THIE HISTORY OF EGYPT FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES TILL THE CONQUEST BY THE ARABS By SAMUEL SHARPE. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. THE SIXTH EDITION. LONDON: GEORGE BELL & SONS, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1885. PREFACE. AMONG the histories of the ancient world those of the Jews, of Greece, and of Rome, will always hold the first place in value; that of the Jews, because it contains the history of our religion; those of Greece and Rome for the poets and historians, the almost perfect works of art, and the quantity of knowledge that those nations have left us, and for the share that they have had in forming our opinions and guiding our tastes even in the present day. After these three histories, that of Egypt may certainly claim the next place, from the influence which that remarkable country has had upon the philosophy and science of the world. Even now the great stream of civilisation, after flowing through ages of antiquity and fertilising the centuries through which it has passed, is in its present fulness still coloured with the Egyptian opinions, as the Nile reaches the Delta red with Ethiopian soil. Architecture and sculpture, the art of writing and the use of paper, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, indeed we might add legislation, and almost every art which flourishes under a settled form of government, either took its rise in Egypt or reached Europe through that country. Many of our superstitions, and some of our religious truths, are here first met with; and above two hundred references to the Bible in these pages show how |