— 45 — 
veneration for their dead should desire to preserve the body itself 
from corruption is quite intelligible to all men ; but it is not so 
easy to understand how it came to pass that these Egyptians, who 
are said to have held the body in such great respect as to have 
regarded it almost as sacred, should have resorted to such digust- 
ing manipulations as packing the limbs with mud, involving as 
it did the destruction of a large part of the body and resulting, 
at best, in little better than a caricature of the deceased. 
It is quite beyond my province to attempt to explain this 
apparent paradox — to reconcile these wanton mutilations and the 
making of these sham restorations with the belief in the sincerity 
of the Egyptians sacred respect for the dead body. I am, however, 
persuaded to give an explanation suggested to me by Dr. George 
A. Reisner (in charge of the Hearst Egyptological Expedition of 
the University of California) ; not because 1 can pretend to express 
any opinion on its merits, but because I have been able to obtain 
information regarding certain practices unknown to Dr. Reisner 
when he suggested that I should look for them in support of his 
hypothesis. 
At certain periods of their history the ancient Egyptians were 
accustomed to place in the tomb of their dead a statue representing 
the deceased, so that when the perishable body should have lost 
all likeness to the person in life the statue would remain as a 
dwelling for the Ka or " double. " These statues were painted 
red in the case of men, and yellow in women. 
Dr. Reisner made the suggestion that all the elaborate measures 
taken to restore the integrity of the skin and to preserve the 
form of the body might be explained on the supposition that the 
embalmers of the 21st dynasty aimed at making the body itself 
take the place of the statue : in other words the corpse was 
preserved and fashioned so as to retain some resemblance to the 
deceased and be the home of the Ka. It was perhaps for the 
