ecked free development and continuous improvement.
Everything subserved a gloomy religion and a powerful priesthood, who held
the people in terror and superstition. Their doctrine, that, after the
death of man, the soul could not enter into her everlasting repose unless
the body were preserved, occasioned the singular custom of embalming the
corpses of the departed to preserve them from decay, and of treasuring them
up in the shape of {21} mummies in shaft-like passages and mortuary
chambers. Through this belief, the priests, who, as judges of the dead,
possessed the power of giving up the bodies of the sinful to corruption,
and by this means occasioning the transmigration of their souls into the
bodies of animals, obtained immense authority. Notwithstanding the
magnificence of their architectural productions, and the vast technical
skill and dexterity in sculpture and mechanical appliances which they
display, the Egyptians have produced but little in literature or the
sciences; and even this little was locked up from the people in the
mysterious hieroglyphical writing, which was understood by the priests
alone.[19] The following translation is a quotation from a Latin work:
"Among the ancient Egyptians, from whom we learn the rudiments of speech,
besides the three common kinds of letters, other descriptions of characters
are used which have been generally consecrated to their peculiar mysteries.
In a dissertation on this subject, that celebrated antiquarian (_conditor
stromatum_), Clement, of Alexandria, teaches in his writings, thus: 'Those
who are taught Egyptian, first, indeed, learn the grammar and chirography
called letter-writing, that is, which is apt for ordinary correspondence;
secondly, however, that used by the priests, called sacred writing, to
commemorate sacred things; the last also, hieroglyphic, meaning sacred
sculpture, one of the first elements of which is {22} cyriologism, meaning,
properly speaking, enunciating truth by one or another symbol, or in other
words, portraying the meaning by significant emblems.' With Clement agrees
the Arabian, Abenephi, who uses this language: (This Arabic writing is
preserved in the Vatican library, but not as yet printed: it is often
quoted by Athanasius Kircher, in his Treatise on the Pamphilian Obelisk,
whence these and other matters stated by us have been taken.) 'But there
were four kinds of writing among the Egyptians: First, that in use among
the populace and the