the chest in which dead bodies are put into the ground.

The sepulchral honours paid to the manes of departed friends in ancient times, demand attention, and are extremely curious. Their being put into a coffin has been particularly considered as a mark of the highest distinction. With us the poorest people have their coffins. If the relations cannot afford them, the parish is at the expense. On the contrary, in the east they are not at all made use of in our times; Turks and Christians, as Thévenot attests us, agree in this. The ancient Jews seem to have buried their dead in the same manner; neither was the body of our Lord, it should seem, put into a coffin; nor that of Elisha, 2 Kings xiii. 21, whose bones were touched by the corpse that was let down a little after into his sepulchre. However, that they were anciently made use of in Egypt, all agree; and antique coffins of stone and sycamore wood, are still to be seen in that country; not to mention those said to be made of a kind of pasteboard; formed by folding or glueing cloth together a great many times, curiously plaited, and then painted with hieroglyphics. Its being an ancient Egyptian custom, and not practised in the neighbouring countries, were, doubtless, the cause that the sacred historian expressly observes of Joseph, that he was not only embalmed, but put into a coffin too*; both being arrangements peculiar to the Egyptians.

Bishop Patrick, in his commentary on this passage, takes notice of these Egyptian coffins of sycamore wood and of pasteboard; but he doth not mention the contrary usage in the neighbouring countries, which was requisite, one might suppose, in order fully to illustrate the place; but even this perhaps would not have conveyed the whole idea of the sacred author. Maillet apprehends that all were not inclosed in coffins who were laid in the Egyptian repositories of the dead; but that it was an honour appropriated to persons of figure; for after having given an account of several riches found in those chambers of death, he adds†, "But it must not be imagined that the bodies deposited in these gloomy apartments were all inclosed in chests, and placed in niches. The greatest part were simply embalmed and swathed after that manner which every one hath some notion of;" COG

of; after which they laid them one by the side of another without any ceremony. Some were even laid in these tombs without any embalming at all; or such a slight one, that there remains nothing of them in the linen in which they were wrapped, but the bones, and those half rotten. It is probable, that each considerable family had one of these burial-places to themselves; that the niches were designed for the bodies of the heads of the families; and that those of their domestics or slaves had no other care taken of them than the laying them on the ground, after having been embalmed, or even without that; which, undoubtedly, was also all that was done even to the heads of families of less distinction." After this he gives an account of a way of burial, practised anciently in that country, which had been but lately discovered, and which consisted in placing the bodies, after they were swathed, upon a layer of charcoal, and covering them with a mat, under a depth of sand of seven or eight feet.

That coffins then were not universally used in Egypt, is undoubted from these accounts; and probably they were only persons of distinction who were buried in them. It is also reasonable to believe, that in times so remote as that of Joseph, they might be much less common than afterwards; and consequently, that Joseph's being put in a coffin in Egypt, might be mentioned with a design to express the great honours which the Egyptians did him at his death, as well as in life, being interred after the most sumptuous manner of the Egyptians, embalmed and put into a coffin. Agreeably to this, the Septuagint version, which was made for Egyptians, seems to represent coffins as a mark of grandeur. Job xxi. 32.

It is no objection to this account, that the widow of Nain's son is represented as carried forth to be buried in a casket, or "on a bier:" for the present inhabitants of the Levant, who are well known to lay their dead bodies in the earth uninclosed, carry them frequently out to burial in a kind of coffin. So Dr Ruffel, in particular, describes the bier used for the Turks at Aleppo, as a kind of coffin much in the form of ours, only that the lid rises with a ledge in the middle. Christians, indeed, as he tells us, are carried to the grave on an open bier: but as the most common kind of bier resembles our coffins, that used by the people of Nain might very possibly be of the same kind; in which case the word casket was very proper.