It is demotic—a style of Egyptian writing and a phase of the language
which had perished from the knowledge of all men twenty-five hundred
years before the Christian era.
Our red Indians have left many records, in the form of pictures, upon
our crags and boulders. It has taken our most gifted and painstaking
students two centuries to get at the meanings hidden in these pictures;
yet there are still two little lines of hieroglyphics among the figures
grouped upon the Dighton Rocks which they have not succeeded in
interpreting to their satisfaction. These: (Figure 3)
The suggested solutions of this riddle are practically innumerable;
they would fill a book.
Thus we have infinite trouble in solving man-made mysteries; it is only
when we set out to discover the secret of God that our difficulties
disappear. It was always so. In antique Roman times it was the custom
of the Deity to try to conceal His intentions in the entrails of birds,
and this was patiently and hopefully continued century after century,
although the attempted concealment never succeeded, in a single
recorded instance. The augurs could read entrails as easily as a modern
child can read coarse print. Roman history is full of the marvels of
interpretation which these extraordinary men performed. These strange
and wonderful achievements move our awe and compel our admiration.
Those men could pierce to the marrow of a mystery instantly. If the
Rosetta-stone idea had been introduced it would have defeated them, but
entrails had no embarrassments for them. Entrails have gone out,
now—entrails and dreams. It was at last found out that as hiding-places
for the divine intentions they were inadequate.
A part of the wall of Valletri having in former times been struck with
thunder, the response of the soothsayers was, that a native of that
town would some time or other arrive at supreme power. —_Bohn’s
Suetonius_, p. 138.
“Some time or other.” It looks indefinite, but no matter, it happened,
all the same; one needed only to wait, and be patient, and keep watch,
then he would find out that the thunder-stroke had Caesar Augustus in
mind, and had come to give notice.
There were other advance-advertisements. One of them appeared just
before Caesar Augustus was born, and was most poetic and touching and
romantic in its feelings and aspects. It was a dream. It was dreamed by
Caesar Augustus’s mother, and interpreted at the usual rates:
Atia, before her delivery, dreamed that her bowels stretched to the
stars and expanded through the whole circuit of heaven and
earth.—_Suetonius_, p. 139.
That was in the augur’s line, and furnished him no difficulties, but it
would have taken Rawlinson and Champollion fourteen years to make sure
of what it meant, because they would have been surprised and dizzy. It
would have been too late to be valuable, then, and the bill for service
would have been barred by the statute of limitation.
In those old Roman days a gentleman’s education was not complete until
he had taken a theological course at the seminary and learned how to
translate entrails. Caesar Augustus’s education received this final
polish. All through his life, whenever he had poultry on the menu he
saved the interiors and kept himself informed of the Deity’s plans by
exercising upon those interiors the arts of augury.
In his first consulship, while he was observing the auguries, twelve
vultures presented themselves, as they had done to Romulus. And when he
offered sacrifice, the livers of all the victims were folded inward in
the lower part; a circumstance which was regarded by those present who
had skill in things of that nature, as an indubitable prognostic of
great and wonderful fortune.—_Suetonius_, p. 141.
“Indubitable” is a strong word, but no doubt it was justified, if the
livers were really turned that way. In those days chicken livers were
strangely and delicately sensitive to coming events, no matter how far
off they might be; and they could never keep still, but would curl and
squirm like that, particularly when vultures came and showed interest
in that approaching great event and in breakfast.