Golenischeff, consists of spells of
various kinds originally intended for the use of the living, but later
employed for funerary purposes.

(g) Under the heading _Miscellaneous_ we must mention a number of
sources of great value: the grave-stones, or stelae, especially those
from Abydos, which throw much light on funerary beliefs; the great
_Papyrus Harris_, the longest of all papyri, which enumerates the gifts
of Rameses III. (XXth Dyn.) to the various temples of Egypt; the hymns
to the gods preserved in Cairo and Leiden papyri; and the inscriptions
of the Ptolemaic temples (Dendera, Edfu, &c.), which teem with good
religious material. Nor can any attempt here be made to summarize the
remaining native Egyptian sources, literary and archaeological, that
deserve notice.

(h) Among the classical writers, Plutarch in his treatise _Concerning
Isis and Osiris_ is the most important. Diodorus also is useful.
Herodotus, owing to his religious awe and dread of divulging sacred
mysteries, is only a second-rate source.

3. _The Gods._--The end of the pre-dynastic period, in which we dimly
descry a number of independent tribes in constant warfare with one
another, was marked by the rise of a united Egyptian state with a single
Pharaonic ruler at its head. The era of peace thus inaugurated brought
with it a rapid progress in all branches of civilization; and there soon
emerged not only a national art and a condition of material prosperity
shared by the entire land in common, but also a state religion, which
gathered up the ancient tribal cults and floating cosmical conceptions,
and combining them as best it could, imposed them on the people as a
whole. By the time that the Pyramid texts were put into writing,
doubtless long before the Vth Dynasty, this religion had assumed a
stereotyped appearance that clung to it for ever afterwards. But the
multitude of the deities and the variety of the myths that it strove to
incorporate prevented the development of a uniform theological system,
and the heterogeneous origin of the religion remained irretrievably
stamped upon its face. Written records were few at the time when the
pantheon was built up, so that the process of construction cannot be
followed historically from stage to stage; but it is possible by arguing
backwards from the later facts to discern the main tendencies at work,
and the principal elementary cults that served as the materials.

Classification of pre-dynastic go