The Monuments of Upper Egypt Author:Auguste Mariette Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE MONUMENTS OF UPPER EGYPT. INTRODUCTION. Before embarking on the Nile the visitor should have mastered certain data which will afford a kind of prepa... more »ration for the journey he is about to undertake. We will endeavor to supply, in as concise a form as possible, some of the requisite knowledge. We shall first treat of the sources from whence Egyptology, generally speaking, springs; we shall then refer successively to History, Chronology, arid Religion, and after noticing Language and Writing, we will conclude by presenting together, in one chapter, under the head of Generalities, a few notes which could not well find a suitable place elsewhere. I.-SOURCES. All the monuments we are going to meet with belong to that civilization which formerly flourished on the banks of the Nile, and which, from beginning to end, used hieroglyphs as its form of writing. For the interpretation and understanding of those monuments Science avails herself of three different sources. As a matter of course, the first and principal source is afforded by the monuments themselves, the undeniable witnesses, and often the contemporaries, of the events they relate. After them comes Manetho, an Egyptian priest, who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek; the third and last place being assigned to the Greek and Roman authors who travelled in Egypt, or who wrote about it from hearsay. A. — MONUMENTS. The monuments are at once many and various. Some are still in Egypt, some have found their way into the museums of various countries. As we have no intention of drawing up an inventory, be it ever so brief, of the monuments preserved in the Museums, we shall not go out of Egypt and will rest satisfied with supplying here a few data upon the temples and tombs,the only monuments the visitor to U...« less