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: ESSAY III. The Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Et manebant structis molibus litterae .Sgyptiae priorem opu- 1entiam complexae. Tacitus. In the last discourse it was our intention to show that there may be evidence for ancient history found in legends, and that the sceptical and mythological schools which have endeavoured to destroy the value of such evidence have only succeeded to a small extent, and have been unable to make good their destructive position. The importance of legends however by themselves must be conceded to be small, if they are not supported by documentary evidence, or by such remains of human culture as can lead us to corroborative conclusions. The object of the present Essay is to discuss the oldest and most remarkable of the documents left us by early races, and to examine their importance in constructing a rational and real ancient history. But when we approach these documents we findContrast of Legends and Documents. 97 the attitude of our sceptical opponents and our own difficulties completely altered. The oral statements of the legends are in general easily understood, but their value as evidence—the truth of what they have delivered—is under question. In the case of written documents, there can be no doubt of their great value as evidence, if contemporary, but their meaning has been the subject of long and violent controversy. For the fullest and apparently the most important of them—those found on the magnificent ruins left us by the Egyptians, the Assyrians, and the Persians—were not only written in characters, of which the meaning had been lost, but the very languages of these nations were of uncertain family and of unknown structure. All men were agreed that if they could be read, they would tell us much of the secrets of a forgotten world. ...