in isolation, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been found so disastrous in the case of the Semitic and the Aryan cults, must be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless error. The key to the origin of the Egyptian faith is to be found, not in the late philosophising glosses quoted by M. de Rougé and his English disciple, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of existing African savages. Looked at from this point of view, then--the evolutionary point of view--nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early Egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations, ancestor-worship and totemism. I will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to consider by far the earliest, and infinitely the most important. And I may add that it is also, to judge by the Egyptian evidence alone, both the element which underlies the whole religious conceptions of the Nile valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon, including Osiris, Ptah, Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as many of their correlative goddesses. There is not, in fact, any great ethnical religion on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in which the basal importance of the Dead Man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient cult of Pharaohnic Egypt. The Egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. It is impossible for a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty shade of the desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent the streets of Thebes and Memphis. The commonest object of worship on all the monuments of Nile is beyond doubt the Mummy: sometimes the private mummy of an ancestor {158}or kinsman, sometimes the greater deified mummies of immemorial antiquity, blended in the later syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities, but represented to the very last in all ages of art--on the shattered Rameseum at Thebes or the Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken Denderah--as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. If ever there was a country where the Worship of the Dead was pushed to an extreme, that country was distinctly and decisively Egypt.