Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/185

 further protected by a thick covering of the pure, dry sands of the desert.

The literature which has thus been preserved and recovered is naturally for the most part of a religious character.

It is perhaps necessary that I should apologize for using the term literature in speaking of compositions written in the hieroglyphic character. It is, I know, hard to make strangers to the writing understand that signs representing birds or beasts may be and are as purely alphabetic letters as our A, B, C. Such, however, is the fact, and every simple sound in the language, whether vowel or consonant, had its corresponding letter. The language had no medial sounds, so that if a g or a d had to be transcribed from a foreign language, a k or a t had to be substituted. But it was from the alphabetic signs of the Egyptians that the Phœnicians derived their own, and from the Phœnician alphabet all those of Europe and Asia were derived: Greek, Etruscan, Roman, Hebrew, Syriac, Arabic, Sanskrit and Zend. The Egyptian writing, it is true, was not confined to alphabetic characters. Some signs are syllabic, but these might at will be exchanged for