Such was the treatment accorded to a Pharaoh of Egypt by one of his subjects three thousand years ago; a curious commentary on the present-day Egyptian protests against the opening of the royal tombs in the interests of science! But the story of the Ramesside tomb-robberies is only an illustration of two contradictory cravings which are seen working all down the long record of the Egyptian monarchy. On the one hand there is the constant attempt of royalty to secure for itself by the most elaborate precautions that age-long endurance of the physical frame which was deemed a necessary condition for the welfare of the dead king in the Underworld, an attempt which expresses itself in different ways, some of them most wonderful, in the successive periods of Egyptian history; on the other, there is the equally constant and resolute determination of the Egyptian tomb-robber that not all the divinity which doth hedge a king, and especially a Pharaoh, shall keep him from his prey. The Ramesside thief has any amount of lip-reverence for the dead king whose rest he so rudely disturbs; but all the time that he is talking about “the august mummy of this god,” he is stripping the gold and jewels from it, and his accomplices are kindling the fire which will shortly destroy, from an Egyptian point of view, King Sebek-em-saf’s hope of immortality; and the contradiction is an epitome of a good deal in the story of Egyptian royalty. The most enduring religious feeling in the Egyptian was the craving for immortality; and the most permanent, as it was one of the earliest religious convictions, was that immortality was linked with faith in the god Osiris, who, as the legend ran, had been treacherously slain by his brother Set, had risen from the dead, had been judged and pronounced just by the tribunal of the gods, and thenceforth reigned as the god of the Underworld and the judge of the dead.