prize of fifty thousand francs, instituted for the reward of services rendered to science such as his. And that he was defeated, it will at once be owned, was far less to his disparagement, than his admission to the glorious race was a laurel only less green than the victor's, when we mention that his successful competitor was no other than Jules Oppert, the Champollion of Assyrian research. To an antagonist of such mark, Mariette Bey himself would be the last to grudge the well-earned crown.

pose of archæological and philological re- | to a successful conclusion that definitive search, and who, with the single excep- campaign which he has already so auspi tion perhaps, of our own distinguished ciously opened, in order to complete its countryman Dr. Birch, the Keeper of the conquest for archæological, historical, and Antiquities at the British Museum, is en- philological science. Nor has France fortitled to be regarded as the most accom- gotten to encourage her brilliant protegé. plished hieroglyphical scholar in the France seldom proves an injusta noverca world. For we rejoice to learn that this to her men of letters. The Academy of eminent German Egyptologer has just Inscriptions and Belles Lettres has hastenbeen appointed Prussian consul at Cairo. ed to award him the rare and much-prized The judicious support of Mr. Harris, our honor of enrolling him amongst its Corown consul at Alexandria, who is also responding Members, and the other day known not only as a diligent and enlight-he but just narrowly missed its great ened collector, but as a successful student in that branch of learning, which the precious treasures he has amassed serve to illustrate, has never, we believe, been wanting to our enterprising and successful discoverer. A recent acquisition of the British resident, which serves to show, that if there is any little rivalry between the diggers in these golden mines, the triumphs are not all on one side, may just be alluded to in passing. We refer to a magnificent Hieratic Papyrus, a hundred yards long, containing the annals of Ramses III., one of the most powerful of the Pharaohs, whose age cannot be placed much lower than the beginning of the twelfth century before the Christian era. This priceless document cannot be too soon given to the world in facsimile, although it must be owned that the cost of such an undertaking is a formidable obstacle. It must be encountered, how-to receive the mummies of the successive ever, and overcome, if not by the munificence of private patrons of learning, then by government aid. For, as Dr. Birch remarks in a letter with which he recently honored the writer of this article: "All (not religious) Hieratic* Papyri are very important and are daily becoming of greater interest. We are all hungry for texts-texts-texts! More materials for the philology, history, and mythology of the country. Monumental Egypt is now competing with Greece and Rome in the interest it excites in men's minds."

Thus the whole land of Egypt is before the founder and director of the new Museum at Boulaq, and he has but to carry

Hieratic writing is the cursive form of the Hieroglyphical. It is that employed in books, the other being the monumental style of Egyptian calligraphy. The Demotic, which is much younger and more compendious still, was mainly used for the purposes of common life, e.g., in commerce.

Mariette's first great discovery was made a dozen years ago. It was that of the site and débris, and especially the souterrains of the Serapeum at Memphis. It was in the October of 1852, if we remember rightly, that he, for the first time, broke into the vast and gloomy funeral chambers which had been excavated

deified bulls, each of which in its turn was worshipped by the Egyptians, under the name of the Apis-so the Greeks write Hapi, the Hidden One, as the hieroglyphical appellation signifies-as the latest Avatar of Osiris, the great tutelary divinity of the nation. The extraordinary interest and value of this achievement,' due not to a happy chance, but to the inspiration of genins and the judicious improvement of the hints dropped by the Greek travellers of old, Strabo, Diodorus, and the father of history, Herodotus, are acknowledged on all hands. Belzoni, Sir Gardner Wilkinson, and others, had penetrated the awful solitudes of Biban-el- Moluk; and clambering amongst the burning rocks of that wil derness of horror, and delving like moles into the choked up Syringes, at the risk of suffocation, had laid open to the wondering world the tombs of the second mighty race of Theban kings, belonging

to the dynasties numbered by Maneth | Vyse, and still less the picturesque Letfrom the eighteenth to the twenty-first. ters of Lepsius and Brugsch without their With, we believe, a single exception, the attractions for ourselves. If the modtombs of the earlier and greater Theban est King's Chamber in the Great PyrHouse, constituting Maneth's Twelfth amid somewhat disappointed us at first, Dynasty, have never yet been found. we remembered that after all it was really The exception is the pyramid built to the Tomb of Cheops. Again, if the syccover his mummy by Amenemha III., amore sarcophagus huddled away with the Moeris of Herodotus and the other a host of other objects in a glass case in Greek writers. This was discovered by the British Museum, is not to be comLepsius, just where the Father of His- pared for splendor with the alabaster tory places it, in the middle of the enor- coffin of Seti in Sir John Soane's house mous artificial lake (one of the wonders in Lincoln's Inn Fields, yet it is someof the world), which was called after the thing that England possesses, in the verking, the site of which lake had been itable coffin of the Mycerinus, about shortly before successfully ascertained by whom the Father of History gossips so the French engineer, Linant. To Lepsius delightfully, the oldest identifiable moralso belongs the honor of being the first tuary relic in the world. Nay, antiquity to identify historically the Labyrinth, apart, and thinking only of grandeur and another wonder of the world, which, as sublimity, we say, even after wandering he has proved, must have been the work through the azure elysium which Seti of the same powerful Pharaoh, although built for himself in the Valley of the Herodotus attributes it to the age of Shadow of Death, the Pyramids for us! Psammetichus. In like manner Lepsius What though the family-vault of Cheops is fairly entitled to share the credit of be no bigger than Sir John's library, yet having laid bare the secret of the artifi- Mr. Bonomi, who is now looking out of eial Alps piled up by the Titan hands of the library-window, will tell us that the Cheops and his race. For if Savary, base of the mountain of masonry, which Caviglia, and especially Perring and Col- covers the vault, equals the area of the onel Howard Vyse, by their more or less square! But we must not be tempted scientific explorations, solved for ever the to digress any further by these sepulchres problem of the Pyramids, by proving of the kings, for, lo, Mariette summons that they were the mausoleums of kings, us to enter the sepulchre of the gods! Lepsius, by his profound researches as an Egyptian scholar, no less than by his patient and intelligent personal rummaging amongst the private tombs in the neighborhood, first assigned to three Pharaohs their true place in the chronological and historical scale. His sagacions and scientific rectification of the mammoth anachronism into which Herodotus was betrayed-how, we do not stop to discussin placing these monarchs next before the last predecessors of Psammetichus, instead of some centuries before Maris (whose epoch, indeed, he dates much too low), adds greatly to the interest even of the Pyramids themselves. By all means let all former explorers have each his full meed of praise. But if Belzoni's descriptions of the gorgeous, yet sombre, magnificence of the tomb of Seti the Great of the nineteenth Manethonian Dynasty, whose astronomical paintings seem to bring heaven down to Hades, might well thrill our fathers, neither were the business-like measurements of Perring and

We approach it by an avenue of between five and six hundred sphinxes, and more than a league in length. This monumental alley led from the faubourgs of Memphis, through its vast necropolis, in the direction of the locality still bearing the name of Sakkara, which it must have inherited from the most ancient times. For in the hieroglyphical inscriptions which abound on the spot, this is one of the most frequent designations of Osiris, the god of the dead, and, accordingly, of the region in which their mummies were laid to rest. The name, it may here be remarked, occurs in the royal cartouche, or scutcheon, of the ninth king on the newly-discovered Memphis Tablet, which reads Sakkar, with the addition of the secondary name Nephercheres, and, undoubtedly, answers to the Se-Sochris of Manetho's Second Dynasty. Already, in the time of Strabo, the sphinxes which, as he tells us, lined both sides of the road leading to the temple of Osiris-Apis, or Serapis, as

scribed on the portals of this mysterious pyramid. It should be added that the pyramid bears no other royal name. Somewhere or other the Apis cemetery or cemeteries of the Old and Middle Empires must still be lying buried in the sand, and if looked for with due sagacity and intelligence they will, doubtless, be found.

the composite name was Hellenized, I sense of the Egyptian theocracy, inwere covered to their bellies and often to the height of their shoulders and heads with the sand, which the chamsin had driven in clouds from the desert. It was this very passage of the intelligent Greek traveller, the reader will be interested to learn, which first led Mariette Bey to seek for and to find the Serapeum in this quarter. A few years before, Lepsius had repeatedly trodden the ground beneath which the buried treasures lay, without dreaming of their existence. He has, however, marked with a great mound the identical spot on his excellent topographical plan.

Flanking the pylons stands an Apis chapel, in which was found a well-exe cuted statue of the god. This stone bull, whose sides are covered with Demotic inscriptions, at present, unfortunately, scarcely legible, is now in Paris, and forms one of the most conspicuous objects in the Salle D'Apis, as the apartment in the Louvre Museum, specially devoted to the antiquities brought from the Serapeum, is styled. There also are to be found the stone lions with which the entrance was ornamented. In common with the pylons, they bear the scutcheons of King Nectanebus, of Manetho's Thirtieth Dynasty, whose epoch is the middle of the fourth century before the Christian era. Of the great Serapeum itself, as it is always denominated in the still extant Greek Papyri, written within its walls, and now preserved amongst the choicest treasures of the British Museum, and those of Paris, Turin, Vienna, and Leyden, but little now remains. The ravages of time and man have been but too successful in sweeping all but its vestiges from the soil. Nor has the spoiler left altogether intact the crypts of the vast building, the catacombs of this temple-city, as these souterrains might be appropriately called, save that they were not devoted

Strabo's avenue of sphinxes, after pursuing a somewhat serpentine course from the foot of the Haram-el-Modarrggeh, or Great Stepped Pyramid of Sakkara, ter minates, at the distance of about a hundred yards from the ruined pylors of the Serapeum, in a fine hemicycle, adorned with thirty statues. Eleven of them represent the sages and poets of Greece, including Homer, Pindar, Euripides, Lycurgus, Pythagoras, and Plato. The others are of a mythological description. Mariette sees some reasons for concluding that the Pyramid just mentioned, which is essentially different from all the rest, may have been the Apis cemetery of the Old Empire, before the irruption of the Hyksos or Shepherd kings. If so, its thirty sepulchral chambers must represent, at least, as many successive divine bulls belonging to that period. It is certain, from the monuments, that the Apisworship is as old as the time of Cheops, of Manetho's Fourth Dynasty, and the Egyptian historian attributes its introduction to King Kaichos, of the Second Dynasty, whose name, under the hiero-to the sepulture of its human inhabitants, glyphical form Kakau, stands fourth in order on the new Memphis Tablet. On the other hand, the Serapeum first unearthed by Mariette Bey contains the record of no Apis older than the reign of Amenophthis III., the Memnon of the Greeks, whose vocal statue was so famous. And since this monarch belongs to the New Empire, between which and the Old comes the so called Middle Empire, or the times of the Hyksos Occupa-rusty hinges, save to receive the mountion, Mariette's suggestion deserves seri ous investigation, especially inasmuch as he found the royal scutcheon of Apis, in his character as Divine Pharaoh, in the

the priests and hierodules, the monks and nuns, however holy, who, to the number of, perhaps, some thousands, swarmed in this monastic cathedral of the old Egyptian paganism, but were religiously reserved as the tomb of the gods. Till Christian and Mohammedan fanaticism, and the auri sacra fames of treasurehunters, violated its sacred precincts, its ponderous portals never creaked on their

tainous sarcophagus of the dead divinity. The epithet will hardly be thought too strong, when it is considered that the weight of each stone coffin, made of finely