ot only are the figured monuments of Egypt published in
princely folios, but its records have been translated and its lost
history recovered to the world's knowledge. Instead of the bare
"Pharaoh" of the Bible, a common designation for all the kings, and in
place of a bare list of names and dynasties copied from Manetho, and so
altered and corrupted in the copying as to be neither Greek nor
Egyptian, we have, on scarab, or gravestone, or pyramid, or
rock-sepulchre wall, in his own spelling, the name of almost every king
from the latest time of the Ptolemies back to the first king of the
first dynasty, five thousand--or was it six thousand?--years before
Christ. And not their names only, but the very pictures of their wars.
We see how they went up the Nile and fought the blacks of Abyssinia, and
brought back the spoils of Punt We see them sending their squadrons
into Syrian Asia, and waging a dubious battle with the Hittites before
the walls of Hamath, where Rameses in his lion-guarded chariot performs
prodigies of valor, and from which he returns not only to paint on
sacred walls the picture of his victory, but also to inscribe a copy of
the treaty of peace with the Hittite king, the earliest treaty in the
preserved annals of diplomacy. Well wrought that Rameses the Great for
eternal fame in the sixty years of his reign, fifteen centuries before
the birth of our Lord. But what fame had been his, had not explorers and
excavators and scholars dug and found and copied and translated what the
sands had covered for centuries? And to-day the curious traveller stops
in sight of the pyramids on the banks of the Nile, and enters the Bulaq
Museum, and there he sees set up before him the very mummy of Rameses
himself and of a dozen other royal personages, rifled from their tombs
and displayed for your amazement and mine. There is the very
Pharaoh--you can see his features, you can touch his coffin--who chased
the Children of Israel out of Egypt. There are the household implements,
the furniture of their homes, the jewelry their queens wore,--queens who
were also sisters of the kings, as Sarah was the sister of Abraham.

Or would you know of some great revolution in Egypt? These decipherers
of the inscriptions will tell you how the Shepherd Kings overthrew the
native dynasty, coming with their armies from Asia long before Rameses,
and changed religion and customs; under whom Jacob and his sons found
hospitable welcome, until their h