From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation, medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria and especially Astarte played the chief part. They appropriated in this manner a certain number of words and phrases with which they were accustomed to interlard their discourses and writings. They thought it polite to call a door no longer by the word _ro_, but the term _tira_, and to accompany themselves no longer with the harp _bordt_, but with the same instrument under its new name _kinnor_, and to make the _salam_ in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, _aau_. They were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the country, and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a portion of the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the languages from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly. This artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into their writings, had no influence upon their method of composition. Their poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors, but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic cadence of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation of literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities in their writings which gave them popularity. A complete library of one of the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange mixture of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which were indispensable to those who were solicitous about their souls,* collections of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and philosophical treatises, letters, and legal documents. * There are found in the rubrics of many religious books, for example that dealing with the unseen world, promises of health and prosperity to the soul which, "while still on earth," had read and learned them. A similar formula appears at the end of several important chapters of the _Book of the Dead._ It would have been similar in character to the literary-possessions of an Egyptian of the Memphite period,* but the language in which it was written would not have been so stiff and dry, but would have flowed more easily, and been more sustained and better balanced. * The composition of these libraries may be gathered from the collections of papyri which have turned up from time to time, and have been sold by the Arabs to Europeans buyers; e.g. the Sallier Collection, the Anastasi Collections, and that of Harris. They have found their way eventually into the British Museum or the Museum at Leyden, and have been published in the _Select Papyri_ of the former, or in the _Monuments Egyptiens_ of the latter.