ciated with the temples of the gods. The | Egyptian Arabs, the pilgrimage to Mecca, most important of these institutions flour- and retained in it to this day. Pilgrimages ished on the territory of the Necropolis of to particular sanctuaries were already cusThebes, and belonged, together with the tomary in the age of the Pharaohs. Bufamous library which bore the inscription bastis, in the Delta, is mentioned as the "Hospital of the Soul," to the Memno-shrine of the most important of these. mium of Ramses II. But in the resi- At that place was situated the principal dential part of Thebes also, scholastic sanctuary of the goddess Sechet, the institutions were maintained in connection daughter of the sun-god Pia, who was repwith the greatest sanctuary of the king-resented by a cat's head, as the Queen of dom. The pupils educated at them meet Love, from whom passion, lust, and festal us often under the name of scholars of intoxication flowed into the hearts of the the town of Ammon, and it is now established that the colleges of Heliopolis and Sais were connected with the temples of those towns. Every sanctuary had landed property, and was put into an excellent position by the endowments provided by Pharaoh and private benefactors, and often by claims to pious services. The real and movable estate of the temples and schools was largely increased, espe cially by the lavish generosity of Ramses the Third, and it may be compared throughout with the ankaf (sing. wakf), the foundations in which Cairo is peculiarly rich, but which have been subject to State supervision since Mohammed 'Ali. Of course it is difficult to determine in what form the heathen custom preserved itself in passing through the Christian period into the Moslem. It is usual, in the transition of a people from one religion to another, for important institutions of the old doctrine to be completely abolished, while matters of unessential detail are often willingly retained and live long in oral tradition as popular superstitions. In this way the worship of cats, which were held high and holy among the ancient Egyptians, has survived to the present day, though in an ever feebler and feebler form. The kadi was obliged, not very long ago, to feed homeless mouse-catchers for the most part at his own cost, and even to- | day meat is laid out for them every afternoon in a particular courtyard to which they flock. The great sultan Bebars bequeathed a garden in the north of Cairo for the entertainment of the cats of the town. The German pilgrim Arnold von Harff saw a soldier sitting in the sunshine, and observed that he allowed himself to be painfully roasted and blinded rather than go back into the shade, because he could not bring it into his heart to disturb the sleep of a cat that lay in his bosom. It is especially remarkable, however, to find this survival of ancient Egyptian animal-worship introduced into one of the most important religious functions of the pious. Men and women from all Egypt streamed in wild licentiousness to her temple. Seven hundred thousand men, we are told by Herodotus, went to Bubastis every year and brought dead cats there for burial; and this statement has been completely authenticated, for a short time ago a cat graveyard, containing innumerable bones of this sacred animal, was discovered in the heap of ruins which rises from the plain of Zakazik, and now constitutes the only remains of the famous pilgrimage city of Bubastis. As seven hundred thousand of the faithful went to Bubastis under the Pharaohs, so in the present day seventy thousand Moslems are obliged to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. If this number is not complete, then Heaven makes up the diference by sending angels. The caravan begins with the mahmal of Cairo, and what comes next in the long procession immediately after the camel-schech, who every year makes the pilgrimage, halfnaked, and with streaming hair? It is the father of cats, or schech of cats, who carries with him, in baskets hanging on either side of his saddle, as many cats as he can accommodate before and behind him. In earlier times the caravan was accompanied by a mother of cats, instead of a father of cats, but the wife has been supplanted by the husband in consequence of the small part which women take in the pilgrimage. Islam has, indeed, generally deprived women of the privileged position which was granted them in ancient Egypt. A pilgrimage similar to that of Bubastis is at present celebrated at Tanta. It is attached to the tomb and commemoration festival of the saint Sejjid Ahmed-el-Bedawi. Popular festivals, on as great a scale as those of the time of the Pharaohs, are associated with the religious celebration, and we have ourselves seen whole boatfuls of women of ill-fame going to the fair of Tanta, who, as soon as they met another boat, uttered those singular, shrill screams with which under like, to the poor. Then the belabe and durabuke (violins and kettledrums) are played, and the visit to the graveyard becomes a feast. The ancient Egyptians conducted themselves in exactly the same emotional excitement, whether gay or sad, | So the Karafe, as the Cairenes term their they rend the ear. These women conduct necropolis, lies in the east and souththemselves in general not much more east of the town, and on desert ground. decently than their predecessors at the Hither every Friday come the Moslem pilgrimage to Bubastis. citizens before sunrise, pronounce a sare In the graveyard of Cairo the Egyptian from the Koran over the grave of their archæologist will find many traces of pre-dead, and distribute dates, bread, and the Christian times. The Greeks burnt the dead; the Christians disliked mummifying them; for example, one of the most ancient saints of the Coptic Church desired to see his body saved from that process; and so the art of the Colchytes, Para-way. shistes, and Taricheutes became lost; but just as Memphis and Thebes had their necropolis, so Cairo has its city of the dead. Of course this is situated in the east of the town, and not, according to ancient Egyptian usage, in the west. This circumstance is partly due to the nature of the locality, and partly to the altered estimate set upon the various quarters of the heavens, for the Moslems have quite different ideas on this point from the ancient Egyptians. The latter gave the first rank to the south, the home of the Nile, on which the weal and woe of their country depended; and since they likened the fate of the soul to the course of the sun, and thought the boat of day received the immortal part of man in order to disappear with it at night in the under world, the necropolis was naturally placed in the west of the town. So too the sarcophagus chambers in the pyramids were placed in the west, because Osiris lived in the west. To the Moslems on the Nile, on the other hand, the east is the most honorable quarter. To the east the face is always turned in dying, for in the east lies the holiest of holy places, Mecca with its Ka'aba. Besides, the Arabs formed an intelligent economical estimate of the nature of the country conquered by them, to which Arrian refers in the first verse of a series of distichs which he caused to be engraved on the Great Sphinx: God founded here this far-shining work of art That carefully guards the field's wheat-producing plain. The habitations of the dead were placed in the desert in order not to diminish the cultivable land of the living, and, as is also well established, in order to protect the corpse from the overflow of the river. The mummies would have been injured by the water, and experience may have taught the priestly physicians that noxious exhalations rise from flooded graveyards after the abatement of the flood. On stated days the survivors visited the tombs of their departed friends, sacrificed, banqueted, played the harp, and sang, and invited their acquaintances to entertainments at home. At the grave of Neferhotep in Thebes (sixteenth century B.C.) may be seen, cut in the stone, the song of the harper who was appointed to play at such festivities, and this song shows how a certain fresh delight in life mingled with the feelings about death that were prevalent among the ancient Egyptians, who celebrated their festivals more boisterously than most other peoples. One is reminded of the Anacreontic verse: "The present day is here for the heart to enjoy ; who knows what the next may bring?" or of the Horatian “Carpe diem,” and the whole ode on Leuconoë, when one hears the harper singing at the tomb of Neferhotep in celebration of the festival of the Prophet: "Bring me sweet-scented ointment, and balsam, and twine with garlands of flowers the breast and arms of thy much-loved sister, who attaches herself affectionately to thee. We will sing songs, we will strike the harp before thy face. Lay aside all care, and think only of joy till the day of our departure draws near. Then shall we arrive and find peace in the kingdom where silence reigns." Is it accidental that the singers who accompany the corpse of deceased Mussulmans are often blind, like the musicians who officiated in the funeral rites of ancient Egypt? And who knows the ancient who made the lamentations for the dead Egyptian representations of the women - who has read what Herodotus bas written about the Egyptian mourning women without being reminded of it all when he sees the women of modern Cairo who attend a funeral smear their breast and brow with mud, raise their arms, and strike their head with their hands? When we meet such a funeral procession, we may well believe that our "to-day" is united without interruption with the days of Neferhotep. The mourning women at the funeral of deceased Cairenes appear | place, day and hour of their disappearance. to be the direct successors of those whom In this way everything was easily found, and we see on innumerable sculptures, strik- the robbed person received his lost property ing their forehead with loud lamentations. on paying a fourth of it. As it was impossible To what Arabic song must we refer the to prevent theft entirely, the lawgiver thus inLinos - song, which vented a means of getting back what was stolen Herodotus heard in return for a certain redemption money, which was willingly paid. among the Greeks, Phoenicians, and in Cyprus, and which is said to have been called Mancrōs on the Nile? Perhaps the melody often sung, beginning "Das ja lelli," may be taken for it. How remarkable is the long duration of this apparently absurd custom! Unquestionably ancient Egyptian is also a part of the calendar which is still in use among the Cairenes to-day. From the variable nature of the Moslem lunar times in different years, and it is natural that the present Egyptians should prefer using the Coptic calendar to their own, in the case of feasts that depend on regularly recurring natural events, because the Coptic calendar is founded on the ancient Egyptian solar year, which was also made the basis of our own calendar by Julius Cæsar. Many religious and superstitious usages of the Mussulmans connect themselves with the Christian feastdays in the Coptic calendar. For example, the forty-nine days of the chamsin, or As in the celebrations of mourning so in those of joy, ancient and modern are mingled. One of the most licentious fig. ures in the popular festivals of Cairo car-year, the periodical feasts fall at different ries an emblem which was of much importance in many a celebration in the time of the Pharaohs, and works with it in mad play. It owes its name to Saladin's vizier Karakusch. The snake-charmers whom one meets in the open streets and at all popular festivities, form a family in which the secret of taming poisonous adders, of driving them out of the course, of making them dance, etc., has been handed down from father to son for thousands of years. Every child knows of the tricks which the magicians of Pharaoh played before Moses; but we possess also a satir-hot S. W. wind, are placed in the period ical papyrus of the time of Ramses III., on which we see in front of the "Sublime Porte," the palace of the king, a ram and an ass playing lute and harp, and a crocodile practising magic on a snake. Receipts for driving noxious animals from a house are found in the Ebers papyrus. Lane asserts that the modern snakecharmers carry about with them only snakes from which they have previously extracted the fangs. The same scholar tells of an institution which existed in Cairo not long since, and in which, as we know from the best sources, many still living Cairenes took part. All the guilds and trades of the town had their president or schecho, and even the common thieves recognized such an officer over them. People often went to him to recover stolen goods and bring the thieves to justice, and they commonly succeeded with his help. Compare with that the following passage which we borrow verbatim from "Diodorus of Sicily: between the third day of the Coptic Easter feast and Whitsunday. Again, the commencement of the rising of the Nile is fixed, not according to the Moslem calendar, but according to the Coptic, and many an ancient Egyptian survival continues in the celebration of this natu ral event. Stern has shown in his paper on the Nile-stele of Gebel Silsile, that the two Nile feasts instituted by Ramses II. are to be regarded as the predecessors of those which are celebrated in the metropolis of Egypt to-day. The one is the Night of the Drop, which always falls on the 11th Bauneh (17th June), when the Nile is at its lowest; the other, the Cutting of the Dam, is fixed according to the state of the water. They are two months apart, just like the festivals mentioned on the Nile-stele of the age of the Pharaohs. We learn from the classical writers (Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny) that the amount of taxation was determined every year after the abatement of the overflow, and that for a fruitful year it was counted necessary that the water should have reached a height of fourteen to sixteen ells. Who does not know of the "Father Nile" in the Vatican sur It was ordained that those who practised the avocation of thief should inscribe their names with the president of the thieves. If they had stolen anything, they had at once to confess what they had done and show him their booty.rounded by sixteen genie children as alThe robbed person was then required to send legorical incorporations of these sixteen to this president of thieves a written statement ells? The desired height of the water of all the things he had missed, and mention here mentioned was, as Aristides ex pressly states, indicated by the Nile-gauge | human sacrifices were actually practised at Memphis, and we know that this gauge was transferred from the left bank of the Nile to the right, or more precisely to the island Roda, opposite Fostat, and that it has retained its importance for the whole country to this day. We have treated in another place of the cutting of the dam and the feast connected therewith. Here we shall only add that some primitive usages are still associated with it. One of the chief of these is the preparation of a cone of earth, called El-Arusi.e., the bride, which is so placed on the dam that the rising flood must wash it away from eight to fourteen days before it reaches its height. The circumstance that a little corn is put on the top of it shows that it had originally the significance of an offering. And, in fact, its recurrence appears to stand in close connection with the ancient custom of throwing an offering into the Nile shortly before the commence ment of its rising. This was practised in heathen times at Memphis, for Pliny mentions that at the Nile feast called Neilsa, a gold or silver dish was thrown by the priest into the so-called source of the Nile at Memphis. among the heathen Egyptians, we feel ourselves compelled to infer some transposition or distortion in the narrative of Ibn Ajās. The overflow of the Nile was naturally not less impatiently waited for in the time of the Pharaohs than in the seventh century A.D. and in our own day, and from the character of the ancient Egyptian cultus we must assume that shortly before the commencement of the rising of the Nile great processions took place, and many kinds of offerings were made. These must have been addressed to the Nile-god Hapi, and to Osiris. The latter was considered the great aboriginal power that ruled all things and awakened all fresh life, working and producing everything in the under world, and by consequence also in the Nile, moving through the abode of the dead, and raising his own to new life. In pantheistic texts Osiris is called the Nile, and just as he brings light out of darkness, and animates the dead to fresh exertions, and withered vegetation to new bloom, so also he makes the river of Egypt to rise in its season. These ideas are contained likewise in the Christian teaching of the Copts; but The following story which Ibn Ajās has since the Copts could not look on a preserved, is well known. Shortly after heathen deity as anything but a demon, the foundation of Fostat by 'Amr, the they transferred his divine energy, which Nile refused to rise, and the Ćopts wished was displayed most actively in the reguto throw into the water a maiden, the larly recurring rise of the river, to their usual offering cast annually into the arms own holy Orion. In a Christian Egyptian of the river, for they thought the Nile papyrus, written in Greek hexameters, would not rise unless it received this its and belonging apparently to the fifth or customary tribute. When the flood still sixth century A.D., the following passage delayed coming, the commander went to occurs in an exorcism: "Come to me, the caliph, and informed him of the holy Orion, thou who resteth in the north, circumstance. The messenger returned, thou who movest the flood of the Nile bringing a letter from Omar, which 'Amr and minglest it with the sea." This was directed to cast into the river. This formula is very like heathen Egyptian was done, and on the very next night the ones of the same kind, and it may be here water rose to the necessary level of six-mentioned that in texts belonging to the teen ells. The caliph's letter contained period of the Pharaohs Osiris is addressed the following words: "To the blessed as the constellation of Orion. A disNile of Egypt. If thou hast hitherto flowed only according to thine own pleasure, then suspend thy rising; but if thou obeyest the commands of the Most High God, then we pray him to increase thy flood." This story is certainly founded on fact, for in the days of the trustworthy Makrissi (1442) the Christian part of the population of Cairo still threw a casket containing the finger of a saint into the Nile, in order to move it to a favorable rise. But when we remember that those who are said shortly after the foundation of Fostat to have pressed for the offering of a virgin were Christians, and that guised Osiris-worship had thus certainly continued among the Copts up till the Mussulman invasion, and when we hear of the offerings of many sorts which the ancient Egyptians threw into the Nile (e.g., the dish already mentioned), we may safely assume that the Copts had not yet renounced this custom of their ancestors when 'Amr built Fostat. We cannot, indeed, attribute to them the offering of a real maiden, a virgin of flesh and blood, but when we find in Porphyry a statement of Manetho to the effect that the Egyptians had in earlier times sacrificed men in great numbers, and that Amasis had abolished this horrible castom and sub- The image of a goddess (Neith) thus A tear of Ifas, when her heart was breaking with anxiety for the return of her husband, fell, according to the belief of heathen times, into the river and made it swell, and then, after Horus had conquered Set (the dry), it brought back the husband (Osiris-Nile) to the mourning wife (the earth longing for fertilization); but this tear the Arabs have converted into the "divine drop," which, as they think, causes the rising of the Nile. The inquirer in Cairo thus finds the old in the new everywhere, in art, in science, in civil and public life. The physical law of the conservation of matter is true also of the acquisitions of the mind. They seem to disappear, vanish, and go to noth ing, but they are only forgotten, and in reality transmute themselves into new and no longer recognizable forms, or disappear perhaps temporarily under dust or behind clouds. But they still live and work on, and it is one of the greatest joys of the investigator to seek and recognize them under rubbish heaps or in thick wrappings. What an enjoyment it is to search through Cairo for the remains of antiquity! May those to whom it is today given to guide the destinies of the Nile valley, not forget that with every monument of ancient Egypt they destroy, they destroy a part of her greatness. History eschews wreaths, but flourishes the whip, and she has engraved on her tables in much deeper letters the destructive work of the Vandals than all their brave and glorious deeds. From Temple Bar. KATTY THE FLASH. "Do I see life? is it? Well," hesitatingly, "I might say I do. Yes. A good few sorts and conditions of people come under my ken here." "It must be awfully interesting, Mrs. Smith, to one who has an eye for character as you have." "Character!" echoed the prison matron. "In one sense of that word it is a microscope bless your soul- and not an eye I shall have. It's very little of that sort of character is to be found in the Grange. Oh, dear! oh, dear! oh, me," she sighed, pulling a huge grey stocking out of her pocket, "I fairly tell you I am never but pulled between laughing and crying with them." The speaker was Mrs. Smith, the matron of prison, which is situated on In the nineteenth Upper Egyptian province, that the north side of Dublin, a tall, handsome of the Oxyrynchites of the Greeks, whose sacred animal, the first Oxyrynchos, was closely connected with woman between forty and fifty years of the worship of Osiris, Horus is said, after he overthrew age. The habit of command was distinctly Set, the enemy of his father, Osiris, to have cut off his to be read in her comely, benevolent face, leg and given it to the priests of the merchet, or (according to Dæmichen's explanation of the word) ob- and her large, gray eyes expressed in alservatory of the Nile rising. Now, an animal's leg is most equal proportions a keen sense of said to have been thrown into the river by these priests humor and a quick sympathy. The fine, as an offering, but that circumstance is susceptible of another explanation than that just suggested. This classic shape of her head with its masses animal's leg is called alodsch or arodsch, and it is pos- of grizzled hair was not altogether consible to take this word of Ibn Ajās for the Arabic harus, and in that case the offering of a leg is a commutation cealed by her cap; and a close-fitting for the offering of a bride or a young maiden (harūs). | black dress, with snowy collar and cuffs, ゴ |