So far as these ceremonies go, man began, we judge, by thinking first of securing for the dead an everlasting habitation. And so he covered his grave with an immense pile of earth.[91] The pile grew greater and greater, and at last, as we saw, it took the shape of the pyramid. Then came the entrance-chamber or _porch_ to the tomb, in which the survivors offered sacrifices to the dead to keep him alive by the smell of the burnt offering.
The Egyptians had very little power of abstracting the idea of the immaterial soul from the material dead body. At any rate, they did not (for a long time) conceive the soul as a purely immaterial being. They thought of the immortal part of man as a sort of _double_ of the mortal part. This double they called his _ka_. The _ka_ could not exist without some material form, and therefore they took infinite pains to provide it with a body of some kind. They mummified the dead body so as to make it last as long as possible. But besides that, they made numerous images of the dead; sometimes (if his state could afford it) large statues of wood[92] or stone. And in addition to these they made a vast number of smaller images, generally of pottery--those little mummy figures in blue or green pottery,[93] of which we find such endless quantities buried in the tombs. There was usually a secret chamber or passage practised in the tomb to contain these mummied figures, and it was so arranged that the scent of the sacrifice might come along it.[94]
All these ideas belong, we see, to the most _stationary_ notion of the dead. If they were followed out logically, the soul would be considered as tied for ever to the mummy, which lies below in a dark chamber, or to the little images in their small passage within the wall of the tomb. But the Egyptians did not carry out this idea logically. For we find prayers upon the walls of their earliest tombs, that Osiris should give to the dead, sheep, oxen, and farm-labourers, and ‘sport,’ or corn, and wine, and dancers, and jesters--all the pleasures, in fact, which he had had in life. Therefore the dead must really have been thought to have the power of life and motion as he had enjoyed it upon earth, inconsistent as such an idea is with the constant enchainment of the _ka_ to some material belonging, to the mummy or to the image of pottery.
