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Excerpt from Priests of Ancient Egypt, Vol. 12 There are two outstanding features of ancient Egypt, both of which are strikingly evident on the banks of the Nile. First, its art, as the Cairo Museum reveals, is as old as history and as beautiful and perfect in its way as all that Greece and more recent civilizations have been able to produce in their greatest periods. Second, one sees that Egypt's monuments are nearly all products of religious preoccupations. From the plateau of Gizeh to the boulders of the cataract, in the shade of the Memphis palms and in the scorching inferno of the Valleys of Kings, in the calm of the Elephantine and in the white feluccas, there is the same striking evidence at each monument, on each visit to the pyramids, temples, tombs, that everything constructed for eternity - everything which has successfully by-passed the centuries - was conceived for the worship of the gods and for the immortality of man. In no country, perhaps, has the desire for eternity been more eloquent, never more effectively realized. Houses, towns, palaces, all the architecture destined for daily life was essentially provisory: crude brick was sufficient. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.