[Illustration:  Glyph]

a ‘wall.’  Beyond that, horizontally, is the symbol for ‘house.’  It should be placed under the wall symbol, but the Egyptians were very apt to fill up spaces instead of continuing their vertical columns.  Now, beneath, we find the imperative command

[Illustration:  Glyph]

‘arise!’ And the Egyptian personal pronoun ‘entuten,’

[Illustration:  Glyph]

which means ‘you’ or ‘thou.’

“Under that is the symbol

[Illustration:  Glyph]

which means ‘priest,’ or, literally, ‘priest man.’  Then comes the imperative ‘awake to life!’

[Illustration:  Glyph]

After that, our first symbol again, meaning ‘I,’ followed horizontally by the symbol

[Illustration:  Glyph]

signifying ‘to go.’

“Then comes a very important drawing—­you see?—­the picture of a man with a jackal’s head, not a dog’s head.  It is not accompanied by the phonetic in a cartouch, as it should be.  Probably the writer was in desperate haste at the end.  But, nevertheless, it is easy to translate that symbol of the man with a jackal’s head.  It is a picture of the Egyptian god, Anubis, who was supposed to linger at the side of the dying to conduct their souls.  Anubis, the jackal-headed, is the courier, the personal escort of departing souls.  And this is he.

“And now the screed ends with the cry ‘Pray for me!’

[Illustration:  Glyph]

the last symbol on this strange scroll—­this missive written by a deposed, wounded, and dying king to an unnamed priest.  Here is the literal translation in columns: 

I cunning
Meris the King escape
little hypnotize
Samaris King of Nothing
eighteen place forcibly
a harpist garden
a dancing girl—­Ruler of water garden
  Upper and Lower wall
  Egypt house
took forcibly—­night Arise.  Do
by water Thou
five days Priest Man
ship Awake
house To life
I I go
Meris the King Anubis
she Pray
awake

“And this is what that letter, thousands of years old, means in this language of ours, hundreds of years young:  ’I, Meris the King, seized little Samaris, a harpist and a dancing girl, eighteen years of age, belonging to the King of Upper and Lower Egypt, and carried her away at night on shipboard—­a voyage of five days—­to my house.  I, Meris the King, lest she lie awake watching cunningly for a chance to escape, hypnotized her (or had her hypnotized) so that she lay like one dead or asleep, but breathing, and I, King no longer of Upper and Lower Egypt, took her and placed her in my house under the wall of the water garden.  Arise! therefore, O thou priest; (go) and awaken her to life.  I am dying (I go with Anubis!).  Pray for me!’”