s about their souls,*
collections of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and
philosophical treatises, letters, and legal documents.

* There are found in the rubrics of many religious books,
for example that dealing with the unseen world, promises of
health and prosperity to the soul which, "while still on
earth," had read and learned them. A similar formula appears
at the end of several important chapters of the _Book of the
Dead._

It would have been similar in character to the literary-possessions of
an Egyptian of the Memphite period,* but the language in which it was
written would not have been so stiff and dry, but would have flowed more
easily, and been more sustained and better balanced.

* The composition of these libraries may be gathered from
the collections of papyri which have turned up from time to
time, and have been sold by the Arabs to Europeans buyers;
e.g. the Sallier Collection, the Anastasi Collections, and
that of Harris. They have found their way eventually into
the British Museum or the Museum at Leyden, and have been
published in the _Select Papyri_ of the former, or in the
_Monuments Egyptiens_ of the latter.

The great odes to the deities which we find in the Theban _papyri_ are
better fitted, perhaps, than the profane compositions of the period,
to give us an idea of the advance which Egyptian genius had made in the
width and richness of its modes of expression, while still maintaining
almost the same dead-level of idea which had characterised it from the
outset. Among these, one dedicated to Harmakhis, the sovereign sun, is
no longer restricted to a bare enumeration of the acts and virtues of
the "Disk," but ventures to treat of his daily course and his final
triumphs in terms which might have been used in describing the
victorious campaigns or the apotheosis of a Pharaoh. It begins with his
awakening, at the moment when he has torn himself away from the embraces
of night. Standing upright in the cabin of the divine bark, "the fair
boat of millions of years," with the coils of the serpent Mihni around
him, he glides in silence on the eternal current of the celestial
waters, guided and protected by those battalions of secondary deities
with whose odd forms the monuments have made us familiar. "Heaven is
in delight, the earth is in joy, gods and men are making festival, to
render glory to Phra-Harmakhis, when the