laborated with great detail in the Pyramid texts, where it is the dead
king to whom this destiny is promised. It was perhaps only a restricted
aristocracy who could aspire to such high honour: the [HRG] _ikh_, or
"glorified being," who has his place in the sky seems often to hold an
intermediate position between the gods and the rank and file of the
dead. But in a few early passages the required qualification appears to
be rather moral integrity than exalted station. The life of the dead man
in the sky is variously envisaged in different texts: at one moment he
is spoken of as accompanying the sun-god in his celestial bark, at
another as a mighty king more powerful than Re himself; the crudest
fancy of all pictures him as a hunter who catches the stars and gods,
and cooks and eats them. According to another conception that persisted
in the imagination of the Egyptians longer than any of the ideas just
mentioned, the home of the dead in the heavens was a fertile region not
very different from Egypt itself, intersected by canals and abounding in
corn and fruit; this place was called the Sokhet Earu or "field of
Reeds."

Even in the oldest texts these beliefs are blended inextricably with the
Osirian doctrines. It is not so much as king of the dead that Osiris
here appears, but every deceased Egyptian was regarded as himself an
Osiris, as having undergone all the indignities inflicted upon the god,
but finally triumphant over the powers of death and evil impersonated by
Seth. This notion became so popular, that beside it all other views of
the dead sink into insignificance; it permeates the funerary cult in all
its stages, and from the Middle Kingdom onwards the dead man is
regularly called "the Osiris so-and-so," just as though he were
completely identical with the god. One incident of the tale of Osiris
acquired a deep ethical meaning in connexion with the dead. It was
related how Seth had brought an accusation against Osiris in the great
judgment hall of Heliopolis, and how the latter, helped by the skilful
speaker Thoth, had emerged from the ordeal acquitted and triumphant. The
belief gradually grew up that every dead man would have to face a
similar trial before he could be admitted to a life of bliss in the
other world. A well-known vignette in the _Book of the Dead_ depicts the
scene. In a shrine sits Osiris, the ruler and judge of the dead,
accompanied by forty-two assessors; and before him stands the balance on
wh