THE TIME OF PTAH-HOTEP

books in the world, the earliest extant specimens of the literary art. They stand on the extreme horizon of all that ocean of paper and ink that has become to us as an atmosphere, a fifth element, an essential of life.

Books of many kinds had of course been written for centuries before Ptah-hotep of Memphis summarized, for the benefit of future generations, the leading principles of morality current in his day; even before the Vizier, five hundred years earlier, gave to his children the scroll which they prized above all things on earth;The monuments leave no doubt of this. Pen and ink were used in the First Dynasty, and speech had been reduced to visible signs before that. but those have perished and these remain. There are lists of titles which have a grand sound, and prayers to the gods for all good things, on the tombs and monuments of kings and magnates long before the time of Ke’gemni; but those are not books in any sense of that word. Even the long, strange chants and spells engraved in the Royal Pyramids opposite Memphis are later than the time of Ptah-hotep and cannot be called books in their present form, although some of them apparently originated before the First Dynasty.About 4770 B.C. In all Egyptian dates given in this book I follow Professor Petrie's chronology.

Nor do the oldest books of any other country approach these two in antiquity. To draw