and to set apart for his use some portion of the provisions offered for his sake in sacrifice to one or other of these deities.  By this agency the Kas or Doubles of these provisions were supposed to be sent on into the next world to gladden and satisfy the human Ka indicated to the divine intermediary.  Offerings of real provisions were not indispensable to this end; any chance visitor in times to come who should simply repeat the formula of the stela aloud would thereby secure the immediate enjoyment of all the good things enumerated to the unknown dead whom he evoked.

[Illustration:  Fig. 127.—­Wall scene of funerary offerings, from mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 128.—­Wall-painting, funeral voyage; mastaba of Urkhuu, Gizeh, Fourth Dynasty.]

[Illustration:  Fig. 129.—­Wall-scene from mastaba of Ptahhotep, Fifth Dynasty.]

The living having taken their departure, the Double was supposed to come out of his house and feed.  In principle, this ceremony was bound to be renewed year by year, till the end of time; but the Egyptians ere long discovered that this could not be.  After two or three generations, the dead of former days were neglected for the benefit of those more recently departed.  Even when a pious foundation was established, with a revenue payable for the expenses of the funerary repasts and of the priests whose duty it was to prepare them, the evil hour of oblivion was put off for only a little longer.  Sooner or later, there came a time when the Double was reduced to seek his food among the town refuse, and amid the ignoble and corrupt filth which lay rejected on the ground.  Then, in order that the offerings consecrated on the day of burial might for ever preserve their virtues, the survivors conceived the idea of drawing and describing them on the walls of the chapel (fig. 127).  The painted or sculptured reproduction of persons and things ensured the reality of those persons and things for the benefit of the one on whose account they were executed.  Thus the Double saw himself depicted upon the walls in the act of eating and drinking, and he ate and drank.  This notion once accepted, the theologians and artists carried it out to the fullest extent.  Not content with offering mere pictured provisions, they added thereto the semblance of the domains which produced them, together with the counterfeit presentment of the herds, workmen, and slaves belonging to the same.  Was a supply of meat required to last for eternity?  It was enough, no doubt, to represent the several parts of an ox or a gazelle—­the shoulder, the leg, the ribs, the breast, the heart, the liver, the head, properly prepared for the spit; but it was equally easy to retrace the whole history of the animal—­its birth, its life in the pasture-lands, its slaughter, the cutting up of the carcass, and the presentation of the joints.  So also as regarded the cakes and bread-offerings, there was no reason why the whole process of tillage,