at is to say, the day of his death
when he will cease to exist. All the gods, Atumu, Horus, Ra,
Thot, Phtah, Khnumu, are represented under the forms of
mummies, and this implies that they are dead. Moreover,
their tombs were pointed out in several places in Egypt.

The ancients long refused to believe that death was natural
and inevitable. They thought that life, once began, might go on
indefinitely: if no accident stopped it short, why should it cease of
itself? And so men did not die in Egypt; they were assassinated. The
murderer often belonged to this world, and was easily recognized as
another man, an animal, some inanimate object such as a stone loosened
from the hillside, a tree which fell upon the passer-by and crushed him.
But often too the murderer was of the unseen world, and so was hidden,
his presence being betrayed in his malignant attacks only. He was a god,
an evil spirit, a disembodied soul who slily insinuated itself into the
living man, or fell upon him with irresistible violence--illness being a
struggle between the one possessed and the power which possessed him.
As soon as the former succumbed he was carried away from his own people,
and his place knew him no more. But had all ended for him with the
moment in which he had ceased to breathe? As to the body, no one was
ignorant of its natural fate. It quickly fell to decay, and a few years
sufficed to reduce it to a skeleton. And as for the skeleton, in the
lapse of centuries that too was disintegrated and became a mere train of
dust, to be blown away by the first breath of wind. The soul might
have a longer career and fuller fortunes, but these were believed to
be dependent upon those of the body, and commensurate with them. Every
advance made in the process of decomposition robbed the soul of some
part of itself; its consciousness gradually faded until nothing was left
but a vague and hollow form that vanished altogether when the corpse had
entirely disappeared. Erom an early date the Egyptians had endeavoured
to arrest this gradual destruction of the human organism, and their
first effort to this end naturally was directed towards the preservation
of the body, since without it the existence of the soul could not be
ensured. It was imperative that during that last sleep, which for
them was fraught with such terrors, the flesh should neither become
decomposed nor turn to dust, that it should be free from offensive odour
and sec