dissatisfaction with the old belief in the simple duplicate
world, the world of Earu under the earth. It is noteworthy that
this first appears in royal tombs. These texts are written for
kings alone. It is only many centuries later that the texts of
the book of the dead showed similar possibilities open to the
common man. This is the usual course of all advances in Egypt,--
architecture, sculpture, writing, whatever gain in skill or
knowledge there is, appears first in the service of the royal
family. Thus, even in the conception of immortality, the new
ideas, the better immortality was first thought out for the
benefit of the king. The basis for this lay simply in the life on
earth. The king had come early to have a sort of divinity
ascribed to him. His chief name was the Horus name. Menes was the
Horus Aha; Cheops was the Horus Mejeru; Pepy II was the Horus
Netery-khau. But he was also the son of Ra, the sun-god, endued
with life forever. The king was a god, and it could only be that
in his future life he shared the life of the gods. Thus, all is
no more confused or mysterious than is the conception of the life
of the gods themselves.

But the texts go even further than this and identify the dead
god-man, who as Horus was king on earth, with the father of
Horus, the dead god of the earth, Osiris. This identification of
the dead man with the dead god Osiris was later enlarged to
include all men, and became in the Ptolemaic period the most
characteristic feature of the Egyptian conception of life after
death.

The Osiris story as it can be pieced together from the pyramid
texts [See A. Erman: _Die Aegyptische Religion_, p. 38 ff.] was