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Excerpt from The Arts of Ancient Egypt: A Lecture Delivered Before the Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts Another foreign Introductlon was the burlal of Slave images. In the tombs of the period of the Empire images are generally found, bearing in either hand a hoe, and with a basket on the back an inscription around them recording that they were to be vivified in the future state, and work for the deceased person, cultivating his fields with the hoes and carrying the earth in the basket. Now these figures, which are found by the hundred in the later times of the Empire, are absolutely unknown in the Old or Middle King dom before the Hyksos invasion, and the earliest examples, Dr. Birch thinks, may belong to the eighteenth dynasty: the beginning of the Empire. These figures are evidently cheap substitutes for Slaves immolated at the grave of their master, to accompany him to the future world, a sub stitution in the same Spirit as the use of paper dollars by the Chinese in their ancestral offerings. And when we think of the ghastly Scythic funerals described by Hero dotus, and consider that during historic times we know the Scythians to have made inroads in the'southern parts of Asia, we can hardly fail to regard this ceremonial slave burial appearing first after the Hyksos invasion, as another of the Asiatic ideas imported into Egypt, and perhaps adopted by the Hyksos originally from more northern tribes. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfu