* This is apparently what we gather from the picture inserted in chapter xvii. of the “Book of the Dead,” where we see the kings of Upper and Lower Egypt guiding the divine bark and the deceased with them.

The idea which the Egyptians thus formed of the other world, and of the life of the initiated within it, reacted gradually on their concept of the tomb and of its befitting decoration.  They began to consider the entrances to the pyramid, and its internal passages and chambers, as a conventional representation of the gates, passages, and halls of Hades itself; when the pyramid passed out of fashion, and they had replaced it by a tomb cut in the rock in one or other of the branches of the Bab el-Moluk valley, the plan of construction which they chose was an exact copy of that employed by the Memphites and earlier Thebans, and they hollowed out for themselves in the mountain-side a burying-place on the same lines as those formerly employed within the pyramidal structure.  The relative positions of the tunnelled tombs along the valley were not determined by any order of rank or of succession to the throne; each Pharaoh after Ramses I. set to work on that part of the rock where the character of the stone favoured his purpose, and displayed so little respect for his predecessors, that the workmen, after having tunnelled a gallery, were often obliged to abandon it altogether, or to change the direction of their excavations so as to avoid piercing a neighbouring tomb.  The architect’s design was usually a mere project which could be modified at will, and, which he did not feel bound to carry out with fidelity; the actual measurements of the tomb of Ramses IV. are almost everywhere at variance with the numbers and arrangement of the working drawing of it which has been preserved to us in a papyrus.  The general disposition of the royal tombs, however, is far from being complicated; we have at the entrance the rectangular door, usually surmounted by the sun, represented by a yellow disk, before which the sovereign kneels with his hands raised in the posture of adoration; this gave access to a passage sloping gently downwards, and broken here and there by a level landing and steps, leading to a first chamber of varying amplitude, at the further end of which a second passage opened which descended to one or more apartments, the last of which, contained the coffin.  The oldest rock-tombs present some noteworthy exceptions to this plan, particularly those of Seti I. and Ramses III.; but from the time of Ramses IV., there is no difference to be remarked in them except in the degree of finish of the wall-paintings or in the length of the passages.  The shortest of the latter extends some fifty-two feet into the rock, while the longest never exceeds three hundred and ninety feet.  The same artifices which had been used by the pyramid-builders to defeat the designs of robbers—­false mummy-pits, painted and sculptured walls built across