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The meaning of the word “Muslim:”—“El Islam” also signifies “the resigning.”

The hookah of the Levant.

Statius (Sylv. 1, 6, 14), speaks of Syrian plums, as, “Quod ramis pia germinat Damascus.”

Our champagne is the favourite sherbet of the East.

Story-telling is, now as ever, the delight of the East: in the coffee and summer houses, at the corners of the streets, in the courts of the mosque, sit the grave and attentive crowd, hearing with childly pleasure the same stories over and over again, applauding every new turn of expression or incident, but not requiring them any more than the hearers of a European sermon.

I cannot here enter into chronological arguments, but I may mention that the schemes of Egyptian history, that give it the largest field of time, seem to me the most probable.

The noise of the Arabs is the greatest drawback to the pleasure of an excursion to the Pyramids—most disagreeable ciceroni besetting you on every side and in numbers that renders resistance impossible.

At Hieropolis.

That is, with the hundred temples: there was no wall round Thebes, therefore no gates; but the Pylones, or massive gates of the Temples, were evidently the object of foreign astonishment and admiration.

In the oldest form of Egyptian theology of which we have cognizance, the Nile is a God, and the phrase “the proper rising of the God,” is found on the tablet in front of the sphynx erected under Nero: the Egyptian theologians also imagined divisions in Heaven similar to those of earth, and could conceive no Paradise without a celestial Nile.

The Egypt of Homer is the river not the country: all the other Greek names of Egypt are derived from the Nile: its Coptic name was Phiaro— hence probably Pharaoh. In somewhat the same sense is India derived from the Indus.

In all probability the Nile has no one particular source, but is created by the convergence of many small streams, like the Thames and the Rhone. We have an excellent vindication for our geographical ignorance on this point in that of Pliny, with regard to the Rhine. Hundreds of years after the first passage of the river by Roman troops, he writes “that the Rhine takes its rise in the most hidden parts of the earth, in a region of perpetual night, amidst forests for ever inaccessible to human footsteps” (iii. 24). The source of the Iser seems, too, to have been equally undiscovered.

The earlier Egyptians arranged their gods habitually in threes; when the theology got confused, the groups became more numerous and varied— just as new characters crept into the hieroglyphics and the titles of the Kings within the ovals became much longer.

Throughout Egyptian history the King is divine; there were temples in front of the Pyramids, and the Labyrinth is the temple of another dynasty; so down to the latest and basest times. The most contemptible of the Ptolemies is on his coins—“the adorable God;” and Cleopatra, on her later ones—“the younger goddess.”

“The Egyptians thought it more worthy of the Gods to adore them in symbols animated by their creating breath, than in empty images of inert matter; they regarded the intelligence of animals as connecting them with Gods and men.”—Champollion.

e.g. that of Osiris I., discovered by a happy hazard by Belzoni, and from which the alabaster coffin was taken, now in Sir J. Soane's museum. The tombs of the Theban kings, as yet known, are confined to a single dynasty; there must be somewhere in the neighbourhood the sepultures of all the others, probably equal in magnificence and interest.

“I have travelled through Greece, Egypt, Nubia, and much of Asia Minor, and I have witnessed much destruction of monuments; but everywhere the injurers were Europeans, the pretext science, and the motive gain.”—Prokesch.

Unless the Pasha will have doors erected and watched, and all pillage forbidden, under heavy penalties; the figures are now being stripped from the walls every day

That of Luxor, at Paris, has already lost the sharpness of the edges.

In the quarries of red granite at Syene may be seen the marks of the tools employed a thousand years ago, as fresh as if they had been left yesterday, and the form of an obelisk may be traced, partially dissevered from its native rock.

Canopus, the ornament of the Southern hemisphere, is called by the Arabs, “the caravan-seducer”— a large caravan having been lost in the desert by the driver taking it for Venus.