One becomes accustomed to seeing, in the ancient Egyptians, 'the most scrupulously religious of all men.' But this statement does not suffice to offer the keys to the Pharaonic civilization; in fact it would be a great error to consider the Egyptians too close to ourselves. Nothing, without doubt, is more modern than these stone heads found in the mastabas,1 than the bust of Queen Nofretete; nothing more alive, human in a reassuring fashion, than the scenes of daily life pictured in the tombs of Saqqara or 'of Thebes; nothing perhaps so directly familiar as the popular stories from the shores of the Nile. But beware of thinking that the ancient Egyptian was a man like us, that his civilization was basically analogous to ours, that his thinking was, in the progress of a world still imperfectly known, the beginning of modern thought.