Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/189

 a great variety of uses. I will not take up your time with a discussion of the matter, but will simply tell you that peri em hru most probably means "coming forth by day," and that the sense of this expression can only be gathered from a study of the contents of the book so entitled.

It is a very curious fact that, out of the many manuscripts which are extant, no two contain exactly the same chapters or follow exactly the same arrangement. The papyrus of Turin, the facsimile of which is published by Lepsius, contains 165 chapters; and it is the longest known. A very considerable number of chapters, however, which are found in other manuscripts, are not included in it. None of the copies therefore contains the entire collection of chapters. The date of the Turin papyrus is not known, but it certainly is not anterior to the twenty-sixth dynasty. The more ancient manuscripts contain much fewer chapters, and their order is quite different. The antiquity of the chapters in the long recensions is not at all inferior to that of those in the shortest recensions, and the chapters omitted by the Turin manuscript are as old as any. The oldest chapters of all are omitted. There is a great uniformity in the style and the grammatical forms of the language as compared with other productions of Egyptian literature, especially those more recent than the twelfth dynasty. Nothing can exceed the simplicity and the brevity of the sentences.