The Egyptians customarily placed in the tomb, in addition to the other objects necessary for the soul's long journey beyond the earth, a papyrus scroll, a kind of passport intended to ensure its favorable reception at the many gates of the celestial realms and abodes, to place it in the presence of the sun, to guide it into the boat of this god where, luminous, it would cross the ethereal plain, and to defend it against the enemy powers that would oppose its progress. Most of the papyri preserved in European museums belong to this class of funerary manuscripts; they were placed under the burial wrappings, between the legs, under the arms, or on the mother's chest. They were largely written by scribes of the priestly caste who prepared them in advance for sale and added, at the last moment, in certain blank spaces, the name of the deceased, almost always accompanied by the name of their mother, and rarely by the name of their father. These are texts in hieroglyphic or hieratic script, interspersed with vignettes and illustrations, which provide more or less developed extracts from a codex dating back to the earliest times. The Egyptians attributed to Thoth the writing of chapter LXIV, discovered during the reign of Mencheres of the Fourth Dynasty. Chapter CXXX was supposedly found in the hypogeum built by Horus for his father Osiris during the reign of Hesepti, the Usa-

1. Only one copy in demotic script is known; it dates from the Roman period.