er part than it does in Moslem Egypt. The mistaken belief
that death and the well-being of the dead overshadowed the
existence of the living, is due to the fact that the physical
character of the country has preserved for us the cemeteries and
the funerary temples better than all the other monuments. The
narrow strip of fat black land along the Nile produces generally
its three crops a year. It is much too valuable to use as a
cemetery. But more than that, it is subject to periodic
saturation with water during the inundation, and is, therefore,
unsuitable for the burials of a nation which wished to preserve
the contents of the graves. On the other hand, the desert, which
bounds this fertile strip so closely that a dozen steps will
usually carry one from the black land to the gray,--the desert
offers a dry preserving soil with absolutely no value to the
living. Thus all the funerary monuments were erected on the
desert, and except where intentionally destroyed they are
preserved to the present day. The palaces, the towns, the farms,
and many of the great temples which were erected on the black
soil, have been pulled down for building material or buried deep
under the steadily rising deposits of the Nile. The tombs of six
thousand years of dead have accumulated on the desert edge.

Moreover, our impression of these tombs has been formed from the
monuments erected by kings, princes, priests, and the great and
wealthy men of the kingdom. The multitude of plain unadorned
burial-places which the scientific excavator records by the
thousands have escaped the attention of scholars interested in
Egypt from the point of view of a comparison of religions. It has
also been overlooked that the strikingly colored mummies and the
glaring burial apparatus of the late period cost very little to
prepare. The manufacture of mummies was a regular trade in the
Ptolemaic period at least. Mummy cases were prepared in advance
with blank spaces for the names. I do not think that any more
expense was incurred in Egyptian funerals in the dynastic period
than is the case among the modern Egyptians. The importance of
the funerary rites to the living must, therefore, not be
exaggerated.

II. SOURCES OF THE MATERIAL

With the exception of certain mythological explanations supplied
by the inscriptions and reliefs in the temples, our knowledge of
Egyptian ideas in regard to the future life is based on funerary
customs as rev