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The Monuments of Rameses The: Champollion

Champollion has called attention to the fact that the mere presence of the wife of the Ethiopian prince who figured in this ceremony at the side of her husband and in advance of all the other functionaries marks an essential difference between the civilization of Egypt and that of the rest of the East.* If the erudite French hierogrammatist had substituted the words the modern Oriental world for the expression above given, he would have kept closer to the exact truth. What we know of India at the epoch of the second Rama allows us to dispense with insisting on this point. Between the exquisite sentiment that revealed to the antique poet Valmiki the fresh and pure creation of Sita, and that which impelled Rameses to rear directly beside the most commemorative edifice of his life a sort of votive chapel to the Egyptian Venus for the use of the Nofre-Ari, the royal spouse whom he loved,t is there * Champollion: Letiers written from Egypt and Nubia. t This inscription is the one on the grand front. "To make up for it, in the dedication carved upon the architrave, in the interior of the temple, at the end of the ordinary not something like a bond of simultaneousness in time or of common origin?