Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/212

 piece of poetry in the literature of the world. The seventeenth chapter is not less remarkable. It consists, as Bunsen says, "of short and obscure ejaculations, and of glosses and commentaries upon this text;" "of an original sacred hymn, interspersed with such glosses or scholia as must have been collected by a vast number of interpreters. This is identical with saying that the record was at that time no longer intelligible. Yet the text of the whole chapter is written, not only in the Turin papyrus, but on the coffin of the eleventh dynasty. Add to this that the text thus confounded in every verse with its glosses is written so confusedly, both on the coffin and in the papyrus, that the scholia are jumbled into wrong spaces. &hellip; Suppose a psalm of the Hebrew text to have been copied on a royal monument with a whole catena of commentaries and glossaries, but copied uno tenore, without distinction of text and notes. Such exactly is the state of the Egyptian record." Since Bunsen wrote, considerable light has been thrown upon the chapter. M. de Rougé has translated the chapter, after having carefully collated all the manuscripts accessible to him, and has learnedly commented upon both the original texts and the glosses. Lepsius has