The transition from such images to small stone sarcophagi, like those of the Etruscan tombs, is by no means a great one. These sarcophagi contained the burnt ashes of the dead, but were covered by a lid which usually represented the deceased, reclining, as if at a banquet, with a beaker in his hands. The tombs in which the sarcophagi were placed were of two types; one, the stone pyramid or {082}cone, which, says Dr. Isaac Taylor, “is manifestly a survival of the tumulus”; the other, the rock-cut chamber, “which is a survival of the cave.” These lordly graves are no mere cheerless sepulchres; they are abodes for the dead, constructed on the model of the homes of the living. They contain furniture and pottery; and their walls are decorated with costly mural paintings. They are also usually provided with an antechamber, where the family could assemble at the annual feast to do homage to the spirits of departed ancestors, who shared in the meal from their sculptured sarcophagus lids. At a further stage of distance from the primitive mummy-idol we come upon the image pure and simple. The Mexicans, for example, as we have seen, were cremationists; and when men killed in battle were missing, they made wooden figures of them, which they honoured, and then burnt them in place of the bodies. In somewhat the same spirit the Egyptians used to place beside the mummy itself an image of the dead, to act as a refuge or receptacle for the soul, “in case of the accidental destruction of the actual body.” So the Mexicans once more, if one of their merchants died on a journey, were accustomed to make a statue of wood in the shape of the deceased, to which they paid all the honours they would have done to his actual corpse before burning it. In Africa, while a king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. Mr. Spencer has collected several similar instances of idols substituted for the bodies of the dead. The Roman _imagines_ wore masks of wax, which preserved in like manner the features of ancestors. Perhaps the most curious modern survival of this custom of double representations is to be found in the effigies of our kings and queens still preserved in Westminster Abbey.