Egyptian Literature: Comprising Egyptian tales, hymns, litanies, invocations, the Book of the Dead, and cuneiform writings

of discoveries in the valley of the Nile with which it is hard for ordinary students to keep pace. Our knowledge of Egyptian life to-day is far clearer and more complete than Bentley's or Porson's acquaintance with the antiquities of Greece and Rome, and we have far more complete access to the treasures of Egyptian literature than Dante or Thomas Aquinas had to the remains of Attic poets and mystics. We know exactly how an Egyptian of the twelfth dynasty dressed; what was the position of women in Egypt; and what uniform was worn by the Egyptian soldiers who took part in the campaign against Khitasis. We can see Rameses II riding in his war-chariot; we know the very names of the horses by whose side his tame lion is running and thirsting for the blood of his master's foes. We know all about the domestic animals, the funeral customs, the trades, the gods, the agriculture of the Nile valley thirty centuries ago. We see the whole many-sided civilization portrayed in the brightest colors in the poetry, the books of ritual, the hieratic inscriptions, the tablets, papyri, and hieroglyphics which day by day come to light in exhaustless abundance from the mounds and ruins of that fertile plain that stretches from Thebes to the Mareotic lake. For instance, we can learn exact particulars about the mode in which Rameses II made war, from the poem of Penta-Our, a Theban writer of the fourteenth century b.c. It is only by a figure of speech that this poem can be called an epic; it is rather a historical narrative couched in terms of poetic exaggeration with the object of flattering the royal vanity of Pharaoh. The campaign in which Rameses then engaged was directed [pg iv] against Kadesh, a city built on an island in the Orontes. It is, according to Penta-Our, inhabited by a people known as Khita, whose spies are brought into the tent of Rameses and questioned as to the whereabouts of the King of Kadesh. The spies are forced by blows to answer, and they tell the Egyptian monarch that the King of the Khita “is powerful with many soldiers, and with chariot soldiers, and with their harness, as many as the sand of the seashore, and they are ready to fight behind Kadesh.” The King is very angry; for he had been deceived by false news to…