t. Their history,
written by the Chinese and translated by Father Gaubil, states that
these Tartars had not at that time the art of writing.

This art cannot have been less unknown to the Scythian Oguskan, named
Madies by the Persians and the Greeks, who conquered a part of Europe
and Asia so long before the reign of Cyrus. It is almost certain that at
that time of a hundred nations there were hardly two or three who used
characters. It is possible that in an ancient world destroyed, men knew
writing and the other arts; but in ours they are all very recent.

There remain records of another kind, which serve to establish merely
the remote antiquity of certain peoples, and which precede all the known
epochs, and all the books; these are the prodigies of architecture, like
the pyramids and the palaces of Egypt, which have resisted time.
Herodotus, who lived two thousand two hundred years ago, and who had
seen them, was not able to learn from the Egyptian priests at what time
they had been erected.

It is difficult to give to the most ancient of the pyramids less than
four thousand years of antiquity; but one must consider that these
efforts of the ostentation of the kings could only have been commenced
long after the establishment of the towns. But to build towns in a land
inundated every year, let us always remark that it was first necessary
to raise the land of the towns on piles in this land of mud, and to
render them inaccessible to the flood; it was essential, before taking
this necessary course, and before being in a state to attempt these
great works, for the people to have practised retreating during the
rising of the Nile, amid the rocks which form two chains right and left
of this river. It was necessary for these mustered peoples to have the
instruments for tilling, those of architecture, a knowledge of
surveying, with laws and a police. All this necessarily requires a
prodigious space of time. We see by the long details which face every
day the most necessary and the smallest of our undertakings, how
difficult it is to do great things, and it needs not only indefatigable
stubbornness, but several generations animated with this stubbornness.

However, whether it be Menes, Thaut or Cheops, or Rameses who erected
one or two of these prodigious masses, we shall not be the more
instructed of the history of ancient Egypt: the language of this people
is lost. We therefore know nothing but that before the most ancie