In the earliest Egyptian tombs the beautiful and realistic drawings have long attracted the attention of archæologists, both on account of their intrinsic merit, and from the curious contrast which they present to the more conventional religious drawing and sculpture of a later date. Though the drawings of the first class are found exclusively upon the walls of tombs, they have apparently no connection either with ideas of death or with religious observances. They seem to represent merely the earthly and secular life of the entombed man: here he is superintending his labourers at their work, here he is hunting, here he is reclining at the banquet and watching the performances of fools or dancing-girls. This is what a mere study of the drawings suggests. A more complete study of the inscriptions which accompany them have, however, convinced Egyptian archæologists that the object of these wall-paintings is not merely decorative or representative, in the sense in which drawings are representative to us. Their essential use is what we may call magical. They are believed to contain (and this is a universal savage belief as touching drawings or sculptures of any kind) some elements of the things they represent. Thus the tomb-paintings would be a kind of _doubles_ of the things which the deceased enjoyed in this life. And they would be placed in the tomb in order that the _double_ of the deceased (what the Egyptians called his _ka_) might enjoy the usufruct of them in the new state. This is the simplest _magic_ use of the copies or representation of things in early Egyptian tombs. But the idea of the makers of these drawings seems often to be more complicated than this. The drawings by being placed in the tombs are supposed to give the _ka_ of the deceased (_not_ in the tomb, but far away in the land of shades) the enjoyment of the doubles of the things which he enjoyed in life. In this instance the drawings are not the actual possessions which the dead man has, but they correspond to, or influence, or in a certain sense create in the land of shades new possessions, the doubles of the old. These subtle and complex notions are by no means to be expressed by the conventional words _magic_, _animism_, etc., loosely thrown about by anthropologists.