1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a bronze statuette of the Saite period in the Gizeh Museum (Mariette, Album photographique du Musee de Boulaq, pl. 6).

That is why she was afterwards called Sokhit the slayer, and represented under the form of a fierce lioness. Nightfall stayed her course in the neighbourhood of Heracleopolis; all the way from Heliopolis she had trampled through blood. As soon as she had fallen asleep, Ra hastily took effectual measures to prevent her from beginning her work again on the morrow. "He said: 'Call on my behalf messengers agile and swift, who go like the wind.' When these messengers were straightway brought to him, the Majesty of the god said: 'Let them run to Elephantine and bring me mandragora in plenty.'"[**]

** The mandragora of Elephantine was used in the manufacture of an intoxicating and narcotic drink employed either in medicine or in magic. In a special article, Brugsch has collected particulars preserved by the texts as to the uses of this plant. It was not as yet credited with the human form and the peculiar kind of life ascribed to it by western sorcerers.

When they had brought him the mandragora, the Majesty of this great god summoned the miller which is in Heliopolis that he might bray it; and the women-servants having crushed grain for the beer, the mandragora, and also human blood, were mingled with the liquor, and thereof was made in all seven thousand jars of beer. Ra himself examined this delectable drink, and finding it to possess the wished-for properties: "'It is well,' said he; 'therewith shall I save men from the goddess;' then, addressing those of his train: 'Take these jars in your arms, and carry them to the place where she has slaughtered men.' Ra, the king, caused dawn to break at midnight, so that this philtre might be poured down upon the earth; and the fields were flooded with it to the depth of four palms, according as it pleased the souls of his Majesty." In the morning the goddess came, "that she might return to her carnage, but she found that all was flooded, and her countenance softened; when she had drunken, it was her heart that softened; she went away drunk, without further thought of men." There was some fear lest her fury might return when the fumes of drunkenness were past, and to obviate this danger Ra instituted a rite, partly with the object of instructing future generations as to the chastisement which he had inflicted upon the impious, partly to console Sokhit for her discomfiture. He decreed that "on New Year's Day there should be brewed for her as many jars of philtre as there were priestesses of the sun. That was the origin of all those jars of philtre, in number equal to that of the priestesses, which, at the feast of Hathor, all men make from that day forth."

Peace was re-established, but could it last long? Would not men, as soon as they had recovered from their terror, betake themselves again to plotting against the god? Besides, Ra now felt nothing but disgust for our race. The ingratitude of his children had wounded him deeply; he foresaw ever-renewed rebellions as his feebleness became more marked, and he shrank from having to order new massacres in which mankind would perish altogether. "By my life," says he to the gods who accompanied him, "my heart is too weary for me to remain with mankind, and slay them until they are no more: annihilation is not of the gifts that I love to make." And the gods exclaim in surprise: "Breathe not a word of thy weariness at a time when thou dost triumph at thy pleasure." But Ra does not yield to their representations; he will leave a kingdom wherein they murmur against him, and turning towards Nu he says: "My limbs are decrepit for the first time; I will not go to any place where I can be reached." It was no easy matter to find him an inaccessible retreat owing to the imperfect state in which the universe had been left by the first effort of the demiurge. Nu saw no other way out of the difficulty than that of setting to work to complete the creation. Ancient tradition had imagined the separation of earth and sky as an act of violence exercised by Shu upon Sibu and Nuit. History presented facts after a less brutal fashion, and Shu became a virtuous son who devoted his time and strength to upholding Nuit, that he might thereby do his father a service. Nuit, for her part, showed herself to be a devoted daughter whom there was no need to treat roughly in order to teach her her duty; of herself she consented to leave her husband, and place her beloved ancestor beyond reach. "The Majesty of Nu said: 'Son Shu, do as thy father Ra shall say; and thou, daughter Nuit, place him upon thy back and hold him suspended above the earth!' Nuit said: 'And how then, my father Nu?' Thus spake Nuit, and she did that which Nu commanded her; she changed herself into a cow, and placed the Majesty of Ra upon her back. When those men who had not been slain came to give thanks to Ra, behold! they found him no longer in his palace; but a cow stood there, and they perceived him upon the back of the cow." They found him so resolved to depart that they did not try to turn him from his purpose, but only desired to give him such a proof of their repentance as should assure them of the complete pardon of their crime. "They said unto him: 'Wait until the morning, O Ra! our lord, and we will strike down thine enemies who have taken counsel against thee.' So his Majesty returned to his mansion, descended from the cow, went in along with them, and earth was plunged into darkness. But when there was light upon earth the next morning, the men went forth with their bows and their arrows, and began to shoot at the enemy. Whereupon the Majesty of this god said unto them: 'Your sins are remitted unto you, for sacrifice precludes the execution of the guilty.' And this was the origin upon earth of sacrifices in which blood was shed."

Thus it was that when on the point of separating for ever, the god and men came to an understanding as to the terms of their future relationship. Men offered to the god the life of those who had offended him. Human sacrifice was in their eyes the obligatory sacrifice, the only one which could completely atone for the wrongs committed against the godhead; man alone was worthy to wash away with his blood the sins of men.[*] For this one time the god accepted the expiation just as it was offered to him; then the repugnance which he felt to killing his children overcame him, he substituted beast for man, and decided that oxen, gazelles, birds, should henceforth furnish the material for sacrifice.[**]

* This legend, which seeks to explain the discontinuance of human sacrifices among the Egyptians, affords direct proof of their existence in primitive times. This is confirmed by many facts. We shall see that uashbiti laid in graves were in place of the male or female slaves who were originally slaughtered at the tombs of the rich and noble that they might go to serve their masters in the next world. Even in Thebes, under the XIXth dynasty, certain rock-cut tombs contain scenes which might lead us to believe that occasionally at least human victims were sent to doubles of distinction. During this same period, moreover, the most distinguished hostile chiefs taken in war were still put to death before the gods. In several towns, as at Eilithyia and at Heliopolis, or before certain gods, such as Osiris or Kronos-Sibu, human sacrifice lasted until near Roman times. But generally speaking it was very rare. Almost everywhere cakes of a particular shape, and called [Greek word], or else animals, had been substituted for man.

** It was asserted that the partisans of Apopi and of Sit, who were the enemies of Ra, Osiris, and the other gods, had taken refuge in the bodies of certain animals. Hence, it was really human or divine victims which were offered when beasts were slaughtered in sacrifice before the altars.

This point settled, he again mounted the cow, who rose, supported on her four legs as on so many pillars; and her belly, stretched out above the earth like a ceiling, formed the sky. He busied himself with organizing the new world which he found on her back; he peopled it with many beings, chose two districts in which to establish his abode, the Field of Reeds—Sokhit Ialu—and the Field of Rest—Sokhit Hotpit—and suspended the stars which were to give light by night. All this is related with many plays upon words, intended, according to Oriental custom, as explanations of the names which the legend assigned to the different regions of heaven. At sight of a plain whose situation pleased him, he cried: "The Field rests in the distance!"—and that was the origin of the Field of Rest. He added: "There will I gather plants!"—and from this the Field of Reeds took its name. While he gave himself up to this philological pastime, Nuit, suddenly transported to unaccustomed heights, grew frightened, and cried for help: "For pity's sake give me supports to sustain me!" This was the origin of the support-gods. They came and stationed themselves by each of her four legs, steadying these with their hands, and keeping constant watch over them. As this was not enough to reassure the good beast, "Ra said, 'My son Shu, place thyself beneath my daughter Nuit, and keep watch on both sides over the supports, who live in the twilight; hold thou her up above thy head, and be her guardian!'" Shu obeyed; Nuit composed herself, and the world, now furnished with the sky which it had hitherto lacked, assumed its present symmetrical form.

Shu and Sibu succeeded Ra, but did not acquire so lasting a popularity as their great ancestor. Nevertheless they had their annals, fragments of which have come down to us. Their power also extended over the whole universe: "The Majesty of Shu was the excellent king of the sky, of the earth, of Hades, of the water, of the winds, of the inundation, of the two chains of mountains, of the sea, governing with a true voice according to the precepts of his father Ra-Harmakhis."



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

Only "the children of the serpent Apopi, the impious ones who haunt the solitary places and the deserts," disavowed his authority. Like the Bedawin of later times, they suddenly streamed in by the isthmus routes, went up into Egypt under cover of night, slew and pillaged, and then hastily returned to their fastnesses with the booty which they had carried off. From sea to sea Ka had fortified the eastern frontier against them. He had surrounded the principal cities with walls, embellished them with temples, and placed within them those mysterious talismans more powerful for defence than a garrison of men. Thus Ait-nobsu, near the mouth of the Wady-Tumilat, possessed one of the rods of the Sun-god, also the living uraeus of his crown whose breath consumes all that it touches, and, finally, a lock of his hair, which, being cast into the waters of a lake, was changed into a hawk-headed crocodile to tear the invader in pieces.[*]

* Egyptians of all periods never shrank from such marvels. One of the tales of the Theban empire tells us of a piece of wax which, on being thrown into the water, changed into a living crocodile capable of devouring a man. The talismans which protected Egypt against invasion are mentioned by the Pseudo-Callisthenes, who attributes their invention to Nectanebo. Arab historians often refer to them.

The employment of these talismans was dangerous to those unaccustomed to use them, even to the gods themselves. Scarcely was Sibu enthroned as the successor of Shu, who, tired of reigning, had reascended into heaven in a nine days' tempest, before he began his inspection of the eastern marches, and caused the box in which was kept the uraeus of Ra to be opened. "As soon as the living viper had breathed its breath against the Majesty of Sibu there was a great disaster—great indeed, for those who were in the train of the god perished, and his Majesty himself was burned in that day. When his Majesty had fled to the north of Ait-nobsu, pursued by the fire of this magic urasus, behold! when he came to the fields of henna, the pain of his burn was not yet assuaged, and the gods who were behind him said unto him: 'O Sire! let them take the lock of Ra which is there, when thy Majesty shall go to see it and its mystery, and his Majesty shall be healed as soon as it shall be placed upon thee.' So the Majesty of Sibu caused the magic lock to be brought to Piarit,—the lock for which was made that great reliquary of hard stone which is hidden in the secret place of Piarit, in the district of the divine lock of the Lord Ra,—and behold! this fire departed from the members of the Majesty of Sibu. And many years afterwards, when this lock, which had thus belonged to Sibu, was brought back to Piarit in Ait-nobsu, and cast into the great lake of Piarit whose name is Ait-tostesu, the dwelling of waves, that it might be purified, behold! this lock became a crocodile: it flew to the water and became Sobku, the divine crocodile of Ait-nobsu." In this way the gods of the solar dynasty from generation to generation multiplied talismans and enriched the sanctuaries of Egypt with relics.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Griffith. The three talismans here represented are two crowns, each in a naos, and the burning fiery uraeus.

Were there ever duller legends and a more senile phantasy! They did not spring spontaneously from the lips of the people, but were composed at leisure by priests desirous of enhancing the antiquity of their cult, and augmenting the veneration of its adherents in order to increase its importance. Each city wished it to be understood that its feudal sanctuary was founded upon the very day of creation, that its privileges had been extended or confirmed during the course of the first divine dynasty, and that these pretensions were supported by the presence of objects in its treasury which had belonged to the oldest of the king-gods. Such was the origin of tales in which the personage of the beneficent Pharaoh is often depicted in ridiculous fashion. Did we possess all the sacred archives, we should frequently find them quoting as authentic history more than one document as artificial as the chronicle of Ait-nobsu. When we come to the later members of the Ennead, there is a change in the character and in the form of these tales. Doubtless Osiris and Sit did not escape unscathed out of the hands of the theologians; but even if sacerdotal interference spoiled the legend concerning them, it did not altogether disfigure it. Here and there in it is still noticeable a sincerity of feeling and liveliness of imagination such as are never found in those of Shu and of Sibu. This arises from the fact that the functions of these gods left them strangers, or all but strangers, to the current affairs of the world. Shu was the stay, Sibu the material foundation of the world; and so long as the one bore the weight of the firmament without bending, and the other continued to suffer the tread of human generations upon his back, the devout took no more thought of them than they themselves took thought of the devout. The life of Osiris, on the other hand, was intimately mingled with that of the Egyptians, and his most trivial actions immediately reacted upon their fortunes. They followed the movements of his waters; they noted the turning-points in his struggles against drought; they registered his yearly decline, yearly compensated by his aggressive returns and his intermittent victories over Typhon; his proceedings and his character were the subject of their minute study. If his waters almost invariably rose upon the appointed day and extended over the black earth of the valley, this was no mechanical function of a being to whom the consequences of his conduct are indifferent; he acted upon reflection, and in full consciousness of the service that he rendered. He knew that by spreading the inundation he prevented the triumph of the desert; he was life, he was goodness—Onnofriu—and Isis, as the partner of his labours, became like him the type of perfect goodness. But while Osiris developed for the better, Sit was transformed for the worse, and increased in wickedness as his brother gained in purity and moral elevation. In proportion as the person of Sit grew more defined, and stood out more clearly, the evil within him contrasted more markedly with the innate goodness of Osiris, and what had been at first an instinctive struggle between two beings somewhat vaguely defined—the desert and the Nile, water and drought—was changed into conscious and deadly enmity. No longer the conflict of two elements, it was war between two gods; one labouring to produce abundance, while the other strove to do away with it; one being all goodness and life, while the other was evil and death incarnate.

A very ancient legend narrates that the birth of Osiris and his brothers took place during the five additional days at the end of the year; a subsequent legend explained how Nuit and Sibu had contracted marriage against the express wish of Ra, and without his knowledge. When he became aware of it he fell into a violent rage, and cast a spell over the goddess to prevent her giving birth to her children in any month of any year whatever. But Thot took pity upon her, and playing at draughts with the moon won from it in several games one seventy-second part of its fires, out of which he made five whole days; and as these were not included in the ordinary calendar, Nuit could then bring forth her five children, one after another: Osiris, Haroeris, Sit, Isis, and Nephthys. Osiris was beautiful of face, but with a dull and black complexion; his height exceeded five and a half yards.[*]

* As a matter of fact, Osiris is often represented with black or green hands and face, as is customary for gods of the dead; it was probably this peculiarity which suggested the popular idea of his black complexion. A magic papyrus of Ramesside times fixes the stature of the god at seven cubits, and a phrase in a Ptolemaic inscription places it at eight cubits, six palms, three fingers.

He was born at Thebes, in the first of the additional days, and straightway a mysterious voice announced that the lord of all—nibu-r-zaru—had appeared. The good news was hailed with shouts of joy, followed by tears and lamentations when it became known with what evils he was menaced.[*] The echo reached Ra in his far-off dwelling, and his heart rejoiced, notwithstanding the curse which he had laid upon Nuit. He commanded the presence of his great-grandchild in Xois, and unhesitatingly acknowledged him as the heir to his throne. Osiris had married his sister Isis, even, so it was said, while both of them were still within their mother's womb;[**] and when he became king he made her queen regent and the partner of all his undertakings.

* One variant of the legend told that a certain Pamylis of Thebes having gone to draw water had heard a voice proceeding from the temple of Zeus, which ordered him to proclaim aloud to the world the birth of the great king, the beneficent Osiris. He had received the child from the hands of Kronos, brought it up to youth, and to him the Egyptians had consecrated the feast of Pamylies, which resembled the Phallophoros festival of the Greeks.

** De Iside et Osiride, Leemans' edition, Sec. 12, pp. 20, 21. Haroeris, the Apollo of the Greeks, was supposed to be the issue of a marriage consummated before the birth of his parents while they were still within the womb of their mother Rhea-Nuit. This was a way of connecting the personage of Haroeris with the Osirian myths by confounding him with the homonymous Harsiesis, the son of Isis, who became the son of Osiris through his mother's marriage with that god.

The Egyptians were as yet but half civilized; they were cannibals, and though occasionally they lived upon the fruits of the earth, they did not know how to cultivate them. Osiris taught them the art of making agricultural implements—the plough and the hoe,—field labour, the rotation of crops, the harvesting of wheat and barley,[*] and vine culture.

* Diodoeus even ascribes to him the discovery of barley and of wheat; this is consequent upon the identification of Isis with Demeter by the Greeks. According to the historian, Leo of Pella, the goddess twined herself a crown of ripe ears and placed it upon her head one day when she was sacrificing to her parents.

Isis weaned them from cannibalism, healed their diseases by means of medicine or of magic, united women to men in legitimate marriage, and showed them how to grind grain between two flat stones and to prepare bread for the household. She invented the loom with the help of her sister Nephthys, and was the first to weave and bleach linen. There was no worship of the gods before Osiris established it, appointed the offerings, regulated the order of ceremonies, and composed the texts and melodies of the liturgies. He built cities, among them Thebes itself, according to some; though others declared that he was born there. As he had been the model of a just and pacific king, so did he desire to be that of a victorious conqueror of nations; and, placing the regency in the hands of Isis, he went forth to war against Asia, accompanied by Thot the ibis and the jackal Anubis. He made little or no use of force and arms, but he attacked men by gentleness and persuasion, softened them with songs in which voices were accompanied by instruments, and taught them also the arts which he had made known to the Egyptians. No country escaped his beneficent action, and he did not return to the banks of the Nile until he had traversed and civilized the world from one horizon to the other.

Sit-Typhon was red-haired and white-skinned, of violent, gloomy, and jealous temper.[*] Secretly he aspired to the crown, and nothing but the vigilance of Isis had kept him from rebellion during the absence of his brother. The rejoicings which celebrated the king's return to Memphis provided Sit with his opportunity for seizing the throne.

* The colour of his hair was compared with that of a red- haired ass, and on that account the ass was sacred to him. As to his violent and jealous disposition, see the opinion of Diodorus Siculus, book i. 21, and the picture drawn by Synesius in his pamphlet AEgyptius. It was told how he tore his mother's bowels at birth, and made his own way into the world through her side.



2 Drawing by Boudier of the gold group in the Louvre Museum. The drawing is made from a photograph which belonged to M. de Witte, before the monument was acquired by E. de Rouge in 1871. The little square pillar of lapis-lazuli, upon which Osiris squats, is wrongly set up, and the names and titles of King Osorkon, the dedicator of the triad, are placed upside down.

He invited Osiris to a banquet along with seventy-two officers whose support he had ensured, made a wooden chest of cunning workmanship and ordered that it should be brought in to him, in the midst of the feast. As all admired its beauty, he sportively promised to present it to any one among the guests whom it should exactly fit. All of them tried it, one after another, and all unsuccessfully; but when Osiris lay down within it, immediately the conspirators shut to the lid, nailed it firmly down, soldered it together with melted lead, and then threw it into the Tanitic branch of the Nile, which carried it to the sea. The news of the crime spread terror on all sides. The gods friendly to Osiris feared the fate of their master, and hid themselves within the bodies of animals to escape the malignity of the new king. Isis cut off her hair, rent her garments, and set out in search of the chest. She found it aground near the mouth of the river[*] under the shadow of a gigantic acacia, deposited it in a secluded place where no one ever came, and then took refuge in Buto, her own domain and her native city, whose marshes protected her from the designs of Typhon even as in historic times they protected more than one Pharaoh from the attacks of his enemies. There she gave birth to the young Horus, nursed and reared him in secret among the reeds, far from the machinations of the wicked one.[**]

* At this point the legend of the Saite and Greek period interpolates a whole chapter, telling how the chest was carried out to sea and cast upon the Phoenician coast near to Byblos. The acacia, a kind of heather or broom in this case, grew up enclosing the chest within its trunk. This addition to the primitive legend must date from the XVIIIth to the XXth dynasties, when Egypt had extensive relations with the peoples of Asia. No trace of it whatever has hitherto been found upon Egyptian monuments strictly so called; not even on the latest.

** The opening illustration of this chapter (p. 221) is taken from a monument at Phihe, and depicts Isis among the reeds. The representation of the goddess as squatting upon a mat probably gave rise to the legend of the floating isle of Khemmis, which HECATAEUS of Miletus had seen upon the lake of Buto, but whose existence was denied by Herodotus notwithstanding the testimony of Hecataeus.

But it happened that Sit, when hunting by moonlight, caught sight of the chest, opened it, and recognizing the corpse, cut it up into fourteen pieces, which he scattered abroad at random. Once more Isis set forth on her woeful pilgrimage. She recovered all the parts of the body excepting one only, which the oxyrhynchus had greedily devoured;[*] and with the help of her sister Nephthys, her son Horus, Anubis, and Thot, she joined together and embalmed them, and made of this collection of his remains an imperishable mummy, capable of sustaining for ever the soul of a god. On his coming of age, Horus called together all that were left of the loyal Egyptians and formed them into an army.[**]

* This part of the legend was so thoroughly well known, that by the time of the XIXth dynasty it suggested incidents in popular literature. When Bitiu, the hero of The Tale of the Two Brothers, mutilated himself to avoid the suspicion of adultery, he cast his bleeding member into the water, and the Oxyrhynchus devoured it.

** Towards the Grecian period there was here interpolated an account of how Osiris had returned from the world of the dead to arm his son and train him to fight. According to this tale he had asked Horus which of all animals seemed to him most useful in time of war, and Horus chose the horse rather than the lion, because the lion avails for the weak or cowardly in need of help, whereas the horse is used for the pursuit and destruction of the enemy. Judging from this reply that Horus was ready to dare all, Osiris allowed him to enter upon the war. The mention of the horse affords sufficient proof that this episode is of comparatively late origin (cf. p. 41 for the date at which the horse was acclimatized in Egypt).

His "Followers"—Shosuu Horu—defeated the "Accomplices of Sit"—Samiu Sit—who were now driven in their turn to transform themselves into gazelles, crocodiles and serpents,—animals which were henceforth regarded as unclean and Typhonian. For three days the two chiefs had fought together under the forms of men and of hippopotami, when Isis, apprehensive as to the issue of the duel, determined to bring it to an end. "Lo! she caused chains to descend upon them, and made them to drop upon Horus. Thereupon Horus prayed aloud, saying: 'I am thy son Horus!' Then Isis spake unto the fetters, saying; 'Break, and unloose yourselves from my son Horus!' She made other fetters to descend, and let them fall upon her brother Sit. Forthwith he lifted up his voice and cried out in pain, and she spake unto the fetters and said unto them: 'Break!' Yea, when Sit prayed unto her many times, saying: 'Wilt thou not have pity upon the brother of thy son's mother?' then her heart was filled with compassion, and she cried to the fetters: 'Break, for he is my eldest brother!' and the fetters unloosed themselves from him, and the two foes again stood face to face like two men who will not come to terms." Horus, furious at seeing his mother deprive him of his prey, turned upon her like a panther of the South. She fled before him on that day when battle was waged with Sit the Violent, and he cut off her head. But Thot transformed her by his enchantments and made a cow's head for her, thereby identifying her with her companion, Hathor.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a bronze statuette of Saite period in the Gizeh Museum (Mariette, Album photographique du musee de Boulaq, pl. 5, No. 167).

The war went on, with all its fluctuating fortunes, till the gods at length decided to summon both rivals before their tribunal. According to a very ancient tradition, the combatants chose the ruler of a neighbouring city, Thot, lord of Hermopolis Parva, as the arbitrator of their quarrel. Sit was the first to plead, and he maintained that Horus was not the son of Osiris, but a bastard, whom Isis hao conceived after the death of her husband. Horua triumphantly vindicated the legitimacy of his birth; and Thot condemned Sit to restore, according to some, the whole of the inheritance which he had wrongly retained,—according to others, part of it only. The gods ratified the sentence, and awarded to the arbitrator the title of Uapirahuhui: he who judges between two parties. A legend of more recent origin, and circulated after the worship of Osiris had spread over all Egypt, affirmed that the case had remained within the jurisdiction of Sibu, who was father to the one, and grandfather to the other party. Sibu, however, had pronounced the same judgment as Thot, and divided the kingdom into halves—poshui; Sit retained the valley from the neighbourhood of Memphis to the first cataract, while Horus entered into possession of the Delta. Egypt henceforth consisted of two distinct kingdoms, of which one, that of the North, recognized Horus, the son of Isis, as its patron deity; and the other, that of the South, placed itself under the protection of Sit Nubiti, the god of Ombos.[*]

* Another form of the legend gives the 27th Athyr as the date of the judgment, assigning Egypt to Horus, and to Sit Nubia, or Doshirit, the red land. It must have arisen towards the age of the XVIIIth dynasty, at a time when their piety no longer allowed the devout to admit that the murderer of Osiris could be the legitimate patron of half the country. So the half belonging to Sit was then placed either in Nubia or in the western desert, which had, indeed, been reckoned as his domain from earliest times.

The moiety of Horus, added to that of Sit, formed the kingdom which Sibu had inherited; but his children failed to keep it together, though it was afterwards reunited under Pharaohs of human race.

The three gods who preceded Osiris upon the throne had ceased to reign, but not to live. Ra had taken refuge in heaven, disgusted with his own creatures; Shu had disappeared in the midst of a tempest; and Sibu had quietly retired within his palace when the time of his sojourning upon earth had been fulfilled. Not that there was no death, for death, too, together with all other things and beings, had come into existence in the beginning, but while cruelly persecuting both man and beast, had for a while respected the gods. Osiris was the first among them to be struck down, and hence to require funeral rites. He also was the first for whom family piety sought to provide a happy life beyond the tomb. Though he was king of the living and the dead at Mendes by virtue of the rights of all the feudal gods in their own principalities, his sovereignty after death exempted him no more than the meanest of his subjects from that painful torpor into which all mortals fell on breathing their last. But popular imagination could not resign itself to his remaining in that miserable state for ever. What would it have profited him to have Isis the great Sorceress for his wife, the wise Horus for his son, two master-magicians—Thot the Ibis and the jackal Anubis—for his servants, if their skill had not availed to ensure him a less gloomy and less lamentable after-life than that of men. Anubis had long before invented the art of mummifying, and his mysterious science had secured the everlasting existence of the flesh; but at what a price!



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Rosellint, Monumenti Civili, pl. cxxxiv. 2. While Anubis is stretching out his hands to lay out the mummy on its couch, the soul is hovering above its breast, and holding to its nostrils the sceptre, and the wind-filled sail which is the emblem of breath and of the new life.

For the breathing, warm, fresh-coloured body, spontaneous in movement and function, was substituted an immobile, cold and blackish mass, a sufficient basis for the mechanical continuity of the double, but which that double could neither raise nor guide; whose weight paralysed and whose inertness condemned it to vegetate in darkness, without pleasure and almost without consciousness of existence. Thot, Isis, and Horus applied themselves in the case of Osiris to ameliorating the discomfort and constraint entailed by the more primitive embalmment.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting in the tomb of a king in the Theban necropolis.

They did not dispense with the manipulations instituted by Anubis, but endued them with new power by means of magic. They inscribed the principal bandages with protective figures and formulas; they decorated the body with various amulets of specific efficacy for its different parts; they drew numerous scenes of earthly existence and of the life beyond the tomb upon the boards of the coffin and upon the walls of the sepulchral chamber. When the body had been made imperishable, they sought to restore one by one all the faculties of which their previous operations had deprived it. The mummy was set up at the entrance to the vault; the statue representing the living person was placed beside it, and semblance was made of opening the mouth, eyes, and ears, of loosing the arms and legs, of restoring breath to the throat and movement to the heart. The incantations by which these acts were severally accompanied were so powerful that the god spoke and ate, lived and heard, and could use his limbs as freely as though he had never been steeped in the bath of the embalmer. He might have returned to his place among men, and various legends prove that he did occasionally appear to his faithful adherents. But, as his ancestors before him, he preferred to leave their towns and withdraw into his own domain. The cemeteries of the inhabitants of Busiris and of Mendes were called Sokhit Ialu, the Meadow of Reeds, and Sokhit Hotpu, the Meadow of Best. They were secluded amid the marshes, in small archipelagoes of sandy islets where the dead bodies, piled together, rested in safety from the inundations. This was the first kingdom of the dead Osiris, but it was soon placed elsewhere, as the nature of the surrounding districts and the geography of the adjacent countries became better known; at first perhaps on the Phoenician shore beyond the sea, and then in the sky, in the Milky Way, between the North and the East, but nearer to the North than to the East. This kingdom was not gloomy and mournful like that of the other dead gods, Sokaris or Khontamentit, but was lighted by sun and moon; the heat of the day was tempered by the steady breath of the north wind, and its crops grew and throve abundantly.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Daniel Heron, taken in 1881 in the temple of Seti I. at Abydos.

Thick walls served as fortifications against the attacks of Sit and evil genii; a palace like that of the Pharaohs stood in the midst of delightful gardens; and there, among his own people, Osiris led a tranquil existence, enjoying in succession all the pleasures of earthly life without any of its pains.

The goodness which had gained him the title of Onnophris while he sojourned here below, inspired him with the desire and suggested the means of opening the gates of his paradise to the souls of his former subjects. Souls did not enter into it unexamined, nor without trial. Each of them had first to prove that during its earthly life it had belonged to a friend, or, as the Egyptian texts have it, to a vassal of Osiris—amakhu khir Osiri—one of those who had served Horus in his exile and had rallied to his banner from the very beginning of the Typhonian wars.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Naville Bas AEgyptische Todtenbuch, vol. i. pl. cxxviii. Ai.

These were those followers of Horus—Shosuu Horu—so often referred to in the literature of historic times.[*]

* Cf, p. 252. The Followers of Horns, i.e. those who had followed Horus during the Typhonian wars, are mentioned in a Turin fragment of the Canon of the Kings, in which the author summarizes the chronology of the divine period. Like the reign of Ra, the time in which the followers of Horus were supposed to have lived was for the Egyptians of classic times the ultimate point beyond which history did not reach.

Horus, their master, having loaded them with favours during life, decided to extend to them after death the same privileges which he had conferred upon his father. He convoked around the corpse the gods who had worked with him at the embalmment of Osiris: Anubis and Thot, Isis and Nephthys, and his four children—Hapi, Qabhsonuf, Amsit, and Tiumautf—to whom he had entrusted the charge of the heart and viscera. They all performed their functions exactly as before, repeated the same ceremonies, and recited the same formulas at the same stages of the operations, and so effectively that the dead man became a real Osiris under their hands, having a true voice, and henceforth combining the name of the god with his own.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Guieysse-Lefebure, Le Papyrus de Soutimes, pl. viii. The outlines of the original have unfortunately been restored and enfeebled by the copyist.

He had been Sakhomka or Menkauri; he became the Osiris Sakhomka, or the Osiris Menkauri, true of voice. Horus and his companions then celebrated the rites consecrated to the "Opening of the Mouth and the Eyes:" animated the statue of the deceased, and placed the mummy in the tomb, where Anubis received it in his arms. Recalled to life and movement, the double reassumed, one by one, all the functions of being, came and went and took part in the ceremonies of the worship which was rendered to him in his tomb. There he might be seen accepting the homage of his kindred, and clasping to his breast his soul under the form of a great human-headed bird with features the counterpart of his own. After being equipped with the formulas and amulets wherewith his prototype, Osiris, had been furnished, he set forth to seek the "Field of Reeds." The way was long and arduous, strewn with perils to which he must have succumbed at the very first stages had he not been carefully warned beforehand and armed against them.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a facsimile by Deveria (E. de Rouge, Etudes sur le Rituel Funeraire, pl. iv. No. 4). Ignorant souls fished for by the cynocephali are here represented as fish; but the soul of Nofirubnu, instructed in the protective formulas, preserves its human form.

A papyrus placed with the mummy in its coffin contained the needful topo-graphical directions and passwords, in order that he might neither stray nor perish by the way. The wiser Egyptians copied out the principal chapters for themselves, or learned them by heart while yet in life, in order to be prepared for the life beyond. Those who had not taken this precaution studied after death the copy with which they were provided; and since few Egyptians could read, a priest, or relative of the deceased, preferably his son, recited the prayers in the mummy's ear, that he might learn them before he was carried away to the cemetery. If the double obeyed the prescriptions of the "Book of the Dead" to the letter, he reached his goal without fail.[*] On leaving the tomb he turned his back on the valley, and staff in hand climbed the hills which bounded it on the west, plunging boldly into the desert, where some bird, or even a kindly insect such as a praying mantis, a grasshopper, or a butterfly, served as his guide. Soon he came to one of those sycamores which grow in the sand far away from the Nile, and are regarded as magic trees by the fellahin. Out of the foliage a goddess—Nuit, iiathor, or Nit—half emerged, and offered him a dish of fruit, loaves of bread, and a jar of water.

* Manuscripts of this work represent about nine-tenths of the papyri hitherto discovered. They are not all equally full; complete copies are still relatively scarce, and most of those found with mummies contain nothing but extracts of varying length. The book itself was studied by Champollion, who called it the Funerary Ritual; Lepsius afterwards gave it the less definite name of Book of the Dead, which seems likely to prevail. It has been chiefly known from the hieroglyphic copy at Turin, which Lepsius traced and had lithographed in 1841, under the title of Das Todtenbuch der AEgypter. In 1865, E. du Rouge began to publish a hieratic copy in the Louvre, but since 1886 there has been a critical edition of manuscripts of the Theban period most carefully collated by E. Naville, Das Mgyptische Todtenbuch der XVIII bis XX Dynastie, Berlin, 1886, 2 vols, of plates in folio, and 1 vol. of Introduction in 4to. On this edition see Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. i. pp. 325-387.

By accepting these gifts he became the guest of the goddess, and could never more retrace his steps[*] without special permission. Beyond the sycamore were lands of terror, infested by serpents and ferocious beasts, furrowed by torrents of boiling water, intersected by ponds and marshes where gigantic monkeys cast their nets.

* Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 224-227. It was not in Egypt alone that the fact of accepting food offered by a god of the dead constituted a recognition of suzerainty, and prevented the human soul from returning to the world of the living. Traces of this belief are found everywhere, in modern as in ancient times, and E. B. Tylob, has collected numerous examples of the same in Primitive Culture, 2nd edit., vol. ii. pp. 47, 51, 52.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coloured plate in Rosellini, Monumenti civili.,pl. cxxxiv. 3.

Ignorant souls, or those ill prepared for the struggle, had no easy work before them when they imprudently entered upon it. Those who were not overcome by hunger and thirst at the outset were bitten by a urasus, or horned viper, hidden with evil intent below the sand, and perished in convulsions from the poison; or crocodiles seized as many of them as they could lay hold of at the fords of rivers; or cynocephali netted and devoured them indiscriminately along with the fish into which the partisans of Typhon were transformed. They came safe and sound out of one peril only to fall into another, and infallibly succumbed before they were half through their journey. But, on the other hand, the double who was equipped and instructed, and armed with the true voice, confronted each foe with the phylactery and the incantation by which his enemy was held in check. As soon as he caught sight of one of them he recited the appropriate chapter from his book, he loudly proclaimed himself Ra, Tumu, Horus, or Khopri—that god whose name and attributes were best fitted to repel the immediate danger—and flames withdrew at his voice, monsters fled or sank paralysed, the most cruel of genii drew in their claws and lowered their arms before him. He compelled crocodiles to turn away their heads; he transfixed serpents with his lance; he supplied himself at pleasure with all the provisions that he needed, and gradually ascended the mountains which surround the world, sometimes alone, and fighting his way step by step, sometimes escorted by beneficent divinities. Halfway up the slope was the good cow Hafchor, the lady of the West, in meadows of tall plants where every evening she received the sun at his setting. If the dead man knew how to ask it according to the prescribed rite, she would take him upon her shoulders[*] and carry him across the accursed countries at full speed.

* Coffins of the XXth and XXIst dynasties, with a yellow ground, often display this scene. Generally the scene is found beneath the feet of the dead, at the lower end of the cartonage, and the cow is represented as carrying off at a gallop the mummy who is lying on her back.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a sketch by Naville (Das AEgyptische Todtenbuch, vol. i. pl. iii. P b). The commonest enemies of the dead were various kinds of serpents.

Having reached the North, he paused at the edge of an immense lake, the lake of Kha, and saw in the far distance the outline of the Islands of the Blest. One tradition, so old as to have been almost forgotten in Rames-side times, told how Thot the ibis there awaited him, and bore him away on his wings;[***] another, no less ancient but of more lasting popularity, declared that a ferry-boat plied regularly between the solid earth and the shores of paradise.

*** It is often mentioned in the Pyramid texts, and inspired one of the most obscure chapters among them (Teti, 11. 185-200; cf. Recueil de Travaux, vol. v. pp. 22, 23). It seems that the ibis had to fight with Sit for right of passage.

The god who directed it questioned the dead, and the bark itself proceeded to examine them before they were admitted on board; for it was a magic bark. "Tell me my name," cried the mast; and the travellers replied: "He who guides the great goddess on her way is thy name." "Tell me my name," repeated the braces. "The Spine of the Jackal Uapuaitu is thy name." "Tell me my name," proceeded the mast-head.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a coloured facsimile published by Leemans, Monuments Egyptiens du Musee d' Antiquites des Pays-Bas a Leyden, part iii. pl. xii.

"The Neck of Amsit is thy name." "Tell me my name," asked the sail. "Nuit is thy name." Each part of the hull and of the rigging spoke in turn and questioned the applicant regarding its name, this being generally a mystic phrase by which it was identified either with some divinity as a whole, or else with some part of his body.

When the double had established his right of passage by the correctness of his answers, the bark consented to receive him and to carry him to the further shore. There he was met by the gods and goddesses of the court of Osiris: by Anubis, by Hathor the lady of the cemetery, by Nit, by the two Maits who preside over justice and truth, and by the four children of Horus stiff-sheathed in their mummy wrappings. They formed as it were a guard of honour to introduce him and his winged guide into an immense hall, the ceiling of which rested on light graceful columns of painted wood.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from pl. cxxxvi. Ag of Naville's Das Thebanische Todtenbuch.

At the further end of the hall Osiris was seated in mysterious twilight within a shrine through whose open doors he might be seen wearing a red necklace over his close-fitting case of white bandaging, his green face surmounted by the tall white diadem flanked by two plumes, his slender hands grasping flail and crook, the emblems of his power.



Behind him stood Isis and Nephthys watching over him with uplifted hands, bare bosoms, and bodies straitly cased in linen. Forty-two jurors who had died and been restored to life like their lord, and who had been chosen, one from each of those cities of Egypt which recognized his authority, squatted right and left, and motionless, clothed in the wrappings of the dead, silently waited until they were addressed. The soul first advanced to the foot of the throne, carrying on its outstretched hands the image of its heart or of its eyes, agents and accomplices of its sins and virtues. It humbly "smelt the earth," then arose, and with uplifted hands recited its profession of faith. "Hail unto you, ye lords of Truth! hail to thee, great god, lord of Truth and Justice! I have come before thee, my master; I have been brought to see thy beauties. For I know thee, I know thy name, I know the names of thy forty-two gods who are with thee in the Hall of the Two Truths, living on the remains of sinners, gorging themselves with their blood, in that day when account is rendered before Onnophris, the true of voice. Thy name which is thine is 'the god whose two twins are the ladies of the two Truths;' and I, I know you, ye lords of the two Truths, I bring unto you Truth, I have destroyed sins for you. I have not committed iniquity against men! I have not oppressed the poor! I have not made defalcations in the necropolis! I have not laid labour upon any free man beyond that which he wrought for himself! I have not transgressed, I have not been weak, I have not defaulted, I have not committed that which is an abomination to the gods. I have not caused the slave to be ill-treated of his master! I have not starved any man, I have not made any to weep, I have not assassinated any man, I have not caused any man to be treacherously assassinated, and I have not committed treason against any! I have not in aught diminished the supplies of temples! I have not spoiled the shrewbread of the gods! I have not taken away the loaves and the wrappings of the dead! I have done no carnal act within the sacred enclosure of the temple! I have not blasphemed! I have in nought curtailed the sacred revenues! I have not pulled down the scale of the balance! I have not falsified the beam of the balance! I have not taken away the milk from the mouths of sucklings! I have not lassoed cattle on their pastures! I have not taken with nets the birds of the gods! I have not fished in their ponds! I have not turned back the water in its season! I have not cut off a water-channel in its course! I have not put out the fire in its time! I have not defrauded the Nine Gods of the choice part of victims! I have not ejected the oxen of the gods! I have not turned back the god at his coming forth! I am pure! I am pure! I am pure! I am pure! Pure as this Great Bonu of Heracleopolis is pure!... There is no crime against me in this land of the Double Truth! Since I know the names of the gods who are with thee in the Hall of the Double Truth, save thou me from them!" He then turned towards the jury and pleaded his cause before them. They had been severally appointed for the cognizance of particular sins, and the dead man took each of them by name to witness that he was innocent of the sin which that one recorded. His plea ended, he returned to the supreme judge, and repeated, under what is sometimes a highly mystic form, the ideas which he had already advanced in the first part of his address. "Hail unto you, ye gods who are in the Great Hall of the Double Truth, who have no falsehood in your bosoms, but who live on Truth in Aunu, and feed your hearts upon it before the Lord God who dwelleth in his solar disc! Deliver me from the Typhon who feedeth on entrails, O chiefs! in this hour of supreme judgment;—grant that the deceased may come unto you, he who hath not sinned, who hath neither lied, nor done evil, nor committed any crime, who hath not borne false witness, who hath done nought against himself, but who liveth on truth, who feedeth on truth. He hath spread joy on all sides; men speak of that which he hath done, and the gods rejoice in it. He hath reconciled the god to him by his love; he hath given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked; he hath given a boat to the shipwrecked; he hath offered sacrifices to the gods, sepulchral meals unto the manes. Deliver him from himself, speak not against him before the Lord of the Dead, for his mouth is pure, and his two hands are pure!" In the middle of the Hall, however, his acts were being weighed by the assessors. Like all objects belonging to the gods, the balance is magic, and the genius which animates it sometimes shows its fine and delicate little human head on the top of the upright stand which forms its body. Everything about the balance recalls its superhuman origin: a cynocephalus, emblematic of Thot, sits perched on the upright and watches the beam; the cords which suspend the scales are made of alternate cruces ansato and tats. Truth squats upon one of the scales; Thot, ibis-headed, places the heart on the other, and always merciful, bears upon the side of Truth that judgment may be favourably inclined. He affirms that the heart is light of offence, inscribes the result of the proceeding upon a wooden tablet, and pronounces the verdict aloud. "Thus saith Thot, lord of divine discourse, scribe of the Great Ennead, to his father Osiris, lord of eternity, 'Behold the deceased in this Hall of the Double Truth, his heart hath been weighed in the balance in the presence of the great genii, the lords of Hades, and been found true. No trace of earthly impurity hath been found in his heart. Now that he leaveth the tribunal true of voice, his heart is restored to him, as well as his eyes and the material cover of his heart, to be put back in their places each in its own time, his soul in heaven, his heart in the other world, as is the custom of the "Followers of Horus." Henceforth let his body lie in the hands of Anubis, who presideth over the tombs; let him receive offerings at the cemetery in the presence of Onno-phris; let him be as one of those favourites who follow thee; let his soul abide where it will in the necropolis of his city, he whose voice is true before the Great Ennead.'" In this "Negative Confession," which the worshippers of Osiris taught to their dead, all is not equally admirable. The material interests of the temple were too prominent, and the crime of killing a sacred goose or stealing a loaf from the bread offerings was considered as abominable as calumny or murder. But although it contains traces of priestly cupidity, yet how many of its precepts are untarnished in their purity by any selfish ulterior motive! In it is all our morality in germ, and with refinements of delicacy often lacking among peoples of later and more advanced civilizations. The god does not confine his favour to the prosperous and the powerful of this world; he bestows it also upon the poor. His will is that they be fed and clothed, and exempted from tasks beyond their strength; that they be not oppressed, and that unnecessary tears be spared them. If this does not amount to the love of our neighbour as our religions preach it, at least it represents the careful solicitude due from a good lord to his vassals. His pity extends to slaves; not only does he command that no one should ill-treat them himself, but he forbids that their masters should be led to ill-treat them. This profession of faith, one of the noblest bequeathed us by the old world, is of very ancient origin. It may be read in scattered fragments upon the monuments of the first dynasties, and the way in which its ideas are treated by the compilers of these inscriptions proves that it was not then regarded as new, but as a text so old and so well known that its formulas were current in all mouths, and had their prescribed places in epitaphs.[*] Was it composed in Mendes, the god's own home, or in Heliopolis, when the theologians of that city appropriated the god of Mendes and incorporated him in their Ennead? In conception it certainly belongs to the Osirian priesthood, but it can only have been diffused over the whole of Egypt after the general adoption of the Heliopolitan Ennead throughout the cities.

As soon as he was judged, the dead man entered into the possession of his rights as a pure soul. On high he received from the Universal Lord all that kings and princes here below bestowed upon their followers—rations of food,[**] and a house, gardens, and fields to be held subject to the usual conditions of tenure in Egypt, i.e. taxation, military service, and the corvee.

* For instance, one of the formulas found in Memphite tombs states that the deceased had been the friend of his father, the beloved of his mother, sweet to those who lived with him, gracious to his brethren, loved of his servants, and that he had never sought wrongful quarrel with any man; briefly, that he spoke and did that which is right here below.

** The formula of the pyramid times is: "Thy thousand of oxen, thy thousand of geese, of roast and boiled joints from the larder of the gods, of bread, and plenty of the good things presented in the hall of Osiris."

If the island was attacked by the partisans of Sit, the Osirian doubles hastened in a body to repulse them, and fought bravely in its defence. Of the revenues sent to him by his kindred on certain days and by means of sacrifices, each gave tithes to the heavenly storehouses. Yet this was but the least part of the burdens laid upon him by the laws of the country, which did not suffer him to become enervated by idleness, but obliged him to labour as in the days when he still dwelt in Egypt.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a vignette in the funerary papyrus of Nebhopit in Turin.

He looked after the maintenance of canals and dykes, he tilled the ground, he sowed, he reaped, he garnered the grain for his lord and for himself. Yet to those upon whom they were incumbent, these posthumous obligations, the sequel and continuation of feudal service, at length seemed too heavy, and theologians exercised their ingenuity to find means of lightening the burden. They authorized the manes to look to their servants for the discharge of all manual labour which they ought to have performed themselves. Barely did a dead man, no matter how poor, arrive unaccompanied at the eternal cities; he brought with him a following proportionate to his rank and fortune upon earth.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a painted limestone statuette from the tomb of Sonnozmu at Thebes, dating from the end of the XXth dynasty.

At first they were real doubles, those of slaves or vassals killed at the tomb, and who had departed along with the double of the master to serve him beyond the grave as they had served him here. A number of statues and images, magically endued with activity and intelligence, was afterwards substituted for this retinue of victims. Originally of so large a size that only the rich or noble could afford them, they were reduced little by little to the height of a few inches. Some were carved out of alabaster, granite, diorite, fine limestone, or moulded out of fine clay and delicately modelled; others had scarcely any human resemblance. They were endowed with life by means of a formula recited over them at the time of their manufacture, and afterwards traced upon their legs. All were possessed of the same faculties. When the god who called the Osirians to the corvee pronounced the name of the dead man to whom the figures belonged, they arose and answered for him; hence their designation of "Respondents "—Uashbiti. Equipped for agricultural labour, each grasping a hoe and carrying a seed-bag on his shoulder, they set out to work in their appointed places, contributing the required number of days of forced labour.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a vignette in No, 4 Papyrus, Dublin (Naville, Das Mgyptische Todtenbuch, vol. i. pl. xxvii. Da). The name of draughts is not altogether accurate; a description of the game may be found in Falkner, Games Ancient and Oriental and how to play them, pp. 9-101.

Up to a certain point they thus compensated for those inequalities of condition which death itself did not efface among the vassals of Osiris; for the figures were sold so cheaply that even the poorest could always afford some for themselves, or bestow a few upon their relations; and in the Islands of the Blest, fellah, artisan, and slave were indebted to the Uashbiti for release from their old routine of labour and unending toil. While the little peasants of stone or glazed ware dutifully toiled and tilled and sowed, their masters were enjoying all the delights of the Egyptian paradise in perfect idleness. They sat at ease by the water-side, inhaling the fresh north breeze, under the shadow of trees which were always green. They fished with lines among the lotus-plants; they embarked in their boats, and were towed along by their servants, or they would sometimes deign to paddle themselves slowly about the canals.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from the Papyrus of Nebhopit, in Turin. This drawing is from part of the same scene as the illustration on p. 275.

They went fowling among the reed-beds, or retired within their painted pavilions to read tales, to play at draughts, to return to their wives who were for ever young and beautiful.[**]

** Gymnastic exercises, hunting, fishing, sailing, are all pictured in Theban tombs. The game of draughts is mentioned in the title of chap. xvii. of the Book of the Dead (Naville's edition, vol. i. pl. xxiii. 1. 2), and the women's pavilion is represented in the tomb of Rakhmiri That the dead were supposed to read tales is proved from the fact that broken ostraca bearing long fragments of literary works are found in tombs; they were broken to kill them and to send on their doubles to the dead man in the next world.

It was but an ameliorated earthly life, divested of all suffering under the rule and by the favour of the true-voiced Onnophris. The feudal gods promptly adopted this new mode of life.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Einil Brugsch-Bey. The original was found in the course of M. de Morgan's excavations at Meir, and is now at Gizeh. The dead man is sitting in the cabin, wrapped in his cloak. As far as I know, this is the only boat which has preserved its original rigging. It dates from the XIth or XIIth dynasty.

Each of their dead bodies, mummified, and afterwards reanimated in accordance with the Osirian myth, became an Osiris as did that of any ordinary person. Some carried the assimilation so far as to absorb the god of Mendes, or to be absorbed in him. At Memphis Phtah-Sokaris became Phtah-Sokar-Osiris, and at Thinis Khontamentifc became Osiris Khontamentit. The sun-god lent himself to this process with comparative ease because his life is more like a man's life, and hence also more like that of Osiris, which is the counterpart of a man's life.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a vignette in the Papyrus of Nebqadn, in Paris.

Born in the morning, he ages as the day declines, and gently passes away at evening. From the time of his entering the sky to that of his leaving it, he reigns above as he reigned here below in the beginning; but when he has left the sky and sinks into Hades, he becomes as one of the dead, and is, as they are, subjected to Osirian embalmment. The same dangers that menace their human souls threaten his soul also; and when he has vanquished them, not in his own strength, but by the power of amulets and magical formulas, he enters into the fields of lalu, and ought to dwell there for ever under the rule of Onuophris. He did nothing of the kind, however, for daily the sun was to be seen reappearing in the east twelve hours after it had sunk into the darkness of the west. Was it a new orb each time, or did the same sun shine every day? In either case the result was precisely the same; the god came forth from death and re-entered into life. Having identified the course of the sun-god with that of man, and Ra with Osiris for a first day and a first night, it was hard not to push the matter further, and identify them for all succeeding days and nights, affirming that man and Osiris might, if they so wished, be born again in the morning, as Ra was, and together with him. If the Egyptians had found the prospect of quitting the darkness of the tomb for the bright meadows of Ialu a sensible alleviation of their lot, with what joy must they have been filled by the conception which allowed them to substitute the whole realm of the sun for a little archipelago in an out-of-the-way corner of the universe. Their first consideration was to obtain entrance into the divine bark, and this was the object of all the various practices and prayers, whose text, together with that which already contained the Osirian formulas, ensured the unfailing protection of Ra to their possessor. The soul desirous of making use of them went straight from his tomb to the very spot where the god left earth to descend into Hades. This was somewhere in the immediate neighbourhood of Abydos, and was reached through a narrow gorge or "cleft" in the Libyan range, whose "mouth" opened in front of the temple of Osiris Khontamentit, a little to the north-west of the city. The soul was supposed to be carried thither by a small flotilla of boats, manned by figures representing friends or priests, and laden with food, furniture, and statues. This flotilla was placed within the vault on the day of the funeral, and was set in motion by means of incantations recited over it during one of the first nights of the year, at the annual feast of the dead. The bird or insect which had previously served as guide to the soul upon its journey now took the helm to show the fleet the right way, and under this command the boats left Abydos and mysteriously passed through the "cleft" into that western sea which is inaccessible to the living, there to await the daily coming of the dying sun-god.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a very small photograph published in the Catalogue of the Minutoli Sale.

As soon as his bark appeared at the last bend of the celestial Nile, the cynocephali, who guarded the entrance into night, began to dance and gesticulate upon the banks as they intoned their accustomed hymn. The gods of Abydos mingled their shouts of joy with the chant of the sacred baboons, the bark lingered for a moment upon the frontiers of day, and initiated souls seized the occasion to secure their recognition and their reception on board of it.[*] Once admitted, they took their share in the management of the boat, and in the battles with hostile deities; but they were not all endowed with the courage or equipment needful to withstand the perils and terrors of the voyage. Many stopped short by the way in one of the regions which it traversed, either in the realm of Khontamentit, or in that of Sokaris, or in those islands where the good Osiris welcomed them as though they had duly arrived in the ferry-boat, or upon the wing of Thot. There they dwelt in colonies under the suzerainty of local gods, rich, and in need of nothing, but condemned to live in darkness, excepting for the one brief hour in which the solar bark passed through their midst, irradiating them with beams of light.[**]

* This description of the embarkation and voyage of the soul is composed from indications given in one of the vignettes of chap. xvi. of the Book of the Dead (Naville's edition, vol. i. pl. xxii.), combined with the text of a formula which became common from the times of the XIth and XIIth dynasties (Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et l'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. i. pp. 14-18, and Etudes Egyptiennes, vol. i. pp. 122, 123).

** Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 44, 45.

The few persevered, feeling that they had courage to accompany the sun throughout, and these were indemnified for their sufferings by the most brilliant fate ever dreamed of by Egyptian souls., Born anew with the sun-god and appearing with him at the gates of the east, they were assimilated to him, and shared his privilege of growing old and dying, only to be ceaselessly rejuvenated and to live again with ever-renewed splendour. They disembarked where they pleased, and returned at will into the world. If now and then they felt a wish to revisit all that was left of their earthly bodies, the human-headed sparrow-hawk descended the shaft in full flight, alighted upon the funeral couch, and, with hands softly laid upon the spot where the heart had been wont to beat, gazed upwards at the impassive mask of the mummy.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Deveria.

This was but for a moment, since nothing compelled these perfect souls to be imprisoned within the tomb like the doubles of earlier times, because they feared the light. They "went forth by day," and dwelt in those places where they had lived; they walked in their gardens by their ponds of running water; they perched like so many birds on the branches of the trees which they had planted, or enjoyed the fresh air under the shade of their sycamores; they ate and drank at pleasure; they travelled by hill and dale; they embarked in the boat of Ra, and disembarked without weariness, and without distaste for the same perpetual round.

This conception, which was developed somewhat late, brought the Egyptians back to the point from which they had started when first they began to speculate on the life to come.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch- Bey, reproducing the miniature sarcophagus of the scribe Ra (Maspero, Guide du Visiteur, pp. 130, 131, No. 1621).

The soul, after having left the place of its incarnation to which in the beginning it clung, after having ascended into heaven and there sought congenial asylum in vain, forsook all havens which it had found above, and unhesitatingly fell back upon earth, there to lead a peaceful, free, and happy life in the full light of day, and with the whole valley of Egypt for a paradise.

The connection, always increasingly intimate between Osiris and Ra, gradually brought about a blending of the previously separate myths and beliefs concerning each. The friends and enemies of the one became the friends and enemies of the other, and from a mixture of the original conceptions of the two deities, arose new personalities, in which contradictory elements were blent together, often without true fusion. The celestial Horuses one by one were identified with Horus, son of Isis, and their attributes were given to him, as his in the same way became theirs. Apopi and the monsters—the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the wild boar—who lay in wait for Ra as he sailed the heavenly ocean, became one with Sit and his accomplices. Sit still possessed his half of Egypt, and his primitive brotherly relation to the celestial Horus remained unbroken, either 'on account of their sharing one temple, as at Nubit, or because they were worshipped as one in two neighbouring nomes, as, for example, at Oxyrrhynchos and at Heracleopolis Magna. The repulsion with which the slayer of Osiris was regarded did not everywhere dissociate these two cults: certain small districts persisted in this double worship down to the latest times of paganism. It was, after all, a mark of fidelity to the oldest traditions of the race, but the bulk of the Egyptians, who had forgotten these, invented reasons taken from the history of the divine dynasties to explain the fact. The judgment of Thot or of Sibu had not put an end to the machinations of Sit: as soon as Horus had left the earth, Sit resumed them, and pursued them, with varying fortune, under the divine kings of the second Ennead. Now, in the year 363 of Harmakhis, the Typhonians reopened the campaign. Beaten at first near Edfu, they retreated precipitately northwards, stopping to give battle wherever their partisans predominated,—at Zatmifc in the Theban nome,[*] at Khaitnutrit to the north-east of Denderah, and at Hibonu in the principality of the Gazelle.

* Zatmit appears to have been situate at some distance from Bayadiyeh, on the spot where the map published by the Egyptian Commission marks the ruins of a modern village. There was a necropolis of considerable extent there, which furnishes the Luxor dealers with antiquities, many of which belong to the first Theban empire.



2 Copied by Faucher-Gudin from the survey-drawings of the tomb of Anni by Boussac, member of the Mission francaise in Egypt (1891). The inscription over the arbour gives the list of the various trees in the garden of Anni during his lifetime.

Several bloody combats, which took place between Oxyrrhynchos and Heracleopolis Magna, were the means of driving them finally out of the Nile Valley; they rallied for the last time in the eastern provinces of the Delta, were beaten at Zalu, and giving up all hope of success on land, they embarked at the head of the Gulf of Suez, in order to return to the Nubian Desert, their habitual refuge in times of distress. The sea was the special element of Typhon, and upon it they believed themselves secure. Horus, however, followed them, overtook them near Shas-hirit, routed them, and on his return to Edfu, celebrated his victory by a solemn festival. By degrees, as he made himself master of those localities which owed allegiance to Sit, he took energetic measures to establish in them the authority of Osiris and of the solar cycle. In all of them he built, side by side with the sanctuary of the Typhonian divinities, a temple to himself, in which he was enthroned under the particular form he was obliged to assume in order to vanquish his enemies. Metamorphosed into a hawk at the battle of Hibonu, we next see him springing on to the back of Sit under the guise of a hippopotamus; in his shrine at Hibonu he is represented as a hawk perching on the back of a gazelle, emblem of the nome where the struggle took place. Near to Zalu he became incarnate as a human-headed lion, crowned with the triple diadem, and having feet armed with claws which cut like a knife; it was under the form, too, of a lion that he was worshipped in the temple at Zalu. The correlation of Sit and the celestial Horus was not, therefore, for these Egyptians of more recent times a primitive religious fact; it was the consequence, and so to speak the sanction, of the old hostility between the two gods.



Horus had treated his enemy in the same fashion that a victorious Pharaoh treated the barbarians conquered by his arms: he had constructed a fortress to keep his foe in check, and his priests formed a sort of garrison as a precaution against the revolt of the rival priesthood and the followers of the rival deity. In this manner the battles of the gods were changed into human struggles, in which, more than once, Egypt was deluged with blood. The hatred of the followers of Osiris to those of Typhon was perpetuated with such implacability, that the nomes which had persisted in adhering to the worship of Sit, became odious to the rest of the population: the image of their master on the monuments was mutilated, their names were effaced from the geographical lists, they were assailed with insulting epithets, and to pursue and slay their sacred animals was reckoned a pious act. Thus originated those skirmishes which developed into actual civil wars, and were continued down to Roman times. The adherents of Typhon only became more confirmed in their veneration for the accursed god; Christianity alone overcame their obstinate fidelity to him.[*]

* This incident in the wars of Horus and Sit is drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a bas-relief of the temple of Edfu. On the right, Har-Huditi, standing up in the solar bark, pierces with his lance the head of a crocodile, a partisan of Sit, lying in the water below; Harmakhis, standing behind him, is present at the execution. Facing this divine pair, is the young Horus, who kills a man, another partisan of Sit, while Isis and Har-Huditi hold his chains; behind Horus, Isis and Thot are leading four other captives bound and ready to be sacrificed before Harmakhis.

The history of the world for Egypt was therefore only the history of the struggle between the adherents of Osiris and the followers of Sit; an interminable warfare in which sometimes one and sometimes the other of the rival parties obtained a passing advantage, without ever gaining a decisive victory till the end of time. The divine kings of the second and third Ennead devoted most of the years of their earthly reign to this end; they were portrayed under the form of the great warrior Pharaohs, who, from the eighteenth to the twelfth century before our era, extended their rule from the plains of the Euphrates to the marshes of Ethiopia. A few peaceful sovereigns are met with here and there in this line of conquerors—a few sages or legislators, of whom the most famous was styled Thot, the doubly great, ruler of Hermopolis and of the Hermopolitan Ennead. A legend of recent origin made him the prime minister of Horus, son of Isis; a still more ancient tradition would identify him with the second king of the second dynasty, the immediate successor of the divine Horuses, and attributes to him a reign of 3226 years. He brought to the throne that inventive spirit and that creative power which had characterized him from the time when he was only a feudal deity. Astronomy, divination, magic, medicine, writing, drawing—in fine, all the arts and sciences emanated from him as from their first source. He had taught mankind the methodical observation of the heavens and of the changes that took place in them, the slow revolutions of the sun, the rapid phases of the moon, the intersecting movements of the five planets, and the shapes and limits of the constellations which each night were lit up in the sky. Most of the latter either remained, or appeared to remain immovable, and seemed never to pass out of the regions accessible to the human eye. Those which were situate on the extreme margin of the firmament accomplished movements there analogous to those of the planets.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a copy by Lepsius, Denkm., iii. 227, 3.

Every year at fixed times they were seen to sink one after another below the horizon, to disappear, and rising again after an eclipse of greater or less duration, to regain insensibly their original positions. The constellations were reckoned to be thirty-six in number, the thirty-six decani to whom were attributed mysterious powers, and of whom Sothis was queen—Sothis transformed into the star of Isis, when Orion (Sahu), became the star of Osiris. The nights are so clear and the atmosphere so transparent in Egypt, that the eye can readily penetrate the depths of space, and distinctly see points of light which would be invisible in our foggy climate. The Egyptians did not therefore need special instruments to ascertain the existence of a considerable number of stars which we could not see without the help of our telescopes; they could perceive with the naked eye stars of the fifth magnitude, and note them upon their catalogues.[*] It entailed, it is true, a long training and uninterrupted practice to bring their sight up to its maximum keenness; but from very early times it was a function of the priestly colleges to found and maintain schools of astronomy. The first observatories established on the banks of the Nile seem to have belonged to the temples of the sun; the high priests of Ra—who, to judge from their title, were alone worthy to behold the sun face to face—were actively employed from the earliest times in studying the configuration and preparing maps of the heavens. The priests of other gods were quick to follow their example: at the opening of the historic period, there was not a single temple, from one end of the valley to the other, that did not possess its official astronomers, or, as they were called, "watchers of the night."[**]

* Biot, however, states that stars of the third and fourth magnitude "are the smallest which can be seen with the naked eye." I believe I am right in affirming that several of the fellahin and Bedawin attached to the "service des Antiquites" can see stars which are usually classed with those of the fifth magnitude.

** Urshu: this word is also used for the soldiers on watch during the day upon the walls of a fortress. Birch believed he had discovered in the British Museum a catalogue of observations made at Thebes by several astronomers upon a constellation which answered to the Hyades or the Pleiades; it was merely a question in this text of the quantity of water supplied regularly to the astronomers of a Theban temple for their domestic purposes.

In the evening they went up on to the high terraces above the shrine, or on to the narrow platforms which terminated the pylons, and fixing their eyes continuously on the celestial vault above them, followed the movements of the constellations and carefully noted down the slightest phenomena which they observed. A portion of the chart of the heavens, as known to Theban Egypt between the eighteenth and twelfth centuries before our era, has survived to the present time; parts of it were carved by the decorators on the ceilings of temples, and especially on royal tombs. The deceased Pharaohs were identified with Osiris in a more intimate fashion than their subjects. They represented the god even in the most trivial details; on earth—where, after having played the part of the beneficent Onnophris of primitive ages, they underwent the most complete and elaborate embalming, like Osiris of the lower world; in Hades—where they embarked side by side with the Sun-Osiris to cross the night and to be born again at daybreak; in heaven—where they shone with Orion-Sahu under the guardianship of Sothis, and, year by year, led the procession of the stars. The maps of the firmament recalled to them, or if necessary taught them, this part of their duties: they there saw the planets and the decani sail past in their boats, and the constellations follow one another in continuous succession. The lists annexed to the charts indicated the positions occupied each month by the principal heavenly bodies—their risings, their culminations, and their settings. Unfortunately, the workmen employed to execute these pictures either did not understand much about the subject in hand, or did not trouble themselves to copy the originals exactly: they omitted many passages, transposed others, and made endless mistakes, which made it impossible for us to transfer accurately to a modern map the information possessed by the ancients.

In directing their eyes to the celestial sphere, Thot had at the same time revealed to men the art of measuring time, and the knowledge of the future. As he was the moon-god par excellence, he watched with jealous care over the divine eye which had been entrusted to him by Horus, and the thirty days during which he was engaged in conducting it through all the phases of its nocturnal life, were reckoned as a month. Twelve of these months formed the year, a year of three hundred and sixty days, during which the earth witnessed the gradual beginning and ending of the circle of the seasons. The Nile rose, spread over the fields, sank again into its channel; to the vicissitudes of the inundation succeeded the work of cultivation; the harvest followed the seedtime: these formed three distinct divisions of the year, each of nearly equal duration. Thot made of them the three seasons,—that of the waters, Shait; that of vegetation, Piruit; that of the harvest, Shomu—each comprising four months, numbered one to four; the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th months of Shait; the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th months of Piruit; the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th months of Shomu. The twelve months completed, a new year began, whose birth was heralded by the rising of Sothis in the early days of August. The first month of the Egyptian year thus coincided with the eighth of ours. Thot became its patron, and gave it his name, relegating each of the others to a special protecting divinity; in this manner the third month of Shait fell to Hathor, and was called after her; the fourth of Piruit belonged to Ranuit or Ramuit, the lady of harvests, and derived from her its appellation of Pharmuti. Official documents always designated the months by the ordinal number attached to them in each season, but the people gave them by preference the names of their tutelary deities, and these names, transcribed into Greek, and then into Arabic, are still used by the Christian inhabitants of Egypt, side by side with the Mussulman appellations. One patron for each month was, however, not deemed sufficient: each month was subdivided into three decades, over which presided as many decani, and the days themselves were assigned to genii appointed to protect them. A number of festivals were set apart at irregular intervals during the course of the year: festivals for the new year, festivals for the beginning of the seasons, months and decades, festivals for the dead, for the supreme gods, and for local divinities. Every act of civil life was so closely allied to the religious life, that it could not be performed without a sacrifice or a festival. A festival celebrated the cutting of the dykes, another the opening of the canals, a third the reaping of the first sheaf, or the carrying of the grain; a crop gathered or stored without a festival to implore the blessing of the gods, would have been an act of sacrilege and fraught with disaster. The first year of three hundred and sixty days, regulated by the revolutions of the moon, did not long meet the needs of the Egyptian people; it did not correspond with the length of the solar year, for it fell short of it by five and a quarter days, and this deficit, accumulating from twelvemonth to twelvemonth, caused such a serious difference between the calendar reckoning and the natural seasons, that it soon had to be corrected. They intercalated, therefore, after the twelfth month of each year and before the first day of the ensuing year, five epagomenal days, which they termed the "five days over and above the year."[*]

* There appears to be a tendency among Egyptologists now to doubt the existence, under the Ancient Empire, of the five epagomenal days, and as a fact they are nowhere to be found expressly mentioned; but we know that the five gods of the Osirian cycle were born during the epagomenal day (cf. p. 247 of this History), and the allusions to the Osirian legend which are met with in the Pyramid texts, prove that the days were added long before the time when those inscriptions were cut. As the wording of the texts often comes down from prehistoric times, it is most likely that the invention of the epagomenal days is anterior to the first Thinite and Memphite dynasties.

The legend of Osiris relates that Thot created them in order to permit Nuit to give birth to all her children. These days constituted, at the end of the "great year," a "little month," which considerably lessened the difference between the solar and lunar computation, but did not entirely do away with it, and the six hours and a few minutes of which the Egyptians had not taken count gradually became the source of fresh perplexities. They at length amounted to a whole day, which needed to be added every four years to the regular three hundred and sixty days, a fact which was unfortunately overlooked. The difficulty, at first only slight, which this caused in public life, increased with time, and ended by disturbing the harmony between the order of the calendar and that of natural phenomena: at the end of a hundred and twenty years, the legal year had gained a whole month on the actual year, and the 1st of Thot anticipated the heliacal rising of Sothis by thirty days, instead of coinciding with it as it ought. The astronomers of the Graeco-Roman period, after a retrospective examination of all the past history of their country, discovered a very ingenious theory for obviating this unfortunate discrepancy. If the omission of six hours annually entailed the loss of one day every four years, the time would come, after three hundred and sixty-five times four years, when the deficit would amount to an entire year, and when, in consequence, fourteen hundred and sixty whole years would exactly equal fourteen hundred and sixty-one incomplete years. The agreement of the two years, which had been disturbed by the force of circumstances, was re-established of itself after rather more than fourteen and a half centuries: the opening of the civil year became identical with the beginning of the astronomical year, and this again coincided with the heliacal rising of Sirius, and therefore with the official date of the inundation. To the Egyptians of Pharaonic times, this simple and eminently practical method was unknown: by means of it hundreds of generations, who suffered endless troubles from the recurring difference between an uncertain and a fixed year, might have consoled themselves with the satisfaction of knowing that a day would come when one of their descendants would, for once in his life, see both years coincide with mathematical accuracy, and the seasons appear at their normal times. The Egyptian year might be compared to a watch which loses a definite number of minutes daily. The owner does not take the trouble to calculate a cycle in which the total of minutes lost will bring the watch round to the correct time: he bears with the irregularity as long as his affairs do not suffer by it; but when it causes him inconvenience, he alters the hands to the right hour, and repeats this operation each time he finds it necessary, without being guided by a fixed rule. In like manner the Egyptian year fell into hopeless confusion with regard to the seasons, the discrepancy continually increasing, until the difference became so great, that the king or the priests had to adjust the two by a process similar to that employed in the case of the watch.

The days, moreover, had each their special virtues, which it was necessary for man to know if he wished to profit by the advantages, or to escape the perils which they possessed for him. There was not one among them that did not recall some incident of the divine wars, and had not witnessed a battle between the partisans of Sit and those of Osiris or Ra; the victories or the disasters which they had chronicled had as it were stamped them with good or bad luck, and for that reason they remained for ever auspicious or the reverse. It was on the 17th of Athyr that Typhon had enticed his brother to come to him, and had murdered him in the middle of a banquet. Every year, on this day, the tragedy that had taken place in the earthly abode of the god seemed to be repeated afresh in the heights of heaven. Just as at the moment of the death of Osiris, the powers of good were at their weakest, and the sovereignty of evil everywhere prevailed, so the whole of Nature, abandoned to the powers of darkness, became inimical to man. Whatever he undertook on that day issued in failure. If he went out to walk by the river-side, a crocodile would attack him, as the crocodile sent by Sit had attacked Osiris. If he set out on a journey, it was a last farewell which he bade to his family and friends: death would meet him by the way. To escape this fatality, he must shut himself up at home, and wait in inaction until the hours of danger had passed and the sun of the ensuing day had put the evil one to flight.[*]

* On the 20th of Thot no work was to be done, no oxen killed, no stranger received. On the 22nd no fish might be eaten, no oil lamp was to be lighted. On the 23rd "put no incense on the fire, nor kill big cattle, nor goats, nor ducks; eat of no goose, nor of that which has lived." On the 26th "do absolutely nothing on this day," and the same advice is found on the 7th of Paophi, on the 18th, on the 26th, on the 27th, and more than thirty times in the remainder of the Sallier Calendar. On the 30th of Mechir it is forbidden to speak aloud to any one.

It was to his interest to know these adverse influences; and who would have known them all, had not Thot pointed them out and marked them in his calendars? One of these, long fragments of which have come down to us, indicated briefly the character of each day, the gods who presided over it, the perils which accompanied their patronage, or the good fortune which might be expected of them. The details of it are not always intelligible to us, as we are still ignorant of many of the episodes in the life of Osiris. The Egyptians were acquainted with the matter from childhood, and were guided with sufficient exactitude by these indications. The hours of the night were all inauspicious; those of the day were divided into three "seasons" of four hours each, of which some were lucky, while others were invariably of ill omen. "The 4th of Tybi: good, good, good. Whatsoever thou seest on this day will be fortunate. Whosoever is born on this day, will die more advanced in years than any of his family; he will attain to a greater age than his father. The 5th of Tybi: inimical, inimical, inimical. This is the day on which the goddess Sokhifc, mistress of the double white Palace, burnt the chiefs when they raised an insurrection, came forth, and manifested themselves. Offerings of bread to Shu, Phtah, Thot: burn incense to Ra, and to the gods who are his followers, to Phtah, Thot, Hu-Su, on this day. Whatsoever thou seest on this day will be fortunate. The 6th of Tybi: good, good, good. Whatsoever thou seest on this day will be fortunate. The 7th of Tybi: inimical, inimical, inimical. Do not join thyself to a woman in the presence of the Eye of Horus. Beware of letting the fire go out which is in thy house. The 8th of Tybi: good, good, good. Whatsoever thou seest with thine eye this day, the Ennead of the gods will grant to thee: the sick will recover. The 9th of Tybi: good, good, good. The gods cry out for joy at noon this day. Bring offerings of festal cakes and of fresh bread, which rejoice the heart of the gods and of the manes. The 10th of Tybi: inimical, inimical, mimical. Do not set fire to weeds on this day: it is the day on which the god Sap-hou set fire to the land of Btito. The 11th of Tybi: inimical, inimical, inimical. Do not draw nigh to any flame on this day, for Ra entered the flames to strike all his enemies, and whosoever draws nigh to them on this day, it shall not be well with him during his whole life. The 12th of Tybi: inimical, inimical, inimical. See that thou beholdest not a rat on this day, nor approachest any rat within thy house: it is the day wherein Sokhit gave forth the decrees." In these cases a little watchfulness or exercise of memory sufficed to put a man on his guard against evil omens; but in many circumstances all the vigilance in the world would not protect him, and the fatality of the day would overtake him, without his being able to do ought to avert it. No man can at will place the day of his birth at a favourable time; he must accept it as it occurs, and yet it exercises a decisive influence on the manner of his death. According as he enters the world on the 4th, 5th, or 6th of Paophi, he either dies of marsh fever, of love, or of drunkenness. The child of the 23rd perishes by the jaws of a crocodile: that of the 27th is bitten and dies by a serpent. On the other hand, the fortunate man whose birthday falls on the 9th or the 29th lives to an extreme old age, and passes away peacefully, respected by all.