In Chapter CLXXX. the deceased says: “My offerings are in heaven in the Field of Rā, and my sepulchral meals are on earth in the Field of Ȧaru.”
It is unnecessary to multiply extracts from the religious texts of later dynasties, for, so far as the importance and necessity of providing the spirits of the dead with meat and drink are concerned, the same ideas recur, expressed in almost the same words, century after century, and dynasty after dynasty, until the worship of Osiris came to an end throughout the country of Egypt. It will be seen in another part of this book that the list of offerings which were made to Unȧs, a king of the Vth Dynasty, about b.c. 3300, is repeated without many variants in the tomb of Peṭā-Ȧmen-ȧpt, wdio flourished under the XXVIth Dynasty, some twenty-seven centuries later. Professor Maspero has shown that there are several mistakes in the texts in the Pyramid of Unȧs, due partly to the ignorance of the masons who cut the inscriptions on the walls, and partly to the fact that the scribes who wrote the drafts for them did not always understand the passages which they were transcribing. The variants in the text of Peṭā-Ȧmen-ȧpt may be the result of the difficulties experienced by the scribes of his time in understanding some portions of the text, but there is certainly no ground for thinking that they are due to any authoritative change in the readings of the Ritual of Funerary Offerings.
All the facts we now have tend to show that at some
