ng the sources of information regarding
pre-Christian Egypt, the native sources, first opened to us by
Champollion, are infinitely the most important. With very few exceptions
they are contemporary with the events which they record. Of the
composition of history and the description of their own manners and
customs by the Egyptians for posterity, few traces have reached our day.
Consequently the information derived from their monuments, in spite of
their great abundance, is of a fortuitous character. For one early
papyrus that survives, many millions must have perished. If the journals
of accounts, the letters and business documents, had come down to us _en
masse_, they would no doubt have yielded to research the history and
life of Egypt day by day; but those that now represent a thousand years
of the Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom together would not half fill an
ordinary muniment chest. A larger proportion of the records on stone
have survived, but that an event should be inscribed on stone depends on
a variety of circumstances and not necessarily on its importance. There
may seem to be a great abundance of Egyptian monuments, but they have to
cover an enormous space of time, and even in the periods which are best
represented, gravestones recording the names of private persons with a
prayer or two are scarcely material for history. A scrap of annals has
been found extending from the earliest times to the Vth Dynasty, as well
as a very fragmentary list of kings reaching nearly to the end of the
Middle Kingdom, to help out the scattered data of the other monuments.
As to manners and customs, although we possess no systematic
descriptions of them from a native source, the native artists and
scribes have presented us with exceptionally rich materials in the
painted and sculptured scenes of the tombs from the Old and Middle
Kingdoms and the New Empire. For the Deltaic dynasties these sources
fail absolutely, the scenes being then either purely religious or
conventional imitations of the earlier ones.

Fortunately the native records are largely supplemented by others:
valuable information comes from cuneiform literature, belonging to two
widely separated periods. The first group is contemporary with the
XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties and consists in the first place of the Tell
el Amarna tablets with others related to them, containing the reports of
governors of the Syrian possessions of Egypt, and the correspondence of
the king