Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/43

 on the walls where they were found. We should in all probability never have recovered the Annals of Tehutimes III. except for the splendid donations to the god of Thebes which they commemorate. All the objects in our museums and other collections which seem to belong to civil or domestic life, have only been preserved by being buried in the tombs. On examining what appears to be a mere trinket, you will often find a prayer for the departed. And this is the case with the papyri, all of which would infallibly have perished had they not been deposited in tombs, and by the deep dry sand of the desert been rendered inaccessible to external influences. It is only accidentally that documents of a purely secular character have been preserved, and fragments of Greek and Coptic literature have in like manner been recovered from tombs. The information which we possess about Egyptian history is entirely derived from the public inscriptions on the walls of the temples, and accidental details contained in the funereal inscriptions of private individuals.

The first step to be taken in the endeavour to obtain light out of these materials is classification, and the most essential kind of classification at starting, is that of the order of succession. We shall never understand the development of the Egyptian, or of any other religion, if our ideas are uncertain as to the order in which the phenomena which represent it stand towards