He had been Sakhomka or Menkaûrî; he became the Osiris Sakhomka, or the Osiris Menkaûrî, 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 Dévèria (E. de
Rougé, Études sur le Rituel Funéraire, pl. iv. No. 4).
Ignorant souls fished for by the cynocephali are here
represented as fish; but the soul of Nofirûbnû, 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 fellahîn. Out of the foliage a goddess—Nûît, ïïâthor, or Nît—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
Ægypter. In 1865, E. du Rougé 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, Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie
Égyptiennes, 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, Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie
Égyptiennes, 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.
