Some of them, if not all, were used for purposes that seem strange to us. Several had little rolls of papyrus fastened to their pedestal or their body, ordinary letters that the writers sent to one another; one possessed by the Leyden Museum is an adjuration addressed _to the perfect soul of the lady Ankhari_ by her still living husband:[80] “What fault have I committed against thee that I should be reduced to the miserable condition in which I find myself? What have I done to justify this attack on me, if no fault has been committed against thee? From the time I became thy husband until this day, what have I done against thee that I should conceal? What shall I do when I have to bear witness to my conduct in regard to thee, and shall appear with thee before the tribunal of the dead, addressing myself to the cycle of the infernal gods, and thou wilt be judged after this writing, which is in words uttering my complaint in regard to what thou hast done. What wilt thou do?” The general tone of the piece is, as is clear, one of complaint and accusation. The husband laments about “the miserable condition to which he is reduced,” three years after he has become a widower; then he relates the incidents of his conjugal life in order to show the ingratitude he has received for his trouble and care. “When thou becamest my wife, I was young, I was with thee, I did not desert thee, I caused no grief to thy heart. Now so I acted when I was young; when I was promoted to high dignities by Pharaoh, I did not desert thee; I said: ‘Let them be mutual between us!’ and as everybody who came saw me with thee, thou didst not receive those whom thou didst not know, for I acted according to thy will. Now, here it is, thou hast not satisfied my heart and I shall plead with thee, and the true will be distinguished from the false.” He dwells on and reminds her of his kindnesses: “I have never been found acting brutally to thee like a peasant who enters other people’s houses.” When she died, during an eight months’ absence occasioned by his service with Pharaoh, “I did what was seeming for thee: I lamented thee greatly with my people opposite my dwelling, I gave stuffs and swathings for thy burial, and for that purpose had many linen cloths woven, and I omitted no good offering I could make thee.”[81] The poor man does not state clearly the nature of the troubles from which he suffered. Perhaps he imagined that his wife tormented him in the form of a spectre; perhaps, what after all comes to the same thing in the belief of an Egyptian, he was attacked by diseases and overwhelmed with infirmities that he attributed to the malignity of the dead woman. We are reminded of the strange actions that the Icelanders of the Middle Ages practised against ghosts. The administration set on foot the whole cortège of officials and the whole of its legal code to bring the accusation, judge and condemn the dead who persisted in haunting the house in which they had lived.