The wide complicated tombs have around the main chamber a series of smaller rooms, which were used to store what was considered necessary for the use of the royal ghost.  Of these necessaries the most interesting to us are the slaves, who were, as there is little reason to doubt, purposely killed and buried round the royal chamber so that their spirits should be on the spot when the dead king came to Abydos; thus they would be always ready to serve him with the food and other things which had been stored in the tomb with them and placed under their charge.  There were stacks of great vases of wine, corn, and other food; these were covered up with masses of fat to preserve the contents, and they were corked with a pottery stopper, which was protected by a conical clay sealing, stamped with the impress of the royal cylinder-seal.  There were bins of corn, joints of oxen, pottery dishes, copper pans, and other things which might be useful for the ghostly cuisine of the tomb.  There were numberless small objects, used, no doubt, by the dead monarch during life, which he would be pleased to see again in the next world,—­carved ivory boxes, little slabs for grinding eye-paint, golden buttons, model tools, model vases with gold tops, ivory and pottery figurines, and other objets d’art; the golden royal seal of judgment of King Den in its ivory casket, and so forth.  There were memorials of the royal victories in peace and war, little ivory plaques with inscriptions commemorating the founding of new buildings, the institution of new religious festivals in honour of the gods, the bringing of the captives of the royal bow and spear to the palace, the discomfiture of the peoples of the North-land.

[Illustration:  067.jpg CONICAL VASE-STOPPERS.  From Abydos. 1st Dynasty:  about 4000 B.C.]

All these things, which have done so much to reconstitute for us the history of the earliest period of the Egyptian monarchy, were placed under the care of the dead slaves whose bodies were buried round the empty tomb-chamber of their royal master in Abydos.

The killing and entombment of the royal servants is of the highest anthropological interest, for it throws a vivid light upon the manners of the time.  It shows the primeval Egyptians as a semi-barbaric people of childishly simple ways of thought.  The king was dead.  For all his kingship he was a man, and no man was immortal in this world.  But yet how could one really die?  Shadows, dreams, all kinds of phenomena which the primitive mind could not explain, induced the belief that, though the outer man might rot, there was an inner man which could not die and still lived on.  The idea of total death was unthinkable.  And where should this inner man still live on but in the tomb to which the outer man was consigned?  And here, doubtless it was believed, in the house to which the body was consigned, the ghost lived on.  And as each ghost had his house with the body, so no doubt all ghosts could communicate