I must acknowledge that my respect for the good sense and accomplishments of my Egyptian allies by no means became more profound as our acquaintance became more intimate: on the contrary, all that Juvenal, in a moment, as might have been supposed, of discontent, had held up to ridicule of their superstitions and their depravity, became, as it were, displayed before my eyes, as the details of their mythology became more intelligible. That Plato professed to have learned much during a long residence in Egypt I can easily believe: he may very probably have derived from thence some hints, that led to his own purer doctrines of the immortality of the soul, although he may have been tempted to exaggerate a little the other advantages of his travels in search of truth; but that Pythagoras ever professed to have acquired any solid knowledge from the Egyptians, appears to me to be very inconsistent with what we know of the history of this illustrious philosopher, speculative and visionary as some of his arithmetical metaphysics seem to have been. I shall enter into some further details of my conclusions, in the words which I have already employed in the article EGYPT. “By means of the knowledge of the hieroglyphical characters, which has been already obtained, we are fully competent to form a general idea of the nature of the inscriptions on the principal Egyptian monuments that are extant. Numerous as they are, there is scarcely one of them which we are not able to refer to the class either of sepulchral or of votive inscriptions; astronomical and chronological there seem to be none, since the numerical characters, which have been perfectly ascertained, have not yet been found to occur in such a form as they necessarily must have assumed in the records of this description: of a historical nature, we can only find the triumphal, which are often sufficiently distinguishable, but they may also always be referred to the votive; since whoever, related his own exploits thought it wisest to attribute the glory of them to some deity, and whoever recorded those of another was generally disposed to intermix divine honours with his panegyric. It has, indeed, been asserted, that the Egyptians were not in the habit of deifying any mortal persons; but the inscription of Rosetta is by no means the only one in which the sovereigns of Egypt are inserted in the number of its deities; the custom is observable in monuments of a much earlier age: indeed, in such a country, it might be considered as a kind of dilemma of degradation, whether it was most ridiculous to be made a divinity, or to be excluded from so plebeian an assemblage; but flattery is more prone to err by commission than by omission, and, consequently, we find the terms king and god very generally inseparable. The sepulchral inscriptions, from the attention that was paid in Egypt to the obsequies of the dead, appear, on the whole, to constitute the most considerable part of the Egyptian literature