nderstood and enjoyed them, others found them almost beyond their
comprehension, and complained bitterly of their obscurity. The later
writers followed them pretty closely, in taking pains, on the one hand
to express fresh ideas in the forms consecrated by approved and ancient
usage, or when they failed to find adequate vehicles to convey new
thoughts, resorting in their lack of imagination to the foreigner for the
requisite expressions. The necessity of knowing at least superficially,
something of the dialect and writings of Asia compelled the Egyptian
scribes to study to some degree the literature of Phonecia and of
Chaldaea.

[Illustration: 350.jpg Page Image with Furniture]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from photographs of the objects in
the Museums of Berlin and Gizeh.

From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation,
medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria
and especially Astarte played the chief part. They appropriated in
this manner a certain number of words and phrases with which they were
accustomed to interlard their discourses and writings. They thought it
polite to call a door no longer by the word _ro_, but the term _tira_,
and to accompany themselves no longer with the harp _bordt_, but with
the same instrument under its new name _kinnor_, and to make the _salam_
in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, _aau_. They
were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their
affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the
country, and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a
portion of the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the
languages from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly.
This artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into
their writings, had no influence upon their method of composition. Their
poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors,
but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic
cadence of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation
of literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities
in their writings which gave them popularity. A complete library of one
of the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange
mixture of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which
were indispensable to those who were solicitou