In no particular have modem historical studies made
greater progress than in the reproduction and publication
of documentary sources from which our knowledge of the
most varied peoples and periods is drawn. In American
history whole libraries of such sources have appeared or are
promised. These are chiefly in English, although the other
languages of Europe are of course often largely represented.
The employment of such sources from the early epochs of
the world's history involves either a knowledge of ancient
languages on the part of the user, or a complete rendition
of the documents into English. No attempt has ever been
made to collect and present all the sources of Egyptian
history in a modern language. A most laudable beginning
in this direction, and one that has done great service, was
the Records of the Past; but that series never attempted to
be complete, and no amount of editing could make con-
sistent with themselves the uncorrelated translations of the
large number of contributors to that series.
The author is only too well aware of the difficulties
involved in such a project. In mere bulk alone it has
been a considerable enterprise, in view of the preliminary
tasks made necessary by the state of the published texts.
These I have indicated briefly in the chapter on the sources
herein (Vol. I, $5 27-32). Under these circumstances, the
author's first obligation has been to go behind the publica-
tions to the original documents themselves, wherever
necessary. The method pursued has also been indicated
herein (Vol. I, $5 33-37). The task has consumed years,
and demanded protracted sojourn among the great col-
lections of Europe. In this work a related enterprise has
been of the greatest assistance. A mission to the museums
of Europe to collect and copy their Egyptian monuments
for a commission of the four Royal Academies of Germany
(Berlin, Leipzig, Gottingen, and Munich), in order to make
these documents available for an exhaustive Egyptian
Dictionary endowed by the German Emperor, enabled the
author to copy from the originals practically all the his-
torical monuments of Egypt in Europe. The other sources
of material, and particularly the papers of the Dictionary
just mentioned, have enabled the author to base the trans-
lations ip these volumes directly, or practically so, upon the
originals themselves in almost all cases.
Unfortunately, the possession of these materials is but
the beginning of the difficulties which beset such an enter-
prise. In the preface to the first edition of his English
Dictionary, Noah Webster complains of the difficulties
caused by the new meanings taken on by English words
as they are modified by the new environment which envelops
them in America. If such changes are involved in the
voyage across the Atlantic, and the lapse of a few genera-
tions, how much wider and deeper is the gulf due to the
total difference between the semitropical northern Nile
valley of millenniums ago, and the English-spea.king world
of this twentieth century! The psychology of early man
is something with which we have as yet scarcely begun to
operate. His whole world and his whole manner of think-
ing are sharply differentiated from our own. His organi-
zation, socially, industrially, commercially, politically; his
tools, his house, his conveniences, constantly involve insti-
tutions, adjustments, and appliances totally unknown to
this modern age and this western world. In the transla-
tion of the New Testament for the tribes of Alaska, I am
told, there has been great difficulty in the rendition of the
term "Good Shepherd," for the reason that many of these
people never saw a sheep and never heard of a shepherd.
Similarly, how shall one rehabilitate this ancient world of
the Nile-dweller, and put his documents into intelligible
English, when the ideas to be rendered are often unknown
to the average modem and western reader, and, needless
to say, there are no corresponding terms in the English
language ?
Another constant source of difficulty has been the lack
of those indispensable helps, the legion of concordances,
glossaries, handbooks, and compilations for ready refer-
ence, which the worker in Greek or Hebrew has constantly
at his hand. In spite of the colossal industry of Brugsch,
we are still without a dictionary of Egyptian to which one
can turn with any hope of finding other examples of a rare
word. Hardly any Old Kingdom documents at all were
employed by Brugsch in the compilation of his dictionary,
and, grateful as we are for what he was able to furnish us,
we must still await the great Berlin Dictionary before we
shall possess an exhaustive compendium of the language.
I was able to employ the alphabetically arranged materials
of the Dictionary here and there, but the compilation was
not sufficiently far advanced at the conclusion of my work
to be of much service. Wherever I have drawn examples
from it, they are carefully acknowledged in the footnotes.
A good many distinctions in the meanings of words have
become evident to me in the course of the work upon the
documents. Wherever such have become clear late in the
progress of the work, it was impossible to go through the
translations and revise the entire manuscript for the sake of
such words alone. I have tried to control these cases as far
as possible in the proofs, but I am confident that some such
changes have been overlooked as the accumulation of alter-
ations demanded in the proofreading was quite beyond
my powers of observation in so large a mass of materials.
Thus, for example, the common word sr is usually trans-
lated "prince," and this is undoubtedly sometimes the
meaning of the word; but it very frequently means "offi-
cial," a fact which I did not observe until far along in the
progress of the work.
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