Its date would be about 3650 B.C. if we were {34} to follow,--as does the translator of the most easily procurable English edition, Mr. Gunn,--the chronology of Flinders Petrie. Recent advances in our knowledge of Egyptology, however, have brought the dates nearer to us than they were placed before. Such men as Breasted of Chicago, and Maspero, would probably take from three hundred to five hundred years from this date. There is a definite tendency in all the histories to bring dates much nearer to the present than before. For a time, the older one could place a date the more scholarly seemed to be the appeal of such an opinion. Now the tendency is all the other way. Even the latest date that can be given for Ptah Hotep, or Phtahhotpû, would still make his little book the oldest book in the world, however. Fortunately for us the manuscripts of the instructions of Ptah Hotep that have come down to us are in much better condition than those of most of the other instructions of similar kinds formerly used in the schools that have been preserved. In some of these there are a great many errors of writing, spelling and grammar with the corrections of the master above in a different-colored ink. Verily, education has not changed much in spite of six millenniums, or very nearly so, of supposed progress since these were written, for the whole process is as familiar as it can be. As Mr. Battiscombe Gunn says in his Introduction to his edition "a schoolboy's scrawl over 3,000 years {35} old is no easy thing to translate." We would seem, however, to have been blessed in the preservation of this oldest book in the world, either of the original copies set by the masters or of such copies as were made by advanced students. The series of lucky chances that have combined to bring to us, in the comparatively perfect form in which it exists, this oldest book in the world is interesting to contemplate. Without them we would have no idea of how closely the first people of whom we have any definite records in history resembled us in every essential quality of humanity, even to the ways and modes by which they tried to lift humanity out of the barbaric selfishness inherent in it to what is higher and nobler in its nature. With this surprising resurrection of our school-teaching methods from the past it is interesting to study other phases of the education of these early times, and at the same time to note the accomplishments of the men, of the period, their tastes, the state of their culture as regards the arts and crafts and personal adornment and the decoration of their houses and buildings of various kinds. Flinders Petrie, the distinguished English Egyptologist, in an article on "The Romance of Early Civilization," printed recently in _The Independent_ (New York), said: