For in course of time the early Egyptians came to learn, no doubt again from the discoveries of their tomb-robbers, that the fate of the corpse, after remaining for some time in a roomy rock-cut tomb or stone coffin, was vastly different from that which befell the body when simply buried in the hot, dry, desiccating sand. In respect of the former they acquired the idea which the Greeks many centuries later embalmed in the word “sarcophagus” under the simple belief that the disappearance of the flesh was due to the stone in some mysterious way devouring it.[7] [Certain modern archæologists within recent years have entertained an equally child-like, though even less informed, view when they claimed the absence of any trace of the flesh in certain stone sarcophagi as evidence in favour of a fantastic belief that the Neolithic people of the Mediterranean area were addicted to the supposed practice which Italian archæologists call _scarnitura_.] But by the time the discovery was made that bodies placed in more sumptuous tombs were no longer preserved as they were apt to be when buried in the sand, the idea of the necessity for the preservation of the body as the essential condition for the attainment of a future existence had become fixed in the minds of the people and established by several centuries of belief as _the_ cardinal tenet of their faith. Thus the very measures they had taken the more surely to guard and preserve the sacred remains of their dead had led to a result the reverse of what had been intended. The elaborate ritual that had grown up and the imposing architectural traditions were not abandoned when this discovery was made. Even in these modern enlightened days human nature does not react in that way. The cherished beliefs held by centuries of ancestors are not renounced for any discovery of science. The ethnologist has not given up his objections to the idea of the spread of culture, now that all the difficulties that militated against the acceptance of the common-sense view have been removed! Nor did the Egyptians of the Proto-dynastic period revert to the practices of their early ancestors and take to sand-burial again. They adopted the only other alternative open to a people who retained implicitly the belief in the necessity of preserving the body, _i.e._, they set about attempting to attain by art what nature unaided no longer secured, so long as they clung to their custom of burying in large tombs. They endeavoured artificially to preserve the bodies of their dead. This explains what I meant to imply when I said that the megalithic idea and the incentive to mummify the dead are genetically related, the one to the other. The stone-tomb came into existence as a direct result of the importance attached to the corpse. This development defeated the very object that inspired it. The invention of the art of embalming was the logical outcome of the attempt to remedy this unexpected result.