PREFACE
lections of Europe. In this work a related enterprise has been of the greatest assistance. A mission to the museums of Europe to collect and copy their Egyptian monuments for a commission of the four Royal Academies of Germany (Berlin, Leipzig, Géttingen, and Munich), in order to make these documents available for an exhaustive Egyptian Dictionary endowed by the German Emperor, enabled the author to copy from the originals practically all the his- torical monuments of Egypt in Europe. The other sources of material, and particularly the papers of the Dictionary just mentioned, have enabled the author to base the trans- Jations in these volumes directly, or practically so, upon the originals themselves in almost all cases.
Unfortunately, the possession of these materials is but the beginning of the difficulties which beset such an enter- prise. In the preface to the first edition of his English Dictionary, Noah Webster complains of the difficulties caused by the new meanings taken on by English words as they are modified by the new environment which envelops them in America. If such changes are involved in the voyage across the Atlantic, and the lapse of a few genera- tions, how much wider and deeper is the gulf due to the total difference between the semitropical northern Nile valley of millenniums ago, and the English-speaking world of this twentieth century! The psychology of early man is something with which we have as yet scarcely begun to operate. His whole world and his whole manner of think- ing are sharply differentiated from our own. His organi- zation, socially, industrially, commercially, politically; his tools, his house, his conveniences, constantly involve insti- tutions, adjustments, and appliances totally unknown to this modern age and this western world. In the transla- tion of the New Testament for the tribes of Alaska, I am
