with
some regularity and conscientiousness; at least, on feast-days offerings
would be brought to the tomb, and the ceremonies of purification and
opening the mouth of the deceased would be enacted. But there could be
little guarantee that later generations would perpetuate the cult. It
therefore became usual under the Old Kingdom for the wealthiest persons
to make testamentary dispositions by which certain other persons agreed
for a consideration to observe the required rites at stated periods:
they received the name of "servants of the _ka_," and stood in the same
relation to the deceased as the priests to the gods. Or again, contracts
might be made with a neighbouring temple, the priesthood of which bound
itself to reserve for the contracting party some portion of the
offerings that had already been used for the divine cult. There is
probably a superstitious reason for the preference shown by the dead for
offerings of this kind; no wish is commoner than that one may receive
"bread and beer that had gone up on to the altar of the local god," or
"with which the god had been sated"; something of the divine sanctity
still clung about such offerings and made them particularly desirable.
In spite of all the precautions they took and the contracts they made,
the Egyptians could never quite rid themselves of the dread that their
tombs might decay and their cult be neglected; and they sought therefore
to obtain by prayers and threats what they feared they might lose
altogether. The occasional visitor to the tomb is reminded by its
inscriptions of the many virtues of the dead man while he yet lived, and
is charged, if he be come with empty hands, at least to pronounce the
funerary formula; it will indeed cost him nothing but "the breath of his
mouth"! Against the would-be desecrator the wrath of the gods is
invoked: "with him shall the great god reckon there where a reckoning is
made."

The funerary customs that have been described are meaningless except on
the supposition that the tomb was the regular dwelling-place of the
dead. But just as the Egyptians found no contradiction between the view
of the temple as the residence of the god and the conception of him as a
cosmic deity, so too they often attributed to the dead a continued
existence quite apart from the tomb. According to a widely-spread
doctrine of great age the deceased Egyptian was translated to the
heavens, where he lived on in the form of a star. This theme is
e