EGYPT, 
AN INTRODUCTION. 
TTOW remote—how vast, are the historical associations which this word calls forth! 
It not only embraces the entire period of sacred history, from Abraham to 
the Christian dispensation, but Egypt, in her profane history, issues at once from 
the mists of Time a great and powerful nation. To us she has no historical infancy. 
Evidence remains in the vast structures of the Valley of the Nile of her maturity 
four thousand years ago; they are the records of her social condition at that period; 
and the earliest historians, and the latest and most profound inquirers, confirm the 
claim which her imperishable pyramids and temples offer to her ancient greatness. 
The discovery by which the hieroglyphic records of Egyptian history have become 
legible, and a lost language recovered, is one almost unparalleled in human research. 
It is not more than thirty years since that this discovery was made: before that time 
our knowledge of this most ancient people was chiefly derived from Herodotus, who 
travelled in Egypt at a period low in the date of her history, though the historian 
is the most ancient of profane authorities. He wrote on Egypt in the fifth century B.c., 
and from tradition and the priesthood, sketched her history. But he wrote of a 
people whose high civilisation and established government had existed two thousand 
years before his visit to their land, and a thousand years after the eighteenth dynasty 
of her kings, the most glorious period of her history. 
When the “Eather of History” visited Egypt, she had fallen from her greatness, 
and was under the government of the Persians: but she had been conquered and 
ruled by the Ethiopians and the Saites, before the destructive curse of the Persian 
invasion, which, under Cambyses, occurred 520 B.c. The hatred of this monarch 
to the people of the Valley of the Nile, led him to destroy many of their monuments: 
the strength of others defied his power; he tried in vain to destroy those records 
which are still legible to us, the “hand-writing on the wall” of their own history. 
These hieroglyphics, which had become and remained a mystery for nearly two thousand 
years, have been disclosed in our own day. The very writings, which might have 
been read by Abraham, were familiar to Joseph, and in which Moses “was learned,” 
still remain to us. These incisions on their monuments were left by the ancient 
Egyptians themselves; they are not copies or translations, hut the actual characters 
