Produced by Charles Klingman

THE PHARAOHAND THE PRIEST

AN HISTORICAL NOVELOF ANCIENT EGYPT

The Pharaoh and the Priest

THE PHARAOHAND THE PRIEST

FROM THE ORIGINAL POLISH OF ALEXANDER GLOVATSKI

BY

JEREMIAH CURTIN
TRANSLATOR OF "WITH FIRE AND SWORD," "THE DELUGE""QUO VADIS," ETC.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS

BOSTON LITTLE, BROWNAND COMPANY.1902

CURTIN.

All rights reserved.
Published September, 1902.

UNIVERSITY PRESS JOHN WILSON AND SON CAMBRIDGE, U.S.A.

PREFATORY REMARKS

The position of Ancient Egypt was unique, not in one, but in everysense. To begin at the very foundation of life in that country, we findthat the soil was unlike any other on earth in its origin. Every acreof fruitful land between the first cataract and the sea had beenbrought from Inner Africa, and each year additions were made to it. Outof this mud, borne down thousands of miles from the great fertileuplands of Abyssinia by rivers, grew everything needed to feed andclothe man and nourish animals. Out of it also was made the brick fromwhich walls, houses, and buildings of various uses and kinds wereconstructed. Though this soil of the country was rich, it could beutilized only by the unceasing co-ordinate efforts of a wholepopulation constrained and directed. To direct and constrain was thetask of the priests and the pharaohs.

Never have men worked in company so long and successfully at tillingthe earth as the Egyptians, and never has the return been so continuousand abundant from land as in their case.

The Nile valley furnished grain to all markets accessible by water;hence Rome, Greece, and Judaea ate the bread of Egypt. On this nationaltillage was founded the greatness of the country, for from it came themeans to execute other works, and in it began that toil, training, andskill indispensable in rearing the monuments and doing those thingswhich have made Egypt famous forever, and preserved to us a knowledgeof the language, religion, modes of living, and history of thatwonderful people who held the Nile valley. No civilized person who haslooked on the pyramid of Ghizeh, the temple of Karnak, and the tombs ofthe pharaohs in the Theban region, can ever forget them. But in thosemonuments are preserved things of far greater import than theythemselves are. In the tombs and temples of Egypt we see on stone andpapyrus how that immense work of making speech visible wasaccomplished, that task of presenting language to the eye instead ofthe ear, and preserving the spoken word so as to give it to eye or earafterwards. In other terms, we have the history of writing from itsearliest beginnings to the point at which we connect it with the systemused now by all civilized nations excepting the Chinese. In thosemonuments are preserved the history of religion in Egypt, not from thebeginning of human endeavor to explain first what the world is and thenwhat we ourselves are and what we and the world mean together, but froma time far beyond any recorded by man in other places.

Egyptians had the genius which turned a narrow strip of Abyssinian mudand a triangular patch of swamp at the end of it into the most fruitfulland of antiquity. They had also th

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