At any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial person to examine the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the Nile without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central object of worship--that the entire practical religion of the people was based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal offerings to the _manes_ of ancestors. Everything in Egypt points to this one conclusion. Even the great sacred ritual is the Book of the Dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that they were really enjoying everlasting life. _Mors janua vitae_ is the short summing-up of Egyptian religious notions. Death was the great beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship. Moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of the religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship {163}to God-Worship. Thus, in the tombs of Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire (Fifth Dynasty), all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. The quotations from (or anticipations of) the Book of the Dead are few and short. The great gods are rarely alluded to. Again, in the grottos of Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty) the paintings mostly represent scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities are still absent. The doctrine of rewards and punishments remains as yet comparatively in abeyance. It is only at the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes (of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire chapters of the Book of the Dead are transcribed at length, and the walls are covered with “a whole army of grotesque and fantastic divinities.” “But the Egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods, distinct from their ancestors--national, or local, or common gods--whose names and figures have come down to us inscribed upon all the monuments.” Quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors--gods whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. But it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various ruling families or dominant cities; and in one or two of the most important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.