The land of which the Father of History declared that no other country held so many wonders, has bequeathed us, by various channels, the rumour and remnant of a strange knowledge. She has devised us enigmas insoluble, and rendered up to us signs and messages whose meaning is dark for all time. And she has left a religion, 'veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbol,' as fascinating as impenetrable for those who approach it. For into our hands the keys of these things have not been delivered; wherefore much study of them is a weariness to the flesh, and of the hazarding of interpretations there is no end. But apart from the mazes of mythology, the broken ways of history and the empty letter of a dead faith, there are, as is known to some, and as this little book professes to show, many documents which are antique, but not antiquated, possessing interest above the purely archaeological--the interest called human. Of these are the tales which recall, in incident as in style, those of the immortal collection, full of the whole glamour of the East, the _Thousand Nights and a Night_. {18} Such are the love-songs, full of the burning utterance of desire; the pathetic and even bitter dirges, whose singers have seen all the works that are done under the sun, and found all to be vanity and vexation of spirit. And such also are the didactic poems for the instruction of youth, which--in poetic phrase and in great detail--inculcate, among other things, the practice of right conduct as the price of happiness; a courtesy hardly less considerate than our own; and a charity which, when certain inevitable shortcomings are allowed for, bears comparison with almost any later system. Out of these there are many that may properly claim a place in a series bearing the seal of the Wisdom of the East, though they belong only to the more objective and 'practical' side of that Wisdom. But, as touching the books here translated--the Instructions of Ptah-hotep and of Ke'gemni--they possess, apart from the curious nature of their contents, a feature of the greatest interest, and an adequate claim on the notice of all persons interested in literature and its history. For if the datings and ascriptions in them be accepted as trustworthy (there is no reason why they should not be so accepted), they were composed about four thousand years before Christ, and three thousand five hundred and fifty years before Christ, respectively. And the significance of those remote dates is, that they are the oldest {19} books in the world, the earliest extant specimens of the literary art. They stand on the extreme horizon of all that ocean of paper and ink that has become to us as an atmosphere, a fifth element, an essential of life.