The necessary corrective to this one-sided view of a great nation is given by their books, and particularly by the romantic fiction which they were the first nation to cultivate. Erman has said that “the romances are not to be relied upon; the country which they describe is not Egypt but fairyland.” This may be so as regards scenery and detail; but the writer of the Tale of the Doomed Prince, or of Setna and the Magic Roll, whether he may cast the scene of his story in Naharina or in Egypt, cannot help revealing in his tale the habitual outlook on life of the Egypt of his time; and in this respect the romances are far more to be relied upon than either the vainglorious vauntings of a royal inscription or the carefully dressed-up moralisings of a scribe. The picture which they give of the Egyptian nature is that of a simple, kindly race, singularly free from the savage cruelty which disgraced their great rivals the Assyrians, loving pleasure, and all the brightness and beauty of life, with a straightforward and childlike affection, not greedy of power, but ready to live and let live, singularly advanced in their conception of family life, and especially worthy of our admiration in the respect which they paid to women, and the position accorded to woman from the very earliest times. It is time to rid our minds of that sinister conception of the Egyptian as a dark, uncanny, supernaturally wise and diabolically malignant being, which is still to be found in second-rate fiction, and in the vain imaginings of gropers in the occult and the miraculous, and to see this great race as it really was--a race of true children of the Sun, leading in the dawn of the world’s story a clean, healthy, open-air life, with its own imperfections and weaknesses, but with its plain virtues as well, and with a moral standard not unworthy of comparison with that of any race in the world. What they have accomplished is plain for all the world to see; surely it is common sense to see also that such things were not the work of gloomy fanatics or of drivelling dabblers in the black arts, but of men. [Illustration: 31. XXth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TEMPLE OF RAMSES III, MEDINET HABU.]