all the
suspicious mistrust of scholars, who object to having the dry results of
erudition clothed in poetic language, and who do not believe that a
treatise on archaeology can possibly be read with as much interest as a
novel.

As I have said, the Egyptians have left us no books, and had they done
so the art of deciphering hieroglyphics or even phonetic or demotic
writing is not yet assured enough to allow of absolute trust being put
in it. Happily the Egyptians performed a work of such mightiness that it
amazes the beholder. By the side of the hieroglyphic inscriptions they
carved on the walls of palaces and temples, on the sides of pylons, the
faces of the corridors and the bays of funeral chambers, on the faces of
the sarcophagi and on the stelae, on the covers and the interior
cartonnages of the mummies,--in short, on every smooth surface of rock,
whether sandstone or granite, basalt or porphyry, with an ineffaceable
line coloured with tints that the long succession of ages has not
faded,--scenes in which we find in detail the habits and customs and the
ceremonies of the oldest civilisation in the world. It seems as if those
strange and mysterious people, foreseeing the difficulty which posterity
would experience in deciphering their hieroglyphics, intrusted their
translation to drawing, and made the hypogea tell the secret kept by
the papyri.

Royal ceremonies, triumphal entries, the payments of tribute, all the
incidents of military life, of agriculture, sport, fishing, banqueting,
dances, the intimate life of the harem, all is reproduced in these
endless paintings, so clearly drawn, with the difference in races,
variety of types, shape of chariots, of weapons, of arms, of furniture,
of utensils, of food, of plants, still clearly visible to-day. A maker
of musical instruments could certainly make a harp, a lyre, or a sistrum
from the pattern of those upon which are playing the female musicians at
the funeral repast represented in one of the tombs of the necropolis of
Thebes. The model of a dog-cart in a plate of modern carriages is not
drawn more accurately than the profile of the chariot seen in the
funeral procession of the ecclesiastical scribe of Amenoph III, a king
of the eighteenth dynasty.

The author has not confined himself to these purely material details. He
has examined the funeral papyri which, more or less valuable, are found
with each mummy; he has carefully studied the allegorical signs which