[126] The texts also bear witness to the ideas with which the complicated processes of embalming were undertaken. See P. PIERRET, _Le Dogme de la la Résurrection_, &c., p. 10. "It was necessary that no member, no substance, should be wanting at the final summons; resurrection depended on that." "_Thou countest thy members which are complete and intact._" (Egyptian funerary text.) "Arise in To-deser (the sacred region in which the renewal of life is prepared), thou august and coffined mummy. Thy bones and thy substance are re-united with thy flesh, and thy flesh is again in its place; thy head is replaced upon thy neck, thy heart is ready for thee." (Osirian statue in the Louvre.) The dead took care to demand of the gods "_that the earth should not bite him, that the soil should not consume him_." (MARIETTE, _Feuilles d'Abydos_.) The preservation of the body must therefore have been an object of solicitude at the earliest times, but the art of embalming did not attain perfection until the Theban period. Under the ancient empire men were content with comparatively simple methods. Mariette says that "more examples would have to be brought together than he had been able to discover before the question of mummification under the ancient empire could be decided. It is certain, first, that no authentic piece of mummy cloth from that period is now extant; secondly, that the bones found in the sarcophagi have the brownish colour and the bituminous smell of mummies. "Not more than five or six inviolate sarcophagi have been found. On each of these occasions the corpse has been discovered in the skeleton state. And as for linen, nothing beyond a little dust upon the bottom of the sarcophagus, which might be the _débris_ of many other things than of a linen shroud." (_Les Tombes de l'Ancien Empire_, p. 16.) [127] PASSALACQUA gives the following description of the mummy of a young woman which he discovered at Thebes: "Her hair and the rotundity and surprising regularity of her form showed me that she had been a beauty in her time, and that she had died in the flower of her youth." He then gives a minute description of her condition and ornaments, and concludes by saying that "the peculiar beauty of the proportions of this mummy, and its perfect preservation, had so greatly impressed the Arabs themselves that they had exhumed it more than once to show to their wives and neighbours." (_Catalogue raisonné et historique des Antiquités découvertes en Égypte_, 8vo. 1826.)