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of the Law in many parts of Egypt must always have been very lax. Texts relating to bequests, endowments, grants of land, &c., are very difficult to translate, because it is well-nigh impossible to find equivalents for Egyptian legal terms. In the British Museum are two documents in hieratic that were drawn up in connection with prosecutions which the Government of Egypt undertook of certain thieves who had broken into some of the royal tombs at Thebes and robbed them, and of certain other thieves who had robbed the royal treasury and made away with a large amount of silver (Nos. 10,221, 10,052, 10,053, and 10,054). Equally interesting is the roll that describes the prosecution of certain highly placed officials and relations of Rameses III who had conspired against him and wanted to kill him. Several of the conspirators were compelled to commit suicide. The text is written in hieratic on papyrus, and is preserved in the Royal Museum, Leyden.
XII. HISTORICAL ROMANCES.--Examples of these are the narrative of the capture of the town of Joppa in Palestine by an officer of Thothmes III, and the history of the dispute that broke out between Seqenenra, King of Upper Egypt, and Aapepi, King of Avaris in the Delta. These are written in hieratic and are preserved in the British Museum, in Harris Papyrus 500, and Sallier No. 1 (10,185).
XIII. MATHEMATICS.--The chief source of our knowledge of the Mathematics of the Egyptians is the Rhind Papyrus in the British Museum (No. 10,057), which was written before 1700 B.C., probably during the reign of one of the Hyksos kings. The papyrus contains a number of simple arithmetical examples and several geometrical problems. The workings out of these prove that the Egyptian spared himself no trouble in making his calculations, and that he worked out both his arithmetical examples and problems in the most cumbrous and laborious way possible. He never studied mathematics in order to make progress in his knowledge of the science, but simply for purely practical e