A rectangular decorative headpiece consists of repeating symmetrical floral and scrolling vine motifs arranged in a grid-like frieze.

BOOK ONE.

ON THE HIEROGLY-

PHICS OF THE EGYPTIANS.

Those who have encompassed the history, or rather the fabulous deeds, of the most ancient Egyptian matters have produced nothing certain for memory regarding the origin of their first letters or sciences; just as they have written nothing regarding the first kings in the world, the gods, or the first men born. Whatever they have written about these is most similar to the mere inventions of the idle, the delusions of the melancholic, or the phantasms of those who dream.

Where the first men were.

Some assert that the first men were brought forth in Egypt based on the conjecture that around Thebes, when the inundation of the Nile ceases, a multitude of mice arises in many places from the cracks in the earth as the sun heats the silt left by the water; as if all living things were generated similarly from the very beginning of the world, and even the first men themselves. But Diodorus Siculus, who traversed the greater part of Asia and Europe, and also Egypt (as he himself confesses),

First Kings. Book 1, ch. 1.

"We have by no means discovered," he says, "who were the first kings in the world, since no historians record them." Indeed, it is impossible that letters existed just as early as the first kings.

First letters and writers.

If, however, one contends that letters also existed then, certainly the writers of such things came much later. But not only do the Greeks doubt what the older age brought forth, but also those who call themselves the indigenous inhabitants and the first writers of