Page:Outlines of European History.djvu/47

 The Story of Egypt. 23 (see Fig. 16). All three of these devices have descended to us from the Egyptians, and paper still bears its ancient name, " papyros," -^ but slightly changed. The invention of writing and of a convenient system of rec- ords on paper has had a greater influence in uplifting the human race than any other intellectual achievement in the career of man. It was more important than all the battles ever fought and all the methods of government ever invented. As a result of it the early Egyptian peasants, now lying in the thickly clustered graves on the margin of the desert, went rapidly forward to new achievements in civilization. They had early found it necessary to measure time, for the Beginnings peasant needed to know when he ought to go into the town for the next religious feast, or how many days still remained before he must pay his neighbor the grain he borrowed last year. Like all other early peoples he found the time from new moon to new moon a very convenient rough measure. If he agreed to pay the grain he borrowed in nine moons and eight of them had passed, he knew that he had one more moon in which to make the payment. But the moon-month varies in length from twenty-nine to thirty days, and it does not evenly divide the year. The Egyptian scribe early discovered this inconvenience, and soon showed himself much more practical in this respect than his neighbors in other lands. He decided to use the moon no longer for dividing his year. Egyptian He would have twelve months and he would make his months our calendar, all of the same length, that is, thirty days each ; then he would 424 celebrate five feast days, a kind of holiday week five days long, at the end of the year. This gave him a year of 365 days. He was not yet enough of an astronomer to know that every four years he ought to have a leap year, of 366 days, although he 1 The change from "papyros" to "paper" is really a very slight one. For OS is merely the Greek grammatical ending, which must be omitted in English. . This leaves us papyr as the ancestor of our word " paper," from which it differs by only one letter. On the other Greek word for " papyrus," from which came our word " Bible," see page 140. I u.c.