariners, who propped their kettle, while it boiled, on
pieces of nitre.

[Sidenote: Antiquity of the Egyptian monarchy.]

[Sidenote: Causes of the rise of civilization.]

Thousands of years have passed since the foundation of the first
Egyptian dynasty. The Pyramids have seen the old empire, the Hyckso