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472 , the ideograph then determining the sense of the word, as we write "fifty pounds, £50." Those words which we do not find in Coptic are interpreted either by the obvious meaning of the ideographs used to determine their sense, as when the figure of an animal follows its name, or by induction. The way to learn hieroglyphics is to begin with Coptic, in which the occurrence of Greek words aids the student's progress, and thus to obtain a notion of the genius of the language and a copia verborum, before entering on the harder enterprise of studying its older phase in the ancient character. After no long time the learner will be convinced that the general sense of all but the religious documents can be ascertained as readily as that of any similar Greek or Roman record. Philologically the most interesting phenomena are the monosyllabic (Nigritian) character of the roots, and the Semitic character of the pronouns whether isolated or affixed, the latter including the verbal forms. The roots lack the rhythmic vowelling of early (true) Semitic, and resemble its worn-away (Syriac) phase.

The religion of every nation is the keynote of its history. That of ancient Egypt is therefore the first subject as to which we must question the monuments. Here it may be well to dismiss the idea that the Egyptian religion continued to grow and went through changes during the historical period before it felt the influence of Greek philosophy. With the exception of a single permanent change, due apparently to foreign influence, it varied as little as the language in which it was written. It had of course its changing fashions, but the main doctrines, the objects of worship, and the rites, continued the same during this vast period of far above twenty centuries. Our chief difficulty in dealing with it is that we are often at a loss to grasp the real sense of the terms used. This is owing to three causes. When the Egyptians became Christians they eliminated most religious terms from their vocabulary as idolatrous, and substituted for them Greek equivalents. Thus the valuable aid of the Coptic often here fails us. We also find it very difficult to place our minds in the attitude of the Egyptians when we know the radical sense of a term: we can construe and cannot translate, like a schoolboy with a hard piece of Virgil. There is moreover another and very grave hindrance. There can be no doubt that the priests allegorized their doctrines, and that much which is nearly unintelligible is so in consequence of this practice. In the great Egyptian religious work, the "Ritual," the text is in general clearer than the commentary, which explains by allegory, and is probably but not certainly of later date. Notwithstanding these difficulties we have now a general idea of the Egyptian religion.

At first sight this religion seems a hopeless puzzle. The student who attempts to understand it feels like a visitor to a museum, in which antiquities of all classes are mixed without even a rudimentary arrangement. Long and patient labors have quite lately made this difficult subject easier to understand than the religion of Greece, though much remains to be done. The results are strangely unexpected. Instead of finding, like old inquirers, a philosophic meaning in the lowest forms of worship, we now accept them as no more than what they appear; and yet in the higher forms we discover as lofty a philosophy as had been before imagined.

Long after hieroglyphics had been read, evidence from them was wanting that the Egyptians had any idea of one God. Lately M. de Rougé, the most philosophic and one of the acutest of Champollion's successors, advanced the strongest reasons for maintaining that they held this doctrine. In the "Ritual," one Supreme Being is distinctly mentioned, called by no proper name, and thus not identical with any member of the Egyptian pantheon, although Ra, the sun, is, probably by a later view, identified in the same work with this mysterious divinity. The Supreme Being was the source of another being equally unnamed, and is thus called "the Double Being." From him came the other gods. This idea of monotheism, though seemingly lost in the multitude of gods in the pantheon, constantly reappears in their identification with one another in mixed forms or interchange of attributes. To what did the Egyptians owe this idea? Those who hold with M. Renan that the Shemites were essentially monotheists, will find a ready answer, and in this discover a fresh instance of the Shemite element. M. Renan's position is, however, one hard to maintain. In antiquity no Shemites were monotheists but the Hebrews, and though the Hebrew teachers were all monotheists, the people were constantly either adopting idolatrous objects of worship, or mistaking the true meaning of monotheism in their idea that they served a national God, instead of the creator and ruler of the universe. The contact of Hebrew with Aryan thought during the Babylonian 