Chapter 2 (part 3)

The texts in these Books state that the beatified live for ever in the kingdom of Osiris, and feed daily upon the heavenly wheat of righteousness that springs from the body of Osiris, which is eternal; he is righteousness itself, and they are righteous, and they live by eating the body of their god daily. On the other hand, the p. xii wicked, i.e., those who did not believe in the great god or make offerings, are hacked to pieces by the divine messengers of wrath, and their bodies, souls, and spirits are consumed by fire once and for all. The Egyptians had no belief in a purgatory. The fires of the Other World were, it is true, occupied daily in burning up the damned and the opponents of the Sun-god, but each day brought its own supply of bodies, souls, spirits, demons, etc., for annihilation. In all the Books of the Other World we find pits of fire, abysses of darkness, murderous knives, streams of boiling water, foul stenches, fiery serpents, hideous animal-headed monsters and creatures, and cruel, death-dealing beings of various shapes, etc., similar to those with which we are familiar in early Christian and mediæval literature, and it is tolerably certain that modern nations are indebted to Egypt for many of their conceptions of hell. In the present work the object has been to give the reader the complete hieroglyphic texts of the BOOK A-M-TUAT and the BOOK OF GATES, with reproductions of all their illustrations in black and white, and English translations and descriptions. The illustrations of the former work have been specially traced from the plates of the excellent edition of the tomb of Seti I. published by MM. G. Lefébure, U. Bouriant, V. Loret, and E. Naville, in the second volume of the Mémoires de la Mission Archéologique Française au Caire , Paris, 1886. The illustrations of the BOOK OF GATES have p. xiii been traced from Bonomi's Sarcophagus of Oimenepthah I ., London, 1864, but for certain scenes I was permitted by the late Mr. G. Birch, Keeper of Sir John Soane's Museum, to compare the tracings with the scenes on the sarcophagi-is itself. A copy of the scene on the portion of the cover, which I acquired for the Trustees of the British Museum a few years ago, has also been included. The plan followed has been to devote a chapter to each Division of the Tuat, and to give the hieroglyphic texts, with short descriptions of the various gods, &c., and translations, as near to the scenes to which they refer as possible. With a view of making the edition as complete as possible, I have added a transcript of the "Summary" of the BOOK AM-TUAT from Dr. Pleyte's facsimile of the Leyden Papyrus, and a translation for the convenience of the reader who may wish to compare the Divisions of Am-Tuat with those of the BOOK OF GATES. The former have been printed in one volume, and the latter in another; the full index given at the end of the introductory volume will, it is hoped, make reference and comparison easy. All general descriptions, and such explanations of the scenes as are possible in the present state of our knowledge have been given in a series of chapters in this volume, together with an account of the origin and development of "guides" to the Other World, and a rendering of a recently published and very important text from a coffin at Cairo. This text proves that the p.