* 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 they see him arise in his bark, having overturned his enemies in his own time!” They accompany him from hour to hour, they fight the good fight with him against Apopi, they shout aloud as he inflicts each fresh wound upon the monster:  they do not even abandon him when the west has swallowed him up in its darkness.* Some parts of the hymn remind us, in the definiteness of the imagery and in the abundance of detail, of a portion of the poem of Pentauirit, or one of those inscriptions of Ramses III. wherein he celebrates the defeat of hordes of Asiatics or Libyans.

     * The remains of Egyptian romantic literature have been
     collected and translated into French by Maspero, and
     subsequently into English by Flinders Petrie.