o the rhetoric of endless
petitions. The tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor in the Red Sea was a piece
of simpler writing, not unpicturesque, of the marvellous type of a
Sindbad story. If all these are deficient in literary merit, they are
deeply interesting as revelations of primitive mind and manners. Of New
Kingdom tales, the story of the Two Brothers is frankly in the simplest
speech of everyday life, while others are more stilted. The demotic
stories of Khamois are simple, but the "Rape of Inaros' Cuirass" (at
Vienna) is told in a stiff and high-flown style.

In general it may be said of Egyptian literary compositions that apart
from their interest as anthropological documents they possess no merit
which would entitle them to survive. They are more or less touched by
artificiality, but so far as we are able to appreciate them at present
they very seldom attain to any degree of literary beauty. Most of the
compositions in the literary language, whether old or archaistic, are in
a stilted style and often with parallelisms of phrase like those of
Hebrew poetry. Simple prose narrative is here quite exceptional. Some
few hymns contain stanzas of ten lines, each line with a break in the
middle. There is no sign of rhyming in Egyptian poetry, and the rhythm
is not yet recognizable owing to our ignorance of the ancient
vocalization. In old Egyptian tales the narrative portions are
frequently in prose; New Egyptian and demotic contain as a rule little
else. Hymns exist in both of these later forms of the language, and a
few love songs in Late Egyptian.

See W. M. F. Petrie, _Egyptian Tales_ (2 vols., London, 1895); G.
Maspero, _Les Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne_ (3rd edition,
Paris, 1906); W. Max Muller, _Die Liebespoesie der alten Agypter_
(Leipzig, 1899). (F. LL. G.)

C. _Religion._--1. _Introductory._--Copious as are the sources of
information from which our knowledge of the Egyptian religion is drawn,
there is nevertheless no aspect of the ancient civilization of Egypt
that we really so little understand. While the youth of Egyptological
research is in part responsible for this, the reason lies still more in
the nature of the religion itself and the character of the testimony
bearing upon it. For a true appreciation of the chaotic polytheism that
reveals itself even in the earliest texts it would be necessary to be
able to trace its development, stage by stage, out of a number of naive
primitive cult