uction of youth, which--in poetic phrase and in great
detail--inculcate, among other things, the practice of right conduct as
the price of happiness; a courtesy hardly less considerate than our
own; and a charity which, when certain inevitable shortcomings are
allowed for, bears comparison with almost any later system. Out of
these there are many that may properly claim a place in a series
bearing the seal of the Wisdom of the East, though they belong only to
the more objective and 'practical' side of that Wisdom.

But, as touching the books here translated--the Instructions of
Ptah-hotep and of Ke'gemni--they possess, apart from the curious nature
of their contents, a feature of the greatest interest, and an adequate
claim on the notice of all persons interested in literature and its
history. For if the datings and ascriptions in them be accepted as
trustworthy (there is no reason why they should not be so accepted),
they were composed about four thousand years before Christ, and three
thousand five hundred and fifty years before Christ, respectively. And
the significance of those remote dates is, that they are the oldest
{19} books in the world, the earliest extant specimens of the literary
art. They stand on the extreme horizon of all that ocean of paper and
ink that has become to us as an atmosphere, a fifth element, an
essential of life.

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