religions, chief of which is the faith in a spirit, in something
that preserves the personality of the man and does not perish
with the body. This faith was, in fact, one of the chief elements
in the Egyptian religion--the element best known to us through
the endless cemeteries which fill the desert from one end of
Egypt to the other, and through the funerary inscriptions.

It is necessary, however, to correct the prevailing impression
that religion played the greatest part in Egyptian life or even a
greater part than it does in Moslem Egypt. The mistaken belief
that death and the well-being of the dead overshadowed the
existence of the living, is due to the fact that the physical
character of the country has preserved for us the cemeteries and
the funerary temples better than all the other monuments. The
narrow strip of fat black land along the Nile produces generally
its three crops a year. It is much too valuable to use as a
cemetery. But more than that, it is subject to periodic
saturation with water during the inundation, and is, therefore,
unsuitable for the burials of a nation which wished to preserve
the contents of the graves. On the other hand, the desert, which
bounds this fertile strip so closely that a dozen steps will
usually carry one from the black land to the gray,--the desert
offers a dry preserving soil with absolutely no value to the
living. Thus all the funerary monuments were erected on the
desert, and except where intentionally destroyed they are
preserved to the present day. The palaces, the towns, the farms,
and many of the great temples which were erected on the black
soil, have been pulled down for building material or buried deep
under the steadily rising deposits of the Nile. The tombs of six
thousand years of dead have accumulated on the desert edge.