the torments which we deserve, so that we may forget the years which we
have passed in the world; and as soon as we have forgotten the grief of
this torment we are cast into another which is still more grievous."

Now, it is easy to see from the above description of the torments which
the wicked were supposed to suffer, that the writer had in his mind some
of the pictures with which we are now familiar, thanks to the excavation
of tombs which has gone on in Egypt during the last few years; and it is
also easy to see that he, in common with many other Coptic writers,
misunderstood the purport of them. The outer darkness, _i.e._, the
blackest place of all in the underworld, the river of fire, the pits of
fire, the snake and the scorpion, and such like things, all have their
counterparts, or rather originals, in the scenes which accompany the
texts which describe the passage of the sun through the underworld
during the hours of the night. Having once misunderstood the general
meaning of such scenes, it was easy to convert the foes of R[=a], the
Sun-god, into the souls of the damned, and to look upon the burning up
of such foes--who were after all only certain powers of nature
personified--as the well-merited punishment of those who had done evil
upon the earth. How far the Copts reproduced unconsciously the views
which had been held by their ancestors for thousands of years cannot be
said, but even after much allowance has been made for this possibility,
there remains still to be explained a large number of beliefs and views
which seem to have been the peculiar product of the Egyptian Christian
imagination.

It has been said above that the idea of the judgment of the dead is of
very great antiquity in Egypt; indeed, it is so old that it is useless
to try to ascertain the date of the period when it first grew up. In the
earliest religious texts known to us, there are indications that the
Egyptians expected a judgment, but they are not sufficiently definite to
argue from; it is certainly doubtful if the judgment was thought to be
as thorough and as searching then as in the later period. As far back as
the reign of Men-kau-R[=a], the Mycerinus of the Greeks, about B.C.
3600, a religious text, which afterwards formed chapter 30B of the Book
of the Dead, was found inscribed on an iron slab; in the handwriting of
the god Thoth, by the royal son or prince Herut[=a]t[=a]f. [Footnote:
See _Chapters of Coming Forth by Day_, Transla