THE INSTRUCTION OF PTAH-HOTEP

comparisons between them, let us, in imagination, place ourselves at the period at which Ptah-hotep lived, that is, about 3550 B.C., "under King Isôsi, living forever," and take a glance at the future.

The Babylonians are doubtless exercising their literary talents, but they will leave nothing worthy the name of a book to the distant posterity of fifty-four centuries hence. Thirteen centuries shall pass before Hammurabi, King of Babylon, drafts the code of laws that will be found at that time. Only after two thousand years shall Moses write on the origin of things, and the Vedas be arranged in their present form. It will be two-and-a-half thousand years before the Great King of Jerusalem will set in order many proverbs and write books so much resembling, in form and style, that of Ptah-hotep;These are round figures, of course, and in the case of Solomon and Moses, traditional dates. Modern criticism places Genesis and Proverbs much later than 1500 and 1000 B.C. before the source and summit of European literature will write his world epics. For the space of years between Solomon and ourselves, great though it seems, is not so great as that between Solomon and Ptah-hotep.

The number of existing texts of the class to which the subjoined immediately belong is not large in proportion to the rest of Egyptian manuscripts,