The Egyptians, when rich enough to pay for it, still had the bodies of their friends embalmed at their death, and made into mummies; though the priests, to save part of the cost, often put the mummy of a man just dead into a mummy-case which had been made and used in the reign of a Thûtmosis or an Amenhôthes. They thought that every man at his death took upon himself the character of Osiris, that the nurses who laid out the dead body represented the goddesses Isis and Nepthys, while the man who made the mummy was supposed to be the god Anubis. When the embalming was finished, it was part of the funeral to bring the dead man to trial for what he had done when living, and thus to determine whether he was entitled to an honourable burial. The mummy was ferried across the lake belonging to the temple, and taken before the judge Osiris. A pair of scales was brought forth by the dog-headed Anubis and the hawk-headed Horus; and with this they weighed the past life of the deceased. The judge, with the advice of a jury of forty-two, then pronounced the solemn verdict, which was written down by the ibis-headed Thot. But human nature is the same in all ages and in all countries, and, whatever might have been the past life of the dead, the judge, not to hurt the feelings of the friends, always declared that he was “a righteous and a good man:” and, notwithstanding the show of truth in the trial, it passed into a proverb to say of a wicked man, that he was too bad to be praised even at his funeral. This custom of embalming was thought right by all; but from examining the mummies that have come down to us, it would seem to have been very much confined to the priestly families, and seldom used in the case of children. The mummies, however, were highly valued by the survivors of the family, and when from poverty any man was driven to borrow money, the mummies were thought good security by the lender, and taken as such for the loan.
The mummy-cases indeed could be sold for a large sum, as when made of wood they were covered with painting, and sometimes in part gilt, and often three in number, one enclosing the other. The stone mummy-cases were yet more valuable, as they were either of white alabaster or hard black basalt, beautifully polished, in either case carved with hieroglyphics, and modelled to the shape of the body like the inner wooden cases.
It is interesting to note here that the pigment known to modern art by the name of mummy is, in many cases, actually prepared from the bituminous substances preserved within the wrappings of the ancient mummies. The grinding up of mummies imported from Thebes or Memphis for the purpose of enabling the twentieth century painter to paint the golden tresses of contemporary belles is of course not very extensively carried on, for one mummy will make several thousand tubes of paint, but the practice exists, and of late has been protested against both in England and France.
Though the old laws of Egypt must very much have fallen into disuse during the reigns of the latter Ptolemies, they had at least been left unchanged; and they teach us that the shadow of freedom may be seen, as in Rome under the Cæsars, and in Florence under the Medici, long after the substance has been lost. In quarrels between man and man, the thirty judges, from the cities of Thebes, Memphis, and Heliopolis, were still guided by the eight books of the law. The king, the priests, and the soldiers were the only landholders in the country, while the herdsmen, husbandmen, and handicraftsmen were thought of lower caste. Though the armies of Egypt were for the most part filled with Greek mercenaries, and the landholders of the order of soldiers could then have had as little to do with arms as knights and esquires have in our days, yet they still boasted of the wisdom of their laws, by which arms were only to be trusted to men who had a stake in the country worth fighting for. The old manners had long since passed away. The priests alone obeyed the old marriage law, that a man should have only one wife. Other men, when rich enough, married several. All children were held equally legitimate, whatever woman was the mother.
It is to these latter reigns of the Ptolemies, when high feeling was sadly wanting in all classes of society, when literature and art were alike in a very low state, that we may place the rise of caricature in Egypt. We find drawings made on papyrus to scoff at what the nation used to hold sacred. The sculptures on the walls of the temples are copied in little; and cats, dogs, and monkeys are there placed in the attitudes of the gods and kings of old. In one picture we have the mice attacking a castle defended by the cats, copied from a battle-scene of Ramses II. fighting against the Ethiopians. In another the king on his throne as a dog, with a second dog behind him as a fan-bearer, is receiving the sacred offerings from a cat. In a third the king and queen are seen playing at chess or checkers in the form of a lion playing with a unicorn or horned ass.
We may form some opinion of the wealth of Egypt in its more prosperous times when we learn from Cicero that in this reign, when the Romans had good means of knowing, the revenues of the country amounted to twelve thousand five hundred talents, or ten million dollars; just one-half of which wras paid by the port of Alexandria. This was at a time when the foreign trade had, through the faults of the government, sunk down to its lowest ebb; when not more than twenty ships sailed each year from the Red Sea to India; when the free population of the kingdom had so far fallen off that it was not more than three millions, which was only half of what it had been in the reign of Ptolemy Soter, though Alexandria alone still held three hundred thousand persons.