By the dawn of history there had been developed in ancient Egypt an enlightened and discriminating conscience.[75] There are two aspects of this conscience which we need to note. First, it was a comparatively homogeneous conscience; that is, the morality of the ancient Egyptians was not a mixture of moralities like that of the modern European nations whose morality is a blend of the moralities of different races—Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Teutonic; of different religions—pagan and Christian; and of different civilizations—Greek, Latin, Celtic, and German.
Second, it was a comparatively unchanging conscience. The moral consciousness which we find in pre-Christian Roman Egypt is fundamentally the same as that which emerged in the Pyramid Age more than three thousand years before. During this long period the Egyptian conscience, although it gained in depth and sensitiveness as the millenniums passed, underwent less change in its essential qualities than the moral consciousness underwent in less than ten centuries in all the other great nations, save China, of the ancient world.
Evidences of moral progress during early times
But though the moral development, like the development of all other phases of Egyptian civilization, was early checked and thereafter made but slow progress, the essential refinement and clarification of the moral sense during prehistoric times, or in the obscure period of the earliest dynasties, is shown by various testimonies, as, for instance, in the moralization of the Osirian myth, to which we have already referred, in the abandonment of the practice of human sacrifices at the tomb, and in the transition, concerning the conception of the life after death, from the continuance to the retribution theory.
Substitution of ka-statues for human sacrifices
The early Egyptians, after the manner of savages, killed and buried with the dead master a number of his slaves, that their souls might attend him in the spirit land. But after a time the growing humanitarian and ethical feelings of the Egyptians forbade human sacrifices, and then merely the portrait-statues of the slaves were placed in the tomb.[76] These, it was thought,—in consonance with the belief which led to the substitution of pictures or of clay and wood models for the real articles at first buried with the dead,—would take the place of the actual bodies of the servants.
But as time passed, the deepening moral feelings of the Egyptians would not permit them to do even this thing. It did not now seem right to them that because a man was a slave in the earthly Egypt he should be a slave forever in the Osirian fields.[77] So they ceased to place in the tomb of the master these portrait-statues of his servants, and in their stead put in statuettes of nobody in particular. The doubles of these, it was conceived, would appear as newly created souls in the underworld, and, being indebted for life itself to the master of the tomb, would, it was naïvely assumed, gratefully labor for him through all eternity.[78]
The history of the ka-statues, as these substitutes are called, thus bears testimony similar to that of the Osirian myth as to the upward trend of ethical thought and humanitarian feeling in prehistoric Egypt.[79]
Transition from the continuance to the retribution theory
Still further evidence of the advance on moral lines in early Egypt is afforded by the character of the belief held by the Egyptians at the beginning of the second millennium B.C. and perhaps earlier respecting the fate of souls in the world beyond the tomb. To understand this we need to cast our glance a little aside and observe how the world of shades, in its social and ethical classifications, has ever been a register of the changing moral feelings of men. As Oscar Peschel finely says, “The other world has ever answered to this as spectrum to the source of light.”