King Isosi, living for ever,' and take
a glance at futurity.

The Babylonians are doubtless exercising their literary talents; but
they will leave nothing worthy the name of book to the far posterity of
fifty-four centuries hence. Thirteen centuries shall pass before
Hammurabi, King of Babylon, drafts the code of laws that will be found
at that time. Only after two thousand years shall Moses write on the
origin of things, and the Vedas be arranged in their present form. It
will be two-and-a-half thousand years before the Great King of
Jerusalem will set in order many proverbs and write books so much
resembling, in form and style, that of Ptah-hotep;[4] before the source
and summit of European literature will write his world epics. For the
space of years between Solomon and ourselves, great though it seem, is
not so great as that between Solomon and Ptah-hotep.

The number of extant texts of the class to which the subjoined
immediately belong is not large in proportion to the rest of Egyptian
MSS., {21} but they seem to be representative of the class, being
diverse in date and subject, but similar in form. There is great
uniformity in the arrangement of most of them, in the following
respects. They have as title the word 'Instruction' (_seb'oyet_), and
are written by a father for the advantage of his son; they are very
poetic in their arrangement of words and phrases, and are usually
divided into short sections or paragraphs by the use of red ink for the
first sentence of each. Such is the Instruction of Ptah-hotep on
morality (the finest of its class); the Instruction of King Amenemhe'et
on the hollowness of friendship and other matters; the Instruction of
Deu'of, the son of Kherti, on the excellence of the literary life; and
others. In many respects and in many details they greatly resemble the
didactic works of the _Old Testament_ and _Apocrypha_.

These 'Instructions' were held in high esteem as text-books and writing
exercises in schools--a circumstance to which we owe the preservation
of many of them. For a considerable number of important and
interesting poems, letters, and narratives are only known to us from
school exercise-books. The pupil at the 'Chamber of Instruction' wrote
out about three pages of these each day, as a means of improving his
writing, as a model of style in composition, and for purposes of
edification. These exercises {22} abound in errors of spelling and
grammar, having somet