I. the malignity of Typhon and the wildest fury of CHAP. the elements: he covered it with pleasant pictures, the mementoes of a happy life on earth; he called the sepulchre itself, his dwelling place and 'everlasting home'. His mummy, in like manner, was entitled 'habitation of Osiris2;' on the type supplied by the arch-mummy of that god, all others had from age to age been scrupulously moulded; prayers were also offered to Osiris for the purpose of securing their incorruptibility3; and as the principal organs of the body were all deemed essential to the rightful actings of the spirit, every limb was now consigned to the protection of one single deity; while Seb, the father of Osiris, was himself entrusted with the guardianship of edifices where the mummy was enshrined. But while conceding that some minor difficul- Judgment after death. ties continue to embarrass the solution of this problem with respect to the precise intention of embalming, as well as to the limits placed by the Egyptian creed upon the metensomatosis of one class of disembodied spirits and their wanderings through the cycle of necessity,' it is impossible to doubt that, in the later periods of Egyptian independence, every spirit was believed to pass at once from this life to Amenthe, the dim region of the under-world, in which account was solemnly taken by Osiris of its actions and its words. In this be 1 Diodor. I. 51: åïdíovs olkovs προσαγορεύουσιν, ὡς ἐν ᾅδου διατε λούντων τὸν ἄπειρον αἰῶνα. Wilkinson (2nd ser. II. 445) seems to think that this care of the dead body intimated a belief in its eventual resuscitation; but, as Prichard long ago remarked (E. Mythol. p. 198), if this doctrine 'was really prevalent among 3 See examples in Döllinger, p. 432. I. CHAP. lief, so universally diffused, we see the clearest and most urgent motive to a course of upright living which the Old Egyptian had been made to feel. The duties which he recognised as proper to the gods, his neighbour and himself, may all be gathered from the judgment-scenes enacted at the great tribunal of Osiris. Light re tian ethics. On examining the pictures thus transmitted to flected on the nature us, we discover that not a few of the more heinous of Egypgics, sins remaining to be expiated in a future life consisted of deflections from a long array of merely ceremonial precepts. Every thing in ancient Egypt, not excluding the most ordinary avocations and most trivial pastimes of the people, had been thrust beneath the iron yoke of arbitrary legislation. As the Nile, for instance, was a sacred river, and as such invoked in the Egyptian hymns' among the foremost of the national gods, whatever bore directly on the culture of the soil and the succession of the crops in every district of the Nile-valley was enforced among the duties claimed from husbandmen by that divinity. To brush its sacred surface with the balance-bucket at a forbidden time was a crime equal in atrocity to that of reviling the face of a king or of a father. The spirit, therefore, which presided over all the social institutions of the Pharaonic empire was akin to that which we have watched already shaping the national character of the Chinese; it was exclusive, cramping, 1 A stanza of one such hymn is given by Mr Birch, as before, p. 268. 2 Osburn, I. 435. 3 Thus in the deprecations of a spirit on approaching the judicial balance, she is made to protest 'I have not changed the customs, nei ther have I enacted foreign abominations.' (Ibid. p. 432). Hence the violent hatred of all strangers which was highly characteristic of the Old Egyptians: see Hengstenberg, Dissertations on the Pentateuch, II. 458, Edinb. 1847. I. isolating, stern, prohibitive, despotic. And cor- CHAP. responding to this general estimate is the discovery that the virtues there imputed to the Old Egyptians are nearly always of a negative kind. The spirit at the bar of judgment ever struggles to evince her own integrity, to justify herself”— and is accordingly most earnest in proclaiming her habitual abstinence from open vice and from all possible breaches of the ceremonial institute. She can declare, indeed, on some occasions, that she has 'given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and asylum to the wretched outcast',' as well as proper victims to the gods and the funereal offerings to the manes; but her language in the great majority of recorded judgment-scenes is rather that of confident disavowal; while confessions of innate depravity, or appeals to the forgiving mercy of the judge, appear to find no echo in Egyptian Rituals. the deceased world. The deceased is, in those Rituals, pictured, first Progress of of all, as undergoing a long series of preliminary in the transformations in order to evade the malice of underinfernal demons, and obtain his heart.' He enters the bark of the Egyptian Charon, and crosses over to the Hall of the Two Truths;' the title of which is borrowed from the goddesses of Truth and Justice, who assist in all determinations of Osiris. Ever since the mythic death ascribed to this divinity, it is believed that he has sat in judgment on the souls of men; and every spirit on 1 Revue Archéol. xive année, p. 194. 2 According to Diodor. I. 96, the word Charon is itself Egyptian (xapw = 'silence'): cf. Uhlemann, Thoth, CHAP. admission finds him ready at his post, attended by I. Anubis, 'the director of the balance,' by Horus Formula of self-excul waiting to conduct acquitted mortals to the nearer presence of Osiris, and by Thoth, the great recorder, with a tablet in his hand. The heart of the deceased which after various struggles has been rescued from the demons of the under-world is now submitted to the fatal balance. Formulæ of exculpation' are presented to him; and although he is supposed to meet the reckoning solely in its own strength and to escape the crisis only when assured of personal innocence, some friendly guidance is upon his own petition administered by Thoth, the Mercury of the Egyptian hades. Of the formulæ2 here mentioned one consists of deprecatory addresses to the gods of the Hall of Judgment, the divine assessors of Osiris. In the second a long catalogue of sins are, one by one, denied or disavowed, before the two and forty avengers,' who as the personifications of the sins themselves are represented waiting for the adverse inclination of the balance, in order to inflict their torments on the soul of the condemned. 6 I give the former series at full length, because pation. it tends far more than any others to exhibit the religion of the Old Egyptians in a favourable light, and illustrates the nature of that secret and selfjudging law, which every where in spite of intellectual aberrations is still active, in the cause of 1 It is worth while to compare the protests of the Old Egyptian as recorded in his Ritual with those contained in the 31st chapter of the Book of Job. The points of simi larity and of contrast are equally instructive. 2 They are translated from the Todtenbuch by Mr Osburn, I. 430 sq. truth and righteousness, among the inmost fibres CHAP. of the human heart: 1. I have neither done any sin, nor omitted any duty to 2. I have committed no uncleanness. I. 9. 10. 11. 12. I have not acted perversely. I have not shortened the cubit. I have not done that which is abominable to the gods. 13. I have not made men to hunger. 15. 16. 17. I have done no act of rapine'. I have not accused of rapine falsely. I have not revived an ancient falsehood before the face of man. 18. I have not forged the deeds of sluices, houses, or lands. 19. I have not forged any of the divine images. 20. I have not withheld the seven linen garments due to the priests. 21. I have not committed adultery. 22. I have not polluted the purity of my divine land (i.e. my 23. I have not been avaricious. 25. I have not cut down on my mother's land (i. e. my 26. I have not falsified the weights of the balance. 27. I have not withheld milk from the mouths of the infants. 1 The besetting sin of the Old Egyptian appears to have been theft, for which he had obtained a special notoriety, as well as, it would seem, a kind of legal indulgence (Herod. |