Ancient Egypt

"[In the 7th century BC] the past was supreme; the priest who cherished it lived in a realm of shadows, and for the contemporary world he had no vital meaning."

"The limits of the dominion of the Egyptian gods had been fixed as the outer fringes of the Nile valley long before the outside world was familiar to the Nile-dwellers; and merely commercial intercourse with a larger world had not been able to shake the tradition. Many a merchant had seen a stone fall in distant Babylon and in Thebes alike, but it had not occurred to him, or to any man in that far-off age, that the same natural force reigned in these widely separated countries."

"It was universalism expressed in terms of imperial power which first caught the imagination of the thinking men of the Empire, and disclosed to them the universal sweep of the Sun-god’s dominion as a physical fact. Monotheism is but imperialism in religion."

"Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose, And shook within their pyramids to hear A new Cambyses thundering in their ear; While the dark shades of forty ages stood Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood."

"When brutes were deified, And Memnon in the sunrise sprang and cried, And love-winds smote Bubastis, and the bare Black breasts of carven Pasht received the prayer Of suppliants bearing gifts from far and wide!"