meaning of a very large number of passages we must always remain
ignorant, because they describe states of civilisation, and conditions
of life and climate, of which no modern person can form any true
conception. Besides this the meanings of many words are unknown, the
spelling is strange and often inexplicable, the construction of the
sentence is frequently unlike anything known in later texts, and the
ideas that they express are wholly foreign to the minds of students of
to-day, who are in every way aliens to the primitive Egyptian African
whose beliefs these words represent. The pyramids at Sakkārah in which
the Pyramid Texts are found were discovered by the Frenchman, Mariette,
in 1880. Paper casts of the inscriptions, which are deeply cut in the
walls and painted green, were made for Professor Maspero, the Director
of the Service of Antiquities in Egypt, and from these he printed an
edition in hieroglyphic type of all five texts, and added a French
translation of the greater part of them. Professor Maspero correctly
recognised the true character of these old-world documents, and his
translation displayed an unrivalled insight into the true meaning of
many sections of them. The discovery and study of other texts and the
labours of recent workers have cleared up passages that offered
difficulties to him, but his work will remain for a very long time the
base of all investigations.

The Pyramid Texts, and the older texts quoted or embodied in them, were
written, like every religious funerary work in Egypt, for the benefit of
the king, that is to say, to effect his glorious resurrection and to
secure for him happiness in the Other World, and life everlasting. They
were intended to make him become a king in the Other World as he had
been a king upon earth; in other words, he was to reign over the gods,
and to have control of all the powers of heaven, and to have the power
to command the spirits and souls of the righteous, as his ancestors the