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Updated: June 26, 2025
It was then that the famous library was destroyed, whose loss still excites the profound regrets of the learned. The Arabians, though such enthusiastic admirers of their national poetry, despised the literature of all the rest of the world. Amrou caused the library of the Ptolemies to be burned, yet this same Amrou was nevertheless celebrated for his poetical effusions.
Hesiod, Parmenides, and Empedocles were, indeed, cited as examples. But in their days poetry was the only vehicle of literary effort, and he who wished to issue accurate information was driven to embody it in verse. In the time of the Ptolemies things were altogether different.
Vichy was more efficacious than Carlsbad water. Hot water was found to have an effect on the bile much like that of the mineral waters. Although Magendie is rightly considered the true initiator of experimentation upon living beings, the practice of vivisection is as old as science itself. Five centuries before him, under the Ptolemies, Egyptian experimenters had operated upon condemned persons.
Its enormous columns are the first specimens of that colossal genius of the Pharaohs, which the Ptolemies never attempted to rival. The entrance to this temple is through a magnificent propylon;-that is, a portal flanked by massy pyramidal moles. It is two hundred feet in breadth, and rises nearly sixty feet above the soil.
But the obsequious priests, who were seduced by the liberality of the Ptolemies, submitted, without resistance, to the power of the god of Pontus: an honorable and domestic genealogy was provided; and this fortunate usurper was introduced into the throne and bed of Osiris, the husband of Isis, and the celestial monarch of Egypt.
ALEXANDRIAN PHILOSOPHY. Athens, which had been the centre of Greek literature during the second or classical period of its development, had now, in all respects but one, resigned the intellectual leadership to the city of the Ptolemies.
Of small specimens of sculptured crystal some little dark purple beads carved into the semblance of human faces may be seen on the Tara brooch; while also on the same brooch occur little purple daisies. The Cup of the Ptolemies, a celebrated onyx cup in Paris, is over fifteen inches in circumference, and is a fine specimen of early lapidary's work.
Sculptors began by clothing the successors of Alexander in Egyptian garb and transforming them into Pharaohs, just as they had in olden time transformed the Hyksos and the Persians. Works dating from the reigns of the first Ptolemies scarcely differ from those of the best Saïte period, and it is only here and there that we detect traces of Greek influence.
One by one the senate seized the provinces; Coele-Syria, the coast of Asia Minor, Cyrene, and the island of Cyprus; and lastly, though the Ptolemies still reigned, they were counted among the clients of the Roman patrician, to whom they looked up for patronage. From this low state Egypt could scarcely be said to fall when it became a part of the great empire of Augustus.
The pleasing illusions which were cherished at the outset of the expedition vanished long before our arrival in Cairo. Egypt was no longer the empire of the Ptolemies, covered with populous and wealthy cities; it now presented one unvaried scene of devastation and misery.
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