far as possible in their proper places. And it may
be this custom which is referred to in various places in the Book of the
Dead, when the deceased declares that he has collected his limbs "and
made his body whole again," and already in the Vth dynasty King Teta is
thus addressed--"Rise up, O thou Teta! Thou hast received thy head, thou
hast knitted together thy bones, [Footnote: _Recueil de Travaux_, tom.
v. p. 40 (I. 287).] thou hast collected thy members."

The history of Osiris, the god of the resurrection, has now been traced
from the earliest times to the end of the period of the rule of the
priests of Amen (about B.C. 900), by which time Amen-R[=a] had been
thrust in among the gods of the underworld, and prayers were made, in
some cases, to him instead of to Osiris. From this time onwards Amen
maintained this exalted position, and in the Ptolemaic period, in an
address to the deceased Ker[=a]sher we read. "Thy face shineth before
R[=a], thy soul liveth before Amen, and thy body is renewed before
Osiris." And again it is said, "Amen is nigh unto thee to make thee to
live again.... Amen cometh to thee having the breath of life, and he
causeth thee to draw thy breath within thy funeral house." But in spite
of this, Osiris kept and held the highest place in the minds of the
Egyptians, from first to last, as the God-man, the being who was both
divine and human; and no foreign invasion, and no religious or political
disturbances, and no influence which any outside peoples could bring to
bear upon them, succeeded in making them regard the god as anything less
than the cause and symbol and type of the resurrection, and of the life
everlasting. For about five thousand years men were mummified in
imitation of the mummied form of Osiris; and they went to their graves
believing that their bodies would vanquish the powers of death, and the
grave, and decay, because Osiris had vanquished them; and they had
certain hope of the resurrection in an immortal, eternal, and spiritual
body, because Osiris had risen in a transformed spiritual body, and had
ascended into heaven, where he had become the king and the judge of the
dead, and had attained unto everlasting life therein.

The chief reason for the persistence of the worship of Osiris in Egypt
was, probably, the fact that it promised both resurrection and eternal
life to its followers. Even after the Egyptians had embraced
Christianity they continued to mummify their dead, and f