[256] Maspero gives a translation of it into French in his Histoire Ancienne, pp. 44 and 45.
[257] This weighing of the actions of the deceased was represented in the illustrated specimens of the Ritual of the Dead and upon the walls of the tombs, and perhaps upon those monuments decorated with Egyptian motives which were sprinkled by the Phœnicians over the whole basin of the Mediterranean. Coming under the eyes of the Greeks, it was modified by their lively imaginations into that ψυχοστασία, or weighing of souls, which we find in the Iliad (xxii. 208-212), where success in a combat between two heroes depends upon the result of that operation. (See Alfred Maury, Revue archéologique, 1844, pp. 235-249, 291-307; 1845, pp. 707-717, and De Witte, ibidem, 1844, pp. 647-656.)
[258] Recueil de Travaux, vol. i. pp. 155-159.
[259] One was found in a Theban tomb opened by Rhind (Thebes, &c., pp. 94 and 95). In the tomb of Ti easily recognized traces of a door were found (Bædeker, Unter-Ægypten, p. 405); nothing but a new door was required to put the opening in its ancient state.
[260] See one of the great inscriptions at Beni-Hassan, interpreted by M. Maspero (Recueil, etc. vol. i. p. 168).
[261] Description de l'Égypte, (Antiquités, vol. iii. p. 35).
[262] A. Rhoné, l'Égypt à petites journées, p. 104.
[263] Passalacqua describes a tomb of this kind in detail in his Catalogue raisonné et historique des Antiquités découvertes en Égypte (8vo., 1826). This tomb had been visited and pillaged at some unknown epoch. One of the two chambers had been opened and stripped, but the second, which opened lower down the well, and on the other side, escaped the notice of the violators (pp. 118-120). In the tomb opened by Rhind (Thebes, its Tombs, etc. pl. 5, v.), the well gave access to four chambers of different sizes arranged round it like the arms of a cross.
[264] Description de l'Égypte, (Antiquités,) plates, vol. ii. p. 78.
[265] Rhind describes one of the most curious of these substitutions in his chapter IV. In that case an usurper of the time of Ptolemy established himself and all his family in the mummy chambers at the foot of the well, after relegating the statues and mummies of the rightful owner and his people to the room above.