The records of the causes are extant and testify to the gravity that presided over this strange procedure. The Leyden papyrus certainly relates to an affair of the kind. A husband, addressing his wife’s soul, summons her to suspend persecutions that are in no way justified, under pain of answering for her conduct before the infernal jury. If she did not heed this preliminary advice, the matter would be brought later before the tribunal of the gods of the west and pleaded: the papyrus would serve as a piece of convincing evidence, and then “the true would be distinguished from the false.” There was one difficulty to be overcome: how was the summons to be sent to her? The Egyptians were never embarrassed when it was a question of communicating with the other world. The husband read the letter in the tomb, then fastened it to a figure of the woman. Thus she could not fail to receive the adjuration as she received the funerary banquet, or the effect of the prayers that assured her happiness beyond the tomb. The preoccupations of art held only a subordinate place in statues like those of the lady Naî and her two companions: the religious idea was predominant, and it was religion which gave the monument its meaning. XIX A FRAGMENT OF A THEBAN STATUETTE[82] The excavations undertaken by Mr. Mond on the eastern slope of the hills of Cheîkh-Abd-el-Gournah, in one of the richest of the Theban cemeteries of the XVIIIth and XIXth Dynasties, have already given several valuable monuments to the “Service des Antiquités”; and nothing surpasses or even equals the fragment illustrated here. The statuette to which it belongs was broken in the middle. The hips and legs have disappeared, as well as the right arm, and the plinth against which the back leaned; Mr. Mond eagerly sought the missing pieces among the residue of his find, but in vain; they were not forthcoming, and were doubtless either destroyed in ancient times, or carried off by some amateur during the nineteenth century. The fragment that remains to us measures nearly a foot in length and about 4½ inches across the shoulders; there is nothing in the lines by which one can determine whether the person it represents was seated or standing. I am inclined to think that, according to the custom of the time, the attitude resembled that of the little lady Touî in the Louvre,[83] standing, the feet nearly on the same level, the right arm hanging down, the head erect, with the wig of ceremony, and the dress of great holidays. [Illustration: THE MOND STATUETTE (FRONT VIEW).]