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! Compare Psalm xxiii. 4.

and kings are accustomed to exercise justice, not only Diodorus because they fear the disapprobation of their subjects, but ^n^SraL also because they fear that after death their bodies may be maltreated, and their memory cursed for ever.


According to Diodorus (I. 92), when the body is ready to be buried, the relatives give notice to the judges and the friends of the deceased, and inform them that the funeral will take place on a certain day, and that the body will pass over the lake; and straightway the judges, forty in number,1 come and scat themselves in a semi-circle above the lake. Then the men who have been commissioned to prepare a boat called ftapi?,* bring it to the lake, and they set it afloat under the charge of a pilot called Charon.3 And they pretend that Orpheus travelling in Egypt in ancient times, was present at a ceremony of this kind, and that he drew his fable of the infernal regions partly from his remembrance of this



Diodorus ceremony,1 and partly from his imagination. Before the coffin tianUurul. containing the dead man was placed in the boat on the lake, every person had the right to bring accusations against the deceased. If any accuser succeeded in showing that the deceased had led a bad life, the judges made a decree which deprived the body of legal burial; if, on the other hand, the accusation was found to be unjust, the person who brought it was compelled to pay heavy damages. If no one stood forth to bring an accusation, or if an accusation seemed calumnious, the relatives of the deceased ceased to mourn and began to praise the dead man and his virtues, and to entreat the gods of the infernal regions to admit him into the place reserved for good men. The Egyptians never praised the birth of a man, as did the Greeks, for they believed that all men are equally noble. The people being gathered together, add their cries of joy, and utter wishes that the deceased may enjoy everlasting life in the underworld in the company of the blessed. Those who have private burial places lay the bodies of their dead in the places set apart for them ; but those who have not, build a new chamber in their house, and set the body in it fixed upright against the wall. Those who are deprived of burial, either because they lie under the ban of an accusation, or because they have not paid their debts, are merely laid in their own houses. It happens sometimes that the younger members of a family, having become richer, pay the debts of their ancestors, secure the removal of the condemnatory sentence upon them, and give them most sumptuous funerals. The great honours which are paid to the dead by the Egyptians form the most solemn ceremonies. As a guarantee for a debt, it is a customary thing to deposit the bodies of dead parents, and the greatest disgrace and privation from burial, wait upon those who redeem not such sacred pledges.


1 Thus Orpheus brought back from his travels in Egypt the ceremonies, and the greater part of the mystic rites celebrated in memory of the courses of Ceres, and the whole of the myth of hell. The difference between the feasts of Bacchus and of those of Oiiris exists only in name, and the same may be said of the mysteries of Isis and those of Osiris. 1 tiodorus, I. 96.

An attempt may now be made to describe briefly what Egyptian happened after death to the body of a man of high rank who ^^Im" departed this life at Thebes towards the end of the XVIIIth according or beginning of the XlXth dynasty, that is to say about B.C. m0nu1400. The facts are all known, and therefore nothing need men,sbe invented; it is only necessary to gather them together and to bring them to a focus on the person of one man. We must imagine then that we are living on the east bank of the Nile, near the temple of Amen-Ra, "lord of the thrones of the earth," in the fifteenth century before Christ. One morning before the day has dawned, even before the officials who conduct the early services in the temples are astir, we are awakened by loud cries of grief and lamentation, and on making inquiries we are told that Ani, the great scribe of the offerings of the gods in the temple of Amen-Ra, is dead. As he was the receiver of the revenues of the gods of Abydos, as well as of Amen-Ra of Thebes, first prophet of Amen, and the precentor who stood on the threshold of the temple morning by morning to lead off" the hymn of praise to the sun, his death naturally causes great excitement in the temples and the immediate neighbourhood; as his forefathers for five or six generations have been temple officers of the highest rank, it is certain that his funeral will be a great event, and that numbers of the hereditary aristocracy and government officials will assist at the ceremony. He leaves no wife to mourn for him, for she is already dead, and is now lying in a chamber of a splendid tomb, not yet finished, however, nine miles away across the river, awaiting the coming of her husband. She was called Tutu, and belonged to one of the oldest and most honourable families in Thebes; she was a member of the famous college of singers of Amen-Ra, and also a member of the choir of ladies, each one of whom carried a sistrum or a tambourine in the temple of that god. Ani began to hew out the tomb for himself and his wife many Tomb years ago, and during his lifetime he spared neither pains nor expense in making it one of the largest and finest ever known for a person of lower rank than a king. Ani was not a very old man when he died, although his step was slow and his back somewhat bent; in stature he was of middle height, and

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For some days past it had been seen that Ani's death was to be expected, and many of his colleagues in the temple had come to see him from time to time, one bringing a charm, another a decoction of herbs, etc., and a few had taken it in turns to stay in his room for some hours at a time. One Death night his illness took a decidedly serious turn, and early in o Am. morn;ng) a short time before daybreak, when, as the


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