By the dawn of history there had been developed in ancient Egypt an enlightened and discriminating conscience.[75] There are two aspects of this conscience which we need to note. First, it was a comparatively homogeneous conscience; that is, the morality of the ancient Egyptians was not a mixture of moralities like that of the modern European nations whose morality is a blend of the moralities of different races--Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Teutonic; of different religions--pagan and Christian; and of different civilizations--Greek, Latin, Celtic, and German. Second, it was a comparatively unchanging conscience. The moral consciousness which we find in pre-Christian Roman Egypt is fundamentally the same as that which emerged in the Pyramid Age more than three thousand years before. During this long period the Egyptian conscience, although it gained in depth and sensitiveness as the millenniums passed, underwent less change in its essential qualities than the moral consciousness underwent in less than ten centuries in all the other great nations, save China, of the ancient world. [Sidenote: Evidences of moral progress during early times] But though the moral development, like the development of all other phases of Egyptian civilization, was early checked and thereafter made but slow progress, the essential refinement and clarification of the moral sense during prehistoric times, or in the obscure period of the earliest dynasties, is shown by various testimonies, as, for instance, in the moralization of the Osirian myth, to which we have already referred, in the abandonment of the practice of human sacrifices at the tomb, and in the transition, concerning the conception of the life after death, from the continuance to the retribution theory. [Sidenote: Substitution of ka-statues for human sacrifices] The early Egyptians, after the manner of savages, killed and buried with the dead master a number of his slaves, that their souls might attend him in the spirit land. But after a time the growing humanitarian and ethical feelings of the Egyptians forbade human sacrifices, and then merely the portrait-statues of the slaves were placed in the tomb.[76] These, it was thought,--in consonance with the belief which led to the substitution of pictures or of clay and wood models for the real articles at first buried with the dead,--would take the place of the actual bodies of the servants.