Edwards, Amelia B.: A thousand miles up the Nile (New York, [1888])

ASSITAN AND ELEPHANTINE. 165

these illegible scrawls, of the importance they were shortly
to acquire in the eyes of the learned, of the possible value
of any chance additions to their number we knew, and
could know, nothing. Six months later we lamented our
ignorance and our lost opportunities.

For the Egyptians, it seems, used potsherds instead of
papyrus for short memoranda; and each of these fragments
which we had picked up contained a record complete in
itself. I fear we should have laughed if any one had sug-
gested that they might be tax-gatherers' receipts. Yet
that is just what they were—receipts for government dues
collected on the frontier during the period of Roman rule
in Egypt. They were written in Greek, because the
Romans deputed Greek scribes to perform the duties of
this unpopular oflice; but the Greek is so corrupt and the
penmanship so clownish that only a few eminent scholars
can read them.

Not all the inscribed fragments found at Elephantine,
however, are tax-receipts, or written in bad Greek. The
British Museum contains several in the demotic, or current,
script of the people, and a few in the more learned hieratic,
or priestly, hand. The former have not yet been translated.
They are probably business memoranda and short private
letters of Egyptians of the same period.

But how came these fragile documents to be preserved,
when the city in which their writers lived, and the temples
in which they worshiped, have disappeared and left scarce

the Ptolemies. Their clerics were Egyptians, and they had a chest
and treasure(phylax)." See p. 109, an above; also Birch's " History
of Ancient Pottery," chap. 1, p. 45.

These barren memoranda are not the only literary curiosities found
at Elephantine. Among the Egyptian manuscripts of the Louvre may
be seen some fragments of the eighteenth book of the " Iliad," dis-
covered in a tomb upon the island. How they came to be buried
there no one knows. A lover of poetry would like to think, how-
ever, that some Greek or Roman officer, dying at his post upon this
distant station, desired, perhaps, to have his Homer laid with him in
his grave.

Note to Second Edition.—Other fragments of "Iliad" have
been found from time to time in various parts of Egypt; some (now
in the Louvre) being scrawled, like the above-mentioned tax-receipts,
on mere potsherds. The finest specimen ever found in Egypt, or
elsewhere, and the earliest, has, however, been discovered this year,
1888, by Mr. Flinders Petrie in the grave of a woman at Hawara, in
the Kayum,