XXXIV PREFACE.
The information which the Coptic martyrdom of Saint George affords us in respect of hell is very interesting; firstly, because it shows what the Copts thought hell was like, and secondly, because we see from it that the ideas of the ancient Egyptians on this subject are reproduced with but slight variation.
The Coptic translators of the Bible rendered Dinb and 6 gdys by ⲁⲙⲉⲛϯ, i. c., oer Amentet, a word which meant first of all ‘the place where the sun hid himself’, and afterwards ‘the place of the dead’.1
In this place Osiris sat in a hall of judgment surrounded by the forty-two “assessors” of the dead.2
Anubis, the god of the dead, stood by waiting to seize and carry off the unfortunate soul that had been “weighed in the balance and found wanting”3, and near him stood the beast, part lion, part crocodile, and part hippopotamus.
The Copts inherited their idea of the judgment hall in Amenti from their ancestors the ancient Egyptians; and the burning fires which, in the old mythology, consumed the enemies of the Sun god, were made to assist in torturing the souls of the damned.
The Coptic hell was a place of fervent and parching heat, and it is said that “the heat of the sun is nothing beside that of Amenti, and if a man were to pass all his time standing in the sun, it would not be equal to one day
1 Brugsch, Diet. Géog. i, p. 33.
2 See the vignette to the 125th chap. of the Book of the Dead.
3 For a very interesting paper on the connexion of the verse in Daniel with the scene in the Book of the Dead see Clermont Ganneau in the Journal Asiatique, Série 8, t. viii, pp. 36-—67.
