with one another from tomb to tomb; and so there grew up the belief in a tomb-world, a subterranean Egypt of tombs, in which the dead Egyptians still lived and had their being.  Later on the boat of the sun, in which the god of light crossed the heavens by day, was thought to pass through this dead world between his setting and his rising, accompanied by the souls of the righteous.  But of this belief we find no trace yet in the ideas of the Ist Dynasty.  All we can see is that the sahus, or bodies of the dead, were supposed to reside in awful majesty in the tomb, while the ghosts could pass from tomb to tomb through the mazes of the underworld.  Over this dread realm of dead men presided a dead god, Osiris of Abydos; and so the necropolis of Abydos was the necropolis of the underworld, to which all ghosts who were not its rightful citizens would come from afar to pay their court to their ruler.  Thus the man of substance would have a monumental tablet put up to himself in this necropolis as a sort of pied-a-terre, even if he could not be buried there; for the king, who, for reasons chiefly connected with local patriotism, was buried near the city of his earthly abode, a second tomb would be erected, a stately mansion in the city of Osiris, in which his ghost could reside when it pleased him to come to Abydos.

Now none could live without food, and men living under the earth needed it as much as men living on the earth.  The royal tomb was thus provided with an enormous amount of earthly food for the use of the royal ghost, and with other things as well, as we have seen.  The same provision had also to be made for the royal resting-place at Abydos.  And in both cases royal slaves were needed to take care of all this provision, and to serve the ghost of the king, whether in his real tomb at Nakada, or elsewhere, or in his second tomb at Abydos.  Ghosts only could serve ghosts, so that of the slaves ghosts had to be made.  That was easily done; they died when their master died and followed him to the tomb.  No doubt it seemed perfectly natural to all concerned, to the slaves as much as to anybody else.  But it shows the child’s idea of the value of life.  An animate thing was hardly distinguished at this period from an inanimate thing.  The most ancient Egyptians buried slaves with their kings as naturally as they buried jars of wine and bins of corn with them.  Both were buried with a definite object.  The slaves had to die before they were buried, but then so had the king himself.  They all had to die sometime or other.  And the actual killing of them was no worse than killing a dog, no worse even than “killing” golden buttons and ivory boxes.  For, when the buttons and boxes were buried with the king, they were just as much dead as the slaves.  Of the sanctity of human life as distinct from other life, there was probably no idea at all.  The royal ghost needed ghostly servants, and they were provided as a matter of course.