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Excerpt from Popular Literature in Ancient Egypt For many centuries past and until recently the civilised world was accustomed to regard the ancient Egyptians as a people leading a monotonous and joyless life, unrippled by any passing breeze of ordinary human pleasure, and with minds entirely absorbed in meditations on death or in deep religious and philosophical speculations. It was indebted for this picture in the first place to the allusions made by Greek authors to the wisdom of the Egyptians, while the austerity of Egyptian plastic representations of gods, and men, and the vital significance ascribed by this people to all rites and worship connected with the dead, pointed to the same conclusion. This view of the matter was confirmed by the tone of the pompous royal inscriptions and almost exclusively religious texts which were the earliest results of the deciphering of Egyptian writing. 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.