RECORDS OF MEETINGS. 465 



family, whether favored by the king or not, may now possess a 

 tomb, a coffin, a stele, may have the attributes of a king in the 

 other world, and may claim as such to bear a sceptre and to wear a 

 crown and the royal apparel. These things are depicted upon the 

 sides of the coffins of common people. The sacred rites which were 

 formerly known only to the king are now known to all. From a 

 religious point of view, society has become quite democratized. 



Political and civil rights also have in the meantime been won by 

 the common people. This appears from the steles and from the 

 papyrus-texts of administrative and literary contents. These 

 show that the royal administration now concedes to every man the 

 right to enter upon a public career, to hold land for burial-places, 

 and to use and dispose of royal lands (subject to the king's right 

 of eminent domain), and the right to independent commercial 

 and industrial activity (not, for instance, in the royal workshops 

 alone), and to have recourse to the royal tribunals of justice by 

 right of petition, formerly accorded only to the higher classes. 

 Society has been levelled under a monarchy which, although of 

 divine right, has become democratized. 



This rise of the common people, in the period between the Old 

 and the INIiddle Empires (say from 2800 to 2000 B.C.), was not 

 brought about without violent crises, which, as in Greece and 

 Rome, wear the aspect of a social revolution. A description of 

 these changes may be found in the texts which Professor James 

 H. Breasted has commented upon and coordinated in the seventh 

 chapter of his Development of Religion and TJwught in Ancient 

 Egypt. The beautiful coffins of the time of the ^Jiddle Empire 

 attest the results of the social and political struggles involved. 



Dr. Stephen Langdon, Professor of Assyriology at Oxford, pre- 

 sented the results of his studies upon the Babylonian Poem of the 

 Righteous Suft'erer. His reconstruction of the poem upon the 

 basis of tablets from Niniveh and Sippur and Assur shows striking 

 resemblances to the Hebrew Book of Job. 



Dr. Langdon announced the recovery of several new texts which 

 supply missing sections of the Babylonian poem. It now appears 

 that the poem consisted of four books, each of about 120 lines, 

 WTitten in strophes of ten lines each. The book was written by 

 an orthodox poet of the ninth century B.C., as an apology or 



