Page:Travels to Discover the Source of the Nile - In the Years 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1772, and 1773 volume 1.djvu/535

Rh mysteries and hidden meanings, moral and philosophical treatises, as the subjects of these hieroglyphics. A sceptre, they say, is the hieroglyphic of a king. But where do we meet a sceptre upon an antique Egyptian monument? or who told us this was an emblem of royalty among the Egyptians at the time of the first invention of this figurative writing? Again, the serpent with the tail in its mouth denotes the eternity of God, that he is without beginning and without end. This is a Christian truth, and a Christian belief, but no where to be found in the polytheism of the inventors of hieroglyphics. Was Cronos or Ouranus without beginning and without end? Was this the case with Osiris and Tot, whose fathers and mothers births and marriages are known? If this was a truth, independent of revelation, and imprinted from the beginning in the minds of men; if it was defined to be an eternal truth, which must have appeared by every man finding it in his own breast, from the beginning, how unnecessary must the trouble have been to write a common known truth like this, at the expence of six weeks labour, upon a table of porphyry or granite.

is not with philosophy as with astronomy; the older the observations, the more use they are of to posterity. A lecture of an Egyptian priest upon divinity, morality, or natural history, would not pay the trouble, at this day, of engraving it upon stone; and one of the reasons that I think no such subjects were ever treated in hieroglyphics is, that in all those I ever had an opportunity of seeing, and very few people have seen more, I have constantly found the same figures repeated, which obviously, and without dispute, allude to the history of the Nile, and its different periods of increase; the mode of measuring it, the Etesian winds; in short, such

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