he country, for from it came the
means to execute other works, and in it began that toil, training, and
skill indispensable in rearing the monuments and doing those things
which have made Egypt famous forever, and preserved to us a knowledge
of the language, religion, modes of living, and history of that
wonderful people who held the Nile valley. No civilized person who has
looked on the pyramid of Ghizeh, the temple of Karnak, and the tombs of
the pharaohs in the Theban region, can ever forget them. But in those
monuments are preserved things of far greater import than they
themselves are. In the tombs and temples of Egypt we see on stone and
papyrus how that immense work of making speech visible was
accomplished, that task of presenting language to the eye instead of
the ear, and preserving the spoken word so as to give it to eye or ear
afterwards. In other terms, we have the history of writing from its
earliest beginnings to the point at which we connect it with the system
used now by all civilized nations excepting the Chinese. In those
monuments are preserved the history of religion in Egypt, not from the
beginning of human endeavor to explain first what the world is and then
what we ourselves are and what we and the world mean together, but from
a time far beyond any recorded by man in other places.

Egyptians had the genius which turned a narrow strip of Abyssinian mud
and a triangular patch of swamp at the end of it into the most fruitful
land of antiquity. They had also that genius which impels man to look
out over the horizon around him, see more than the material problems of
life, and gaze into the beyond, gaze intently and never cease gazing
till he finds what his mind seeks. It was the possession of these two
kinds of genius and the union of the two which made the position of
Egypt in history unique and unapproachable.

The greatness of Egypt lay primarily in her ideas, and was achieved
through a perfect control over labor by intellect. While this control
was exerted even approximately in accordance with the nation's
historical calling, it was effectual and also unchallenged. But when
the exercise of power, with the blandishments and physical pleasures
which always attend it, had become dearer to the priesthood and to
pharaohs than aught else on earth or in their ideals, then began the
epoch of Egypt's final doom: foreign bondage and national ruin.

The action presented in the volume before us relates to