Egyptian religious poetry

48 EGYPTIAN RELIGIOUS POETRY

things that are hated. It is the Mind which gives Life to the peaceful and Death to the guilty. It is the Mind which makes every kind of work and all Art. The hands act, the feet walk, the limbs move, as they are commanded, because of what the Mind thinks and the Tongue speaks.

This section of the inscription ends with the words: “ And Ptah rested, after he had made all the things as well as all the Words of God” ; a phrase suggesting the origin of the words which end the Biblical account of Creation. I quote here Breasted’s summing-up of this inscription :

As Ptah furnishes all designs to the architect and craftsman, so now he does the same for all men in all that they do ; he becomes the supreme mind ; he is mind and all things proceed from him. The world and all that is in it existed as thought in his mind; and his thoughts, like his plans for buildings and works of art, needed but to be expressed in spoken words to take concrete form as material realities. Gods and men alike proceeded from mind, and all that they do is but the mind of the god working in them. [BHE., p. 357]

As the greater part of our knowledge concerning the funeral rites and the beliefs in the Hereafter are obtained from tombs, and as the number of tombs excavated greatly exceeds the number of temples and houses, our information on this subject is greater than our knowledge of the gods. The funerary rites for the wealthy were highly elaborate, and were copied from the ceremonies at the burial of a Pharaoh, with the modifications due to the lesser rank of the dead man. The Pharaoh’s burial rites were those which were said to have been performed by Horus over his father Osiris ; therefore when all the dead were identified with Osiris they could claim the same ceremonies. Mummification was important, for without the actual body to which to return, neither the ka nor the soul could survive.