Essays in the Revue Archeologique and other learned periodicals, by the Vicomte de Rouge, Professor of Egyptian Philology at Paris.  Works by M. Chabas, M. Mariette, De Brugsch, “Aus dem Orient,” etc., Samuel Sharpe, A. Maury, Lepsius, and others.

[169] The Egyptian doctrine of transmigration differed from that of the Hindoos in this respect, that no idea of retribution seems to be connected with it.  According to Herodotus (II. 123), the soul must pass through all animals, fishes, insects, and birds; in short, must complete the whole circuit of animated existence, before it again enters the body of a man; “and this circuit of the soul,” he adds, “is performed in three thousand years.”  According to him, it does not begin “until the body decays.”  This may give us one explanation of the system of embalming; for if the circuit of transmigration is limited to three thousand years, and the soul cannot leave the body till it decays (the words of Herodotus are, “the body decaying,” [Greek:  tou somatos de kataphthinontos]), then if embalming delays decay for one thousand years, so much is taken off from the journey through animals.  That the soul was believed to be kept with the body as long as it was undecayed is also expressly stated by Servius (Comm. on the AEneid of Virgil):  “The learned Egyptians preserve the corpse from decay in tombs in order that its soul shall remain with it, and not quickly pass into other bodies.”

Hence, too, the extraordinary pains taken in ornamenting the tombs, as the permanent homes of the dead during a long period.  Diodorus says that they ornamented the tombs as the enduring residences of mankind.

Transmigration in India was retribution, but in Egypt it seems to have been a condition of progress.  It was going back into the lower organizations, to gather up all their varied life, to add to our own.  So Tennyson suggests,—­

    “If, through lower lives I came,
    Though all experience past became
    Consolidate in mind and frame,” etc.

Beside the reason for embalming given above, there may have been the motive arising from the respect for bodily organization, so deeply rooted in the Egyptian mind.

[170] Animals and plants, more than anything else, and animals more than plants, are the types of variety; they embody that great law of differentiation, one of the main laws of the universe, the law which is opposed to that of unity, the law of centrifugal force, expressed in our humble proverb, “It takes all sorts of people to make a world.”

[171] Maury, “Revue des Deux Mondes, 1867.”  “Man’s Origin and Destiny, J. P. Lesley, 1868.”  “Recherches sur les Monumens, etc., par M. de Rouge, 1866.”

[172] Article “AEgypten,” in Schenkel’s Bibel-Lexicon, 1869.  Duncker, “Geschichte des Alterthums, Dritte Auflage, 1863.”

[173] See Duncker, as above.

[174] Les Pasteurs en Egypt, par F. Chabas.  Amsterdam, 1868.