The Sisters

The Sisters

The Project Gutenberg EBook The Sisters, by Georg Ebers, Complete
#28 in our series by Georg Ebers
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Title: The Sisters, Complete
Author: Georg Ebers
Release Date: April, 2004 [EBook #5466] [Yes, we are more than one
year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on May 12, 2002]
Edition: 10
Language: English

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THE SISTERS, Complete
By Georg Ebers
Translated from the German by Clara Bell

DEDICATION TO HERR EDUARD von HALLBERGER
Allow me, my dear friend, to dedicate these pages to you. I present
them to you at the close of a period of twenty years during which a
warm and fast friendship has subsisted between us, unbroken by any
disagreement. Four of my works have first seen the light under your
care and have wandered all over the world under the protection of your
name. This, my fifth book, I desire to make especially your own; it was
partly written in your beautiful home at Tutzing, under your hospitable
roof, and I desire to prove to you by some visible token that I know
how to value your affection and friendship and the many happy hours
we have passed together, refreshing and encouraging each other by a
full and perfect interchange of thought and sentiment.

PREFACE.
By a marvellous combination of circumstances a number of fragments
of the Royal Archives of Memphis have been preserved from
destruction with the rest, containing petitions written on papyrus in the
Greek language; these were composed by a recluse of Macedonian
birth, living in the Serapeum, in behalf of two sisters, twins, who
served the god as "Pourers out of the libations."
At a first glance these petitions seem scarcely worthy of serious

consideration; but a closer study of their contents shows us that we
possess in them documents of the greatest value in the history of
manners. They prove that the great Monastic Idea--which under the
influence of Christianity grew to be of such vast moral and historical
significance--first struck root in one of the centres of heathen religious
practices; besides affording us a quite unexpected insight into the
internal life of the temple of Serapis, whose ruined walls have, in our
own day, been recovered from the sand of the desert by the
indefatigable industry of the French Egyptologist Monsieur Mariette.
I have been so fortunate as to visit this spot and to search through every
part of it, and the petitions I speak of have been familiar to me for years.
When, however, quite recently, one of my pupils undertook to study
more particularly one of these documents--preserved in the Royal
Library at Dresden--I myself reinvestigated it also, and this study
impressed on my fancy a vivid picture of the Serapeum under Ptolemy
Philometor; the outlines became clear and firm, and acquired color, and
it is this picture which I have endeavored to set before the reader, so far
as words admit, in the following pages.
I did not indeed select for my hero the recluse, nor for my heroines the
twins who are spoken of in the petitions, but others who might have
lived at a somewhat earlier date under similar conditions; for it is
proved by the papyrus that it was not once only and by accident that
twins were engaged in serving in the temple of Serapis, but that, on the
contrary, pair after pair of sisters succeeded each other in the office of
pouring out libations.
I have not invested Klea and Irene with this function, but have simply
placed them as wards of the Serapeum and