Brugsch, Heinrich: Egypt under the pharaohs: a history derived entirely from the monuments (London, 1891)

oh. i. OPPRESSION OF THE PEOPLE 11

are contained in the ' Book of the Dead,' are not in-
ferior to the precepts of Christianity; and in reading
the old inscriptions concerning morality we are
tempted to believe that Moses modelled his teachings
on the patterns given by those old sages.

They were not free, however, from vices and fail-
ings. Hatred, envy, cunning, intrigue, combined with
an overweening sentiment of pride, contradiction, and
perversity, added to avarice and cruelty—such is the
long series of those hereditary faults which history
reveals to us among the Egyptians by innumerable
examples.

Nor did the rule of the Pharaohs open to the in-
habitants of the land the gates of a terrestrial para-
dise. The people suffered and endured under the
blows of their oppressors, and the stick quickened the
despatch of business between the peasant and the tax-
gatherer. We need but glance at the gigantic masses
of the Pyramids; the}'' tell more emphatically than
living speech or written words of the miseries of a
whole population, which was condemned to erect these
everlasting monuments of Pharaonic vanity : and when,
thirty centuries later, Herodotus visited the Pyramids
of Gizeh, the Egyptians told him of the imprecations
"wrung from their unhappy forefathers during the erec-
tion of those monuments.

The Egyptians were as enquiring as ourselves about
prehistoric times, but with this difference, that for them
primeval history was concerned but little with the
people and much more with the fame of their kings.
Their enquiries were directed to the names and genealo-
gies of the princes who ruled the land before the
first authentic king, Mena. As they could not discover
from their monuments any records of their land before
the Pharaoh Mena mounted the throne, their imagina-