by name, he declares:  “I have not been idle.  I have not boasted.  I have not stolen.  I have not counterfeited, nor killed sacred beasts, nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor despised God in my heart.”  According to some texts, he declares, positively, that he has loved God, that he has given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and an asylum to the abandoned.

Funeral ceremonies among the Egyptians were often very imposing.  The cost of embalming, and the size and strength of the tomb, varied with the position of the deceased.  When the seventy days of mourning had elapsed, the body in its case was ferried across the lake in front of the temple, which represented the passage of the soul over the infernal stream.  Then came a dramatic representation of the trial of the soul before Osiris.  The priests, in masks, represented the gods of the underworld.  Typhon accuses the dead man, and demands his punishment.  The intercessors plead for him.  A large pair of scales is set up, and in one scale his conduct is placed in a bottle, and in the other an image of truth.  These proceedings are represented on the funeral papyri.  One of these, twenty-two feet in length, is in Dr. Abbott’s collection of Egyptian antiquities, in New York.  It is beautifully written, and illustrated with careful drawings.  One represents the Hall of the Two Truths, and Osiris sitting in judgment, with the scales of judgment before him.[162]

Many of the virtues which we are apt to suppose a monopoly of Christian culture appear as the ideal of these old Egyptians.  Brugsch says a thousand voices from the tombs of Egypt declare this.  One inscription in Upper Egypt says:  “He loved his father, he honored his mother, he loved his brethren, and never went from his home in bad-temper.  He never preferred the great man to the low one.”  Another says:  “I was a wise man, my soul loved God.  I was a brother to the great men and a father to the humble ones, and never was a mischief-maker.”  An inscription at Sais, on a priest who lived in the sad days of Cambyses, says:  “I honored my father, I esteemed my mother, I loved my brothers.  I found graves for the unburied dead.  I instructed little children.  I took care of orphans as though they were my own children.  For great misfortunes were on Egypt in my time, and on this city of Sais.”

Some of these declarations, in their “self-pleasing pride” of virtue, remind one of the noble justification of himself by the Patriarch Job.[163] Here is one of them, from the tombs of Ben-Hassan, over a Nomad Prince:—­

“What I have done I will say.  My goodness and my kindness were ample.  I never oppressed the fatherless nor the widow.  I did not treat cruelly the fishermen, the shepherds, or the poor laborers.  There was nowhere in my time hunger or want.  For I cultivated all my fields, far and near, in order that their inhabitants might have food.  I never preferred the great and powerful to the humble and poor, but did equal justice to all.”