Books of many kinds had of course been written for centuries before Ptah-hotep of Memphis summarised, for the benefit of future generations, the leading principles of morality current in his day; even before the Vizier, five hundred years earlier, gave to his children the scroll which they prized above all things on earth;[2] but those have perished and these remain. There are lists of titles which have a large sound, and prayers to the Gods for all good things, on the tombs and monuments of kings and magnates long before the time of Ke'gemni; but those are not books in any sense of that word. Even the long, strange chants and spells engraven in the Royal Pyramids over against Memphis are later than the time of Ptah-hotep, and cannot be called books in their present form, although some of them apparently originated before the First Dynasty.[3] Nor do the oldest books of any other country approach these two in antiquity. To draw {20} comparisons between them let us, in imagination, place ourselves at the period at which Ptah-hotep lived, that is, about B.C. 3550, 'under King Isosi, living for ever,' and take a glance at futurity. The Babylonians are doubtless exercising their literary talents; but they will leave nothing worthy the name of book to the far posterity of fifty-four centuries hence. Thirteen centuries shall pass before Hammurabi, King of Babylon, drafts the code of laws that will be found at that time. Only after two thousand years shall Moses write on the origin of things, and the Vedas be arranged in their present form. It will be two-and-a-half thousand years before the Great King of Jerusalem will set in order many proverbs and write books so much resembling, in form and style, that of Ptah-hotep;[4] before the source and summit of European literature will write his world epics. For the space of years between Solomon and ourselves, great though it seem, is not so great as that between Solomon and Ptah-hotep. The number of extant texts of the class to which the subjoined immediately belong is not large in proportion to the rest of Egyptian MSS., {21} but they seem to be representative of the class, being diverse in date and subject, but similar in form. There is great uniformity in the arrangement of most of them, in the following respects. They have as title the word 'Instruction' (_seb'oyet_), and are written by a father for the advantage of his son; they are very poetic in their arrangement of words and phrases, and are usually divided into short sections or paragraphs by the use of red ink for the first sentence of each. Such is the Instruction of Ptah-hotep on morality (the finest of its class); the Instruction of King Amenemhe'et on the hollowness of friendship and other matters; the Instruction of Deu'of, the son of Kherti, on the excellence of the literary life; and others. In many respects and in many details they greatly resemble the didactic works of the _Old Testament_ and _Apocrypha_.