20 
March 1. —The Eev. John Kenrick read a notice of *‘The 
Papyrus of Nas-Kliem,” a work by Dr. Birch, of the British 
Museum, presented to the Society’s Library by His Poyal Highness 
the Prince of "Wales. The Papyrus described by Dr. Birch was 
found upon a mummy in a tomb on the western side of the Nile 
at Thebes, which was opened in the presence of the Prince of 
Wales. It is one of those papyri, with a religious subject, 
which are generally met with rolled up and deposited either 
close to the skin or to the innermost wrapper of the mummy, or 
else externally on the breast or by the sides. They relate to the 
doctrine of the immortality of the soul and to its adventures after 
quitting the body, which are described in a work extending, when 
perfect, to 165 chapters ; but the papyri of the class to which that 
described by Dr. Birch belonged, rarely contain more than a small 
portion of the whole work. The general idea conveyed by the 
emblems and by the hieroglyphic legends, is the assimilation of the 
deceased to Osiris—^the established symbol of life after death. The 
epithets Osirian and Justified are applied on the monuments and in 
the papyri to the deceased person. Most of the papyri of this class 
exhibit the judgment scene before Osiris and his forty-two assessors, 
the declarations of the deceased in which he protests his innocence 
of crime, the weighing of the symbol of his heart, his purification 
by fire, his passage through the gates of the Elysian fields, his 
employments there, his embarcation in the boat of the Sun on the 
celestial river, &c. The Papyrus brought home by the Prince of 
Wales, which is much mutilated, and was written by an ignorant 
or dishonest scribe, cannot be completely explained, although there 
is no doubt as to its general purport. It belongs to a class of 
papyri in which the phenomena of life and death, and the belief in 
the immortality of the soul, were assimilated to the course of the 
sun. It was executed for a priest or prophet of Amen-Ea, the 
Theban Jupiter ; his name was Nas-Khem, and he was the son of 
a female functionary named Tahesi, who appears to have been a 
singer. The papyrus is twelve feet in length. Dr. Birch considers 
its age to be probably as late as the fourth century b. c., near the 
close of the Persian dominion in Egypt. 
April 5.—The Eev. John Kenrick read a paper by the Eev. 
J. C. Atkinson, of Danby, giving an “Account of Excavations 
of Barrows in the Neighbourhood of Danby in Cleveland.” 
(This paper has been read before the Geological and Polytechnic 
