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down, with her head bowed over her breast, and exceedingly sad and miserable. He asked her, saying, "O Lady, wherefore art thou so sad?" And she told him that the cause of her sorrow was the handmaiden, who had been born in the house and had grown up in it, and who had just left it, threatening that she would go and tell the king about the birth of the three kings. The uncle of the handmaiden nodded his head in a consoling manner, and told Rut-tetet how she had come to him and informed him what she was going to do, and how he had given her a good beating with a rope of flax, and how she had gone to the river to fetch some water, and how a crocodile had carried her off.
There is reason to think that the three sons of Rut-tetet became the three kings of the fifth dynasty who were known by the names of Khafra, Menkaura, and Userkaf. The stories given above are valuable because they contain elements of history, for it is now well known that the immediate successors of the fourth dynasty, of which Khufu, Khafra, and Menkaura, the builders of the three great pyramids at Gizah, were the most important kings, were kings who delighted to call themselves sons of Ra, and who spared no effort to make the form of worship of the Sun-god that was practised at Anu, or Heliopolis, universal in Egypt. It is probable that the three magicians, Ubaaner, Tchatchamankh, and Teta were historical personages, whose abilities and skill in working magic appealed to the imagination of the Egyptians under all dynasties, and caused their names to be venerated to a remote posterity.
CHAPTER IV
THE BOOK OF THE DEAD
"Book of the Dead" is the name that is now generally given to the large collection of "Chapters," or compositions, both short and long, which the ancient Egyptians cut upon the walls of the corridors and chambers in pyramids and rock-hewn tombs, and cut or painted upon the insides and outsides of coffins and sarcophagi, and wrote upon