"Get thee back, thou Crocodile of the North, that feedest upon what is left by the hours. That which is thy taboo is in me. The emissions shall [not] fall upon my head. I am Tem.[2] "Get thee back, thou Crocodile of the North, for the Scorpion-goddess[3] is inside me, unborn (?). I am Uatch-Merti (?).[4] "Created things are in the hollow of my hand, and the things that are not yet made are inside me. I am clothed in and supplied with thy spells, O Rā, which are above me and beneath me.... I am Rā, the self-protected, no evil thing whatsoever shall overthrow me" (Chap. XXXII). [Footnote 1: A god of the Eastern Delta and a local form of the Sun-god early in the day.] [Footnote 2: The primeval god, a form of Pautti, the oldest Egyptian god.] [Footnote 3: She was called "Serqet."] [Footnote 4: A green-eyed serpent-god, or goddess, equipped with great power to destroy.] CHAPTER V BOOKS OF THE DEAD OF THE GRÆCO-ROMAN PERIOD From what has been said in the preceding chapter it will be clear that only wealthy people could afford to bury copies of the great Book of the Dead with their deceased relatives. Whether the chapters that formed it were written on coffins or on papyrus the cost of copying the work by a competent scribe must have been relatively very great. Towards the close of the twenty-sixth dynasty a feeling spread among the Egyptians that only certain parts of the Book of the Dead were essential for the resurrection of the body and for the salvation of the soul, and men began to bury with their dead copies of the most important chapters of it in a very much abridged form. A little later the scribes produced a number of works, in which they included only such portions of the most important chapters as were considered necessary to effect the resurrection of the body. In other words, they rejected all the old magical elements in the Book of the Dead, and preserved only the texts and formulæ that appertained to the cult of Osiris, the first man who had risen from the dead. One of the oldest of these later substitutes for the Book of the Dead is the _Shai en Sensen_, or "Book of Breathings." Several copies of this work are extant in the funerary papyri, and the following sections, translated from a papyrus in the British Museum, will give an idea of the character of the Book: