their duties were limited to merely answering for their
master when called by Thoth to the _corvee_, and acting as his substitutes
when he was summoned by the gods to work in the Fields of Aalu. Thenceforth
they were called "Respondents" (_Ushabtiu_), and were represented with
agricultural implements in their hands. No longer clothed as the man was
clothed when living, they were made in the semblance of a mummified corpse,
with only the face and hands unbandaged. The so-called "canopic vases,"
with lids fashioned like heads of hawks, cynocephali, jackals, and men,
were reserved from the time of the Eleventh Dynasty for the viscera, which
were extracted from the body by the embalmers. As for the mummy, it
continued, as time went on, to be more and more enwrapped in _cartonnage_,
and more liberally provided with papyri and amulets; each amulet forming an
essential part of its magic armour, and serving to protect its limbs and
soul from destruction.

Theoretically, every Egyptian was entitled to an eternal dwelling
constructed after the plan which I have here described with its successive
modifications; but the poorer folk were fain to do without those things
which were the necessities of the wealthier dead. They were buried wherever
it was cheapest--in old tombs which had been ransacked and abandoned; in
the natural clefts of the rock; or in common pits. At Thebes, in the time
of the Ramessides, great trenches dug in the sand awaited their remains.
The funeral rites once performed, the grave-diggers cast a thin covering of
sand over the day's mummies, sometimes in lots of two or three, and
sometimes in piles which they did not even take the trouble to lay in
regular layers. Some were protected only by their bandages; others were
wrapped about with palm-branches, lashed in the fashion of a game-basket.
Those most cared for lie in boxes of rough-hewn wood, neither painted nor
inscribed. Many are huddled into old coffins which have not even been
altered to suit the size of the new occupant, or into a composite
contrivance made of the fragments of three or four broken mummy-cases. As
to funerary furniture, it was out of the question for such poor souls as
these. A pair of sandals of painted cardboard or plaited reeds; a staff for
walking along the heavenly highways; a ring of enamelled ware; a bracelet
or necklace of little blue beads; a tiny image of Ptah, of Osiris, of
Anubis, of Hathor, or of Bast; a few mystic eyes or scar