It must be confessed that the knowledge of writing in Egypt led to a kind of primitive pedantry, and a taste for unnatural and to us childish formality; the free play and naivete of the story-teller is too often choked, and the art of literary finish was little understood. Sim plicity and truth to nature alone gave lasting charm, for though adornment was often at tempted, their rude arts of literary embellish ment were seldom otherwise than clumsily em ployed.
A word should be said about the strange condition in which most of the literary texts have come down to us. It is rarely that mon umental inscriptions contain serious blunders of orthography; the peculiarities of late archaistic inscriptions which sometimes produce a kind of 'dog Egyptian)) can hardly be considered as blunders, for the scribe knew what meaning he intended to convey. But it is otherwise with copies of literary works on papyrus. Some times these were the productions of schoolboys copying from dictation as an exercise in the writing school, and the blank edges of these papyri are often decorated with essays at exe cuting the more difficult signs. The master of the school would seem not to have cared what nonsense was produced by the misunderstand ing of his dictation, so long as the signs were well formed. The composition of new works on the model of the old, and the accurate under standing of the ancient works, were taught in a very different school, and few indeed attained to skill in them. The boys turned out of the writing school would read and write a little; the clever ones would keep accounts, write let ters, make out reports as clerks in the govern ment service, and might ultimately acquire con siderable proficiency in this kind of work. Apparently men of the official class sometimes amused themselves with puzzling over an ill written copy of some ancient tale, and with trying to copy portions of it. The work, how ever, was beyond them; they were attracted by it, they revered the compilations of an elder age and those which were 'written by the finger of Thoth himself*• but the science of language was unborn, and there was little or no syste matic instruction given in the principles of the ancient grammar and vocabulary. Those who desired to attain eminence in scholarship after they had passed through the writing school had to go to Heliopolis, Hennopolis or wherever the principal university of the time might be, and there sit at the feet of priestly professors; who we fancy were reverenced as demigods, and who in mysterious fashion and with nig gardly hand imparted scraps of knowledge to their eager pupils. Those endowed with spe
cial talents might after almost lifelong study become proficient in the ancient language. Would that we might one day discover the hoard of rolls of such a copyist and writer! There must have been a large class of hack copyists practised in forming characters both uncial and cursive. Sometimes their copies of religious works are models of deft writing, the embellishments of artist and colorist being added to those of the calligrapher; the magnifi cent rolls of the 'Book of the Dead) in the British Museum and elsewhere are the admira tion of all beholders. Such manuscripts satisfy the eye, and apparently neither the multitude in Egypt nor even the priestly royal undertakers questioned their efficacy in the tomb. Yet are they very apples of Sodom to the hieroglyphic scholar,. fair without but ashes within. On comparing different copies of the same text, he sees in almost every line omissions, perversions, corruptions, until he turns away baffled and dis gusted. Only here and there is the text prac tically certain, and even then there are probably grammatical blunders in every copy. Nor is it only in the later papyri that these blunders are met with. The hieroglyphic system of writing, especially in its cursive forms, lends itself very readily to perversion by ignorant and inattentive copyists; and even monumental inscriptions, so long as they are mere copies, are usually cor rupted. The most ridiculous perversions of all date from the Rameses epoch when the dim past had lost its charm, for the glories of the 18th dynasty were still fresh, while new im pulses and foreign influence had broken down adherence to tradition and isolation.
In the 8th centu B.C. the new and the old were definitely parted, to the advantage of On the one hand the transactions of ordinary life were more easily registered in the cursive demotic script, while on the other the sacred writings were more thoroughly investigated and brought into order by the priests. Hence, in spite of absurdities that had irremediably crept in, the archaistic texts copied in the 26th dy nasty are more intelligible than the same class of work on the 19th and 20th dynasties.