With the human god was closely connected the ancestor worship, which was quite as much a characteristic of Egypt as the worship of animals. It was due in the first instance, perhaps, to the belief that the _Ka_ of the dead man needed food and nourishment, and that if he did not receive them the hungry double would revenge himself on the living. To this day the Egyptian fellahin, both Moslem and Copt, visit the tombs of their forefathers at certain times in the year, and, after eating and drinking beside them, place a few grains of wheat or some similar offering on a shelf in front of a window-like opening into the tomb. But the belief in the material needs of the _Ka_ would not of itself have sufficed to support the long lines of priests who were attached to the cult of the dead, or the prayers that were addressed to them. It was the deification of the Pharaoh which caused "prophets" of Khufu and Khafra to be still consecrated in the days of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty,(85) and prevented the forms of the sacred animals from being pictured on the temple walls. As long as there was a human god on earth, there could also be a human god in heaven; and in the Pyramid texts of the Sixth Dynasty the dead Pepi or Teta is as much a god as any deity in the pantheon.
When the Osirian faith had spread throughout Egypt, and the pious Egyptian looked forward after death to becoming himself an "Osiris," there was still greater reason for the divine honours that were paid to the ancestor. In paying them to him the worshipper was paying them to the god of the dead. And the god of the dead was himself one of the ancestors of the Egyptian people. He was a human god who had once ruled on earth, and he still governed as a Pharaoh in the world beyond the grave. As the Pharaoh was a theomorphic man, so Osiris was an anthropomorphic god. In him the cult of the ancestor reached its fullest development.
It was natural that Pharaonic Egypt should have been, so far as we know, the birthplace of euhemerism. Where the gods had human forms, and the men were gods, it was inevitable that it should arise. The deification of the Pharaoh prevented any line being drawn between the living man and the deity he worshipped. As the man could be a god, so too could the god be a man. The gods of Egypt were accordingly transformed into Pharaohs, who lived and conquered and died like the Pharaohs of history. They differed from the men of to-day only in having lived long ago, and on that account being possessed of powers which are now lost. That they should have died did not make them less divine and immortal. The Pharaoh also died like the ancestors who were worshipped at the tombs, but death meant nothing more than passing into another form of existence. It was merely a re-birth under new conditions. The _Ka_ continued as before; there was no change in outward shape or in the moral and intellectual powers.