Everything depended on being acquainted with the magical “right word,” and in order that it should always be at the command of the traveller through the next world, it was first written on the sarcophagus and then on the grave-clothes. From the collection of these formulas, then, arose the “Book of the Dead,” the _vade mecum_, the cicerone, for the pilgrim through the mysteries of the other life. After the dead had received back all the faculties of the body which he possessed on earth, and when, after the justification in the hall of judgment, he had also received his heart, he advanced from portal to portal, and from degree to degree, until he had attained his final goal, apotheosis. In this last stage the pure spirit of light was freed from all the dust of this life; and then, being one with the sun-god Ra, as a shining day-star, he crossed the heavens in a golden bark, and received, himself a god, the attributes and the reverence of gods and the homage of men. Endowed with the power of clothing himself at will in any form he desired, he was permitted by day or night to sail through the firmament as sun or star in divine light, to mix with mortals upon earth, to soar through the air as a bird, or as a lotos flower, blooming beautifully, to repose in serene blessedness and breathe forth perfume. As might be expected from what has already been said, in this book are to be found the elements of the Egyptian religious belief and doctrine of immortality. Although these are difficult to understand on account of the inflated mode of expression, as well as the confused superabundance of symbols, allegories, metaphors, and illustrations (unfortunately, these obscure the sense far more frequently than they elucidate it), and although much of it must have been misunderstood by Lepsius at the age of thirty, yet it could not escape him that a searching study of this fundamental book must precede any critical treatment of Egyptian mythology. On this account, as we know, in 1836 he made a copy of the large and very perfect hieroglyphic specimen of the “Book of the Dead,” and amended it during a second sojourn in Turin in 1841. In the year 1842, as we shall see, he published[31] the great roll of papyrus, fifty-seven feet and three inches long. The seventy-nine tablets contained in this fine publication were transferred to the stone by the careful and skillful designer and lithographer, Max Weidenbach, a Naumburg fellow-countryman of Lepsius. This man, as well as his no less skillful brother, certainly deserves mention here, for under the direction of Lepsius they both succeeded in mastering Egyptian writing so thoroughly that their hieroglyphic manuscript was in no respect inferior to that of the best hierogrammatists of the time of the Pharaohs, It is to them that the publications of Lepsius owe the rare purity of style which distinguishes them, and we are indebted above all to the delicate apprehension and the skillful hand of the brothers