To commemorate his Sicilian victory, he caused it to be pictorially represented on the wall of the Curia Hostilia, the first example of an historical fresco at Rome.
How they conveyed their meaning, how far they pictorially represented ideas or spelt words in the different languages of the country, is a question not yet answered in a complete way; Landa's description (p. 320) gives a table of a number of their elements as phonetically representing letters or syllables, but, though there may be a partial truth in his rules, they are insufficient or too erroneous to serve for any general decipherment.
So in the famous scene of the weighing of the soul, which first appears pictorially under the New Empire, she introduces the deceased before the forty-two assessors of the heavenly judge, Osiris, and presides over the scale in which his actions and life are weighed.
In the most ancient Egyptian records the gods are not pictorially represented, and we have not obtained from these records any descriptions of adoration and sacrifice.
His myth, to be afterwards narrated, is found pictorially represented in a tomb and in the late temple of Philae, is frequently alluded to in the litanies of the dead about 1400 B.C., is indicated with reverent awe by Herodotus, and after the Christian era is described at full length by Plutarch.
