Egyptian texts. Almost all the old copies, not even excepting those made by Belzoni, are absolutely worthless. Science is insatiate, and its wants can never be adequately supplied, yet much has been done, both through the unassisted efforts of private individuals and through the munificence of governments and public bodies. The collection of published Egyptian texts which can be relied upon is now very considerable. To the plates contained in the Description de l'Egypte published in 1809 by the French government, as the result of a great scientific expedition, must be added the collections of Champollion, Rosellini and Prisse d'Avennes, Burton's Excerpta Hieroglyphica, Sharpe's Egyptian Inscriptions, Dr. Leemans's Monumens Egyptiens du Musée de Leide, Ungarelli's Obelisks, the magnificent Denkmaeler of Lepsius, the Hieratic Papyri of the British Museum, and many other splendid publications bearing the names of Lepsius, Chabas, Bonomi, Rhind, Brugsch, Dümichen, Mariette Bey, E. de Rougé, Rossi and Pleyte, Naville, Ebers and Stern, Maspero, Guyesse, Golenischeff, Bergman, Wiedeman and others. Some of these costly works reproduce the original text in facsimile; in some of them the accuracy of the copy is secured by photography.
But large as is the collection of these texts, it is but a fragment of the texts actually in existence. Mariette Bey has published four folio volumes of plates from the temple of Denderah alone, but he
