That human sacrifice lasted up to the Eleventh Dynasty[154] is the belief of Messrs. King and Hall, who point to the excavations at Thebes, in the precinct of the funerary temple of Nebhapet-Ra-Mentuhetep and about the central pyramid which commemorated his memory. There were buried a number of ladies of his _harim_, who were without doubt killed and buried at the same time, in order that they might accompany their royal master to his new abiding place. With each of these ladies there was buried a little waxen human figure placed in a little coffin, the image being intended to take the place of the slave of the lady of the _harim_. As the ladies were not royal, real slaves were not killed for them, which shows that the idea of sacrifice even then had contracted until it was restricted to personages of the highest rank. According to Porphyry, who quotes a work of Manetheo on _Antiquity and Piety_,[155] the law permitting or ordering the sacrifice of men was repealed by Amosis. Amosis, it is said, ordered that waxen images be substituted. The excavators have found not only the wax images but those of later days, when wood and glazed _faience_ as well as stone were used, the growing humanity of the age seeking in this way to progress from the primitive indifference to the death of others.[156] Nowhere is there any evidence that among the Egyptians of the Old, and Middle or New period (that is from the Fourth Dynasty up to the Twentieth, or from about 2800 to 110 B. C.), children were ill-treated or suffered from any of the usual methods of getting rid of surplus progeny. It is true that the monuments are more given to warlike exploits than to revelations of social manners, but the conditions in early Egypt all seem to point to the fact that, living in a land of plenty, they had early passed beyond the stage when the life of the child was the first sacrifice to the god of necessity. In this connection it must be said that the only direct evidence we have from the ancients is that of Diodorus Siculus, a contemporary of Cæsar, who visited Egypt in the course of his thirty years’ preparation for his historical work. In what he says of the punishment of those who killed their children, he is citing the ancient Egyptians before they came under the influence of the Greeks and Romans: “Parents that killed their children, were not to die, but were forced for three days and nights together to hug them continually in their arms, and had a guard all the while over them, to see they did it; for they thought it not fit that they should die, who gave life to their children; but rather that men should be deterred from such attempts by a punishment that seemed attended with sorrow and repentance.”[157] In another section of his work, Diodorus is evidently speaking of the Egyptians of his own day: