Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 7.djvu/745

721 LANGUAGE AND LITER ATI! RE. J These two kinds of entertainment are precisely what are customary at the present day in Egypt. Among the amuse ments of the ancient Egyptians was witnessing the perfor mance of various gymnastic feats. They had several games, one of which probably resembled draughts. Under the old kingdom the chief occupations of the rich seem to have been those of a country life, in its duties, the superintendence of husbandry, of the taking stock of flocks and herds, and of the shipment of produce, and the examination of fisheries, or again in seeing to the efficient work of the people of the estate who were engaged in any craft ; and the pleasures of country life filled up the leisure. In ancient times Egypt had far more cover for wild fowl than now. Thus we see from the subjects of the tombs that the rich Egyptian was in the habit of going into the marshes in a canoe, generally with some of his children, to spear the hippopotamus, or more frequently to knock down birds with the curved throw-stick. In fowling, a cat was sometimes used as a retriever. At other times he fished in his ponds, or shot or coursed with hounds various animals of the antelope kind. Every rich man in the age of the Empire had a chariot, generally drawn by two horses, which he usually drove himself, standing up in it. The life of the ladies was not unlike that of the men, except that they only joined in the sports as spectators They seem to have passed their time in household matters, iu visiting, and in the simplest country pleasures. Occasionally they rode in heavy cars drawn by oxen. Their manners appear to have been indolent and luxurious. Among the lower orders the lighter work usually fell to the women. Both men and women led hard lives, having scanty clothing and poor food ; yet the genial climate, in which the wants of the labourer must always have been few, rendered their condition not so painful as one might suppose. Language and Literature. The language of the people was the Egyptian, the later form of which, after they had become Christians, is called Coptic. Comparative philology has not yet satisfactorily determined its place. There can be no doubt that it is related to the Semitic family, but it has not yet been proved to belong to it. The grammatical structure is distinctly Semitic, and many roots are common to the Semitic languages. On the other hand, the Egyptian has essential characteristics which detach it from this family. It is monosyllabic, and its monosyllabism is not that from which scholars have endeavoured to deduce Semitic, but rather such as would belong to a dacayed condition. This monosyllabism is like that of Syriac. Dr Brugsch strongly affirms the affinity of the Egyptian to the Indo-Germanic as well as the Semitic languages (Hist., 2 ed. 6), but the former relation has to be proved. It has been supposed that the monosyllabism of the Egyptian is due to its having in part originated from a NTigritian source (Genesis of the Earth and of Man, 2d ed. 255, seqq.). Certainly this is a characteristic of some Xigritian languages, and the want of any large agreement in the vocabulary would be sufficiently explained by the changes that the languages of savage nations undergo from the absence of a literature. It can therefore scarcely yet be asserted with Dr Brugsch that the Egyptian has no analogy to the African languages (I.e.), by which, no doubt, he intends those which have no Semitic element. The problem will probably be solved either by a careful study of all the African languages which show traces of Semitic structure side by side with those that are without such traces, or by the discovery of the unknown element in Egyptian in the Akkadian or some other primitive language of Western Asia, which cannot be called Semitic in the recognized sense of the term. During its long history the language underwent little change until it became Coptic. It had two dialects those of Upper and Lower Egypt, i 721 (Brugsch, ibid.) ; and by degrees a vulgar dialect was formed which ultimately became the national language not long before the formation of Coptic. One curious innova tion in the Egyptian language was the fashion under the Ramses family of introducing Semitic words instead of Egyptian ones. From the manner in which these words are spelt it is evident that the Egyptians at that time had no idea of a Semitic element in Egyptian, for they always treat them as foreign words and retain the long foreign forms. The chief change in Coptic was the introduction of many Greek words, especially to supply the place of religious terms eliminated from the vocabulary. The inscribed and written character of Egyptian was the hieroglyphic, a very complex system, which expressed ideas by symbols or by phonetic signs, syllabic and alphabetic, or else by a combination ot the two methods. From this was formed the hieratic, a running hand, or common written form of the hieroglyphic, principally used for documents written on papyrus. Its oldest records are not equal in age to the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions, but probably it is not much later in origin. The demotic or enchorial writing is merely a form of hieratic used for the vulgar dialect, and employed for legal documents from the time of Dyu. XXVI. downwards. The Coptic is written with the Greek alphabet, with the addition of six new letters and a ligature, these letters being taken from the demotic to ex press sounds unknown to Greek. For further details see the article HIEROGLYPHICS. Much ancient Egyptian literature has come down to us, and it must be allowed that from a literary point of view it has disappointed expectation. What it tells is full of interest, but the mode of telling rarely rises to the dignity of style. So unsystematic is this literature that it has not given us the connected history of a single reign, or a really intelligible account of a single campaign. The religious documents are still less orderly than the historical. It is only by the severe work of some of the ablest critics during the last fifty years that from those disjointed materials a consistent whole has been constructed. The most important religious work is the Funeral Ritual, or Book of the Dead, a collection of prayers of a magical character referring to the future condition of the disembodied soul, which has already been noticed. It has been published by Dr Lepsius (Das Todtenbuch dcr Aegypter) and M. de Rouge (Rituel Funeraire), and translated by Dr Birch (Bunsen s jEgypt s Place, v.). De Rouge, in his most interesting papers in the Reviic Archeoloyique (n.s.), has done the utmost that a splendid critical faculty and an unusual mastery of language could achieve to present parts of the work in the most favourable form. Still it must remain a marvel of confusion and poverty of thought. Similar to the Ritual is the Book of the Lower Hemisphere. The other religious works and inscriptions are of a wider range. The temple inscription? indeed are singularly stilted and wanting in variety; but the papyri contain some hymns which are of a finer style, particularly that to the Nile by Enna, translated by Canon Cook (Records of the Past, iv. 105), and that to Ra- Harmachis, translated by Dr Lushington (ibid. viii. 129) and Professor Maspero (Histoire Ancienne, 32, seqq.). The moral writings have a higher quality than the religious, if we may judge from their scanty remains. The historical writings fall into two classes according to their official or unofficial character. Those that are official present the worst form of the panegyrical style, the others are simple though wanting in method. The letters are of more interest, from their lively portrayal of ancient Egyptian manners. In works of fiction there is a greater degree of skill, and in the &quot; Tale of Setuau &quot; (Records of the Past, iv.) we even find touches of humour. Egyptian literature V1L qi