All these things, which have done so much to reconstitute for us the
history of the earliest period of the Egyptian monarchy, were placed
under the care of the dead slaves whose bodies were buried round the
empty tomb-chamber of their royal master in Abydos.

The killing and entombment of the royal servants is of the highest
anthropological interest, for it throws a vivid light upon the manners
of the time. It shows the primeval Egyptians as a semi-barbaric people
of childishly simple ways of thought. The king was dead. For all his
kingship he was a man, and no man was immortal in this world. But yet
how could one really die? Shadows, dreams, all kinds of phenomena which
the primitive mind could not explain, induced the belief that, though
the outer man might rot, there was an inner man which could not die
and still lived on. The idea of total death was unthinkable. And where
should this inner man still live on but in the tomb to which the outer
man was consigned? And here, doubtless it was believed, in the house to
which the body was consigned, the ghost lived on. And as each ghost had
his house with the body, so no doubt all ghosts could communicate with
one another from tomb to tomb; and so there grew up the belief in a
tomb-world, a subterranean Egypt of tombs, in which the dead Egyptians
still lived and had their being. Later on the boat of the sun, in which
the god of light crossed the heavens by day, was thought to pass through
this dead world between his setting and his rising, accompanied by the
souls of the righteous. But of this belief we find no trace yet in the
ideas of the Ist Dynasty. All we can see is that the _sahus_, or bodies
of the dead, were supposed to reside in awful majesty in the tomb,
while the ghosts could pass from tomb to tomb through the mazes of
the underworld. Over this dread realm of dead men presided a dead god,
Osiris of Abydos; and so the necropolis of Abydos was the necropolis of