212 THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS. CHAP. XII. 



belief at the earliest periods of which any records 

 exist, and Osiris the judge and president of Amenti 

 is mentioned in tombs belonging to cotemporaries 

 of the Kings who erected the pyramids, upwards of 

 2000 years before our era. Indeed, if at any early 

 period the religion of Egypt bore a diiFerent cha- 

 racter, or if any great change took place in its doc- 

 trines, this must have been long before the found- 

 ation of the monuments that remain ; and, with 

 the exception of some addition to the catalogue 

 of minor Deities, and an alteration in the name of 

 Amun*, we perceive no change in the religion 

 from the earliest times to the reigns of the Ptole- 

 mies and Caesars. That several Genii, or minor 

 Gods, particularly those who were supposed to per- 

 form inferior functions in a future state, and some 

 local Divinities, were added at various periods, is 

 highly jn'obable, but no change appears to have 

 taken place in the form of worship, or in the main 

 tenets of the religion : the ceremonies of the 

 temple may have become more splendid, the offer- 

 ings more rich, or the increased dimensions of the 

 temples may have admitted a larger number of con- 

 templar Gods ; and in the time of the Ptolemies 

 and Caesars the rites of Osiris may have become more 

 generally preferred ; but no change was effected 

 in the religion itself, and the preference given to 

 any peculiar Deity was only what had always hap- 

 pened in Egypt, where each town or district paid 

 the greatest honours to the God who was supposed 

 immediately to preside over it. Even tiie alter- 



* I shall have occasion to mention this afterwards in Ch. 13. 



