old age that should reach, if possible, to the ’perfect term of no years.’  They gave themselves up to pleasures of every kind; they sang, they drank, they danced, they delighted in making excursions into the country, where hunting and fishing were occupations reserved especially for the nobility.  In conformity with this inclination towards pleasure, sportive proposals, a pleasantry that was perhaps over-free, witticisms, raillery, and a mocking spirit, were in vogue among the people, and fun was allowed entrance even into the tombs.  In the large schools the masters had a difficulty in training the young and keeping down their passion for amusements.  When oral exhortation failed of success, the cane was used pretty smartly in its place; for the wise men of the land had a saying that ‘a boy’s ears grow on his back.’"[5]

Herodotus tells us how gaily the Egyptians kept their festivals, thousands of the common people—­men, women, and children together—­crowding into the boats, which at such times covered the Nile, the men piping, and the women clapping their hands or striking their castanets, as they passed from town to town along the banks of the stream, stopping at the various landing-places, and challenging the inhabitants to a contest of good-humoured Billingsgate.  From the monuments we see how the men sang at their labours—­here as they trod the wine-press or the dough-trough, there as they threshed out the corn by driving the oxen through the golden heaps.  In one case the words of a harvest-song have come down to us: 

    “Thresh for yourselves,” they sang, “thresh for yourselves,
    O oxen, thresh for yourselves, for yourselves—­
    Bushels for yourselves, bushels for your masters!”

Their light-hearted drollery sometimes found vent in caricature.  The grand sculptures wherewith a king strove to perpetuate the memory of his warlike exploits were travestied by satirists, who reproduced the scenes upon papyrus as combats between cats and rats.  The amorous follies of the monarch were held up to derision by sketches of a harem interior, where the kingly wooer was represented by a lion, and his favourites of the softer sex by gazelles.  Even in serious scenes depicting the trial of souls in the next world, the sense of humour breaks out, where the bad man, transformed into a pig or a monkey, walks off with a comical air of surprise and discomfiture.

It does not, however, help us much towards the true knowledge of a people to scan their frames or study their facial angle, or even to contemplate the outer aspect of their daily life.  We want to know their thoughts, their innermost feelings, their hopes, their fears—­in a word, their belief.  Nothing tells the character of a people so much as their religion; and we are only dealing superficially with the outward shows of things until we get down to the root of their being, the conviction, or convictions, held in the recesses of a people’s heart.  What, then, was the Egyptian religion?  What did they worship?  What did they reverence?  What future did they look forward to?