But we have no need to know what he was: merely in leaving us his portrait, he has rendered signal service to science. Let us recall the part played by the statues of the tombs in the theological conceptions of the Egyptians: they were the indispensable support of the _double_, the body without which the soul of the dead person could not exist in the other world. It might be thought that in passing from life in this world to that beyond the tomb, the people to whom beauty had been chary might not have been sorry to assume a new appearance; if we are to be re-born, it is better to be re-born less ugly. The care that poor Khnoumhotpou has taken to reach us deformed shows that the old Egyptians did not hold our views on the subject: they desired to remain always as nature created them at the moment of conception. It was not absence of coquetry on their part, but necessity: their idea of the soul compelled them so to act. From the moment that their personality was indissolubly bound up with the existence of the body, the first condition imposed on them for remaining identical with themselves after death, as before, was to preserve their earthly form intact. In order that the Khnoumhotpou who dwelt in the hypogeum of Saqqarah might not be a different being from the Khnoumhotpou who walked through the streets of Memphis, it was necessary that his disincarnated _double_ should find there the support of a statue of a dwarf. Give him the fine proportions of Ti or Rânofir, the proud bearing and haughty mien of the Cheîkh-el-Beled, even the more common type of the Crouching Scribe, he would not have known what to do. His substance, poured, so to speak, into the exiguous and deformed mould of the dwarf, could never have adapted itself to the new mould into which the artist would have tried to cast it. Khnoumhotpou beautified would no longer have been Khnoumhotpou; his tomb, without the statue of a dwarf, would only have sheltered a double and a support strangers to each other.