The incoming of this theory of rewards and punishments after death constitutes a great landmark in the moral evolution of mankind. In the words of Tylor, this transition from the continuance to the retribution theory “for deep import to human life has scarcely its rival in the history of religion.”[80] The sanctions of morality are doubled. Now in ancient Egypt by the beginning of the second millennium B.C. the transition from the continuance to the retribution theory had already been effected, as will appear in the following account of the Egyptian Judgment of the Dead. Thus here, as in the change of practices at the tomb, we have indisputable evidence of the progress of moral ideas in early Egypt. [Sidenote: The Judgment of the Dead] The Judgment of the Dead was the trial which every soul had to undergo before Osiris and his forty-two assessors in the great tribunal hall of the underworld. The astonishing thing about this tribunal, as we have just intimated, is that at a time when the oldest monuments raised in Egypt were yet recent this whole conception of the moral order in all its details was already fully matured.[81] Osiris had been raised to the judgment seat in the other world, and the moral standard in some departments of life, particularly in the relations of man to man in the everyday social and business spheres, was as high and true as is the standard in many of the civilized nations of to-day. This admirable code of social morals points unmistakably to long periods of organized society and moral training in prefeudal Egypt. [Sidenote: The Negative Confession] This early standard of goodness is embodied in the so-called Negative Confession, in which the soul before the Osirian tribunal pleaded his innocence of the forty-two sins condemned by the Egyptian code of morality. This confession, previous to the discovery of the Babylonian code of Hammurabi, constituted the oldest known code of morality of the ancient world. These are some of the declarations of the soul: “I did not steal”; “I did not get any man treacherously killed”; “I did not utter any lie”;[82] “I did not make any one weep”; “I did not kill any sacred animals”; “I did not damage any cultivated land”; “I was angry only when there was reason [for being angry]”; “I did not turn a deaf ear to the words of truth”; “I did not commit any act of rebellion”; “I did not do any witchcraft”; “I did not blaspheme a god”; “I did not make the slave to be misused by his master”; “I was not imperious”; “I did not strip the mummies of their stuff.”[83] After this confession to the forty-two assessors in the hall of judgment, the soul made the following affirmative declaration, which makes a singularly close approach to Christian morality: “I gave bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, a bark to the one who was without one [that is, a boat to the detained traveler], offerings to the gods, and funeral conservations to the shades.”[84]