— 44 — 
whatever to the mode of procedure in the 21st dynasty, to offer 
any satisfactory interjn-ctatiou of this passa<2,e, unless the word 
"opening" be used for apertures other than those artificially 
made. 
When the body w as ])laced in the salt bath it would have only 
the opening in the left flank and the " seven doors of the head," 
i.e., the statutory eight. When it came out of the bath an inci- 
sion would be made for stuffing the back, one in each shoulder 
for the arms, each leg would be tunnelled from the abdomen— in 
all five new incisions. These, together with the four " à la poitrine" 
— whatever these may be, perhaps neck, the two breasts and some 
other of the varied openings known to have been made — would 
make up the nine secondary apertures completing the statutory 
seventeen. Now that philologists have a more accurate and 
intimate acquaintance withtheancientEgyptianscriptsthanBrugsch 
could have liad forty years ago, it is possible that a new transla- 
tion might clear up some of the obscurity in these renderings. 
So far as we are aware no evidence of any such manipulations as 
this papyrus hints at were practised at the time (about 200 years 
B. C.) when it was written. But at present it is impossible to 
say whether the statements contained in the Rhind papyrus are 
merely the tra(hti()nal report of a practise long extinct or on the 
other hand whether they might not be an account of operations 
sometimes employed in Ptolemaic times, which may or may not 
l )e identical Avith those resorted to by embalmers in the time of the 
21st d}'nasty. 
The ancient Egyptians Avere ahvays regarded by visitors of 
foreign nationality as a people of strange customs ; but none of 
their practices could haA'e been considered so extraordinarily bizarre 
as that Avhich forms the subject of the foregoing account. 
That a people strongly imbued Avith the belief in a future life 
or exen those Avho, not having such a belief, had an intense 
