t our friend the scribe is going to
write upon it. How does he go about it? To begin with, he draws from his
belt a long, narrow wooden case, and lays it down beside him. This is
his palette; rather a different kind of palette from the one which
artists use. It is a piece of wood, with one long hollow in it, and two
or three shallow round ones. The long hollow holds a few pens, which are
made out of thin reeds, bruised at the ends, so that their points are
almost like little brushes. The shallow round hollows are for holding
ink--black for most of the writing, red for special words, and perhaps
one or two other colours, if the scribe is going to do a very fine piece
of work. So he squats down, cross-legged, dips a reed-pen in the ink,
and begins. As he writes he makes his little figures of men and beasts
and birds face all in the one direction, and his readers will know that
they must always read from the point towards which the characters face.
Now and then, when he comes to some specially important part, he draws,
in gay colours, a little picture of the scene which the words describe.

Now, you can understand that this picture-writing was not very easy work
to do when you had nothing but a bruised reed to draw all sorts of
animals with. Gradually the pictures grew less and less like the
creatures they stood for to begin with, and at last the old hieroglyphic
broke down into a kind of running hand, where a stroke or two might
stand for an eagle, a lion, or a man. And very many of the Egyptian
books are written in this kind of broken-down hieroglyphic, which is
called "hieratic," or priestly writing. But some of the finest and
costliest books were still written in the beautiful old style.

On their papyrus rolls the Egyptians wrote all sorts of things--books of
wise advice, stories like the fairy-tales which we have been hearing,
legends of the gods, histories, and poems; but the book that is oftenest
met with is one of their religious books. It is nearly always called the
"Book of the Dead" now, and some people call it the Egyptian Bible, but
neither of these names is the right one. Certainly, it is not in the
least like the Bible, and the Egyptians themselves never called it the
Book of the Dead. They called it "The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day,"
and the reason they gave it that name was because they believed that if
their dead friends knew all the wisdom that was written in it, they
would escape all the dangers of