of the funeral, or on that wherein it was laid in the tomb.  It is interesting to notice that no mention is made of meat or drink in the CLIVth Chapter, and the only thing which the deceased refers to as necessary for his existence is air, which he obtains through, the god Temu, the god who is always depicted in human form; the god is here mentioned in his aspect of the night Sun as opposed to R[=a] the day Sun, and a comparison of the Sun’s daily death with the death of the deceased is intended to be made.  The deposit of the head of the God-man Osiris at Abydos has already been mentioned, and the belief that it was preserved there was common throughout Egypt.  But in the text quoted above the deceased says, “My head shall not be separated from my neck,” which seems to indicate that he wished to keep his body whole, notwithstanding that Osiris was almighty, and could restore the limbs and reconstitute the body, even as he had done for his own limbs and body which had been hacked to pieces by Set.  Chapter XLIII of the Book of the Dead [Footnote:  See The Chapters of Coming Forth by Day, p. 98.] also has an important reference to the head of Osiris.  It is entitled “The Chapter of not letting the head of a man be cut off from him in the underworld,” and must be of considerable antiquity.  In it the deceased says:  “I am the Great One, the son of the Great One; I am Fire, and the son of the Fire, to whom was given his head after it had been cut off.  The head of Osiris was not taken away from him, let not the head of the deceased be taken away from him.  I have knit myself together (or reconstituted myself); I have made myself whole and complete; I have renewed my youth; I am Osiris, the lord of eternity.”

From the above it would seem that, according to one version of the Osiris story, the head of Osiris was not only cut off, but that it was passed through the fire also; and if this version be very ancient, as it well may be and probably is, it takes us back to prehistoric times in Egypt when the bodies of the dead were mutilated and burned.  Prof.  Wiedemann thinks [Footnote:  See J. de Morgan, Ethnographie Prehistorique, p. 210.] that the mutilation and breaking of the bodies of the dead were the results of the belief that in order to make the KA, or “double,” leave this earth, the body to which it belonged must be broken, and he instances the fact that objects of every kind were broken at the time when they were placed in the tombs.  He traces also a transient custom in the prehistoric graves of Egypt where the methods of burying the body whole and broken into pieces seem to be mingled, for though in some of them the body has been broken into pieces, it is evident that successful attempts have been made to reconstitute it by laying the pieces as far as possible in their proper places.  And it may be this custom which is referred to in various places in the Book of the Dead, when the deceased declares that he has collected his limbs “and made his body whole again,” and already in the Vth dynasty King Teta is thus addressed—­“Rise up, O thou Teta!  Thou hast received thy head, thou hast knitted together thy bones, [Footnote:  Recueil de Travaux, tom. v. p. 40 (I. 287).] thou hast collected thy members.”