Osiris is the judge who weighs the souls, and allots them happiness or misery, according to their deserts. “The Book of the Dead” is interesting because it teaches how clearly and dogmatically the solemn and precise Egyptian stated his views and held his convictions concerning the unknown country. Four parts of man, it was said, survive after death, namely, the soul, the spirit, the shadow, and the double. The double remains in the tomb, and only leaves it in search of food. Sometimes it feels its loneliness and avenges itself upon near relations who have forsaken it. But the soul hurries to the bar of Osiris, where Thoth weighs the heart in the scales, and the innocent are admitted into the Field of Beans, a realm of fertility, where wheat grows seven cubits high. Immortality is spent in feasting, singing, conversation, and games. But the whole of this wonderful book is well worth studying. It shows how what Addison calls “this longing after immortality” led an ancient and deeply religious people to attempt in their burial rites to rob even the grave of its terrors, and conjured up out of the shadows of the tomb a clear and distinct vision of future life, wherein man in his complete individuality survived to all eternity. Among the most important results of recent Egyptian exploration must be reckoned the discovery of the tablets of Tell Amarna. Tell Amarna is a village in Upper Egypt, and in a pit at the foot of the mountain, at the base of which it stands, were discovered hundreds of these relics, which have since been distributed among the museums of London, Berlin, and Gizeh. The writing on these tablets is cuneiform, and the matter is of profound historic importance, illustrating, as it does, the relations between Egypt and western Asia in the fifteenth century B.C. While the existence of these tablets proves that cuneiform writing was common to Palestine and Syria as well as the Euphrates Valley, yet curiously enough the manuscripts of Tell Amarna are different from any of the same kind that have been found elsewhere, and the language resembles somewhat the Hebrew of the Old Testament. While most of these tablets are letters and despatches from friendly powers in Syria, and from vassal princes in Palestine, others contain interesting legends. The letters are addressed to the Pharaohs known as Amenophis III and Amenophis IV, who reigned in the sixteenth and fifteenth centuries B.C.