Fig. 175.—Painting in a royal tomb at Gournah. Amenophis II.
upon the lap of a goddess. (Champollion, pl. 160.)
We shall here content ourselves with remarking that the separation of the tomb and the funerary chapel by some mile or mile and a half was a novelty in Egypt. The different parts of the royal tomb were closely connected under the Memphite Empire, and the change in arrangement must have been a consequence of some modification in the Egyptian notions as to a second life.
Fig. 176.—Amenophis III.
presenting an offering to Amen.
Decoration of a pier at Thebes;
from Prisse.
In the mastaba the double had everything within reach of his hand. Without trouble to himself he could make use of all of the matters which had been provided for the support of his precarious existence: the corpse in the mummy pit, the statues in the serdab, the portraits in bas-relief upon the walls of the public chamber. Through the chinks between the pieces of stone by which the well was filled up, and through the conduits contrived in the thickness of the walls, the magic formulæ of the funerary prayers, the grateful scent of the incense, and of the burnt fat of the victims ([Fig. 177]), reached his attentive senses. Brought thus into juxtaposition one with another, the elements of the tomb were mutually helpful. They lent themselves to that intermittent act of condensation, so to speak, which from time to time gave renewed substance and consistency to the phantom upon which the future life of the deceased depended. This concentration of all the acts and objects, which had for their aim the preservation of the deceased for a second term of life, was obviously destroyed as soon as the division of the tomb into two parts took place. The mummy, hidden away in the depths of those horizontal wells in the flank of the Western Range of which we have spoken, would seem to be in danger of losing the benefit of the services held in its honour upon the Theban plain. At such a distance it would neither hear the prayers nor catch the scent of the offerings. And the double? Is it to be supposed that he oscillated between the colossi in the temple where the funerary sites were celebrated, and the chamber in which the corpse reposed?
Fig. 177.—Flaying the funerary victim.
From a tomb of the 5th dynasty at Sakkarah. (Boulak.)
Before they could have accepted this division of the tomb into two parts the Egyptians must have arrived at some less childish conception of the future life than that of their early civilization. That primitive conception was not entirely banished from their minds; evidence of its persistency is, indeed plentiful, but a more intelligent and less material notion gradually superimposed itself upon the ancient belief. The indescribable being which was the representative of the deceased after death became gradually less material and more spiritual; in time it escaped from its enforced sojourn in the tomb and approached more nearly to that which we call the soul. This soul, like the nocturnal sun, passed a period of probation and purgation in the under world, and, thanks to the protection of Osiris and the other deities of the shades, was at last enabled to return to earth and rejoin the body which it had formerly inhabited. The problem of death and a future life was resolved in much the same way by the Greeks and by all other races who drew much of their inspiration from the Egyptians. They all looked upon the corpse as still alive when they expressed their hopes that the earth upon which they poured out wine and milk would like lie lightly upon it. After a time they added Tartarus and the Elysian Fields to their beliefs, they introduced the heroic fathers of their race into the councils of the gods, and they described and figured the joys which awaited the just upon the Happy Islands.
These various hypotheses are contradictory enough from a logical point of view; they exclude and destroy one another. But when it is a question of notions which are essentially incapable of being strictly defined, the human intelligence is singularly content to rest in vague generalities. Contradictions do not embarrass it; its adaptability is practically infinite.