Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick.

  • James Bonwick
Date:
1878
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Egyptian belief and modern thought / by James Bonwick. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    those who need a deal of hedging-in to keep them on the straight line of duty. The dead received mystical names, as those acquired on earth were of no avail below in the Shades. Thus we read of one, “ Osiris is thy name in the bosom of the ghosts, Oun-nofre (good king) is thy name in the inferior heaven.” Dances took place at graves, according to Gerhard, to testify to the welcome the deceased would experience by friends already in Hades. Such dances are not, however, confined to Egypt, being the custom in many lands, as among the aborigines of Australia, and expressing the wel- come to be received below. The Prophet Isaiah, in one of his loftiest flights of eloquence, has one of the few refer- ences to immortality in the Old Testament, when he gives the greeting of the ghostly kings to the new comer, and the sarcastic cry of “ Is this the man that made the earth to tremble It has been commonly said that the embalming was adopted for hygienic reasons. The wise priests, who were would that all priests were such!—real progressionists, zealous advocates of reform, earnest extirpators of evil and promoters of good, seeing the effect of decaying bodies upon the health of the living in such a climate, were said to have suggested the propriety of such pre- servation, and, by their public influence, got the system securely and permanently adopted. How ancient this was, will appear from the fact that tombs of Egypt are now recognised by Egyptologists as dating, perhaps, 4,500 before Christ I Over six thousand years since, and, very probably, a thousand years or more before that epoch, the mummy system was in existence. Whatever originated it therefore, must have been a principle of extreme antiquity. But could it have been on merely sanitary considerations that the wise priests of Egypt, say, some seven thousand