has ever equalled them in their love for recording all human events and transactions.  They wrote down all the details of private life with wonderful zeal, method, and regularity.  Every year, month, and day had its record, and thus Egypt is the monumental land of the earth.  Bunsen says that “the genuine Egyptian writing is at least as old as Menes, the founder of the Empire; perhaps three thousand years before Christ.”  No other human records, whether of India or China, go back so far.  Lepsius saw the hieroglyph of the reed and inkstand on the monuments of the fourth dynasty, and the sign of the papyrus roll on that of the twelfth dynasty, which was the last but one of the old Empire.  “No Egyptian,” says Herodotus, “omits taking accurate note of extraordinary and striking events.”  Everything was written down.  Scribes are seen everywhere on the monuments, taking accounts of the products of the farms, even to every single egg and chicken.  “In spite of the ravages of time, and though systematic excavation has scarcely yet commenced,” says Bunsen, “we possess chronological records of a date anterior to any period of which manuscripts are preserved, or the art of writing existed in any other quarter.”  Because they were thus fond of recording everything, both in pictures and in three different kinds of writing; because they were also fond of building and excavating temples and tombs in the imperishable granite; because, lastly, the dryness of the air has preserved for us these paintings, and the sand which has buried the monuments has prevented their destruction,—­we have wonderfully preserved, over an interval of forty-five centuries, the daily habits, the opinions, and the religious faith of that ancient time.

The oldest mural paintings disclose a state of the arts of civilization so advanced as to surprise even those who have made archaeology a study, and who consequently know how few new things there are under the sun.  It is not astonishing to find houses with doors and windows, with verandas, with barns for grain, vineyards, gardens, fruit-trees, etc.  We might also expect, since man is a fighting animal, to see, as we do, pictures of marching troops, armed with spears and shields, bows, slings, daggers, axes, maces, and the boomerang; or to notice coats of mail, standards, war-chariots; or to find the assault of forts by means of scaling-ladders.  But these ancient tombs also exhibit to us scenes of domestic life and manners which would seem to belong to the nineteenth century after our era, rather than to the fifteenth century before it.  Thus we see monkeys trained to gather fruit from the trees in an orchard; houses furnished with a great variety of chairs, tables, ottomans, carpets, couches, as elegant and elaborate as any used now.  There are comic and genre pictures of parties, where the gentlemen and ladies are sometimes represented as being the worse for wine; of dances where ballet-girls in short dresses perform