"And thou hast walked about how strange a story, And time had not begun to overthrow Thou hast a tongue, come, let us hear its tune! Not like thin ghosts or disembodied creatures, But with thy bones, and flesh, and limbs, and features!" Rameses, however, keeps silent. Though his lips remain in perfect formation, they have not spoken for more than three. milleniums. Such are some of the "signs and wonders upon Pharaoh," to use a Scriptural phrase, "as it is this day." CHAPTER IV ROUND ABOUT KARNAK: OLD THEBES, WHOSE DESTRUCTION SCRIPTURE PREDICTED HE Bible has been frequently verified. We are to see TH the fulfillment of the following indirect prophesy; "Art thou better than No-Amon, that was situate among the rivers, that had the waters round about her; whose rampart was the sea and her wall was of the sea? Ethiopia and Egypt were her strength, and it was infinite." No-Amon was the Biblical name for a city which was better known in antiquity as Thebes. It was on the Nile, which formed for it irrigating canals and sacred lakes, till its abundance of water was like that of the sea. It had the strength of Egypt, the richest country of the time, in which it was located. But its downfall was so complete, that the prophet Nahum in predicting the overthrow of Nineveh said it should be as utter as that of Thebes, which was pointed out as an awful example. In harmony with this representation, Jeremiah said “Behold, I will punish Amon of No, and Pharaoh, and Egypt, with her gods, and her kings." Ezekiel, too, prophesied, "No shall be broken up," "and I will cut off the multitude of No," "and will execute judgments upon No." In other words, Thebes was to be, as Nahum said, "carried away," or as we would say, swept away. We are bound for this city, to see if Scripture was thus fulfilled. But as we are travelling, we will stop here and there on the way. About 120 miles above Cairo, and back a little from the Nile, we are in the Fayoum district, where was located the ancient labyrinth, which was more intricate and extensive than the famous one in Crete. It contained, Herodotus said, 3,000 rooms, it was constructed about 2300 B. C., but it has long been a mass of ruins. In this vicinity have been exhumed some remarkable papyri. We all know how out of the reeds of the Nile was early manufactured an article called papyrus, resembling our paper. No only was the ark of bulrushes, in which the infant Moses was hidden at the water's edge, a papyrus box, but long before Moses the flags of the river were made to serve the very practical purpose of paper, on which scribes could and did write not only for their own day but for generations yet unborn. The skins of animals also were dressed into a fine sort of vellum, which was more durable than papyrus. Of this stronger material is the third in antiquity of the great uncial manuscripts of the Bible in the Greek language. This is known as the Codex Alexandrinus, because (by gift of the Greek patriarch at Constantinople) it came from Alexandria, though it is now one of the choice possessions of the British Museum. It dates back to the first half of the fifth century, only the Sinaitic and Vatican Manuscripts of this class being older. These are of vellum. But the naturally less enduring papyrus rolls have also survived the ravages of time. Some of these, discovered by Petrie in the Fayoum, are assigned to the third century before Christ, and still others to the twelfth Egyptian dynasty, which goes back to the time of Abraham and earlier. There is to-day in the archives of the Bibliotheque Nationale of Paris a precious document, known as the Prisse Papyrus, written by a scribe of the eleventh dynasty, not far from 2500 B. C., sometimes called "the oldest book in the world." A Homer papyrus, found in 1889, was rolled up to serve as a pillow for the head of its former owner, who apparently had been a young and beautiful woman. Her silken black hair, and her Homer which she loved so well as to have it buried with her, are both in the Bodleian library of Oxford, and there have been seen by me. Of special interest to Bible students was the sensational discovery, in the winter of 1896-7, at this point where we are lingering, at Oxyrrhynchus in the Fayoum, of a second-century papyrus containing "Sayings of Jesus," not reported in the canonical gospels. These "Logia," of which we have here and there hints in ecclesiastical literature, have now been recovered after a slumber of about eighteen centuries. One of these Sayings, to give a sample, reads as follows: "Except ye fast to the world, ye shall in no wise find the kingdom of God; and except ye keep the Sabbath, ye shall not see the Father." We cannot tarry longer at this point of papyrus discoveries, and we speed on till we are 190 miles beyond Cairo, and there, at Der Manas, we are close to Tell-el-Amarna, which has recently sprung into fame. Here Amenophis the Fourth established a new capital, after moving from Thebes. His library was uncovered at this point in 1887, giving us more than 300 clay tablets inscribed with Babylonian characters, the court language of the time. These are now scattered among various Museums in the world, and they can be read. They remind us of records lately dug up in the unearthing of Ahab's palace at Samaria, these being written with characters in black and perfectly legible yet. The Amarna tablets had their letters cut in clay when it was |