TOMB REPRESENTATIONS—ANGLERS’ DEBT 303 
Difference in religious belief, for one thing, precluded. The 
Sumerians, the first settlers recognised by history in the plains 
of Shinar, conceived (as did their successors the Babylonians 
and Assyrians) the next world to be a forbidding place of 
darkness and dust beneath the earth, to which all, both good 
and bad, descended. Hence burial under the court of a house 
or the floor of a room, often without any tomb or coffin, or 
much equipment for the life beyond the grave, was sufficient. 
In belief and equipment the Egyptians differed toto orbe. 
For them after death was preordained a life to obtain which 
the body must be preserved from destruction ; otherwise it 
hastened to dissolution and second death, 7z.e. annihilation. 
To avoid this fate, they resorted to permanent tombs, embalm- 
ment, and mummification. 
But as the Double, or Ka, of the departed (unlike the Soul, 
or Ba, which fared forth to follow the gods) never quitted the 
place where the mummy rested, daily offerings of food and 
drink for its sustenance had to be placed in the chapel chamber 
of the richer tombs. Sooner or later came the time when for 
reasons of expense, or other, the dead of former generations 
found themselves neglected, and the Ka was reduced to 
seeking his food in the refuse of the town. To obviate such 
a desecration, and ensure that the offerings consecrated on the 
day of burial might for all time preserve their virtue, the 
mourners hit upon the idea of drawing and describing them on 
the walls of the chapel. 
Furthermore to make homelike and familiar his new 
abode, or the “‘ Eternal House ’’ (in contrast to which the houses 
of the living were but wayside inns) elaborate precautions 
were taken. We find depicted on the walls of the chapel the 
lord of the domain, surrounded by sights and pursuits familiar 
to him when alive. “‘ The Master in his tomb,’’ writes Maspero, 
‘“superintends the preliminary operations necessary to raise 
the food by which he is to be nourished in the form of funerary 
offerings: scenes and implements of sowing, harvesting, 
hunting, fishing meet his eye.”’ 
From these representations of actual life, intended for the 
comfort of the dead, we, the living, are enabled not only to 
