her productions to thee."1 The same texts assign to the king the fourteen kas of Ra. I have already explained the meaning of ka, which corresponds in this place to our word "spirit." But Ra was said to possess seven souls (baiu) and fourteen kas.2 This explains the true meaning of the expression, "the souls of the king," which has puzzled many scholars. It is very frequently found and at a very early period. king had the seven souls of Rā.3

The

That the sovereign in his official utterances should proclaim his divinity, is less to be wondered at than that private individuals should speak of him in the same style. But the doctrine was universally received. "Thou art," says an ode translated by M. Chabas and Mr. Goodwin, "as it were the image of thy father the Sun, who rises in heaven. Thy beams penetrate the cavern. No place is without thy goodness. Thy sayings are the law of every land. When thou reposest in thy palace, thou hearest the words of all the lands. Thou hast millions of ears. Bright is thy eye above

1 I quote, with slight alteration, the excellent English version given in Madame Duemichen's translation of the "Flotte einer ägyptischen Königin."

2 Transactions of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, Vol. VI. p. 501.

3 It is quite true, as M. Grébaut says, Mélanges d'Arch. Vol. III. p. 60, "que le singulier [ba] variait avec la forme [baiu] pour l'expression de la même idée et dans les mêmes formules." This is also the case with ka and the plural kau.

the stars of heaven, able to gaze at the solar orb. If anything be spoken by the mouth in the cavern, it ascends into thine ears. Whatsoever is done in secret, thy eye seeth it. O Baenra Meriamen, merciful Lord, creator of breath." Mr. Goodwin, whose version I have been quoting, judiciously observes: "This is not the language of a courtier. It seems to be a genuine expression of the belief that the king was the living representative of Deity, and from this point of view is much more interesting and remarkable than if treated as a mere outpouring of empty flattery."

It must not be forgotten that the kings are frequently represented in the humblest postures of adoration before the gods. And they are also represented as worshipping and propitiating their own "genius."

The doctrine of the king's divinity was proclaimed by works of art even more eloquently than by words. Dean Stanley writes as follows: 2

"What spires are to a modern city-what the towers of a cathedral are to its nave and choir-that the statues of the Pharaohs were to the streets and temples of Thebes. The ground is strewn with their fragments; there were avenues of them towering high above plain and houses. Three of gigantic size still remain. One was the granite statue of Rameses himself, who sat on

1 "Records of the Past," Vol. IV. p. 102.

2 "Sinai and Palestine," p. xxxv.

the right side of the entrance to his palace. By some extraordinary catastrophe, the statue has been thrown down, and the Arabs have scooped their millstones out of his face; but you can still see what he was the largest statue in the world. Far and wide that enormous head must have been seen, eyes, mouth and ears. Far and wide you must have seen his vast hands resting on his elephantine knees. You sit on his breast and look at the Osiride statues which support the portico of the temple, and which anywhere else would put to shame even the statues of the cherubs in St. Peter's -and they seem pigmies before him. His arm is thicker than their whole bodies. The only part of the temple or palace at all in proportion to him must have been the gateway, which rose in pyramidal towers, now broken down, and rolling in a wide ruin down to the plain.

"Nothing which now exists in the world can give any notion of what the effect must have been when he was erect..... No one who entered that building, whether it were temple or palace, could have thought of anything else but that stupendous being who thus had raised himself up above the whole world of gods and men.

"And when from the statue you descend to the palace, the same impression is kept up.. Everywhere the king is conquering, worshipping, ruling. The palace is the Temple, the king is Priest. But everywhere the

same colossal proportions are preserved. He and his horses are ten times the size of the rest of the army. Alike in battle and in worship, he is of the same stature as the gods themselves. Most striking is the familiar gentleness with which-one on each side-they take him by each hand, as one of their own order, and then in the next compartment introduce him to Ammon and the lion-headed goddess. Every distinction, except of degree, between divinity and royalty, is entirely levelled, and the royal majesty is always represented by making the king, not like Saul or Agamemnon, from the head and shoulders, but from the foot and ankle upwards, higher than the rest of the people.

"It carries one back to the days when there were giants on the earth.' It shows how the king, in that first monarchy, was the visible God upon earth. No pure Monotheism could for a moment have been compatible with such an intense exaltation of the conquering king."

THE RELIGIOUS BOOKS OF EGYPT.

THE hopes and fears of the Egyptians with reference to the world beyond the grave are revealed to us in various books or collections of writings which have been preserved to us by the tombs.

Most of the evidence upon which the preceding Lectures are based has been taken from inscriptions sculptured or painted upon monuments of stone. But from the very earliest times to which it is possible to go back, the Egyptians were acquainted with the use of the pen and of papyrus as a material for writing upon. Leather skins are also recorded to have been used for certain documents, and some of these have actually been preserved. But the durability and other qualities of the papyrus recommended it for ordinary use beyond all other writing materials. The age of some of the papyri now in our museums must necessarily seem fabulous to those whose experience has been limited to Greek or Latin manuscripts, which are considered as of most venerable antiquity if they were written in the