Adams, Walter M.: The house of the hidden places: a clue to the creed of early Egypt from Egyptian sources (London, 1895)

II.] The Resurrection of Antiquity. 43

this world and the next, were fulminated by
the Sultan against the official who should dare
to allow a Christian " to approach the sacred
port of Suez, the starting-point of the holy
Haj." To-day that port is the crowded en-
trance of the most cosmopolitan highway of
the globe. For centuries Egypt, as it was
the earliest, so it was the most jealously
guarded seat of Moslem law. To-day its
courts recognize a multiplex jurisdiction of
alien nations, for which no precedent exists
in the history of any other state.* Within
living memory its hieroglyphs were an enigma
hopelessly abandoned ; its temples hidden 1 >e-
neath the accumulated filth of generations of
Arabs; the very age of its ruins unguessed
within thousands of years. To-day the mighty

1 The case of the Holy Roman Empire may perhaps
BOggeat itself as a precedent; for foreign princes un-
doubtedly sat in the Diet. But those princes had
jurisdiction not by virtue of treaties or in right of their
foreign kingdoms, but of the Imperial principalities of
which they happened to be possessed.