writings.  These copies were executed in the most magnificent style, and were splendidly illuminated with letters of gold.  The Jewish government also, at Ptolemy’s request, designated a company of Hebrew scholars, six from each tribe—­men learned in both the Greek and Hebrew languages—­to proceed to Alexandria, and there, at the Museum, to make a careful translation of the Hebrew books into Greek.  As there were twelve tribes, and six translators chosen from each, there were seventy-two translators in all.  They made their translation, and it was called the Septuagini, from the Latin septuaginta duo, which means seventy-two.

Although out of Judea there was no feeling of reverence for these Hebrew Scriptures as books of divine authority, there was still a strong interest felt in them as very entertaining and curious works of history, by all the Greek and Roman scholars who frequented Alexandria to study at the Museum.  Copies were accordingly made of the Septuagint translation, and were taken to other countries; and there, in process of time, copies of the copies were made, until at length the work became extensively circulated throughout the whole learned world.  When, finally, Christianity became extended over the Roman empire, the priests and monks looked with even a stronger interest than the ancient scholars had felt upon this early translation of so important a portion of the sacred Scriptures.  They made new copies for abbeys, monasteries, and colleges; and when, at length, the art of printing was discovered, this work was one of the first on which the magic power of typography was tried.  The original manuscript made by the scribes of the seventy-two, and all the early transcripts which were made from it, have long since been lost or destroyed; but, instead of them, we have now hundreds of thousands of copies in compact printed volumes, scattered among the public and private libraries of Christendom.  In fact, now, after the lapse of two thousand years, a copy of Ptolemy’s Septuagint may be obtained of any considerable bookseller in any country of the civilized world; and though it required a national embassage, and an expenditure, if the accounts are true, of more than a million of dollars, originally to obtain it, it may be procured without difficulty now by two days’ wages of an ordinary laborer.

Besides the building of the Pharos, the Museum, and the Temple of Serapis, the early Ptolemies formed and executed a great many other plans tending to the same ends which the erection of these splendid edifices was designed to secure, namely, to concentrate in Alexandria all possible means of attraction, commercial, literary, and religious, so as to make the city the great center of interest, and the common resort for all mankind.  They raised immense revenues for these and other purposes by taxing heavily the whole agricultural produce of the valley of the Nile.  The inundations, by the boundless fertility which they annually produced, supplied the royal treasuries.  Thus the Abyssinian rains at the sources of the Nile built the Pharos at its mouth, and endowed the Alexandrian library.