Chapter 4 (part 9)

Entrance to the Boat of Millions of Years was likewise obtained by the knowledge of magical words and formulae, and of the secret names of the great gods, but the food on which lived the beatified souls who succeeded in securing a place in the Boat consisted of the emanations of the god Ra, or, according to the priests of Amen, Amen-Ra. In other words, the beatified souls in the Boat became beings formed of the light of Ra, on which they subsisted. The belief p. 21 that the souls of the righteous flew into the Boat of Ra is a very old one, but the doctrine in the form in which it was developed by the priests of Amen can never have been universally accepted in Egypt, for it was not sufficiently material to satisfy any but the educated classes. The great kings of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, being convinced that their military successes were due to the influence and operation of Amen-Ra, dutifully accepted the instructions of the priests of the god in all matters relating to his worship, and they permitted them to prepare tombs for them in the Valley of Biban al-Muluk at Thebes, which were built and ornamented according to the views held by the followers of Amen-Ra concerning the Other World. The oldest tombs here, i.e., those of the XVIIIth Dynasty, are usually entered by means of long, sloping corridors that lead down into the chambers which held the sarcophagi, and into smaller halls which adjoin the large chambers; in the later tombs the corridors are often very long, and it is this characteristic which caused certain Greek writers to call them Σύριγγες, i.e., "shepherd's pipes." Of the forty-five tombs in this valley (Strabo mentions forty only), the oldest royal tomb appears to be that of Thothmes I., and the most recent that of Rameses XII., of the XXth Dynasty. These tombs vary greatly in details, just as they do in size and in the arrangement and number of their chambers, but it seems that each tomb was intended to represent the Underworld, and that the ceremonies, p. 22 which were performed in it as. the mummy was taken from the entrance to the last chamber in which it was to rest, were highly symbolical, and that the progress of the body through the tomb was, so far as it was possible, made to resemble that of the Sun-god through the hours of the night in the Other World. The religious texts with which the walls of the royal tombs are decorated do not consist of extracts from the funeral works of the Ancient and Middle Empires, but of sections from a work entitled AM-TUAT, i.e., [The Book of] "what is in the Tuat," or Underworld, and many of these are illustrated more or less fully with coloured pictures of the gods, mythological scenes, &c. The rubrics show that portions of this work belong to remote antiquity, and many of the beliefs which appear in it are the products of the period when the Egyptians were partly, if not wholly, savages. In the book itself numbers of gods and mythological beings are mentioned whose names are not found elsewhere in Egyptian literature. As we find it in the tombs of the royal followers of Amen, the Book "Am-Tuat" contains all the dogmas and doctrines which the priests of Amen held concerning the future life and the state. and condition of the dead, and it is quite easy to see that the great object of those who compiled it was to prove that Amen-Ra was not only the head of the gods in heaven, and the ruler of the world which he had created, but also the king of all the gods of the dead, and the master of all the beings who were in the p.