him not only a “living soul” in the Tuat, or Other World, but to keep him alive there.  The object of every prayer, every spell, every hymn, and every incantation contained in these Texts, was to preserve the king’s life.  This might be done in many ways.  In the first place it was necessary to provide a daily supply of offerings, which were offered up in the funerary temple that was attached to every pyramid.  The carefully selected and duly appointed priest offered these one by one, and as he presented each to the spirit of the king he uttered a formula that was believed to convert the material food into a substance possessing a spiritual character and fit to form the food of the ka, or “double,” or “vital power,” of the dead king.  The offerings assisted in renewing his life, and any failure to perform this service was counted a sin against the dead king’s spirit.  It was also necessary to perform another set of ceremonies, the object of which was to “open the mouth” of the dead king, i.e. to restore to him the power to breathe, think, speak, taste, smell, and walk.  At the performance of these ceremonies it was all-important to present articles of food, wearing apparel, scents and unguents, and, in short, every object that the king was likely to require in the Other World.  The spirits of all these objects passed into the Other World ready for use by the spirit of the king.  It follows as a matter of course that the king in the Other World needed a retinue, and a bodyguard, and a host of servants, just as he needed slaves upon earth.  In primitive times a large number of slaves, both male and female, were slain when a king died, and their bodies were buried in his tomb, whilst their spirits passed into the Other World to serve the spirit of the king, just as their bodies had served his body upon earth.  As the king had enemies in this world, so it was thought he would have enemies in the Other World, and men feared that he would be attacked or molested by evilly-disposed gods and spirits, and by deadly animals and serpents, and other noxious reptiles.  To ward off the attacks of these from his tomb, and his mummified body, and his spirit, the priest composed spells of various kinds, and the utterance of such, in a proper manner, was believed to render him immune from the attacks of foes of all kinds.  Very often such spells took the form of prayers.  Many of the spells were exceedingly ancient, even in the Pyramid Period; they were, in fact, so old that they were unintelligible to the scribes of the day.  They date from the time when the Egyptians believed more in magic than religion; it is possible that when they were composed, religion, in our sense of the word, was still undeveloped among the Egyptians.