of two men, with bushy plaited hair and long beards: they stand with a tray of offerings in front of them, on which lie fishes, with papyrus plants hanging round. The details are beautifully worked, the flowers and buds being most delicately wrought. The black granite sphinxes made by the Hyksos have been often described. They have the flat, massive, muscular, lowering face, with short whiskers and beard around it, the lips being shaven; and the hair is in a mat of thick, short locks descending over the whole chest, a style copied from the great sphinxes of the twelfth dynasty. It is a curious fact that the inscriptions on Hyksos sphinxes, &c., are always in a line down the right shoulder, never on the left. Mr Petrie suggests that this honouring of the right shoulder by this Semitic people is analogous to the particular offering of the right shoulder continually enjoined in the Jewish law.[1] The Egyptians missed this idea, and inscribed either side indifferently, showing no preference for the left, although that was their side of honour.
Here at San, or Tanis, was discovered the famous Stone of San or Decree of Canopus, which is now preserved in the National Museum of Egypt. It bears the text of a decree made by the priests of Egypt, assembled at Canopus (which was at that time the religious capital of the country) in the ninth year of Ptolemy Euergetes (B.C. 254). It ordains the deification of Berenice, a daughter of Ptolemy's just dead, and creates a fifth order of priests, to be called Euergetæ, for the better paying of divine honours to the king and queen. The chief value of the monument consists in the circumstance that the inscription is tri-lingual, the characters being hieroglyphic (sacred), demotic (those of everyday business), and Greek (the chief language of foreigners in Egypt); so that, like the Rosetta Stone, it is of great use in helping scholars to decipher the Egyptian
- ↑ Exod. xxix. 22; Levit. vii. 32, viii. 25, ix. 21; Num. xviii. 18.
