Edwards, Amelia B.: Pharaohs, fellahs and explorers (New York, NY, 1892)

VI.

THE LITERATURE AND RELIGION OF
ANCIENT EGYPT.

That the first people who possessed letters in the literal
sense should also be the first people to possess letters in the
literary sense, is no more than we should expect. Not, in-
deed, that the possession of an alphabet necessarily implies
literary activity on the part of those who possess it. The
Romans engraved their codes on tablets of stone and brass,
and sculptured inscriptions on their public buildings, for cen-
turies before they wrote histories and dramas, odes and sa-
tires. The Oscans, the Etruscans, and other early nations of
Italy, never, so far as we know, got beyond mere inscriptions.
Even the Greeks of the iEgean, as we are now just begin-
ning to find out, were in possession of the Cadmasan alpha-
bet some five or six centuries before the time of Homer; and
yet we have no evidence that the Iliad was committed to
writing earlier than some four hundred years after the death
of the poet. Literature is, in fact, the fruit of leisure. Na-
tions which are going through the struggle for existence call
for soldiers, not scribes. The bard, the rhapsodist, the ex-
temporaneous singer of war-chants and dirges, is the only
representative of literature at that early stage in the history
of a people; and it is not till the arts of peace have taken
their place side by side with the arts of war, that poems are
written, not sung—that histories are recorded with the pen,

not carved out by the sword.
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