Sepulchral Architecture. 127 of the texts which throw Hght upon this subject, together with some of the reflections which those texts suggested to him.^ Were we to affirm that during thousands of years no change took place in the ideas of the Egyptians upon a future life, we should not be believed, and, as a fact, those ideas underwent a continual process of refinement. Under the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, during those centuries when the limits of Egyptian empire and Egyptian thought were carried farthest afield, we find traces of doctrines which offer notable variations, and even, when closely examined, actual contradictions. These are successive answers made during a lonor course of time to the eternal and never-changing enigma. As they became more capable of philo- sophic speculation the Egyptians modified their definition of the soul, and, by a necessary consequence, of the manner in which its persistence after death must be understood, and as always happens in such a case, these successive conceptions are super-imposed one upon another ; the last comer did not dethrone its predecessor but became inextricably blended with it in the popular imagination. We refer all those who wish to follow minutely this curious development of the Egyptian intellect to the subtle analysis of M. Maspero. That historian has applied himself to the apprehen- sion of every delicate shade of meaning in a system of thought which has to be grasped through the veil thrown around it by extreme difficulties of language and written character, but at the same time he has never attempted to endow it with a precision or logical completeness to which it had no claim. By well chosen comparisons and illustrations he enables us to understand how the Egyptian contented himself with vague notions, and how he manao^ed to harmonize ideas which seem to us inconsistent. We shall not enter into those details. We shall not seek to determine the sense which the Egyptians attached, after a certain period, to the word bdii- which has been translated soul, nor the ^ " Confcre7ice siir FHistoii-e des Ames darts V Egypte aficieune, d'aprcs hs Monuments du Musee du Louvre, in the Bulletin hebdomadaire de F Association scientifique de France, No. 594. M. Maspero has often and exhaustively treated this subject, especially in his numerous lectures at the College de France. Those lectures afforded the material for the remarkable paper in the J^ounial asiatique entitled, " Etude sur quelques Peintures et sur quelques Textes relatifs aux Funerailles " (numbers for May, June, 1878, for December-June, and November, December, 1879, and May- June, 1880). These articles have been republished in a single volume with important corrections and additions (Maisonneuve, 1880). " Ox ba. — Ed.
