Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/430

392 is accompanied by full submarginal notes and reduced reproductions of the more characteristic and interesting vignettes, another 130 pages. An elaborate and most useful bibliography fills seven pages more, and the editor's Introduction runs to no fewer than 145 pages. The headings of the sections will show better than any description the nature and interest of this Introduction; "The Versions of the Book of the Dead," "The Legend of Osiris," "The Doctrine of Eternal Life," "Egyptian Ideas of God," "The Abode of the Blessed," "The Gods of the Book of the Dead," "Geographical and Mythological Places," "Funeral Ceremonies," "The Papyrus of Ani."

It would be out of place in Folklore, even were the reviewer competent, to discuss Dr. Budge's work from the technical Egyptological standpoint. Caution and prudence are displayed on every page; the authorities are cited fully, and the interpretations advanced are those supported by the weightiest authorities. The layman can use this volume in full confidence that it represents the doctrine generally agreed to by experts, concerning the obscure and complicated subjects of which it treats. He will, if he is wise, pay regard to the opinions which have commended themselves to the experts, but he will also recollect—and Dr. Budge's candid and unprejudiced exposition quickens rather than deadens the recollection—the great and manifold difficulties that still beset the consideration of Egyptian mythology in general and eschatology in especial, and will regard much that is now accepted by the experts as useful working hypotheses rather than as assured results. If there is one fault to be found with Dr. Budge it is that he has hardly laid sufficient stress upon the difficulties presented by what may be called the official view of the Egyptian belief in a future life. Some of them may briefly be glanced at by way of emphasising the extraordinary interest of the subject and the extreme complexity of the questions involved.

The official chronology is taken for granted by Dr. Budge, and with it the ascription of the more characteristic features of the Egyptian creed, e.g. the Osiris myth, and the elaborately complex eschatological psychology, to the Pyramid kings, or to a period from 3,000 to 4,000 years before Christ. But the very text, the funeral inscription of the 6th dynasty Unas, from which an early date is argued for conceptions as highly developed on the moral as on the metaphysical side, contains passages in which the rela-