Manchester Memoirs, Vol. lix. (191 5), No. 10. 33 



ling" in the soil lying in the attitude naturally assumed 

 by primitive people when sleeping. Its vital spirit or ka 

 was liberated from the body, but hovered round the 

 corpse so long as its tissues were preserved. It needed 

 food and all the other things that ministered to the wel- 

 fare and comfort of the living, not omitting the luxuries 

 and personal adornments which helped to make life 

 pleasant. Hence at all times graves became the objects 

 of plunder on the part of unscrupulous contemporaries ; 

 and so incidentally the knowledge was forthcoming from 

 time to time of the fate of the body in the grave. 



The burial customs of the Proto-Egyptians, starting 

 from those common to the whole group of the Brown 

 Race in the Neolithic phase, first became differentiated 

 from the rest when special importance came to be attached 

 to the preservation of the actual tissues of the body. 



It was this development, no doubt, that prompted 

 their more careful arrangements for the protection of the 

 corpse, and gradually led to the aggrandisement of the 

 tomb, the more abundant provision of food offerings and 

 funerary equipment in general. 



Even in the earliest known Pre-dynastic period the 

 Proto-Egyptians were in the habit of loosely wrapping 

 their dead in linen — for the art of the weaver goes back 

 to that remote time in Egypt — and then protecting the 

 wrapped corpse from contact with the soil by an addi- 

 tional wrapping of goat-skin or matting. 



Then, as the tomb became larger, to accommodate 

 the more abundant offerings, almost every conceivable 

 device was tried to protect the body from such contact. 

 Instead of the goat-skin or matting, in many cases the 

 same result was obtained by lining the grave with series 

 of sticks, with slabs of wood, with pieces of unhewn stone, 

 or by lining the grave with mud-bricks. In other cases, 



