Egypt “forged the instruments that raised civilization out of the slough of the Stone Age” (Elliot Smith).  Of special interest to us is the fact that one of the best-known names of this earliest period is that of a physician—­guide, philosopher and friend of the king—­a man in a position of wide trust and importance.  On leaving Cairo, to go up the Nile, one sees on the right in the desert behind Memphis a terraced pyramid 190 feet in height, “the first large structure of stone known in history.”  It is the royal tomb of Zoser, the first of a long series with which the Egyptian monarchy sought “to adorn the coming bulk of death.”  The design of this is attributed to Imhotep, the first figure of a physician to stand out clearly from the mists of antiquity.  “In priestly wisdom, in magic, in the formulation of wise proverbs, in medicine and architecture, this remarkable figure of Zoser’s reign left so notable a reputation that his name was never forgotten, and 2500 years after his death he had become a God of Medicine, in whom the Greeks, who called him Imouthes, recognized their own AEsculapius."(3) He became a popular god, not only healing men when alive, but taking good care of them in the journeys after death.  The facts about this medicinae primus inventor, as he has been called, may be gathered from Kurt Sethe’s study.(4) He seems to have corresponded very much to the Greek Asklepios.  As a god he is met with comparatively late, between 700 and 332 B.C.  Numerous bronze figures of him remain.  The oldest memorial mentioning him is a statue of one of his priests, Amasis (No. 14765 in the British Museum).  Ptolemy V dedicated to him a temple on the island of Philae.  His cult increased much in later days, and a special temple was dedicated to him near Memphis Sethe suggests that the cult of Imhotep gave the inspiration to the Hermetic literature.  The association of Imhotep with the famous temple at Edfu is of special interest.

     (3) Breasted:  A History of the Ancient Egyptians, Scribner,
     New York, 1908, p. 104.

     (4) K. Sethe:  Imhotep, der Asklepios der Aegypter, Leipzig,
     1909 (Untersuchungen, etc., ed.  Sethe, Vol.  II, No. 4).

Egypt became a centre from which civilization spread to the other peoples of the Mediterranean.  For long centuries, to be learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians meant the possession of all knowledge.  We must come to the land of the Nile for the origin of many of man’s most distinctive and highly cherished beliefs.  Not only is there a magnificent material civilization, but in records so marvellously preserved in stone we may see, as in a glass, here clearly, there darkly, the picture of man’s search after righteousness, the earliest impressions of his moral awakening, the beginnings of the strife in which he has always been engaged for social justice and for the recognition of the rights of the individual.  But above all, earlier and more strongly than in any