Page:Books on Egypt and Chaldaea, Vol. 32--Legends of the Gods.pdf/97

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EGYPTIAN LITERATURE

useless without its indwelling spirit, the Prince of Bekhten permitted the priests of Khensu Pa-ȧri-sekher to depart with it to Egypt, and dismissed them with gifts of all kinds. In due course they arrived in Egypt and the priests took their statue to the temple of Khensu Nefer-ḥetep, and handed over to that god all the gifts which the Prince of Bekhten had given them, keeping back nothing for their own god. After this Khensu Pa-ȧri-sekher returned to his temple in peace, in the thirty-third year of the reign of Rameses II., having been absent from it about eight years.

VII.

A Legend of Khnemu and of a Seven Years' Famine

The text of this most interesting legend is found in hieroglyphics on one side of a large rounded block of granite some eight or nine feet high, which stands on the south-east portion of Sâhal, a little island lying in the First Cataract, two or three miles to the south of Elephantine Island and the modern town of Aswân. The inscription is not cut into the rock in the ordinary way, but was "stunned” on it with a blunted chisel, and is, in some lights, quite invisible to anyone