i 9 4 



NATURE 



[June 29, 1882 



prince, to Egypt, and his marriage with the sister of the 

 queen. Besides the devices the canopy was ornamented 

 with a hieroglyphical inscription, the purport of which 

 appears to be that the queen in the future state was in the 

 arms of Khonsu, one of the deities of Thebes, son of 

 Mut and Amen, " redolent with perfumes sweet as those of 

 Punt " the present Somili or Guariafui, and "crowned 

 with flowers." Those found in the coffins of this period, 

 and which still preserved their original colours, have been 

 determined to be blue larkspur, yellow mimosas, or 

 acacias, and the white lotus, besides which, according to 

 Mr. Stuart, a moss was discovered in the coffins resem- 

 bling a kind found only in Greece. The coloured plate 

 of the canopy which accompanies this part of the work 

 gives an idea of the brilliancy of this remarkable piece of 

 leather embroidery as it appeared nearly three thousand 

 years a^o. Specimens of this leather canopy, which have 

 been brought to England, show that the colours with which 

 it was painted or dyed still retained their original lustre. 

 From so.ne unknown circumstance they have, like the 

 flowers, never paled by the effects of time. 



In his commentary on the text, which it is unnecessary 

 t:> follow here in detail, Mr. Stuart has given an account 

 of the scarabaeus, known as the Copris Isidis of Savigny, 

 and detailed a fact not 'generally known or described in 

 the account of that insect. Instead of propelling the clay 

 ball or pellet or the dung cased in with clay as the other 

 kinds of this family are said to do with their hind legs, the 

 mile Copris Isidis carries the ball on its head and neck, 

 for which the peculiar formations of the horns and pro- 

 jections of the thorax are specially adapted. One has 

 been found wending its wiy over the ground with its 

 spherical load, another has been knocked down bearing it 

 as the beetle hummed his drony flight through the air. 



Besides the description of the leather pall, Mr. Stuart 

 gives some account of the recently discovered pyramid of 

 Pepi at Sakkarah and that of Haremsaf. The interior 

 of these pyramids, unlike any of the others, was covered 

 with incised inscriptions coloured green, a peculiarity 

 seen also on some sepulchral tablets. The inscriptions 

 of these pyramids are mythological phrases, consisting of 

 formulas like those of the Ritual comparing the passage 

 of the soul of the deceased kings after death through the 

 heavens to the movement of the constellation Orion and 

 the course of Sothis or the Dog Star. Amongst the other 

 new facts mentioned in these inscriptions is that of the 

 tree of life, which is placed in the island of the blest 

 amongst the pools of the fields of the Aahlu or Egyptian 

 Elysium. A new light is shed on the earlier mythology 

 by these texts, which chiefly turn on the Nut or goddess 

 of the Ether, from whom Osiris and the monarch in the 

 character of that god is descended. These remarkable 

 texts have been translated by Brugs;h-Bey, and Lauth. 

 It is much to be regretted that these inscriptions are so 

 entirely religious, and that these earliest of hieroglyphic 

 monuments offer no contribution to the history of that 

 remote period, Meidoum, is surrounded by tombs, in one 

 of which the author found the na'ne of Senofru of the 

 3rd dynasty. The attempts to solve the antiquity of this 

 sepulchre from other sources has failed like all the earliest 

 works of Egypt ; for the passage is uninstructive, some 

 scribes of a later age have scrawled or scratched a 

 memorandum of a visit, but the walls are otherwise silent, 



and the chamber has not been found in which the royal 

 tenant was deposited. The mastabas of the age do not 

 abound in relics, and the antiquity of some of the terra 

 cotta vases has been impugned, the criteria of the different 

 kinds of pottery being obscure. At Dashour the author 

 found a very early tomb of a person named Afoua, but 

 although the style of art announced a high antiquity, the 

 inscriptions curt, and in the oldest form, offered no novel 

 points of interest, they were like those of the slab of the 

 3rd dynasty at Oxford, supposed to have been brought by 

 Greaves from Egypt. 



Mr. Stuart has published the tomb of Rameses, the 

 governor of Thebes, in the reign of Amenophis IV., and 

 the so-called Khuenaten, and enters into a discussion of 

 the difference between Amenophis IV. and the heretic 

 monarch. The general idea is that Amenophis IV. 

 adopted the worship of the sun's disk soon after his 

 accession, and altered his name from Amenophis, or " the 

 peace of Amen," to that of Khuenaten, or the " splendour 

 of the disk," in honour of the orb of heaven, whose worship 

 he had substituted for that of the Theban god. The fact 

 that the features of Amenophis and Khuenaten essentially 

 differ, the one depicted as a rotund youth, the other that 

 of a haggard septuagenarian, had long attracted attention, 

 and been explained on the hypothesis that the portraits 

 of Egyptian royalty were conventional, and therefore not 

 to be depended on, and that the introduction of the new 

 worship had unshackled the technical details of the 

 Egyptian artists. But who was the mysterious Khuen- 

 aten ? was he an emasculated virility of the harem, or a 

 withered senility of the Nigritic race who had ascended 

 the throne of Egypt ? Was he possibly the old queen 

 Tii, who, ambitious of power, had assumed manly costume 

 and, attended by a mock or daughter queen and attendant 

 princesses, endeavoured to set up a new capital and a 

 foreign cultus at a small but rival capital. All is mystery, 

 the facts pointed out by Mr. Stuart of the different features 

 which could not change with the same facility as the 

 name, the different functionaries of the two courts, the 

 strange and servile homage paid by the courtiers of the 

 old heretic and perhaps impostor, the copious bribery of 

 the novel monarchy only add to the unsolved problem, 

 and are not the least interesting part of the work. The 

 identity of the two monarchs as two single gentlemen 

 rolled into one will be long contested, as even the tomb 

 at Thebes gives the same name and titles to the erased 

 and mutilated heretical forms of Khuenaten. Amongst 

 his miscellaneous plates are one of the mummy of 

 Thothmes III. in its bandages, a box of the queen 

 Makara, and some mummies of the find at Deir-el- 

 Bahari. 



These are also known from the photographs of M. 

 Emile Brugsch, attached to the report of Maspero. Some 

 discussions and examples of the Indo-Germanic nature 

 of the Egyptian language are given ; but this branch of 

 philology is a knotty point, for the Egyptian language is 

 not of a decidedly Indo-Germanic construction, although 

 many of the words undoubtedly have Indo-Germanic 

 analogies. 



The main interest of the work, however, centres in the 

 monuments of the Deir-el-Bahari, especially the leather 

 canopy of Isiemkheb. There are, however, in Egypt 

 such an enormous mass of unpublished monuments and 



