Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/191

 the text itself, the first being followed by the words ki t'et, "otherwise said." This practice is of the most remote antiquity. The different readings of the seventeenth chapter according to the Turin text are already found in the text of that chapter which Sir Gardner Wilkinson copied from the sarcophagus of a queen of the eleventh dynasty.

Some of these variants have unquestionably arisen from the difficulty of understanding the ancient texts. I have no doubt whatever that some of the chapters of the Book of the Dead were as obscure to Egyptians living under the eleventh dynasty as they are to ourselves. The Book of the Dead is mythological throughout, and the true sense of a mythology dies away with the stage of culture which has produced it. A critical collation of a sufficient number of copies of each chapter will in time restore the text to as accurate a standard as could be attained in the most flourishing days of the Egyptian empire. This revision of the text, which, for want of the requisite leisure, I was sorrowfully compelled to decline when it was proposed to me by Dr. Lepsius at the Congress of Orientalists in 1874, is now being actively conducted by a most competent scholar, M. Naville, of Geneva. The most accurate knowledge of the Egyptian vocabulary and grammar will, however, not suffice to pierce the obscurity arising from what M. de Rougé called symbols or allegories, which are in fact simply mythological allusions. The