which excluded, than to the
Persian, which emphasized, the resurrection of the body.

Another theory which has been devised to explain the purpose of
Egyptian embalming, is that "it was to unite the soul permanently
to its body, and keep the vital principle from perishing or
transmigrating; the body and soul ran together through the journey
of the dead and its dread ordeal." 5 This arbitrary guess is
incredible. The preservation of the body does not appear in any
way not even to the rawest fancy to detain or unite the soul with
it; for the thought is unavoidable that it is precisely the
absence of the soul which constitutes death. Again: such an
explanation of the motive for embalming cannot be correct, because
in the hieroglyphic representations of the passage to the judgment
the separate soul is often depicted as hovering over the body, 6
or as kneeling before the judges, or as pursuing its adventures
through the various realms of the creation. "When the body is
represented," Champollion says, "it is as an aid to the spectator,
and not as teaching a bodily resurrection. Sharpe's opinion that
the picture of a bird poised over the mouth of a mummy, with the
emblems of breath and life in its claws, implies the doctrine of a
general physical resurrection, is an inferential leap of the most
startling character. What proof is there that the symbol denotes
this? Hundreds of paintings in the tombs show souls undergoing
their respective allotments in the other world while their bodily
mummies are quiet in the sepulchres of the present. In his
treatise on "Isis and Osiris," Plutarch writes, "The Egyptians
believe that while the bodies of eminent men are buried in the
earth their souls are stars shining in heaven." It is equally
nonsensical in itself and unwarranted by evidence to imagine that,
in the Egyptian faith, embalming either retained the soul in the
body or preserved the body for a future return of the soul. Who
can believe that it was for either of those purposes that they
embalmed the multitudes of animals whose mummies the explorer is
still turning up? They preserved cats, hawks, bugs, crocodiles,
monkeys, bulls, with as great pains as they did men.7 When the
Canary Islands were first visited, it was found that their
inhabitants had a custom of carefully embalming the dead. The same
was the case among the Peruvians, whose vast cemeteries remain to
this day crowded with mummies. But the expectation of a return of
t