eart, and breast of each victim being presented
and heaped together upon the ground, that there the dead might find them
when they began to be hungry. Vessels of beer or wine, great jars of
fresh water, purified with natron, or perfumed, were brought to them
that they might drink their fill at pleasure, and by such voluntary
tribute men bought their good will, as in daily life they bought that of
some neighbour too powerful to be opposed.

The gods were spared none of the anguish and none of the perils which
death so plentifully bestows upon men. Their bodies suffered change and
gradually perished until nothing was left of them. Their souls,
like human souls, were only the representatives of their bodies, and
gradually became extinct if means of arresting the natural tendency to
decay were not found in time. Thus, the same necessity that forced men
to seek the kind of sepulture which gave the longest term of existence
to their souls, compelled the gods to the same course. At first, they
were buried in the hills, and one of their oldest titles describes them
as those "who are upon the sand,"[*] safe from putrefaction; afterwards,
when the art of embalming had been discovered, the gods received the
benefit of the new invention and were mummified.

* In the _Book of Knowing that which is in Hades_, for the
fourth and fifth hours of the night, we have the description
of the sandy realm of Sokaris and of the gods _Hiriu Shaitu-
senu_, who are on their sand. Elsewhere in the same book we
have a cynocephalus _upon its sand_, and the gods of the
eighth hour are also mysterious gods who are on their sand.
Wherever these personages are represented in the vignettes,
the Egyptian artist has carefully drawn the ellipse painted
in yellow and sprinkled with red, which is the conventional
rendering of sand, and sandy districts.

Each nome possessed the mummy and the tomb of its dead god: at Thinis
there was the mummy and the tomb of Anhuri, the mummy of Osiris at
Mendes, the mummy of Tumu at Heliopolis.[*] In some of the nomes the
gods did not change their names in altering the mode of their existence:
the deceased Osiris remained Osiris; Nit and Hathor when dead were still
Nit and Hathor, at Sais and at Denderah. But Phtah of Memphis became
Sokaris by dying; Uapuaitu, the jackal of Siut, was changed into
Anubis;[**] and when his disk had disappeared at evening, Anhuri, the
sunlit sk