not only by many Greek narrators, but by the laboriously erased
inscriptions discovered in the chambers of some tombs.]

"Why care about the grave?" cried Croesus, becoming angry. "We live for
life, not for death!"

"Say rather," answered Amasis rising from his seat, "we, with our Greek
minds, believe a beautiful life to be the highest good. But Croesus, I
was begotten and nursed by Egyptian parents, nourished on Egyptian food,
and though I have accepted much that is Greek, am still, in my innermost
being, an Egyptian. What has been sung to us in our childhood, and
praised as sacred in our youth, lingers on in the heart until the day
which sees us embalmed as mummies. I am an old man and have but a short
span yet to run, before I reach the landmark which separates us from that
farther country. For the sake of life's few remaining days, shall I
willingly mar Death's thousands of years? No, my friend, in this point at
least I have remained an Egyptian, in believing, like the rest of my
countrymen, that the happiness of a future life in the kingdom of Osiris,
depends on the preservation of my body, the habitation of the soul.

[Each human soul was considered as a part of the world-soul Osiris,
was united to him after the death of the body, and thenceforth took
the name of Osiris. The Egyptian Cosmos consisted of the three
great realms, the Heavens, the Earth and the Depths. Over the vast
ocean which girdles the vault of heaven, the sun moves in a boat or
car drawn by the planets and fixed stars. On this ocean too the
great constellations circle in their ships, and there is the kingdom
of the blissful gods, who sit enthroned above this heavenly ocean
under a canopy of stars. The mouth of this great stream is in the
East, where the sun-god rises from the mists and is born again as a
child every morning. The surface of the earth is inhabited by human
beings having a share in the three great cosmic kingdoms. They
receive their soul from the heights of heaven, the seat and source
of light; their material body is of the earth; and the appearance or
outward form by which one human being is distinguished from another
at sight--his phantom or shadow--belongs to the depths. At death,
soul, body, and shadow separate from one another. The soul to
return to the place from whence it came, to Heaven, for it is a part
of God (of Osiris); the body, to be committed to the earth