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Excerpt from The Priests of Ancient Egypt One becomes accustomed to seeing, in the ancient Egyptians, 'the most scrupulously religious of all men.' But this statement does not suffice to offer the keys to the Pharaonic civilization; in fact it would be a great error to consider the Egyptians too close to ourselves. Nothing, without doubt, is more modern than these stone heads found in the mastabas,1 than the bust of Queen Nofretete; nothing more alive, human in a reassuring fashion, than the scenes of daily life pictured in the tombs of Saqqara or 'of Thebes; nothing perhaps so directly familiar as the popular stories from the shores of the Nile. But beware of thinking that the ancient Egyptian was a man like us, that his civilization was basically analogous to ours, that his thinking was, in the progress of a world still imperfectly known, the beginning of modern thought. 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.