“I live upon loaves, white wheat, beer, red wheat.... Place me with vases of milk and wine, with cakes and loaves, and plenty of meat in the dwelling of Anubis.”(24) “Grant to me the funereal food, the drinks, the oxen, the geese, the fabrics, the incense, the oil, and all the good and pure things upon which the gods live.”(25) There is one passage that almost implies that the dead retained in idea a claim upon the produce of the land which nourished them whilst alive, or that they had a special allotment even in the other world:— “I sit down among the very great gods of Nut. A field extends for me; the products of the ground are for me. I eat them; I am favoured with them; I live in plenty by them.... I am given corn and wheat for my mouth.”(26) Chapter cxliv. of the _Book of the Dead_ is to be said, “at the gate of every room while offering to each of them thighs and heads of red cows, the value of seven vases; while offering blood extracted from the heart, the value of a hundred vases; sixteen loaves of white bread, eight round cakes, eight oval cakes, eight broad thin cakes, eight measures of beer, and eight of wheat, a perfumed oil-basin full of milk from a white cow, green grass, green figs, mestem and beads of incense to be burnt.” Chapter cxlviii. ordains that there “shall be placed offerings before them of loaves, beer, meat, incense, funereal dishes, bringing into favour with Râ and making that the _deceased is fed in the netherworld_.” (M16) In the next chapters frequent reference will be made to the offerings to ancestors, or _manes_, among the ancient Hindoos. With them the cake-offering to the dead became a most important symbol, uniting in a common duty all descendants from certain ancestors within fixed degrees, and marking them off in the matter of responsibility thereto from more distant relations, who owed similar duty elsewhere. (M17) Being thus surrounded by nations that believed intensely in the need in the dead of nourishment at the hands of their relatives on earth, it would indeed be surprising if the Greeks were found not to share in the belief. But the fact remains that in the earliest Greek literature it is least conspicuous, and the gulf seems widest between the living and the dead. Can this be laid to the charge of the artificial superstitions of a philosophical class of poets? Or is it due to the true evolution of such beliefs, that as long as our search touches upon the unsettled periods of semi-migratory life, the tombs of individual members of a family being scattered here or there wherever they meet their deaths, the offering to the dead takes a special form, inasmuch as the solidarity of the tribe eclipses the importance of the family as a unit, and the religious ceremonies of the chieftain absorb the attention of the lesser members of the tribe?