of history.  Nobles and fellahs, soldiers and priests, scribes and craftsmen,—­the whole nation lives anew before us; each with his manners, his dress, his daily round of occupation and pleasures.  It is a perfect picture, and although in places the drawing is defaced and the colour dimmed, yet these may be restored with no great difficulty, and with almost absolute certainty.  The king stands out boldly in the foreground, and his tall figure towers over all else.  He so completely transcends his surroundings, that at first sight one may well ask if he does not represent a god rather than a man; and, as a matter of fact, he is a god to his subjects.  They call him “the good god,” “the great god,” and connect him with Ra through the intervening kings, the successors of the gods who ruled the two worlds.  His father before him was “Son of Ra,” as was also his grandfather, and his great-grandfather, and so through all his ancestors, until from “son of Ra” to “son of Ra” they at last reached Ra himself.  Sometimes an adventurer of unknown antecedents is abruptly inserted in the series, and we might imagine that he would interrupt the succession of the solar line; but on closer examination we always find that either the intruder is connected with the god by a genealogy hitherto unsuspected, or that he is even more closely related to him than his predecessors, inasmuch as Ra, having secretly descended upon the earth, had begotten him by a mortal mother in order to rejuvenate the race.*

* A legend, preserved for us in the Westcar Papyrus (Erman’s edition, pl. ix. 11. 5-11, pl. x. 1. 5, et seq.), maintains that the first three kings of the Vth dynasty, Usirkaf, Sahuri, and Kakiu, were children born to Ra, lord of Sakhibu, by Ruditdidit, wife of a priest attached to the temple of that town.

If things came to the worst, a marriage with some princess would soon legitimise, if not the usurper himself, at least his descendants, and thus firmly re-establish the succession.

[Illustration:  021.jpg THE BIRTH OF A KING AND HIS DOUBLE]

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Gay et.  The king is Amenothes III., whose conception and birth are represented in the temple of Luxor, with the same wealth of details that we should have expected, had he been a son of the god Amon and the goddess Mut.

The Pharaohs, therefore, are blood-relations of the Sun-god, some through their father, others through their mother, directly begotten by the God, and their souls as well as their bodies have a supernatural origin; each soul being a double detached from Horus, the successor of Osiris, and the first to reign alone over Egypt.  This divine double is infused into the royal infant at birth, in the same manner as the ordinary double is incarnate in common mortals.  It always remained concealed, and seemed to lie dormant in those princes whom destiny did not call upon to reign, but it awoke to full self-consciousness in those