The next highest class to the priests were the soldiers, and below these were the lower classes--farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, merchants, mechanics, and last of all the swineherds. The Egyptians did not worship one God as we do. They believed in hundreds of gods and goddesses, and they had a special god for every sort of thing, who ruled over and had charge of that thing--a god of the farm, a god of the home, and so on. Some of their gods were good and some were bad, but the Egyptians prayed to them all. Osiris was the chief god, and Isis was his wife. Osiris was the god of farming and judge of the dead. Their son Horus had the head of a hawk. Many of their gods had bodies of men with heads of animals. Animals they thought sacred. The dog and the cat were sacred animals. The ibis, which was a bird like a stork, was another. Then there was the beetle, which was called a scarab. If any one killed a sacred animal he was put to death, for the Egyptians thought it much worse to kill a sacred and holy creature than to kill even a human being. [Illustration] 7 The Tomb-Builders [Illustration: Tu-tank-amen’s tomb showing foods preserved.] The Egyptians believed that when they died, their souls stayed near by their bodies. So when a person died they put in the tomb with him all sorts of things that he had used in daily life--things to eat and drink, furniture and dishes, toys and games. They thought the soul would return to its own body at the day of judgment. They wanted their bodies to be kept from decaying until judgment day, in order that the soul might then have a body to return to. So they pickled the bodies of the dead by soaking them in a kind of melted tar and wrapping them round and round and round with a cloth like a bandage. A dead body pickled in this way is called a mummy, and after thousands of years the mummies of the Egyptian kings may still be seen. Most of them are not, however, in the tombs where they were at first placed. They have been moved away and put in museums, and we may see them there now. Although they are yellow and dried up, they still look like “Little old men All skin and bones.” At first only kings or important people of the highest classes were made mummies, but after a while all the classes, except perhaps the lowest, were treated in the same way. Sacred animals from beetles to cows were also made into mummies.