THE EXPLANATION OF THE COVER-PLATE.
I have been given to understand that the cover-plateof this volume needs some explanation: if so, it can nowonly be inserted on an additional fly-leaf.
At the top is the familiar, winged, serpent-supportedglobe of the old Egyptians. This, as every body knows,is generally found over the main entrances of the temples,and on the heads of mummy cases. In speaking on suchsubjects we must not press words too far. But I believe itmay be taken for what we may almost call a pantheisticemblem, compounded of symbols of three of the attributesof Deity, as then imagined. The central globe, the sun,represents the source of light and warmth, and, therefore,of life. The serpents represent maternity. The wings,beneath which the hen gathers her chickens, representprotection. This is one interpretation.
There might have been, and doubtless were, containedin the emblem other ideas, irrecoverable now by the aid ofthe ideas that exist in our minds. At all events, theologicalemblems, like theological terms, must vary in theirimport from time to time, in accordance with the varyingknowledge of those who use them: for they can be readonly by the light of what is in the mind of the reader.This emblem, therefore, may not always have stood to theminds of the old Egyptians for precisely the same conceptions.The above interpretation, however, probably containedfor them, for some millenniums, its main and mostobvious suggestions; suggestions which were for thoseearly days a profound, though easily read, exposition ofthe relations of nature to man, and which are very far frombeing devoid of, at all events, historical interest to themodern traveller in Egypt.
For the lower division of the plate, the author of the[2]volume is responsible. It is meant to illustrate the statementon page 15, that the agricultural wealth of Egyptthat is to say its history, results in a great measure fromthe fact of its having a winter as well as a summer harvest.The sun is represented on the right, at its winter altitude,maturing the wheat crop, which stands for the variedproduce of the temperate zone; on the left, at its summeraltitude, maturing the cotton crop, which stands for thevaried produce of the tropical, or almost tropical, zone.Both have been grown beneath the same Palm tree, whichsymbolizes the region itself. The unusually erect Palmtree in the plate, was cut from a photographic portrait ofone which we may trust is still yielding fruit, and castingon the rock-strewn ground the shade of its lofty tuft ofwavy leaves, in the Wady Feiran, to the north-east ofMount Sinai. The black diagonal line gives the equatorof the sky at the latitude of Cairo, which is taken, forthe purposes of the illustration, as the mean latitude ofEgypt. This is also indicated by the Pyramid.
The pathway of the sun is given as it is representedon one of the finest and most precious monuments of oldEgypt in its proudest days—the wonderfully instructivemonolithic alabaster sarcophagus of the great Sethos,Joseph’s Pharaoh, at all events the grandfather of th