ich the heart of the deceased man is to be weighed against Truth;
Thoth stands behind and registers the result. The words that accompany
this picture are still more remarkable: they form a long negative
confession, in which the dead man declares that he has sinned neither
against man nor against the gods. Not all the sins named are equally
heinous according to modern conceptions; many of them deal with petty
offences against religious usages that seem to us but trifling. But it
is clear that by the time this chapter was penned it was believed that
no man could attain to happiness in the hereafter if he had not been
upright, just and charitable in his earthly existence. The date at which
these conceptions became general is not quite certain, but it can hardly
be later than the Middle Kingdom, when the dead man has the epithet
"justified" appended to his name in the inscriptions of his tomb.

It was but a natural wish on the part of the Egyptians that they should
desire to place their tombs near the traditional burying-place of
Osiris. By the time of the XIIth Dynasty it was thought that this lay in
Abydos, the town where the kings of the earliest times had been
interred. But it was only in a few cases that such a wish could be
literally fulfilled. It therefore became customary for those who
possessed the means to dedicate at least a tombstone in the
neighbourhood of "the staircase of the great god," as the sacred spot
was called. And those who had found occasion to visit Abydos in their
lifetime took pleasure in recalling the part that they had there taken
in the ceremonies of Osiris. Such pilgrims doubtless believed that the
pious act would stand to their credit when the day of death arrived.

6. _Magic._--Among the rites that were celebrated in the temples or
before the statues of the dead were many the mystical meaning of which
was but imperfectly understood, though their efficacy was never doubted.
Symbolical or imitative acts, accompanied by spoken formulae of set form
and obscure content, accomplished, by some peculiar virtues of their
own, results that were beyond the power of human hands and brain. The
priests and certain wise men were the depositaries of this mysterious
but highly useful art, that was called _hik_ or "magic"; and one of the
chief differences between gods and men was the superior degree in which
the former were endowed with magical powers. It was but natural that the
Egyptians should wish to empl