Vanished are the hearths and homes,
What he does or thinks, who dies,
None to tell us comes.
Eat and drink in peace to-day,
When you go, your goods remain;
He who fares the last, long way,
Comes not back again."
A curious work of much later date that has come down to us is in the form of a discussion between an Ethiopian cat and the unbelieving jackal Kufi, in which the arguments of a sceptical philosophy are urged with such force and sympathy as to show that they were the author's own. But such scepticism was confined to the few; the Egyptian enjoys this life too much, as a rule, to be troubled by doubts about another, and he has always been distinguished by an intensity of religious belief.
With his religion there were associated ideas and beliefs some of which have a strangely Christian ring. He was a believer in the resurrection of the body; hence the care that was taken from the time of the Third dynasty onwards to preserve it by embalmment, and to place above the heart the scarab beetle, the symbol of evolution, which by its magical powers would cause it to beat again. Hence, too, the long texts from the Ritual of the Dead which enabled the deceased to pass in safety through the perils that encompassed the entrance to the next world, as well as the endeavour to place the corpse where it should not be found and injured.
The Egyptian believed also in a Messiah. Thus, in a papyrus of the time of Thothmes III., we read that "a king will come from the south, Ameni the truth-declaring by name.... He will assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and will lift up the red crown of Lower Egypt.... The people of the age of the Son of Man will rejoice, and establish his name for all eternity. They will be far from evil, and the wicked will humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics will fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his flame."