Furthermore, there exists to this day in Egypt an apparent survival of the ancient Osiris rite, in an attenuated form (like the mock mayors in England), which distinctly suggests {311}the identification I am here attempting. In Upper Egypt, Klunzinger tells us, on the first day of the (Egyptian) solar year, when the Nile has usually reached its highest point, the regular government is suspended for three days in each district, and every town chooses its own temporary ruler. This temporary king (a local Osiris, as I believe) wears a conical cap, and a long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange mantle. I say unhesitatingly, the dress of an Osiris, wearing the old royal cap of Upper Egypt. With a wand of office in his hands--like the crook which Osiris carries on the monuments--and attended by men disguised as scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the governor’s house. The governor allows himself to be deposed; the mock king, mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to whose decisions even the governor himself must bow. In short, like other temporary kings, he really enjoys royal authority for the moment. After three days, however, the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in which he is encased is committed to the flames; and from its ashes creeps forth the Fellah who impersonated him. I do not doubt that the case here represents the antique coffer or mummy-case of Osiris. In this graphic ceremonial, then, I see a survival, with the customary mitigations, of the annual Osiris sacrifice, once actually performed on a human victim. I do not doubt that in Egypt as elsewhere a mock king was formerly chosen in place of the real king to personate the descendant of Osiris, an Osiris himself; and that this substitute was put to death, and torn to pieces or burnt, while his ashes were winnowed and scattered over the land. It may also be worth while to enquire whether the scourge which Osiris holds in the bas-reliefs is not the equivalent of the divine whip of the Potraj, and the other whips which Mr. Gomme has so ingeniously correlated with that very venerable and mystic attribute.