“THE PRECIOUS THINGS OF EGYPT.”
By Lee S. Wheeler
It is said that the degraded and ignorant peasantry along the Nile look with a mingled sense of wonder, superstition, and jealousy upon companies of English or American workmen digging up the rubbish of their long-crumbled and sand-covered cities, poking it over carefully, and carrying it away in baskets, as if searching for gold. Well may we ask, What do people want of those old musty scraps? The answer is, They are looking for inscriptions. It means much labor which may amount to but little, yet now and then they strike something that carries a ray of light far back into the dark past, to scenes of which we read in no known book except the Bible. Then it becomes interesting, and helps us to prize the Bible as the only authorized account which God has had preserved of the earliest times of our world. The inscriptions of Egypt were made in hieroglyphic writing, in Coptic (demotic), or in Greek. The hieroglyphic is the oldest form of Egyptian writing—a lost language. This was, in time, changed to the Coptic, as the Copts were descendants of the ancient Egyptian stock. This is still the sacred language of the Coptic church in Egypt. The Greek was the literary language of Egypt under the Ptolemies. At that time all three languages were in use, however, and Ptolemy V, Epiphanes, inscribed one of his decrees in all three upon a stone, now known as the “Rosetta Stone,” which was found in 1799. That is how men have learned to read the most ancient language of the Egyptians. This stone is now in a glass case in the British Museum. It enabled men to read all the books of stone left by these ancient Egyptians, so that the very stones began to cry out, declaring the truth of the Bible. Several years ago the Egyptian Exploration party, unearthing some ruins in the land of Goshen, came upon the ancient treasure city, or storage city, of Pithom, which we are told, in Ex. 1:11–14, the children of Israel were building for Pharaoh when he “made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in mortar, and in brick.” The town was square, and inclosed by walls twenty-two feet thick. The space of the town presented the ruins of vast storage chambers built of brick laid with mortar, some of the tiers with straw and some without straw, just as recorded in the Bible. The name of the city was found, also the name of the builder, Rameses II. In July, 1881, the tomb of this king, the king of the oppression, was found. Far back from the Nile, across the plain from the great city of Thebes, among the dewless limestone hills, is the royal cemetery. Here in a deep chamber of rock, they found the mummy, all that was left of Rameses II. Taking it from its long-resting place with others that were in the vault, and carrying it down to the river, where, no doubt, the royal barge landed it three thousand years before, they conveyed it to the museum at Cairo. This wonderful discovery was made by the Turkish government, which forced the native Egyptians to tell where this burial place was. The Egyptian servants performed the work of carrying the bodies across the plain to the river; for it was said of this their present master, “He shall have power over . . . the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps.” June 1, 1886, the mummy was unwrapped and exposed to the camera for his photograph, that Sabbath-school children, reading the story of Moses and Pharaoh’s daughter, might see a picture of the cruel king. There is no mistaking his identity, for his name was written on his mummy case, and again upon his burial coverings.