The inexorable fate in this tale which brings one after another of the family to die in the same spot is not due to Greek influence, though it seems akin to that. In the irrepressible transmigrations of Bata, and the successive risks of the Doomed Prince, the same ideas are seen working in the
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Egyptian mind. The remorse of Na-nefer-ka-ptah is a stronger touch of conscience and of shame than is seen in early times.
There is an unexplained point in the action as to how Na-nefer-ka-ptah, with the book upon him, comes up from the water, after he is drowned, into the cabin of the royal boat. The narrator had a difficulty to account for the recovery of the body without the use of the magic book, and so that stage is left unnoticed. The successive stages of embalming and mourning are detailed. The sixteen days in the Good House is probably the period of treatment of the body, the time up to the thirty-fifth day that of wrapping and decoration of the mummy cartonnage, and then the thirty-five days more of lying in state until the burial.
We now reach the third act, of Setna's struggle to get the magic roll. Here the strange episode comes in of the rival magicians gambling; it recalls the old tale of Rampsinitus descending into Hades and play-
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ing at dice with Ceres, and the frequent presence of draught-boards in the tombs, shows how much the ka was supposed to relish such pleasures. The regular Egyptian game-board had three rows of ten squares, or thirty in all. Such are found from the XIIth Dynasty down to Greek times; but this form has now entirely disappeared, and the man-galah of two rows of six holes, or the tab of four rows of nine holes, have taken its place. Both of these are side games, where different sides belong to opposite players. The commoner siga is a square game, five rows of five, or seven rows of seven holes, and has no personal sides. The ancient game was played with two, or perhaps three, different kinds of men, and the squares were counted from one end along the outer edge; but what the rules were, or how a game of fifty-two points was managed, has not yet been explained.
The strange scene of Setna being sunk into the ground portion by portion, as he loses