“The principal part of the text of all these manuscripts appears to consist of a collection of hymns, or rather homages, to certain deities, generally expressed in the name of the deceased, with his title of Osiris, although the true Osiris is not excluded from the groups that are introduced. The upper part of each manuscript is occupied by a series of pictural tablets; under them are vertical columns of distinct hieroglyphics, or, in the epistolographic manuscripts, pages of the text, which are commonly divided into paragraphs, with a tablet at the head of each; the first words being constantly written with red ink, made of a kind of ochre, as the black is of a carbonaceous substance. The beginning of the manuscripts is seldom entire, being always at the outside of the roll; as the _umbilicus_ of the Romans was synonymous with the end.” ... “The coffins of the mummies, and the larger sarcophagi of stone, are generally covered with representations extremely similar to some of those which are found in the manuscripts. The judicial tablet is frequently delineated on the middle of the coffins; above it are Isis and Nephthe, at the sides, and apparently Rhea in the middle, with outspread wings. The space below is chiefly occupied by figures of twenty or thirty of the principal deities, to whom the deceased, in his mystical character, is doing homage; each of them being probably designated by the relationship in which he stands to the new representative of Osiris. In the sculptures, the figures are generally less numerous; the same deities are commonly represented as on the painted coffins, but without the repetition of the suppliant, and in an order subject to some little variation. The large sarcophagus of granite, in the British Museum, brought from Cairo, and formerly called the Lover’s Fountain, has the name of Apis, as a part of the characteristic denomination. This circumstance, at first sight, seemed to make it evident that it must have been intended to contain the mummy of an Apis, for which its magnitude renders it well calculated; but when the symbols of other deities were found in the mystic names upon various other monuments, this inference could no longer be considered as absolutely conclusive.” ...