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Updated: June 12, 2025
Any volume on Egypt, such as one of those by Maspero, has a multitude of suggestions for the man inclined to the idea. If this system of pasteboard scenarios is taken literally, I would like to suggest as a beginning rule that in a play based on twenty hieroglyphics, nineteen should be the black realistic signs with obvious meanings, and only one of them white and inexplicably strange.
And with the sepulchres of the "Old Kingdom," in the Memphite necropolis proper, we have naturally grouped those of the "Middle Kingdom" at Dashûr, Lisht, Illahun, and Hawara. Some of these modern discoveries have been commented on and illustrated by Prof. Maspero in his great history.
You find, for example, in looking up your authorities in what has come to be called Egyptology, that while you have Wilkinson's Ancient Egypt, and Lane's Modern Egyptians, both of which are very valuable works, you have not the more modern books of Brugsch-Bey, or of A. H. Sayce, or of Maspero.
He is a member of the French Institute, and was formerly Professor of Egyptian Archeology and Ethnology in the Collège de France, and, more recently, Director of the Egyptian Museum at Bulak. His writings cover the entire field of Oriental antiquity. In this field Maspero has no peer among Egyptologists of the present or the past.
All recent progress in Egyptology and Assyriology goes to prove that the fragments in question contain much authentic and precious information, in spite of the carelessness with which they were transcribed, often at second and third hand, by abbreviators of the basse époque. Gaston MASPERO, Histoire ancienne des Peuples de l'Orient, liv. ii. ch. iv. La Chaldée.
"Hatshepsût," more commonly known as "Hatasû;" the new reading is, however, more correct. Professor Maspero thinks that it was pronounced "Hatshopsitû." For full illustrated account of the complete excavation of this temple, see the Deir el Baharî publications of the Egypt Exploration Fund. Temenos, i.e., the enclosure wall of the Temple, within which all was holy ground.
Maspero, it is true, was too sane a critic to assert borrowing on the part of Canticles. But he speaks of the "same manner of speech, the same images, the same comparisons," as Lessing does. Now if A = B, and B = C, then it follows that A = C. But in this case A does not equal C. There is no similarity at all between the Egyptian Songs and Theocritus.
Nothing is easier than to verify his descriptions by reference to the works of Champollion, Mariette, Wilkinson, Rawlinson, Erman, Edwards, and Maspero. Scarcely here and there will the reader find a possible error in his statements.
Babylonian seal engravings and wall pictures often represent a tree before which men or higher beings stand in adoration; according to Maspero there was actual worship of trees in Egypt, and similar cults are found among the wild tribes of India.
I sighed rather wearily as I crossed the room to my bookcase and took down the volume of Gaston Maspero, the same which I had been reading but had returned to its shelf as Gatton had been admitted. "We have it here in a nutshell," I said. Gatton methodically noted the passages which I read to him. The task concluded: "H'm," he muttered, scanning his notes, "very strange, very strange indeed.
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