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Updated: May 11, 2025
These models, too, were supposed to be transformed by magic into actual workmen who would work for the deceased, heap up grain for her, brew beer for her, ferry her over the ghostly Nile into the tomb-world, or perform any other services required.
He crossed the Nile at Bedrashein, and went again to the Tomb-World of Sakkara; but through all the chatter of veiled and helmeted tourists, the bandar-log of our modern Jungle, ran this dark under-stream of awe their monkey methods could not turn aside.
The killing and entombment of the royal servants is of the highest anthropological interest, for it throws a vivid light upon the manners of the time. It shows the primeval Egyptians as a semi-barbaric people of childishly simple ways of thought. The king was dead. For all his kingship he was a man, and no man was immortal in this world. But yet how could one really die? Shadows, dreams, all kinds of phenomena which the primitive mind could not explain, induced the belief that, though the outer man might rot, there was an inner man which could not die and still lived on. The idea of total death was unthinkable. And where should this inner man still live on but in the tomb to which the outer man was consigned? And here, doubtless it was believed, in the house to which the body was consigned, the ghost lived on. And as each ghost had his house with the body, so no doubt all ghosts could communicate with one another from tomb to tomb; and so there grew up the belief in a tomb-world, a subterranean Egypt of tombs, in which the dead Egyptians still lived and had their being. Later on the boat of the sun, in which the god of light crossed the heavens by day, was thought to pass through this dead world between his setting and his rising, accompanied by the souls of the righteous. But of this belief we find no trace yet in the ideas of the Ist Dynasty. All we can see is that the sahus, or bodies of the dead, were supposed to reside in awful majesty in the tomb, while the ghosts could pass from tomb to tomb through the mazes of the underworld. Over this dread realm of dead men presided a dead god, Osiris of Abydos; and so the necropolis of Abydos was the necropolis of the underworld, to which all ghosts who were not its rightful citizens would come from afar to pay their court to their ruler. Thus the man of substance would have a monumental tablet put up to himself in this necropolis as a sort of pied-
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