Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/96

 men insensible to art or poetry of a high order. Now it is certain that at least three thousand years before Christ there was in Egypt a powerful and elaborately organized monarchy, enjoying a material civilization in many respects not inferior to that of Europe in the last century. Centuries must have elapsed before such a civilization became possible. Of a state of barbarism or even of patriarchal life anterior to the monumental period, there is no historical vestige. The earliest monuments which have been discovered present to us the very same fully developed civilization and the same religion as the later monuments. The blocks of the Pyramids bear quarry marks exhibiting the decimal notation, and are dated by the months of the calendar which was in use down to the latest times. You must remember that the calendars of other nations (Hebrews, Greeks and Romans) show great ignorance of the real length of the year. It was only after the conquest of Alexandria that the Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Cæsar. The political division into nomes (provinces, each of which had its principal deity) is as old as the age of the Pyramids. The gods whose names appear in the oldest tombs were worshipped down to the Christian times. The same kind of priesthoods which are mentioned in the tablets of Canopus and Rosetta in the Ptolemaic period are as ancient as the Pyramids, and more ancient than any Pyramid of which we know the date. There is in the Ashmolean Museum