of help from supernatural powers or against supernatural powers.
The spirit of the man needed the spirit of the copper axe to
swing in battle; but just as much he needed the spirit of the
flint knife to make the first cut across the throat of the spirit
bull of sacrifice. Remember this--the other world, in which
lived the spirit of the dead, was filled with the spirits or
ghosts of all things and animals. The other, the unseen, was a
duplicate of this world; all things which have shape were there
--even to the black fields and the broad river of Egypt. This is
the foundation of the Egyptian conception of immortality. Through
all the modifications and accretions of the following three
thousand years, this foundation idea is always clearly visible.
All the statues, the carved and painted tombs, all the curious
little model boats and workshops, all the painted mummies, all
the amulets, the scarabs, the little funerary statuettes,--all
this mummery which seems to be so characteristic and so
essential, is only the means to an end, and an ever changing
means to secure a successful comfortable existence of the spirit
in the life after death,--in the ghostly duplicate of life on
earth.




IV. THE EARLY DYNASTIC PERIOD


It is clear that the effort to attain an immortality which is
merely a ghostly continuation of life on earth must reflect the
general development of Egyptian culture,--especially the