Some of the inscriptions speak of the important part which a priest accompanying the spirit in the under-world played in getting the spirit through the various demon-guarded doors and arguing his case, as a barrister might, before the judge. I say spirit, but in the pictures the body is shown, very substantially. Of course it was all the more to the priests' advantage to prove how useful they could be in the after-life, as well as in this. {44} The mummies, as you must know, were dead bodies preserved by putting chemicals into them and over them, and wrapping them round, and often by painting their faces, and giving them altogether an appearance which to us, discovering them after all these years, seems rather dreadful, but no doubt was much admired. We have no record of the time when the Egyptians began thus to "mummy" their dead; we may almost say that we have no record of a time when they did not do so. There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember, has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C. At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard the king as being almost identical with--almost the same as--Osiris. It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in the body of the reigning king. [Illustration: BANDAGING A MUMMY.] [Sidenote: Mummies] Later on in the story, many great people, as well as the kings, were mummied, and yet later again it became quite common with all classes. Sacred animals, such as the cats in Bubastis, hawks in the temples of Horus, and even crocodiles and quite large creatures, have been found, mummied, in great numbers. The art and trade {45} of making mummies was a very important one, and grew to greater perfection as the artists began to learn more of the preserving power of chemicals. Generally, they are the mummies of royal personages that have come down to us in the best preservation, no doubt because the greatest care and expense were given to their embalming. One of the best is of that famous king Tethmosis III. who was the greatest hero of that greatest eighteenth dynasty up, or down, to which we have now brought our story. I have said, and you will be ready to agree with it, that all this care for the dead body shows what high value the Egyptians placed on the corpse, although life and the soul had left it. But they had the idea that the soul could be brought back again, by incantations, to go into the body again through the mouth, and so make the mouth and the legs and other parts move, almost as they did before death. That idea explains perhaps why they took so much pains about keeping the body perfect. It may explain why the wicked Seth, in his malice, cut up the body of Osiris, whom he had murdered, and scattered the pieces in fourteen different places, and also why the faithful Isis collected them and put them all together again.