become in the mean time larger, more complicated, more exacting, and more difficult to grapple with and to master.  It had its classical authors, whose writings were committed to memory and taught in the schools.  These were truly masterpieces, for if some felt that they understood and enjoyed them, others found them almost beyond their comprehension, and complained bitterly of their obscurity.  The later writers followed them pretty closely, in taking pains, on the one hand to express fresh ideas in the forms consecrated by approved and ancient usage, or when they failed to find adequate vehicles to convey new thoughts, resorting in their lack of imagination to the foreigner for the requisite expressions.  The necessity of knowing at least superficially, something of the dialect and writings of Asia compelled the Egyptian scribes to study to some degree the literature of Phonecia and of Chaldaea.

[Illustration:  350.jpg Page Image with Furniture]

     Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from photographs of the objects in
     the Museums of Berlin and Gizeh.

From these sources they had borrowed certain formulae and incantation, medical recipes, and devout legends, in which the deities of Assyria and especially Astarte played the chief part.  They appropriated in this manner a certain number of words and phrases with which they were accustomed to interlard their discourses and writings.  They thought it polite to call a door no longer by the word ro, but the term tira, and to accompany themselves no longer with the harp bordt, but with the same instrument under its new name kinnor, and to make the salam in saluting the sovereign in place of crying before him, aau.  They were thorough-going Semiticisers; but one is less offended by their affectation when one considers that the number of captives in the country, and the intermarriages with Canaanite women, had familiarised a portion of the community from childhood with the sounds and ideas of the languages from which the scribes were accustomed to borrow unblushingly.  This artifice, if it served to infuse an appearance of originality into their writings, had no influence upon their method of composition.  Their poetical ideal remained what it had been in the time of their ancestors, but seeing that we are now unable to determine the characteristic cadence of sentences or the mental attitude which marked each generation of literary men, it is often difficult for us to find out the qualities in their writings which gave them popularity.  A complete library of one of the learned in the Ramesside period must have contained a strange mixture of works, embracing, in addition to books of devotion, which were indispensable to those who were solicitous about their souls,* collections of hymns, romances, war and love songs, moral and philosophical treatises, letters, and legal documents.