come to be universal. No doubt political events had much to do
with this. The absorption of the powers of the king by the
priesthood of the national god Amon-Ra, the crushing of the
nobility by a succession of foreign invaders, and the general
uncertainty of life, had disturbed the old fixed relations. The
hope of every Egyptian turned to a glorified future life as
Osiris.

The tendency to use magical texts and symbolic objects reached
its height. About 700 B.C. a revival of national life, brought
about by the establishment of the Egyptian kings of Sais as kings
of Egypt, led to a renaissance of Egyptian art. The old monuments
were copied and imitated, the old funerary texts and offering
formulas were sought out in the older graves. Even the pyramid
texts reappear after one thousand years of practical oblivion.
The value of master words was so firmly fixed in the Egyptian
mind that misunderstood texts of all sorts were copied out and
placed in the graves to secure to the dead some vague benefit in
the other world.

The process of mummification was at its height. The bodies were
no longer preserved. The process was merely the creation of a
simulacrum of the dead Osiris So-and-So. All the perishable parts
of the body were removed or destroyed by chemicals. Only the
skin, bones, hair, and teeth remained to be padded with mud and
resin, wrapped in cloths, covered with a painted and gilded
_cartonnage_ to represent the glorified Osiris mummy.