In ancient Egypt the doorway shrine of the gods was prominent, as in Babylonia.[290] Moreover, a false door was represented in the earlier mastabahs, or tombs, of the Old Empire of Egypt. This representation of a door was toward the west, in which direction Osiris, the god of the under-world, was supposed to enter his realm as the sun went down. On or around this false door were memorial inscriptions, and prayers for the dead; and before it was a table, or altar, for offerings to the _ka_, or soul, of the dead.[291] Gradually this false door came to be recognized as the monumental slab, tablet, or stele, on which were inscribed the memorials of the deceased. As a doorway or a niche, square-topped, or arched, it was the shrine of the one worshiped; and as a panel, or independent stele, it was the place of record of the object of reverence. “Even at the beginning of the Middle Empire the door form disappeared completely, and the whole space of the stone was taken up with the representation of the deceased sitting before a table of offerings, receiving gifts from his relatives and servants. Soon afterwards it became the custom to round off the stone at the top, and when, under the New Empire, pictures of a purely religious character took the place of the former representations, no one looking at the tomb stele could have guessed that it originated from the false door.”[292] A “false door” was, in ancient Egypt, a valued gift from a sovereign to an honored subject. Doors of this kind were sometimes richly carved and painted, and were deemed of priceless value by the recipient.[293] In Phenicia,[294] Carthage,[295] Cyprus,[296] Sardinia,[297] Sicily,[298] and in Abyssinia,[299] a like prominence was given to the door as a door, in temple and in tomb, and as a niche for the figure of a deity or for the representation of one who had crossed the threshold of the new life. And the door-form is a sacred memorial of the dead in primitive lands in various parts of the world, from the rudest trilithon to the more finished structures of a high civilization.[300] In primitive New Zealand the gateway, or doorway, of a village, a cemetery, or a public building, is both a sacred image and a sacred passage-way. It is in the form of a superhuman personage, and it has its guardians on either hand.[301] A doorway with an altar between its posts was a symbol of religious worship in ancient Mexico, as in the far East.[302] It would seem that the “mihrab,” or prayer niche, pointing toward Meccah, in Muhammadan lands, and the Chinese honorary portals and ancestral tablets,[303] as well as the niches for images of saints in churches or at wayside shrines, or for heroes in public halls, in Christian lands, are a survival of the primitive doorway in a tomb.