the desert of Africa. It produces in abundance wheat, beans, lentils,
and all leguminous foods; palms rear themselves in forests. On the
pastures irrigated by the Nile graze herds of cattle and goats, and
flocks of geese. With a territory hardly equal to that of Belgium,
Egypt still supports 5,500,000 inhabitants. No country in Europe is so
thickly populated, and Egypt in antiquity was more densely thronged
than it is today.

=The Accounts of Herodotus.=--Egypt was better known to the Greeks
than the rest of the Orient. Herodotus had visited it in the fifth
century B.C. He describes in his History the inundations of the Nile,
the manners, costume, and religion of the people; he recounts events
of their history and tales which his guides had told him. Diodorus and
Strabo also speak of Egypt. But all had seen the country in its
decadence and had no knowledge of the ancient Egyptians.

=Champollion.=--The French expedition to Egypt (1798-1801) opened the
country to scholars. They made a close examination of the Pyramids
and ruins of Thebes, and collected drawings and inscriptions. But no
one could decipher the hieroglyphs, the Egyptian writing. It was an
erroneous impression that every sign in this writing must each
represent a word. In 1821 a French scholar, Champollion, experimented
with another system. An official had reported that there was an
inscription at Rosetta in three forms of writing--parallel with the
hieroglyphs was a translation in Greek. The name of King Ptolemy, was
surrounded with a cartouche.[8] Champollion succeeded in finding in
this name the letters P, T, O, L, M, I, S. Comparing these with other
names of kings similarly enclosed, he found the whole alphabet. He
then read the hieroglyphs and found that they were written in a
language like the Coptic, the language spoken in Egypt at the time of