With the foregoing references to some of the most venerable documents that have yet come to light, we may leave Assyria for Egypt, no longer a land of marvel and of mystery, with its past hidden as the sources of the great river of which that land is "the gift" were long hidden. For the discovery of the key to that past, and of the vast waters that feed the Nile, alike lie within the present century. Till then the veil of Isis hung over the significance of the inscriptions on coffin, sepulchral box, stele, tomb, obelisk, and temple, and over the interpretation of characters written on papyri rolls centuries before the foundations of Athens were laid. Of these records, be it noted, Death, which sweeps away man and the memory of him from his fellows, has been more than aught else--in Egypt, and indeed, all the world over, but notably in Egypt--the preserver. And this because there all that appertained to the departed was guarded with the most jealous care. The tomb, as often elsewhere, was modelled on the plan of the house, and supplied with utensils, food, and drink, or adorned with the painted representations of these things on the walls, for the needs of the _ka_, or double, _sahn_, or spirit, or some other of the eight Egyptian ontological divisions of the individual. Like the other pictographic systems already surveyed, the Egyptian interests us because it has preserved the traces of its origin, adding its "cloud of witnesses" to the identity of the several stages of development marking the scripts of all literate peoples. Until very recently, its chief interest lay in the belief that it is the parent of the family of alphabets of the civilised world; but, as will be shown later on, the theory is no longer tenable. Although the earliest known examples of Egyptian hieroglyphs (Greek _hieros_, "sacred," and _glypho_, "to carve," so called in the belief that they were used solely by the priests) contain alphabetic characters, they have come down as highly elaborated types of picture-writing, the changes in which during the long period covered by the records being so slight that, to cite Professor Whitney, "it is like a language which has never forgotten the derivations of its words, or corrupted their etymological form, however much it may have altered its meaning." Therefore, although the Egyptians had developed alphabet-signs five thousand years B.C. they never advanced to the stage of their sole and independent use, partly because of the conservative instincts of the race, which, fostering veneration for the old, was reluctant to alter anything, and partly because, as Professor Flinders Petrie has pointed out, their "treatment of everything was essentially decorative, the love of form and drawing being in Egypt a greater force than amongst any other ancient people. Babylon and China, from want of sufficient artistic taste, allowed their pictorial writing to sink into a mere string of debased and conventional forms; the Egyptians,