Chapter 4 (part 6)

Moreover, the soul which had knowledge of certain sections of the work would "live among the living ones," and would "see Osiris every day," and would have "air in his nostrils, and death would never draw nigh unto him." 2 The illustrations which accompany the texts on the coffins from Al-Barsha make it evident that under the XIth Dynasty the Egyptian theologian had not only divided the Under-world in his mind into sections, with doors, &c., but that he was prepared to describe that portion of it which belonged to the blessed dead, and to supply a plan of it! Besides the sections from the "Pyramid Texts," to which reference has already been made, and the "Book of the Two Ways," the coffins of Al-Barsha p. 14 contain a number of texts of various lengths, many of which have titles, and resemble in form the Chapters of the great Theban Recension of the Book of the Dead. Examples of these have been published in Prof. Maspero's Recueil de Travaux , tom. xxvi., p. 64 ff., by M. P. Lacau, e.g., "Chapter of the Seven Addresses of homage to the goddess Meh-urt"; [Chapter of] "the reassembling of the kinsfolk of a man in Neter-khert"; "Chapter of driving back Kebka"; "Chapter of setting out for Orion," &c. From the considerations set forth above it is quite clear that the practice of illustrating certain sections of Books of the Dead existed under the XIth Dynasty, and there is no good reason for doubting that it continued to be observed during the prosperous rule of the kings of the XIIth Dynasty. Under the IVth, Vth, and VIth Dynasties the selections of extracts from Books of the Dead which were intended to benefit royal souls in the Underworld were cut upon the walls of the chambers and corridors of their pyramids, and in the case of private individuals texts intended to produce the same effect were usually cut into the walls of the chambers wherein their stone sarcophagi were placed. The pyramids of the kings of the XIth and XIIth Dynasties, whether in the north or south of Egypt, are not, so far as the information at present available goes, characterized by lengthy extracts from Books of the Dead, and officials and men of rank in general were content to dispense with the cutting of religious p. 15 inscriptions into the sides of stone sarcophagi, and into the walls of the passages and chambers of their tombs in the mountains, and to transfer them to the sides of their brightly painted, rectangular wooden coffins. The practical advantages of this change are obvious. Wooden coffins were easier to obtain and cheaper than stone sarcophagi, longer and fuller selections from religious texts could be easily and quickly traced upon them in the hieratic character, which an expert scribe could, no doubt, write at a rapid rate, the expense of adding coloured drawings was small, and, above all, the deceased would have close to his mummy the sacred writings on which he so greatly relied for assistance in the Other World. The coffin which was fully inscribed could easily be made to hold copies of all the texts deemed to be of vital importance to the dead, and such a coffin when, as was frequently the case, it was placed in a massive, outer, wooden coffin, served the purpose of the large rolls of papyri inscribed with religious and funeral texts, and illustrated with elaborately painted vignettes, which were buried with the dead from the XVIIIth to the XXVIth Dynasty. After the death of Amen-em-bat III., who was perhaps the greatest king of the XIIth Dynasty, the whole country fell into a state of confusion, and the kings of Thebes ceased to be masters of all Egypt.