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 yet been satisfactorily explained: some learned men suppose it to have been a kind of senate-house, where the representatives of the various nomes assembled for political deliberation; others regard it as a real Pantheon, consecrated to the worship of all the gods of Egypt; while a third class insist that, to whatever other uses it may have been applied, its principal object was to afford an asylum to the mummies of the kings who erected it.

Non nostrum tantas componere lites.

However this may be, it seems extremely probable that the idea of the Elysian Fields did actually originate in Egypt, and migrate thence into Greece. Those delicious habitations of the dead, as Creuzer observes after Diodorus, which are spoken of by the Greeks, really existed on the banks of a lake called Acheron, situated in the environs of Memphis, and surrounded by beautiful meadows and cool lakes, and forests of lotus and reeds. These were the waters which were yet to be traversed by the dead who had passed the river, and who were journeying to their sepulchral grottoes in the kingdom of Osiris or Pluto, the [Greek: Hormos agathôn], "haven of the good, the pious, the virtuous," to which none were admitted whose lives were incapable of sustaining the strictest scrutiny. The heaven of the Egyptians, contrary to what might have been expected, was a place of more complete happiness and enjoyment than that of the Greeks. The very word Elysium, according to Jablonski, signified glory and splendour; but before they could arrive at this region of joy, all human souls were condemned to pass through a circle of transmigrations, greater or less, according to their deeds.

To return, however, to Pococke: From Faioum he returned by Dashone and Sacara to Cairo, from whence he set sail on the 6th of December for