Egypt.
Notwithstanding this extensive use, the system of writing among the Egyptians continued to the end a clumsy and difficult system, partly owing to the number of pictures and symbols, and partly to the variety of the phonetic pictures. The unchanging character of the Egyptians, the symbolical and mystic sense concealed in the hieroglyphics, the religious character of these old and sacred signs, stood in the way of the change to a more simple and phonetic mode of writing. Yet the effort to obtain such a system is unmistakable. After the year 1300 B.C. a number of picture symbols were used as phonetic symbols, which up to that time had no phonetic value, and this change becomes more and more frequent in the last centuries B.C. The habit of writing the hieroglyphics on the papyrus had early led to abbreviation in writing; the pictures were represented by simple outlines more adapted to the hand; and hence arose a cursive mode of writing the hieroglyphics, the so-called "hieratic" writing, which we already (pp. 90, 94) found in use on the pyramids under the old kingdom, and which was in use on an extensive scale at the time when the new kingdom was at its height. Finally, from the hieratic writing arose a third and more abbreviated kind, the demotic, which represented the language of ordinary intercourse and the national dialect. This was in existence when Herodotus travelled in Egypt. Here we see the most marked effort to avoid the ideographic element and picture signs, and to extend the use of the phonetic symbols. Beside the remains of the picture symbols, the demotic writing employs seventeen simple phonetic symbols and some fifty symbols of syllables. The hieroglyphic and hieratic modes of writing are called on the monuments the "writing of the gods," the demotic is "the writing of the books." For us the difficulty of the hieroglyphics is materially increased by the fact that the Coptic language in the form accessible to us is removed by thousands of years from the form of words represented by the hieroglyphics of the old and new kingdom. The forms which we obtain from the records preserved in the demotic writing are about midway between those in the hieroglyphics and the forms retained in the Coptic translation of the Scriptures, and in some books of liturgies, which belong to the first centuries A.D.[279]
In the circles of the priests the traditional invocations of the gods, the rules for the proper conduct of sacrifices and feasts, for the pure conversation which is the way to life and salvation in this world and the next, were without doubt committed to writing at a very early period. When gradually extended and continued, those writings grew into a liturgical canon and ecclesiastical codex of religious and moral law, and a comprehensive collection of all the wisdom known to the priests. We learn that the Egyptian priests possessed forty-two sacred books. Regarded as a collection of religious rules in every department of civilisation and life, as the measure of holy and upright conversation, and as rules of civil law, these books passed as the writings of the god Thoth, the scribe of heaven, the god of truth and justice. The civil law also was grounded upon the rules and axioms of religion; from these it arose, and the books of civil law without doubt formed a part of the sacred law, and of the books of the priests. Of these forty-two books ten belonged to the high priest, of which eight may have been the eight books of civil law (p. 202). In that case the two others would contain the doctrine concerning the gods, and the instruction of the priests. Ten other books belonged to the temple-scribe. Of these the first contained the rules for the sacred writing; the second the geography and cosmogony; the third and fourth the arrangement of the sun, moon, and five planets; the fifth and sixth the description of Egypt and the Nile; the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth, the weights and measures, the mode of registering the temple furniture and property. Again, ten books belonged to the chamberlain. These taught the ritual and the liturgy, the offering of first-fruits and sacrifices, hymns and prayers, together with the conduct of festivals and other things of the kind, and, finally, discipline and the rules for examining the animals for sacrifices. The two books of the minstrel contained the hymns and the contemplation of the life proper for a king (p. 188). The four books of the astrologer concluded the narrower circle of the sacred writings. Of these, the first contained the arrangement of the fixed stars; the second and third the coincidences of the orbits of the sun and moon; the fourth, the rising of the constellations. Besides these sacred books the pastophors (p. 196) had six books which taught the principles and practice of medicine;[280] for the art of healing, i.e. of preserving life, also belonged to the priests. The medicine of the Egyptians is commended as early as the Homeric poems (p. 15). Herodotus assures us that in Egypt every kind of sickness had a special physician, and Diodorus states that the art was carried out strictly according to the written principles, i.e. no doubt, according to these six sacred books. A hieratic papyrus on the subject of medicine has been recently found at Thebes, which is supposed to belong to the first centuries of the restoration of the monarchy. A section of this deals with diseases of the eye.[281] Egyptian physicians were much sought after in the East (the founder of the Persian kingdom, Cyrus, procured an oculist from Egypt), until the fame of the Greek medicine about 500 B.C. threw Egyptian physicians into the shade.[282]
In the sacred books of the priests was drawn up the religious system into which the original conceptions of the gods were shaped and developed in the circles of the priests. The gods who passed for the greatest and mightiest in the various districts out of which Egypt was made up, the protecting deities of the separate localities, were here arranged in definite ranks and classes. And if, nevertheless, considerable differences can be observed in the teaching of the priests of Memphis and Thebes, they are sufficiently explained by the mode in which religion and state were developed in Egypt, and the rival position of the two great centres of ecclesiastical life. According to the doctrine of Memphis the seven highest deities were Ptah, the creative god of light of the lower country; Ra, the sun-god of Heliopolis; and Shu (Sosis, p. 50), the deity of the clear air; these three were followed by the forms belonging to the Osiris circle, on whose nature rested the moral basis of the life of the Egyptians; Seb, the father of Osiris; Osiris himself; then his opposite, Typhon; and lastly, Horus, the conqueror of Typhon.[283] The doctrine of Thebes placed Ammon at the head instead of Ptah, and in the place of Ra stood the two sun-gods of Upper Egypt, Tum (Atum, p. 51) and Mentu; these were followed by Shu, and the gods of the Osiris circle. To the seven or eight great gods was appended a circle of twelve gods, and among these Thoth and Anubis. The twelve were followed by a number of spirits, genii and demigods. With this system of gods the doctrine of the priests was connected. Even from the attributes of Ptah, Neith, and other deities, it is clear that there was among the priests a strong tendency to gather up the divine powers into the forms of Ptah, Tum, Osiris, and Ra. The teaching of the priests evidently desired to grasp the connection of life, and attain to a theogony and a theory of creation. It has been already pointed out on the authority of documents belonging to the times of the Amenemha and Sesurtesen, that the priests in their doctrine were at pains to discover the unity of the divine spirits, and to conceive the forms of the gods as manifestations of one being. They regarded the animals as the manifestations of special characteristics of the gods, and men as phænomena of a divine origin and nature, who would return to the place whence they came. To go further and grasp the heart of the system is impossible in the present condition of our researches. Conceptions and inferences of the Græco-Egyptian speculation of the time of the Ptolemies and the first centuries after Christ cannot be accepted as the true form of the old Egyptian religion, or as the doctrine of the priests of ancient Egypt.
With the Egyptians, as with other nations, poetry probably arose out of the invocations of the gods and hymns of praise and thanksgiving. Religious poetry had