How long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is shown by Mr. Renouf himself in one instructive passage. The kings who built the Pyramids in the Early Empire endowed a priestly office for the purpose of celebrating the periodical rites of offering to their ghosts or mummies. Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a certain person who lived under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before his time. We have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors who filled the same office immediately after Khufu’s death. So that in this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch continued for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “If in the case of private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we find no proof of so persistent a veneration, that is because in ordinary tombs the ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children or descendants of the deceased person. Often, at the end of a few generations, either through negligence, removals, ruin, or extinction of the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out altogether.” For this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense importance was attached by the Egyptians to the begetting of a son who should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed by others after him. The duty of undertaking these rites is thoroughly insisted upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while on the other hand, the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the most terrible of all ancient Egyptian imprecations. “Many centuries after the construction of a tomb, Egyptian travellers have left a record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, {161}of the abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the funeral formula.” In fact, the whole practical religion of the ordinary Egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of the _ka_--the _genii, manes, or lares_ of the departed.