_Writing in Egypt 5000 B.C._ The origin of writing, that is of the art of transmitting information by means of symbols representing speech, is, like the origin of every other invention, obscure and uncertain. It is not the proud Aryan, nor his elder brother the Semite, who can claim the honour of the invention. It belongs neither to Japhet nor to Shem (convenient eponyms) but to the despised Ham, with whom they are unwilling to acknowledge kinship. Four thousand years before Christ (the very period at which, in Milton's opinion, Adam and Eve were banished from Paradise) the people of the Nile Valley formed a rich and powerful monarchy, with an old civilisation, and possessed the arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and writing. Their writing was chiefly upon stone monuments, and recorded the deeds of their Kings or the greatness of their Gods. They also wrote upon leaves of papyrus the forms of prayer and eulogy which were buried with their dead. Among the surviving written productions of that great monarchy is a work containing the Moral Precepts of Ptah-Hotep. Written in the language of Khem (old Egypt), and in the hieratic character, upon papyrus, it is "the oldest book in the world." The period of its composition is more ancient than the date of the writing, which, by internal evidence, has been proved to be over 2000 B.C. It is now in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and is known by the name of the Papyrus Prisse. As there can be no question that hieroglyphic writing (engraving) upon stone was considerably anterior to the evolution of the cursive hieratic written with pen and ink upon papyrus; and as there is a hieroglyphic inscription on stone in the Ashmolean Museum {6}which is assigned to 4000 B.C.--we must infer that the real age of Egyptian writing is beyond our ken. It must be at the least six thousand years old; and there are numerous examples in lapidar inscriptions which represent the millennium preceding the date of the Prisse Papyrus. With this book, written several centuries before Moses dwelt in the land of Egypt, a sketch of the history of writing may modestly begin. It must not be imagined that the dates of Egyptian and Babylonian documents are based upon enthusiastic conjecture, or upon unaided calculation of the years assigned to the lives and reigns of monarchs in their newly discovered and deciphered records. Josephus and Eusebius have preserved fragments of older historical writers, among them portions of the lost Chronicles of Berossus the Chaldæan and Manetho the Egyptian, whose works were written in Greek in the fourth and third centuries before Christ. In former days, when scholars were nurtured upon the Christian chronology which counted the birth of Christ as A.M. 4004, or A.M. 5870, according as the Hebrew Bible or the Septuagint was adopted as the authority for dates, it was the custom to deride as fabulous the immense lists of Chaldean and Egyptian dynasties, which spoiled the