49
meat and bread, the beer and wine, which had once been piled
up in the dead man's tomb, and from the time of the Eighteenth
Dynasty onwards we find terra-cotta cakes, inscribed with the
name and titles of the deceased, substituted for the funerary
bread.
The same idea as that which led to the manufacture of these
sham offerings had introduced statues and images into the tomb at
an early date. In the tombs of the Third and Fourth and following
Dynasties, statues have been found of a very high order of art. No
effort has been spared to make them speaking likenesses of the
men and women in whose tombs they were placed; even the eyes
have been made lifelike with inlaid ivory and obsidian. Usually,
too, the statues are carved out of the hardest, and therefore the [051]
most enduring, of stone, so that, when the corpse of the dead
was shrivelled beyond recognition, his counterpart in stone still
represented him just as he was in life. But the statue had its Ka
like the man it represented, and if the likeness were exact, the Ka
of the statue and the Ka of the man would be one and the same.
Hence the Ka could find a fitting form in which to clothe itself
whenever it wished to revisit the tomb and there nourish itself on
the offerings made to the dead by the piety of his descendants.
And even if the mummy perished, the statue would remain for
the homeless Ka.^18
It was probably on this account that we so often find more
than one statue of the dead man in the same tomb. The more
numerous the statues, the greater chance there was that one at
least of them would survive down to the day when the Ka should
at last be again united to its body and soul. And the priests of
Heliopolis discovered yet a further reason for the practice. From
time immemorial Ra the sun-god had been invoked there under
(^18) Professor Maspero, to whom, along with Sir P. Le Page Renouf, we owe
the explanation of what the Egyptians meant by the Ka, first pointed out the
meaning of the portrait statues which were buried in the tomb (Recueil de
Travaux, i. pp. 152-160).