Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume VI.djvu/486

 478 EGYPT (LANGUAGE AND LITERATUEE) bles, and explains its truths by the aid of meta- phors from common life. A translation of it is given in Leemans's Monuments du muaee cTantiquites des Pays-Bas (Leyden, 1839-'64). The instructions conveyed in letters mostly con- cern particular cases, and recommend special professions ; and being all the compositions of literary men, they naturally laud their own oc- cupation as the highest. The Sallier papyri in the British museum furnish the best specimens of these epistolary treatises. There are trans- lations of them by Prof. Goodwin in the " Cam- bridge Essays " for 1858. The magical litera- ture has come down to us in many specimens. They are preserved in the papyrus of Mr. Har- ris, which Chabas has translated, and in the Ramesid papyri and demotic fragments of the Leyden and Paris museums. The principles adopted in the magic ceremonies of the Egyp- tians were uniform. There is first a mention of a mythological event, generally relating to some of the conflicts between Osiris and Set, or the good and evil powers in nature ; second- ly, the conjurer identifies himself with a deity whose powers and attributes he assumes by means of incantation ; lastly, injunctions and threats against the objects to be conjured. People in almost every condition of life appear to have sought assistance from magic, and nu- merous little rolls of papyrus inscribed with magic formulas have been found, which were used as amulets to protect the wearer from sickness or death. The medical papyri, or pre- scriptions of the old Egyptians, are described by Brugsch in his Ueber die mediziniscJien Kenntnisse der alien Aegypter (1853), and in his Notice raisonnee d?un traite medical, &c. (Leipsic, 1863), reprinted from the second vol- ume of his Recueil de monuments (Leipsic, 1859) ; by Chabas in his Melanges egyptolo- giques (vol. i.) ; and by Birch in Lepsius's Zeit- schrift for 1871. The most remarkable is the papyrus of Berlin, which states that it was discovered rolled up in a case, under the feet of an Anubis in the town of Sekhem, in the days of Tet (or Thoth), after whose death it was transmitted to King Sent, and was then restored to the feet of the statue. King Sent belonged to the 2d dynasty, and if the treatise was old in his day, Manetho's statement that the second king of Egypt, the successor of Menes, composed works on anatomy, is more than probable. These data remove the origin of medicine among the Egyptians to a time long previous to 3000 B. C. The contents of this papyrus give a kind of anatomy of the human body, and a number of remedies, which were generally to be taken internally, and consisted of carefully proportioned prescrip- tions, in which the milk of various animals, honey, salt, and vinegar play a prominent part. There are also directions for the application of raw flesh, lard, and ammonia, and prescriptions of draughts, unguents, and injections. Notice- able is the entire absence of charms and super- stitious observances in administering medicines, and the attempts at rational treatment far surpass the medical literature of the early Greeks. Later documents are of inferior sci- entific value, and they contain a great deal of magic and incantation, although the remedies are prescribed for the most part separately from them. But the documents are so few that we may have recovered accidentally a higher order of treatise from the earlier, and inferior kinds from the later period of Egyp- tian history. The demotic papyrus repeats the same technical terms for remedies, but shows a small proportion of honest prescrip- tions ; and love philtres, which turn the love of women toward their husbands and lovers, and not the opposite, as generally told by clas- sical authors, play a great part in it. The Cop- tic period furnishes a fragment treating of skin diseases, one of the most prevalent and perma- nent plagues of Egypt. It is a small portion of a large work, as the prescriptions preserved are called the 185th chapter ; they consist of potions, baths, and unguents. The scientific treatises show, especially in a document be- longing to the old empire, and now preserved in the Berlin museum, that the Egyptians were acquainted with the true motion of the plan- ets, including that of the earth. Among the Ehind papyri in the British museum, there is one called the geometric papyrus, of which Mr. Birch has published a short description in Lep- sius's Zeitschrift for 1868. The age is given as the 20th dynasty, or about 1100 B. 0. The treatise proceeds in regular propositions, sta- ting the questions with " Suppose," and the answers with " Therefore " or " It follows." It is chiefly concerned with mensuration, the mea- suring of fields, and the estimating of the solid contents of pyramids; its title reads, "Prin- ciple of arriving at the Knowledge of Quanti- ties, and of solving all Secrets which are in the Nature of Things." The area to be mea- sured is divided into parallelograms or isosceles triangles, and the lengths of the sides are gen- erally given in the statement of the question. Epistolary correspondence is, like the solar hymns, one of the best known and most per- fectly understood branches of Egyptian litera- ture. From the Ramesid era, which was un- doubtedly the most literary of all, we have about 80 letters on various subjects, from different scribes, of whom the names of 13 are preserved, and they are mere specimens of style and illus- trations of manners. There are about 20 let- ters in different papyri of the Leyden collec- tion, but as some of them seera to have been prepared for transmission, they cannot well be considered as specimens of literature. The most important collection is that in the Sallier and Anastasi papyri of the British museum, and consists of 58 letters, of which a few are duplicates. The collection was made by three scribes, about the time of the Exodus, and their names are Pentaur, Pinebsa, and Enna. The fictitious writing of the ancient Egyptians is represented by two valuable and tolerably com-