THE RELIGIONS OF
ANCIENT EGYPT AND BABYLONIA
THE RELIGIONS OF
ANCIENT EGYPT
AND BABYLONIA
THE GIFFORD LECTURES ON THE
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN AND BABYLONIAN
CONCEPTION OF THE DIVINE
DELIVERED IN ABERDEEN
Jl oi BY
A U r . SAYCE, D.D., LL.D.
PROFESSOR OF ASSYRIOLOGY, OXFORD
EDINBURGH
T. & T. CLARK, 38 GEORGE STREET
1902
PRINTED BY
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NEW YORK : CHARLES SCRIBNER S SONS.
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UNIVERSITYOF TORONTO
PEEFACE.
THE subject of the following Lectures was " The Concep
tion of the Divine among the ancient Egyptians and
Babylonians," and in writing them I have kept this
aspect of them constantly in view. The time has not
yet come for a systematic history of Babylonian religion,
whatever may be the case as regards ancient Egypt, and,
for reasons stated in the text, we must be content with
general principles and fragmentary details.
It is on this account that so little advance has been
made in grasping the real nature and characteristics of
Babylonian religion, and that a sort of natural history
description of it has been supposed to be all that is
needed by the student of religion. While reading over
again my Hibbert Lectures, as well as later \vorks on the
subject, I have been gratified at finding how largely they
have borrowed from me, even though it be without
acknowledgment. But my Hibbert Lectures were neces
sarily a pioneering work, and we must now attempt
to build on the materials which were there brought
together. In the present volume, therefore, the materials
are presupposed ; they will be found for the most part
either in my Hibbert Lectures or in the cuneiform texts
which have since been published.
We are better off, fortunately, as regards the re
ligion of ancient Egypt. Thanks more especially to
Professor Maspero s unrivalled combination of learning
VI PREFACE.
and genius, we are beginning to learn what the old
Egyptian faith actually was, and what were the founda
tions on which it rested. The development of its dogmas
can be traced, at all events to a certain extent, and we
can even watch the progress of their decay.
There are two facts which, I am bound to add, have
been forced upon me by a study of the old religions of
civilised humanity. On the one hand, they testify to
the continuity of religious thought. God s light lighteth
every man that cometh into the world, and the religions
of Egypt and Babylonia illustrate the words of the
evangelist. They form, as it were, the background and
preparation for Judaism and Christianity ; Christianity
is the fulfilment, not of the Law only, but of all that was
truest and best in the religions of the ancient world.
In it the beliefs and aspirations of Egypt and Babylonia
have found their explanation and fulfilment. But, on
the other hand, between Judaism and the coarsely poly
theistic religion of Babylonia, as also between Christianity
and the old Egyptian faith, in spite of its high morality
and spiritual insight, there lies an impassable gulf.
And for the existence of this gulf I can find only one
explanation, unfashionable and antiquated though it be.
In the language of a former generation, it marks the
dividing-line between revelation and unrevealed religion.
It is like that " something," hard to define, yet impossible
to deny, which separates man from the ape, even though
on the physiological side the ape may be the ancestor
of the man.
A. H. SAYCE.
October 1902.
CONTENTS.
PART I.
THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT.
PAGE
I. INTRODUCTION
{II. EGYPTIAN liELIGION . . *21
THE IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 46 -
V. THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD . . 71
ANIMAL WORSHIP . .100
. THE GODS OF EGYPT . 127
1VII.. OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH . 153-
THE SACRED LOOKS .
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT . . 204
P X. THE PLACE OF EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN THE HISTORY OF
THEOLOGY .
PART II.
THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS.
I. INTRODUCTORY
II. PRIMITIVE ANIMISM . 276
III. THE GODS OF BABYLONIA . 2!)7
IV. THE SUN-GOD AND ISTAR . 323
V. SUMERIAN AND SEMITIC CONCEPTIONS OF THE DIVINE :
ASSUR AND MONOTHEISM .
VI. COSMOLOGIES . *73
VII. THE SACRED BOOKS .
VII I. THE MYTHS AND EPICS
IX. THE BITUAL OF THE TEMPLE . 448
X. ASTRO-THEOLOGY AND THE MORAL ELEMENT IN BABY
LONIAN RELIGION ..... 479
INDEX ....
vii
503
THE RELIGIONS OF ANCIENT EGYPT
AND BABYLONIA.
PART I.
THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT.
LECTUKE I.
INTRODUCTION.
IT was with a considerable amount of diffidence that
I accepted the invitation to deliver a course of lectures
before this University, in accordance with the terms of
Lord Gifford s bequest. Not only is the subject of them
a wide and comprehensive one ; it is one, moreover,
which is full of difficulties. The materials upon which
the lectures must be based are almost entirely monu
mental : they consist of sculptures and paintings, of
objects buried with the dead or found among the ruins
of temples, and, above all, of texts written in languages
and characters which only a century ago were absolutely
unknown. How fragmentary and mutilated such materials
must be, I need hardly point out. The Egyptian or
Babylonian texts we possess at present are but a tithe of
those which once existed, or even of those which will yet
be discovered. Indeed, so far as the Babylonian texts
are concerned, a considerable proportion of those which
2 THE KELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
have already been stored in the museums of Europe and
America are still undeciphered, and the work of thoroughly
examining them will be the labour of years. And of
those which have been copied and translated, the im
perfections are great. Not infrequently a text is broken
just where it seemed about to throw light on some
problem of religion or history, or where a few more words
were needed in order to explain the sense. Or again,
only a single document may have survived to us out of a
long series, like a single chapter out of a book, leading us
to form a wholly wrong idea of the author s meaning and
the object of the work he had written or compiled. We
all know how dangerous it is to explain a passage apart
from its context, and to what erroneous conclusions such _v
a practice is likely to lead. --u-^
And yet it is with such broken and precarious materials
that the student of the religions of the past has to work.
Classical antiquity can give us but little help. In the
literary age of Greece and Rome the ancient religions of
Babylonia and Egypt had passed into their dotage, and
the conceptions on which they were founded had been
transformed or forgotten. What was left of them was
little more than an empty and unintelligible husk, or
even a mere caricature. The gods, in whose name the
kings of Assyria had gone forth to conquer, and in whose
honour Nebuchadrezzar had reared the temples and
palaces of Babylon, had degenerated into the patrons of a
system of magic ; the priests, who had once made and
unmade the lords of the East, had become " Chaldsean "
fortune-tellers, and the religion and science of Babylonia
were remembered only for their connection with astrology.
The old tradition had survived in Egypt with less
apparent alteration, but even there the continuity of
religious belief and teaching was more apparent than
real, external rather than internal ; and though the
INTRODUCTION 3
Ptolemies and early Eoman emperors rebuilt the temples
on the old lines, and allowed themselves to be depicted
in the dress of the Pharaohs, making offerings to gods
whose very names they could not have pronounced, it
was all felt to be but a sham, a dressing up, as it were,
in the clothes of a religion out of which all the spirit and
life had fled.
\ Both in Egypt and in Babylonia, therefore, we are
thrown back upon the monumental texts which the exca
vator has recovered from the soil, and the decipherer has
pieced together with infinite labour and patience. At
every step we are brought face to face with the imper
fections of the record, and made aware how much we
have to read into the story, how scanty is the evidence,
how disconnected are the facts. The conclusions we
form must to a large extent be theoretical and pro
visional, liable to be revised and modified with the
acquisition of fresh material or a more skilful combina
tion of what is already known. We are compelled to
interpret the past in the light of the present, to judge
the men of old by the men of to-day, and to explain their
beliefs in accordance with what seem to us the common
and natural opinions of civilised humanity^
I need not point out how precarious all such attempts
must necessarily be. There is nothing harder than to
determine the real character of the religion of a people,
even when the religion is still living. We may describe
its outward characteristics, though even these are not
unfrequently a matter of dispute ; but the religious ideas
themselves, which constitute its essence, are far more
difficult to grasp and define. Indeed, it is not always
easy for the individual himself to state with philosophical
or scientific precision the religious beliefs which he may
hold. Difficult as it is to know what another man
believes, it is sometimes quite as difficult to know exactly
4 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
what one believes one s self. Our religious ideas and
beliefs are a heritage which has come to us from the
past, but which has also been influenced and modified by
the experiences we have undergone, by the education we
have received, and, above all, by the knowledge and
tendencies of our age. We seldom attempt to reduce
them into a harmonious whole, to reconcile their incon
sistencies, or to fit them into a consistent system. Beliefs
which go back, it may be, to the ages of barbarism, exist
with but little change by the side of others which are
derived from the latest revelations of physical science ;
and our conceptions of a spiritual world are not un-
frequently an ill-assorted mixture of survivals from a
time when the universe was but a small tract of the
earth s surface, with an extinguisher-like firmament above
it, and of the ideas which astronomy has siven us of
illimitable space, with its millions of worlds. ^
If it is difficult to understand and describe with
accuracy the religions which are living in our midst, how
much more difficult must it be to understand and
describe the religions that have gone before them, even
when the materials for doing so are at hand ! We are
constantly told that the past history of the particular
forms of religion which we profess, has been misunderstood
and misconceived ; that it is only now, for example, that
the true history of early Christianity is being discovered
and written, or that the motives and principles under
lying the Reformation are being rightly understood. The
earlier phases in the history of a religion soon become
unintelligible to a later generation. If we would under
stand them, we must have not only the materials in which
the record of them has been, as it were, embodied, but also
the seeing eye and the sympathetic mind which will
enable us to throw ourselves back into the past, to see
the world as our forefathers saw it, and to share for a time
INTRODUCTION 5
in their beliefs. Then and then only shall we be able
to realise what the religion of former generations actually
meant, what was its inner essence as well as its outer
form.
When, instead of examining and describing a past
phase in the history of a still existing form of faith, we
are called upon to examine and describe a form of faith
which has wholly passed away, our task becomes infinitely
greater. We have no longer the principle of continuity
and development to help us ; it is a new plant that we
have to study, not the same plant in an earlier period of
its growth. The fundamental ideas which form, as it
were, its environment, are strange to us ; the polytheism
of Babylonia, or the animal-worship of Egypt, transports
us to a world of ideas which stands wholly apart from
that wherein we move. It is difficult for us to put our
selves in the place of those who saw no underlying unity
in the universe, no single principle to which it could all
be referred, or who believed that the dumb animals were
incarnations of the divine. And yet, until we can do
so, the religions of the two great cultured nations of the
ancient world, the pioneers of the civilisation we enjoy
to-day, will be for us a hopeless puzzle, a labyrinth with
out a clue.
Before that clue can be found, we must divest ourselves
of our modernism. We must go back in thought and
sympathy to the old Orient, and forget, so far as is
possible, the intervening ages of history and development,
and the mental and moral differences between the East
and the West. I say so far as is possible, for the possi
bility is relative only. No man can shake off the
influences of the age and country of which he is the
child ; we cannot undo our training and education, or
root out the inherited instincts with which we were born.
We cannot put back the hand of time, nor can the
6 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Ethiopian change his skin. All we can do is to suppress
our own prejudices, to rid ourselves of baseless assumptions
and prepossessions, and to interpret such evidence as we
have honestly and literally. Above all, we must possess
that power of sympathy, that historical imagination, as
it is sometimes called, which will enable us to realise the
past, and to enter, in some degree, into its feelings and
experiences.
The first fact which the historian of religion has to
bear in mind is, that religion and morality are not
necessarily connected together. The recent history of
religion in Western Europe, it is true, has made it
increasingly difficult for us to understand this fact,
especially in days when systems of morality have been
put forward as religions in themselves. But between
religion and morality there is not necessarily any close
tie. Eeligion has to do with a power outside ourselves,
morality with our conduct one to another. The civilised
nations of the world have doubtless usually regarded the
power that governs the universe as a moral power, and
have consequently placed morality under the sanction of
religion. But the power may also be conceived of as
non-moral, or even as immoral ; the blind law of destiny,
to which, according to Greek belief, the gods themselves
were subject, was necessarily non-moral; while certain
Gnostic sects accounted for the existence of evil by the
theory that the creator-god was imperfect, and therefore
evil in his nature. Indeed, the cruelties perpetrated by
what we term nature have seemed to many so contrary
to the very elements of moral law, as to presuppose that
the power which permits and orders them is essentially
immoral. Zoroastrianism divided the world between a
god of good and a god of evil, and held that, under the
present dispensation at all events, the god of evil was, on
the whole, the stronger power.
INTRODUCTION 7
It is strength rather than goodness that primitive
man admires, worships, and fears. In the struggle for
existence, at any rate in its earlier stages, physical strength
plays the most important part. The old instinctive pride
of strength which enabled our first ancestors to battle
successfully against the forces of nature and the beasts
of the forest, still survives in the child and the boy.
The baby still delights to pull off the wings and legs of
the fly that has fallen into its power ; and the hero of
the playground is the strongest athlete, and not the best
scholar or the most virtuous of schoolboys. A sudden
outbreak of political fury like that which characterised
the French Eevolution shows how thin is the varnish
of conventional morality which covers the passions of
civilised man, and Christian Europe still makes the
battlefield its court of final appeal. Like the lower
animals, man is still governed by the law which dooms
the weaker to extinction or decay, and gives the palm
of victory to the strong. In spite of all that moralists
may say and preach, power and not morality still governs
the world.
We need not wonder, therefore, that in the earliest
forms of religion we find little or no traces of the moral
element. What we term morality was, in fact, a slow
growth. It was the necessary result of life in a community.
As long as men lived apart one from the other, there was
little opportunity for its display or evolution. But with the
rise of a community came also the development of a moral
law. In its practical details, doubtless, that law differed
in many respects from the moral law which we profess
to obey to-day. It was only by slow degrees that the
sacredness of the marriage tie or of family life, as we
understand it, came to be recognised. Among certain
tribes of Esquimaux there is still promiscuous intercourse
between the two sexes ; and, wherever Mohammedanism
8 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
extends, polygamy, with its attendant degradation of the
woman, is permitted. On the other hand, there are still
tribes and races in which polyandry is practised, and the
child has consequently no father whom it can rightfully
call its own. Until the recent conversion of the Fijians
to Christianity, it was considered a filial duty for the
sons to kill and devour their parents when they had
become too old for work ; and in the royal family of
Egypt, as among the Ptolemies who entered on its
heritage, the brother was compelled by law and custom
to marry his sister. Family morality, in fact, if I may
use such an expression, has been slower in its develop
ment than communal morality ; it was in the community
and in the social relations of men to one another that
the ethical sense was first developed, and it was from
the community that the newly-won code of morals was
transferred to the family. Man recognised that he was
a moral agent in his dealings with the community to
which he belonged, long before he recognised it as an
individual.
Eeligion, however, has an inverse history. It starts
from the individual, it is extended to the community.
The individual must have a sense of a power outside
himself, whom he is called upon to worship or pro
pitiate, before he can rise to the idea of tribal gods.
The fetish can be adored, the ancestor addressed in
prayer, before the family has become the tribe, or pro
miscuous intercourse has passed into polygamy.
The association of morality and religion, therefore, is
not only not a necessity, but it is of comparatively late
origin in the history of mankind. Indeed, the union
of the two is by no means complete even yet. Orthodox
Christianity still maintains that correctness of belief is
at least as important as correctness of behaviour, and
it is not so long ago that men were punished and done
INTRODUCTION 9
to death, not for immoral conduct, but for refusing to
accept some dogma of the Church. In the eyes of the
Creator, the correct statement of abstruse metaphysical
questions was supposed to be of more importance than
the fulfilment of the moral law.
The first step in the work of bringing religion and
morality together was to place morality under the
sanction of religion. [The rules of conduct which the
experiences of social life had rendered necessary or
advantageous were enforced by an appeal to the terrors
of religious belief. ] Practices which sinned against the
code of social morality were put under the ban of the
gods and their ministers, and those who ventured to
adopt them were doomed to destruction in this world
and the next. The tapu, which was originally confined
to reserving certain places and objects for the use of the
divine powers, was invoked for the protection of ethical
laws, or to punish violations of them, and the curse of
heaven was called down not only upon the enemy of
the tribe, but upon the enemy of the moral code of the
tribe as well.
Religion thus became tribal as well as personal ; the
religious instinct in the individual clothed itself with the
forms of social life, and the religious conceptions which
had gathered round the life of the family were modified
and transferred to the life of the community. It was no
longer only a feeling of fear or reverence on the part of
the individual which made him bow down before the
terrors of the supernatural and obey its behests ; to this
were now added all the ties and associations connected
with the life of a tribe. The ethical element was joined
to the religious, and what has been termed the religious
instinct or consciousness in the individual man attached
itself to the rules and laws of ethical conduct. But the
attachment was, in the first instance, more or less
10 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
accidental; long ages had to pass before the place of
the two elements, the ethical and religious, was reversed,
and the religious sanction of the ethical code was ex
changed for an ethical sanction of religion. It needed
centuries of training before a Christian poet could declare:
" He can t be wrong whose life is in the right."
There is yet another danger against which we must
guard when dealing with the religions of the past; it
is that of confusing the thoughts and utterances of
individuals with the common religious beliefs of the
communities in which they lived. We are for the most
part dependent on literary materials for our knowledge
of the faiths of the ancient world, and consequently the
danger of which I speak is one to which the historian of
religion is particularly exposed. But it must be remem
bered that a literary writer is, by the very fact of his
literary activity, different from the majority of his con
temporaries, and that this difference in the ages before
the invention of printing was greater than it is to-day.
He was not only an educated man ; he was also a man
of exceptional culture. He was a man whose thoughts
and sayings were considered worthy of being remembered,
who could think for himself, and whose thoughts were
listened to by others. His abilities or genius raised him
above the ordinary level ; his ideas, accordingly, could not
be the ideas of the multitude about him, nor could he,
from the nature of the case, express them in the same
way. The poets or theologians of Egypt and Babylonia
were necessarily original thinkers, and we cannot, there
fore, expect to find in their writings merely a reflection of
the beliefs or superstitions of those among whom they
lived.
\To reconstruct the religion of Egypt from the literary
works of which a few fragments have come down to us,
would be like reconstructing the religion of this country
INTRODUCTION 1 1
in the last century from a few tattered pages of Hume or
Burns, of Dugald Stewart or Sir Walter Scott. The
attempts to show that ancient Egyptian religion was a
sublime monotheism, or an enlightened pantheism which
disguised itself in allegories and metaphors, have their
origin in a confusion between the aspirations of individual
thinkers and the actual religion of their time. There are
indeed literary monuments rescued from the wreck of
ancient Egyptian culture which embody the highest and
most spiritual conceptions of the Godhead, and use the
language of the purest monotheism. But such monu
ments represent the beliefs and ideas of the cultured
few rather than of the Egyptians as a whole, or even
of the majority of the educated classes. They set before
us the highest point to which the individual Egyptian
could attain in his spiritual conceptions not the
religion of the day as it was generally believed and
practised. To regard them as representing the popular
faith of Egypt, would be as misleading as to suppose that
Socrates or Plato were faithful exponents of Athenian
religionV
\ That tnis view of the literary monuments of ancient
Egypt is correct, can be shown from two concrete in
stances. On the one side, there is the curious attempt
made by Amon-hotep iv., of the Eighteenth Dynasty,
to revolutionise Egyptian religion, and to replace the old
religion of the State by a sort of monotheistic pantheism.
The hymns addressed to the solar disk the visible
symbol of the new God breathe an exalted spirituality,
and remind us of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures.
" God," we read in one of them. " God, who in truth
art the living one. who standest before our eyes ; thou
created that which was not, thou formest it all " ; " We
also have come into being through the word of thy
mouth."
12 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
"VBut all such language was inspired by a cult which
was not Egyptian, and which the Egyptians themselves
regarded as an insult to their national deity, and a
declaration of war against the priesthood of Thebes.
Hardly was its royal patron consigned to his tomb when
the national hatred burst forth against those who still
adhered to the new faith ; the temple and city of the
solar disk were levelled with the ground, and the body
of the heretic Pharaoh himself was torn in pieces. Had
the religious productions of the court of Amon-hotep iv.
alone survived to us, we should have formed out of
them a wholly false picture of the religion of ancient
Egypt, and ascribed to it doctrines which were held only
by a few individuals at only one short period of its
history, doctrines, moreover, which were detested and
bitterly resented by the orthodox adherents of the old
creeds. V
Jv My other example is taken from a class of literature
which exists wherever there is a cultured society and an
ancient civilisation. It is the literature of scepticism, of
those minds who cannot accept the popular notions of
divinity, who are critically contemptuous of time-honoured
traditions, and who find it impossible to reconcile the
teaching of the popular cult with the daily experiences
of life. It is not so much that they deny or oppose the
doctrines of the official creed, as that they ignore them.
Their scepticism is that of Epicurus rather than of the
French encyclopaedists. Let the multitude believe in
its gods and its priests, so long as they themselves are
not forced to do the sameX
Egypt had its literary sceptics like Greece or Eome.
Listen, for instance, to the so-called Song of the
Harper, written as long ago as the age of the Eleventh
Dynasty, somewhere about 2500 B.C. This is how a
part of it runs in Canon Eawnsley s metrical translation,
INTEODUCTION 1 3
which faithfully preserves the spirit and sense of the
original
" What is fortune ? say the wise.
Vanished are the hearths and homes ;
What he does or thinks, who dies,
None to tell us comes.
Eat and drink in peace to-day,
When you go your goods remain ;
He who fares the last long way,
Comes not back again."
The Song of the Harper is not the only fragment of
the sceptical literature of Egypt which we possess. At
a far later date, a treatise was written in which, under
the thinly-veiled form of a fable the dogmas of the
national faith were controverted and overthrown. It
takes the form of a dialogue between an Ethiopian cat
the representative of all that was orthodox and respect
able in Egyptian society and a jackal, who is made
the mouthpiece of heretical unbelief. 2 But it is clear
that the sympathies of the author are with the sceptic
rather than with the believer ; and it is the cat and not
the jackal who is worsted in argument. In this first
controversy between authority and reason, authority thus
comes off second best, and just as Epicurus has a prede
cessor in the author of the Song of the Harper, so
Voltaire has a predecessor in the author of the dialogue.
N^Here, again, it is obvious that if only these two
specimens of Egyptian theological literature had been
preserved, we should have carried away with us a very
erroneous idea of ancient Egyptian belief or unbelief.
Who could have imagined that the Egyptians were a
people who had elaborated a minutely-detailed descrip
tion of the world beyond the grave, and who believed
1 Notes for the Nile, pp. 188, 189.
2 Revillout in the Revue egyptologique, i. 4, ii. 3
14 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
more intensely perhaps than any other people has done
either before or since in a future life ? Who could have
supposed that their religion inculcated a belief not only
in the immortality of the soul or spirit, but in the
resurrection of the body as well ; and that they painted
the fields of the blessed to which they looked forward
after death as a happier and a sunnier Egypt, a land of
light and gladness, of feasting and joy ? We cannot
judge what Egyptian religion was like merely from the
writings of some of its literary men, or build upon them
elaborate theories as to what priest and layman believed.
In dealing with the fragments of Egyptian literature, we
must ever bear in mind that they represent, not the
ideas of the mass of the people, but the conceptions of
the cultured few.N^
But there is still another error into which we may
fall. It is that of attaching too literal a meaning to the
language of theology. The error is the natural result of
the reaction from the older methods of interpretation,
which found allegories in the simplest of texts, and
mystical significations in the plainest words. The
application of the scientific method to the records of
the past brought with it a recognition that an ancient
writer meant what he said quite as much as a writer
of to-day, and that to read into his language the arbitrary
ideas of a modern hierophant might be an attractive
pastime, but not a serious occupation. Before we can
hope to understand the literature of the past, we must
try to discover what is its literal and natural meaning,
unbiassed by prejudices or prepossessions, or even by the
authority of great names. Theologians have been too
fond of availing themselves of the ambiguities of language,
and of seeing in a text more than its author either knew
or dreamt of. Unless we have express testimony to the
contrary, it is no more permissible to find parables and
INTRODUCTION 1 5
metaphorical expressions in an old Egyptian book than it-
is in the productions of the modern press.
But, on the other hand, it is possible to press this
literalism too far. Language,, it has been said, is a
storehouse of faded metaphors ; and if this is true of
language in general, it is still more true of theological
language. We can understand the spiritual and the
abstract only through the help of the material ; the
words by which we denote them must be drawn, in the
first instance, from the world of the senses. Just as in
the world of sense itself the picture that we see or the
music that we hear comes to us through the nerves of
sight and hearing, so all that we know or believe of the
moral and spiritual world is conveyed to us through
sensuous and material channels. Thought is impossible
without the brain through which it can act, and we
cannot convey to others or even to ourselves our con
ceptions of right and wrong, of beauty and goodness,
without having recourse to analogies from the world of
phenomena, to metaphor and imagery, to parable and
allegory. What is " conception " itself but a " grasping
with both hands," or " parable " but a " throwing by the
side of " ? If we would deal with the spiritual and
moral, we must have recourse to metaphorical forms of
speech. A religion is necessarily built up on a founda
tion of metaphor.
To interpret such metaphors in their purely natural
sense would therefore land us in gross error. Un
fortunately, modern students of the religious history of
the past have not always been careful to avoid doing so.
Misled by the fact that language often enshrines old
beliefs and customs which have otherwise passed out of
memory, they have forgotten that a metaphor is not
necessarily a survival, or a survival a metaphor. In the
hieroglyphic texts discovered in the Pyramids of the
16 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
sixth Egyptian dynasty, Sahu or Orion, the huntsman of
the skies, is said to eat the great gods in the morning,
the lesser gods at noon and the smaller ones at night,
roasting their flesh in the vast ovens of the heavens ; and
it has been hastily concluded that this points to a time
when the ancestors of the historical Egyptians actually
did eat human flesh. It would be just as reasonable to
conclude from the language of the Eucharistic Office that
the members of the Christian Church were once addicted
to cannibalism. Eating and drinking are very obvious
metaphors, and there are even languages in which the
word " to eat " has acquired the meaning " to exist." l
I remember hearing of a tribe who believed that we
worshipped a lamb because of the literal translation into
their language of the phrase, " Lamb of God."
Theology is full of instances in which the language it
uses has been metaphorical from the outset, and the
endeavour to interpret it with bald literality, and to see
in it the fossilised ideas and practices of the past, would
end in nothing but failure. Christianity is not the only
religion which has consciously employed parable for
inculcating the truths it professes to teach. Buddhism
has done the same, and the " Parables of Buddhagosha "
have had a wider influence than all the other volumes of
the Buddhist Canon.
Survivals there undoubtedly are in theological language
as in all other forms of language, and one of the hardest
tasks of the student of ancient religion is to determine
where they really exist. Is the symbolism embodied in
a word, or an expression of primary or secondary origin ?
1 For the extraordinary variety of senses in which the verb ye, "to
eat," has come to be used in the African language of Akra, see Pott,
Ueber die V erschiedenhcit des menschlichen Sprachbaues von Wilhelm von
Humboldt, ii. pp. 495-498 (1876). Thus ye no, "to be master," is
literally "to eat the upper side"; ye gbi, "to live" or "exist," is
literally "to eat a day" ; fei ye, "to be cold," is "to eat cold."
INTRODUCTION 1 7
Was it from the very beginning a symbol and metapbor
intended to be but the sensuous channel through which
some perception of divine truth could be conveyed to us,
or does it reflect the manners and thought of an earlier
age of society, which has acquired a symbolical significance
with the lapse of centuries ? When the primitive : Aryan
gave the Being whom he worshipped the name of Dyaus,
from a root which signified " to be bright," did he
actually see in the bright firmament the divinity he
adored, or was the title a metaphorical one expressive
only of the fact that the power outside himself was
bright and shining like the sun ? The Babylonians
pictured their gods in the image of man : did Babylonian
religion accordingly begin- with the worship of deified
ancestors, or were the human figures mere symbols and
images denoting that the highest conception man could
form of his creator was that of a being like himself ?
The answer to these questions, which it has been of late
years the fashion to seek in modern savagery, is incon
clusive. It has first to be proved that modern savagery
is not due to degeneration rather than to arrested
development, and that the forefathers of the civilised
nations of the ancient world were ever on the same level
as the savage of to-day. In fact the savage of to-day
is not, and cannot be, a representative of primitive man.
If the ordinary doctrine of development is right, primitive
man would have known nothing of those essentials of
human life and progress of which no savage community
has hitherto been found to be destitute. He would have
known nothing of the art of producing fire, nothing
of language, without which human society would be
impossible. On the other hand, if the civilised races of
mankind possessed from the outset the germs of culture
and the power to develop it, they can in no way be
compared with the savages of the modern world, who
18 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
have lived, generation after generation, stationary and
unprogressive, like the beasts that perish, even though at
times they may have been in contact with a higher
civilisation. To explain the religious beliefs and usages
of the Greeks and Eomans from the religious ideas and
customs of Australians or Hottentots, is in most cases
but labour in vain ; and to seek the origin of Semitic
religion in the habits and superstitions of low-caste
Bedawin, is like looking to the gipsies for an explanation
of European Christianity. Such a procedure is the abuse,
not the use, of the anthropological method. Folk-lore
gives us a key to the mind of the child, and of the child
like portion of society ; it sheds no light on the beginnings
either of religion or of civilisation, and to make it do so
is to mistake a will-o -the-wisp for a beacon-light. It is
once more to find " survivals " where they exist only in
the mind of the inquirer. So long as civilised society
has lasted, it has contained the ignorant as well as the
learned, the fool as well as the wise man, and we are no
more justified in arguing from the ignorance of the past
than we should be in arguing from the ignorance of the
present. So far as folk-tales genuinely reflect the mind
of the unlearned and childlike only, they are of little
help to the student of the religions of the ancient
civilised world.
We must, then, beware of discovering allegory and
symbol where they do not exist; we must equally
beware of overlooking them where they are actually to
be found. And we must remember that, although the
metaphors and symbolism of the earlier civilisations are
not likely to be those which seem natural to the modern
European, this is no reason why we should deny the
existence of them. In fact, without them religious
language arid beliefs are impossible ; it is only through
the world of the senses that a way lies to a knowledge
INTRODUCTION 1 9
of the world beyond. The conditions into which we
were born necessitate our expressing and realising our
mental, moral, and religious conceptions through sensuous
imagery and similitude. Only we must never forget
that the imagery is not the same for different races or
generations of mankind.
Before concluding, I must say a few words in explana
tion of the title I have given to the course of lectures I
have the honour of delivering before you. It is not my
intention to give a systematic description or analysis of
the ancient religions of Egypt and Babylonia. That
would hardly be in keeping with the terms of Lord
Gifford s bequest, nor would the details be interesting,
except to a small company of specialists. Indeed, in the
case of the ancient religion of Babylonia, the details are
still so imperfect and disputed, that a discussion of them
is fitted rather for the pages of a learned Society s
journal than for a course of lectures. What the lecturer
has to do is to take the facts that have been already
ascertained, to see to what conclusions they point, and to
review the theories which they countenance or condemn.
The names and number of the gods and goddesses
worshipped by the Egyptians and Babylonians is of little
moment to the scientific student of religion : what he
wants to know is the conception of the deity which
underlay these manifold forms, and the relation in which
man was believed to stand to the divine powers around
him. What was it that the civilised Babylonian or
Egyptian meant by the term "god"? What was the
idea or belief that lay behind the polytheism of the
popular cult, and in what respects is it marked off from
the ideas and beliefs that rule the religions of our modern
world ? The old Egyptian, indeed, might not have under
stood what we mean by " polytheism " and " monotheism,"
but would he not have already recognised the two
20 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
tendencies of thought which have found expression among
US in these words ? Was St. Paul right when he
declared that the old civilised nations had sought after
the God of Christianity, " if haply they might feel after
Him and find Him," or is there an impassable gulf
between the religious conceptions of paganism and those
of Christian Europe ? Such are some of the questions to
whose solution I trust that the facts I have to bring
before you. may contribute, in however humble a degree.
LECTUEE II.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION.
< IT is through its temples and tombs that ancient Egypt
is mainly known to us. It is true that the warm and
rainless climate of Upper Egypt has preserved many of
the objects of daily life accidentally buried in the ruins
of its cities, and that even fragments of fragile papyrus
have come from the mounds that mark the sites of its
villages and towns; but these do not constitute even
a tithe of the monuments upon which our present
knowledge of ancient Egyptian life and. history has been
built. It is from the tombs and temples that we have
learned almost all we now know about the Egypt of the
past. The tombs were filled with offerings to the dead
and illustrations of the daily life of the living, while
their walls were adorned with representations of the
scenes at which their possessor had been present, with
the history of his life, or with invocations to the gods.
The temples were storehouses of religious lore, which
was sculptured or painted on their walls and ceilings.
In fact, we owe most of our knowledge of ancient
.Egypt to the gods and to the dead; and it is natural,
therefore, that the larger part of it should be concerned
with religion and the life to comeX
N^\Ve are thus in an exceptionally good position for
ascertaining, at all events in outline, the religious ideas
of the old Egyptians, and even for tracing their history
through long periods of time. The civilisation of Egypt
21
22 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
goes back to a remote past, and recent discoveries have
carried us almost to its beginnings. The veil which so
long covered the origin of Egyptian culture is at last
being drawn aside, and some of the most puzzling in
consistencies in the religion, which formed so integral
a part of that culture, are being explained. We have
learnt that the religion of the Egypt which is best known
to us was highly composite, the product of different
races and different streams of culture and thought; and
the task of uniting them all into a homogeneous whole
was never fully completedVTo the last, Egyptian religion
remained a combination of ill-assorted survivals rather
than a system, a confederation of separate cults rather
than a definite theology. Like the State, whatever unity
it possessed was given to it by the Pharaoh, who was
not only a son and representative of the sun-god, but
the visible manifestation of the sun-god himself. Its
unity was thus a purely personal one : without the
Pharaoh the Egyptian State and Egyptian religion would
alike have been dissolved into their original atoms.\
The Pharaonic Egyptians the Egyptians, that is to
say, who embanked the Nile, who transformed the marsh
and the desert into cultivated fields, who built the
temples and tombs, and left behind them the monuments
we associate with Egyptian culture seem to have come
from Asia ; and it is probable that their first home was
in Babylonia. The race (or races) they found in the
valley of the Nile were already possessed of a certain
measure of civilisation. They were in an advanced stage
of neolithic culture ; their flint tools are among the finest
that have ever been made ; and they were skilled in the
manufacture of vases of the hardest stone. But they
were pastoral rather than agricultural, and they lived in
the desert rather than on the river-bank. They proved
no match for the newcomers, with their weapons of
EGYPTIAN KELIGION 23
copper ; and, little by little, the invading race succeeded
in making itself master of the valley of the Nile, though
tradition remembered the fierce battles which were
needed before the " smiths " who followed Horus could
subjugate the older population in their progress from
south to north.
How far the invaders themselves formed a single race
is still uncertain. Some scholars believe that, besides
the Asiatics who entered Egypt from the south, crossing
the Red Sea and so marching through the eastern
desert to the Nile, there were other Asiatics who came
overland from Mesopotamia, and made their way into
the Delta across the isthmus of Suez. Of this overland
invasion, however, I can myself see no evidence ; so far
as our materials at present allow us to go, the Egyptians
of history were composed, at most, of three elements, the
Asiatic invaders from the south, and two older races,
which we may term aboriginal. One of them Professor
Petrie is probably right in maintaining to be Libyan. 1
V We thus have at least three different types of religious
belief and practice at the basis of Egyptian religion,
corresponding with the three races which together made
up the Egyptian people. Two of the types would be
African ; the third would be Asiatic, perhaps Babylonian.
From the very outset, therefore, we must be prepared
to find divergences of religious conception as well as
divergences in rites and ceremonies. And such diver
gences can be actually pointed oufo
The practice of embalming, for instance, is one which
we have been accustomed to think peculiarly character
istic of ancient Egypt. It is referred to in the Book of
1 See Schweinfurth, "Ueber den Ursprung der Aegypter," in the Ver-
handlungen der Berliner anthropologischen Gesellschaft, June 1897.
2 See W. M. Flinders Petrie, Religion and Conscience in Ancient
Egypt, 1898.
24 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Genesis, and described by classical writers. \ There are
many people whose acquaintance with the old Egyptians
is confined to the fact that when they died their bodies
were made into mummies. It is from the wrappings of
the mummy that most of the small amulets and scarabs
have come which fill so large a space in collections of
Egyptian antiquities, as well as many of the papyri
which have given us an insight into the literature of the
past. We have been taught to believe that from times
immemorial the Egyptians mummified their dead, and
that the practice was connected with an equally imme
morial faith in the resurrection of the dead; and yet
recent excavations have made it clear that such a belief
is erroneous. Mummification was never universal in
Egypt, and there was a time when it was not practised
at aa It was unknown to the prehistoric populations
whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found on their arrival in
the country ; and among the Pharaonic Egyptians them
selves it seems to have spread only slowly. Few traces
of it have been met with before the age of the Fourth
and Fifth Dynasties, if, indeed, any have been met with
at alVV
But, as we shall see hereafter, the practice of mummi-
ficVion was closely bound up with a belief in the
resurrection of the dead. The absence of it accordingly
implies that this belief was either non-existent, or, at all
events, did not as yet occupy a prominent place in the
Egyptian creed. Like embalming, it must have been
introduced by the Pharaonic Egyptians ; it was not until
the older races of the country had been absorbed by
their conquerors that mummification became general,
along with the religious ideas that were connected with
it. Before the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty it seems
to have been practically confined to the court and the
official priesthoods^
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 25
On the other hand, one at least of the prehistoric
races appears to have practised secondary burial. The
skeletons discovered in its graves have been mutilated
in an extraordinary manner. The skull, the legs, the
arms, the feet, and the hands have been found dis
severed from the trunk; even the backbone itself is
sometimes broken into separate portions ; and there are
cases in which the whole skeleton is a mere heap of
dismembered bones. But, in spite of this dismember
ment, the greatest care has been taken to preserve the
separate fragments, which are often placed side by side.
An explanation of the dismemberment has been sought
in cannibalism, but cannibals do not take the trouble
to collect the bones of their victims and bury them
with all the marks of respect; moreover, the bones
have not been gnawed except in one or two examples,
where wild beasts rather than man must have been
at work. It seems evident, therefore, that the race
whose dismembered remains have thus been found in
so many of the prehistoric cemeteries of Egypt, allowed
the bodies of the dead to remain unburied until the
flesh had been stripped from their bones by the birds
and beasts of prey, and that it was only when this
had been done that the sun-bleached bones were con
signed to the tomb. Similar practices still prevail in
certain parts of the world ; apart from the Parsi " towers
of silence," it is still the custom in New Guinea to leave
the corpse among the branches of a tree until the flesh
is entirely destroyed. 1
"The custom of dismembering the body or stripping it of its flesh
is widely spread : the neolithic tombs of Italy contain skulls and bones
which have been painted red ; Baron de Baye has found in the tombs of
Champagne skeletons stripped of their flesh, and the Patagonians and
Andamanners as well as the New Zealanders still practise the custom "
(De Morgan, Reclierclics sur les Origincsde I Eyypte, ii. p. 142). Secondary
burial is met with in India among the Kullens, the Kathkaris, and the
2G THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Between mummification and secondary burial no
reconciliation is possible. The conceptions upon which
the two practices rest are contradictory one to the other.
In the one case every effort is made to keep the body
intact and to preserve the flesh from decay; in the
other case the body is cast forth to the beasts of the
desert and the fowls of the air, and its very skeleton
allowed to be broken up. A peopl^.jwhojractised.
secondary burial can hardly have believed in a future
"existence of the Jbofe .itself. \Their belief must rather
have been in the existence of that shadowy, vapour-
like form, comparable to the human breath, in which
so many races of mankind have pictured to themselves
the imperishable part of man. It was the misty ghost,
seen in dreams or detected at night amid the shadows
of the forest, that survived the death of the body ; the
body itself returned to the earth from whence it had
sprungV*
\fhis prehistoric belief left its traces in the official
religion of later Egypt. The Ba or "Soul," with the
figure of a bird and the head of a man, is its direct
descendant. As we shall see, the conception of the Ba
fits but ill with that of the mummy, and the harmonistic
efforts of a later date were unable altogether to hide
the inner contradiction that existed between them. The
soul, which fled on the wings of a bird to the world
beyond the sky, was not easily to be reconciled with
the mummified body which was eventually to lead a
life in the other world that should be a repetition and
reflection of its life in this. How the Ba and the
mummy were to be united, the official cult never
Agariya, as well as in Motu, Melanesia, Sarawak, the Lucliu Islands,
Torres Straits, and Ashanti, while "in some of the English long barrows
the bones appear to have been flung in pell-mell " (Crooke in Journal of
the Anthropological Institute, xxix. pp. 284-286 (1899)).
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 27
endeavoured to explain ; the task was probably beyond
its powers. It was content to leave the two conceptions
side by side, bidding the individual believer reconcile
them as best he coiiloV
N^he fact illustrates another which must always be
kept in mind in dealing with Egyptian religion. Up
to the last it remained without a philosophic system 1 .
There were, it is true, certain sides of it which were
reduced to systems, certain parts of the official creed
which became philosophies. But\as a whole it was
a loosely-connected agglomeration of beliefs and practices
which had come down from the past, and one after the
other had found a place in the religion of the State.
No attempt was ever made to form them into a coherent
and homogeneous whole, or to find a philosophic basis
upon which they all might rest. Such an idea, indeed,
never occurred to the Egyptian. He was quite content
to take his religion as it had been handed down to
him, or as it was prescribed by the State ; he had none
of that inner retrospection which distinguishes the Hindu,
none of that desire to know the causes of things which
characterised the Greek. The contradictions which we
find in the articles of his creed never troubled him ;
he never perceived them, or if he did they were ignored.
He has left to us the task of finding a philosophic basis
for his faith, and of fixing the central ideas round which
it revolved ; the task is a hard one, and it is rendered
the harder by the imperfection of our materials./
N^The Egyptian was no philosopher, but he had an
immense veneration for the past. The past, indeed,
was ever before him ; he could not escape from it.
Objects and monuments which would have perished in
other countries were preserved almost in their pristine
freshness by the climate under which he lived. As
to-day, so too in the age of the Pharaohs, the earliest
28 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and the latest of things jostled one another, and it was
often difficult to say which of the two looked the older.
The past was preserved in a way that it could not be
elsewhere ; nothing perished except by the hand of man.
And man, brought up in such an atmosphere of con
tinuity, became intensely conservative^ Nature itself
only increased the tendency.\The Nile rose and fell
with monotonous regularity ; year after year the seasons
succeeded each other without change ; and the agricul
turist was not dependent on the variable alternations
of rain and sunshine, or even of extreme heat and cold.
\In Egypt, accordingly, the new grew up and was adopted
without displacing the oloX^ It was a land to which the
rule did not apply that " the old order changeth, giving
place to new." The old order might, indeed, change,
through foreign invasion or the inventions of human
genius, but all the same it did not give place to the
new. The new simply took a place by the side of the
old.
The Egyptian system of writing is a striking illustra
tion of the fact. All the various stages through which
writing must pass, in its development out of pictures
into alphabetic letters, exist in it side by side. The
hieroglyphs can be used at once ideographically, syllabic-
ally, and alphabetically. >yVnd what is true of Egyptian
writing is true also of Egyptian religion. The various
elements out of which it arose are all still traceable in
it ; none of them has been discarded, however little it
might harmonise with the elements with which it has
been combined. Eeligious ideas which belong to the
lowest and to the highest forms of the religious con
sciousness, to races of different origin and different age,
exist in it side by side\
It is true that even in organised religions we find
similar combinations of heterogeneous elements. Sur-
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 29
vivals from a distant past are linked in them with
the conceptions of a later age, and beliefs of divergent
origin have been incorporated by them into the same
creed. /%But it is a definite and coherent creed into
which Siey have been embodied ; the attempt has been
made to fuse them into a harmonious whole, and to
expkin away their apparent divergencies and contradic
tion^, Either the assertion is made that the creed of
the present has come down unchanged from the past, or
else it is maintained that the doctrines and rites of the
past have developed normally and gradually into those
of the present.
\ But the Egyptian made no such endeavour. He
never realised that there was any necessity for making
it. It was sufficient that a thing should have descended
to him from his ancestors for it to be true, and he
never troubled himself about its consistency with other
parts of his belief. He accepted it as he accepted the
inconsistencies and inequalities of life, without any effort
to work them into a harmonious theory or form them
into a philosophic system. His religion was like his
temples, in which the art and architecture of all the past
centuries of his history existed side by side. All that
the past had bequeathed to him must be preserved, if
possible; it might be added to, but not modified or
destroyed/^V
It is curious that the same spirit has prevailed in
modern Egypt. The native never restores. If a build
ing or the furniture within it goes to decay, no attempt
is made to mend or repair it ; it is left to moulder on in
the spot where it stands, while a new building or a new
piece of furniture is set up beside it. That the new
and the old should not agree together should, in fact,
be in glaring contrast is a matter of no moment. This
veneration for the past, which preserves without repairing
30 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
or modifying or even adapting to the surroundings of the
present, is a characteristic which is deeply engrained in
the mind of the Egyptian. \It had its prior origin in
the physical and climatic conditions of the country in
which he was born, and has long since become a leading
characteristic of his raceX
^Along with the inability to take a general view of the
briefs he held, and to reduce them to a philosophic
system, went an inability to form abstract ideas. This
inability, again, may be traced to natural causes. Thanks
to the perpetual sunshine of the valley of the Nile, the
Egyptian leads an open-air life. Except for the purpose
of sleep, his house is of little use to him, and in the
summer months even his sleep is usually taken on the
roof. He thus lives constantly in the light and warmth
of a southern sun, in a land where the air is so dry and
clear that the outlines of the most distant objects are
sharp and distinct, and there is no melting of shadow
into light, such as characterises our northern climes.
Everything is clear ; nothing is left to the imagination ;
and the sense of sight is that which is most frequently
brought into play. It is what the Egyptian sees rather
than what he hears or handles that impresses itself upon
his memory, and it is through his eyes that he recognises
and remembers^
\ At the same time this open-air life is by no means
one of leisure. The peculiar conditions of the valley of
the Nile demand incessant labour on the part of its
population^ Fruitful as the soil is when once it is
watered, without water it remains a barren desert or an
unwholesome marsh. And the only source of water is
the river Nile. The Nile has to be kept within its
banks, to be diverted into canals, or distributed over the
fields by irrigating machines, before a single blade of
wheat can grow or a single crop be gathered in. Day
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 31
after day must the Egyptian labour, repairing the dykes
and canals, ploughing the ground, planting the seed, and
incessantly watering it ; the Nile is ready to take advan
tage of any relaxation of vigilance and toil, to submerge
or sweep away the cultivated land, or to deny to it the
water that it needs. Of all people the Egyptian is the
most industrious ; the conditions under which he has to
till the soil oblige him to be so, and to spend his existence
in constant agricultural work.
But, as I have already pointed out, this work is
monotonously regular. There are no unexpected breaks
in it ; no moments when a sudden demand is made for
exceptional labour. The farmer s year is all mapped
out for him beforehand : what his forefathers have done
for unnumbered centuries before him, he too has to do
almost to a day. It is steady toil, day after day, from
dawn to night, during the larger portion of the year.
^This steady toil in the open air gives no opportunity
for philosophic meditation or introspective theorising.
On the contrary, life for the Egyptian fellah is a very
real and practical thing : he knows beforehand what he
has to do in order to gain his bread, and he has no time
in which to theorise about ^N*. It is, moreover, his sense
of sight which is constantly being exercised. The things
which he knows and remembers are the things which he
sees, and he sees them clearly in the clear sunshine of
his fields.
\We need not wonder, therefore, that the ancient
Egyptian should have shown on the one hand an
incapacity for abstract thought, and on the other hand
a love of visible symbols. The two, in fact, were but
the reverse sides of the same mental tendency. Sym
bolism, indeed, is always necessary before we can
apprehend the abstract : it is only through the sensuous
symbol that we can express the abstract thought. But
32 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the Egyptian did not care to penetrate beyond the
expression. He was satisfied with the symbol which he
could see and remember, and the result was tiiat his
religious ideas were material rather than spiritual The
material husk, as it were, sufficed for him, and he did
not trouble to inquire too closely about the kernel
within. The soul was for him a human-headed bird,
which ascended on its wings to the heavens above ; and
the future world itself was but a duplicate of the Egypt
which his eyes gazed upon below.
The hieroglyphic writing was at once an illustration
and an encouragement of this characteristic of his mind.
All abstract ideas were expressed in it by symbols which
he could see and understand The act of eating was
denoted by the picture of a man with his hand to his
mouth, the idea of wickedness by the picture of a sparrow.
And these symbolic pictures were usually attached to
the words they represented, even when the latter had
come to be syllabically and alphabetically spelt. \ Even
in reading and writing, therefore, the Egyptian was not
required to concern himself overmuch with abstract
thought. The concrete symbols were ever before his
eyes, and it was their mental pictures which took the
place for him of abstract ideas. >
/It must, of course, be remembered that the foregoing
generalisations apply to the Egyptian people as a whole.
There were individual exceptions ; there was even a class
the lives of whose members were not devoted to agricul
tural or other labour, and whose religious conceptions
were often spiritual and sublime. This was the class of
priests, whose power and influence increased with the
lapse of time, and who eventually moulded the official
theology of Egypt. -Priestly colleges arose in the great
sanctuaries of the country, and gradually absorbed a
considerable part of its land and revenues. At first the
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 33
priests do not seem to have been a numerous body, and
up to the last the higher members of the hierarchy were
comparatively few. But in their hands the religious
beliefs of the people underwent modification, and even a
rudimentary systematisation ; the different independent
cults of the kingdom were organised and combined
together, and with this organisation came philosophic
speculation and theorising. If Professor Maspero is
right, the two chief schools of religious thought and
systematising in early Egypt were at Heliopolis, near
the apex of the Delta, and Hermopolis, the modern
Eshmunen, in Central Egypt. In Hermopolis the
conception of creation, not by voice merely, but even by
the mere sound of the voice, was first formed and worked
out while Heliopolis was the source of that arrangement
of the deities into groups of nine which led to the
identification of the gods one with another, and so
prepared the way for monotheism. 1 If Heliopolis were
indeed, as seems probable, the first home of this religious
theory, its influence upon the rest of Egypt was profound.
Already in the early part of the historical period, in the
age of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the religious
texts of the Pyramids were compiled, the scheme which
placed the Ennead or group of nine at the head of the
Pantheon had been accepted throughout the country. It
was the beginning of an inevitable process of thought,
which ended by resolving the deities of the official cult
into forms or manifestations oneof the other, and by
landing its adherents in pantheismNv
To a certain extent, therefore, the general incapacity for
abstract thought which distinguished the Egyptians did
not hold good of the priestly colleges. But even among
the priests the abstract was never entirely dissociated
1 See Maspero, Etudes de Mythologic ct d Arche ologic egyptiennes, ii.
p. 372 sqq.
3
34 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
from the symbol^ Symbolism still dominates the pro-
foundest thoughts and expressions of the later inscrip
tions ; the writer cannot free himself from the sensuous
image, except perhaps in a few individual cases. At
the most, Egyptian thought cannot rise further than the
conception of " the god who has no form " a con
fession in itself of inability to conceive of what is form
less. It is true that after the rise of the Eighteenth
Dynasty the deity is addressed as Kheper zes-ef, " that
which is self -grown," " the self-existent " ; but when we
find the same epithet applied also to plants like the
balsam and minerals like saltpetre, it is clear that it
does not possess the abstract significance we should read
into it to-day. It simply expresses the conviction that
the god to whom the prayer is offered is a god who was
never born in human fashion, but who grew up of him
self, like the mineral which effloresces from the ground,
or the plant which is not grown from seed. Similarly,
when it is said of him that he is " existent from the
beginning," kheper em hat, or, as it is otherwise ex
pressed, that he is " the father of the beginning," the
phrase is less abstract than it seems at first sight to be.
The very word kheper or " existent " denotes the visible
universe, while hat or " beginning " is the hinder ex
tremity. The phrase can be pressed just as little as the
epithet " lord of eternity," applied to deities whose birth
and death are nevertheless asserted in the same breath.
Perhaps the most abstract conception of the divine to
which the Egyptian attained was that of " the nameless
one," since the name was regarded as something very
real and concrete, as, in fact, the essence of that to
which it belonged. To say. therefore, that a thing was
nameless, was equivalent to either denying its existence
or to lifting it out of the world of the concrete altogethety
There was a moment in the history of Egypt when
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 35
an attempt was made to put a real signification into the
apparently abstract terms and phrases addressed to the
gods. The Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten, towards the close of
the Eighteenth Dynasty, appears suddenly on the scene
as a royal reformer, determined to give life and meaning
to the language which had described the supreme deity
as " the sole and only god," the absolute ruler of the
universe, who was from all eternity, and whose form was
hidden from men. But the impulse to the reform came
from Asia. Khu-n-Aten s mother was a foreigner, and
his attempt to engraft Asiatic ideas upon Egyptian
religion, or rather to substitute an Asiatic form of faith
for that of his fathers, proved a failure. \ The worship
of the one supreme deity, whose visible symbol was the
solar disc, though enforced by persecution and by all the
power of the Pharaoh himself, hardly survived his death.
Amon of Thebes and his priesthood came victorious out
of the struggle, and the pantheistic monotheism of Khu-
n-Aten was never revived. Symbolism remained, while
the abstract thought, to which that symbolism should
have been a stepping-stone, failed to penetrate into
Egyptian religioh^ The Egyptian continued to be con
tent with the symbol, as his father had been before him.
But in the priestly colleges and among the higher circles
of culture it became less materialistic ; while the mass of
the people still saw nothing but the symbol itself, the
priests and scribes looked as it were beyond it, and saw
in the symbol the picture of some divine truth, the out
ward garment in which the deity had clothed himself.
What constituted, however, the peculiarity of the
Egyptian point of view was, that this outward garment
was never separated from that which it covered ; it was
regarded as an integral part of the divine essence, which
could no more be dissociated from it than the surface
of a statue can be dissociated from the stone of which it
3G THE KELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
is made, he educated Egyptian came to see in the
multitudinous gods of the public worship merely varying
manifestations or forms of one divine substance ; but
still they were manifestations or forms visible to the
senses, and apart from such forms the divine substance
had no existence. It is characteristic that the old belief
was never disavowed, that images were actually animated
by the gods or human personalities whose likeness they
bore, and whom they were expressively said to have
" devoured " \mdeed, the king still received the Sa or
principle of immortality from contact with the statue of
the god he served ; and wonder-working images, which
inclined the head towards those who asked them ques
tions, continued to be consulted in the temples. 1 At
Dendera the soul of the goddess Hathor was believed to
descend from heaven in the form of a hawk of lapis-
lazuli in order to vivify her statue ; 2 and the belief is a
significant commentary on the mental attitude of her
worshippers.
\ One result of the Egyptian s inability or disinclination
for abstract thought was the necessity not only of repre
senting the gods under special and definite forms, but
even of always so thinking of them. The system of
writing, with its pictorial characters, favoured the habit ;
and we can well understand how difficult the most
educated scribe must have found it to conceive of Thoth
otherwise than as an ibis, or of Hathor otherwise than
as a cow. Whatever may have been the origin of the
Egyptian worship of animals, or which is something
very different of the identification of certain individual
animals with the principal gods, its continuance was
materially assisted by the sacred writing of the scribes
1 See Maspero, Etudes de Mythologic et VArcheologic fyyptiennes, i.
p. 85 sqq.
2 Mariette, DeruUrah, Texte, p. 156.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 37
and the pictures that adorned the walls of the temples.
To the ordinary Egyptian, Thoth was indeed an ibis, and
the folk-lore of the great sanctuaries accordingly described
him as such. 1 But to the cultured Egyptian, also, the
ibis was his symbol ; and in Egypt, as we have seen, the
symbol and what is symbolised were apt to be con
founded together. \
The beast- worship of Egypt excited the astonishment
and ridicule of the Greeks and Eomans, and the un
measured scorn of the Christian apologists. I shall have
to deal with it in a later lecture. Eor the present it is
sufficient to point out how largely it owed its continued
existence\to the need for symbolism which characterised
Egyptian thought, in spite of the fact that there was
another and contradictory conception which held sway
within Egyptian religion. This was the conception of
the divinity of man, which found its supreme expression
in the doctrine that the Pharaoh was the incarnation of
the sun-god. It was not in the brute beast, bui in man
himself, that the deity revealed himself on earth.X
v The origin of the conception must be sought in the
early history of the countryX Egypt was not at first
the united monarchy it afterwards became. It was
divided into a number of small principalities, each inde
pendent of the other and often hostile. It is probable
that in some cases the inhabitants of these principalities
did not belong to the same race ; that while in one the
older population predominated, in another the Pharaonic
Egyptians held absolute sway. At all events the man
ners and customs of their inhabitants were not uniform,
any more than the religious beliefs they held and the rites
they practised. The god who was honoured in one place
1 In the Pyramid texts the dead are described as being carried across
the lake which separates this world from the fields of Alu, on the wings
of Thoth.
38 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
was abhorred in another, and a rival deity set over
against him.
True to its conservative principles, Egypt never forgot
the existence of these early principalities. They con
tinued to survive in a somewhat changed form. They
became the nomes of Pharaonic Egypt, separate districts
resembling to a certain degree the States of the American
Republic ; and preserving to the last their independent
life and organisation. \Each nome had its own capital,
its own central sanctuary, and its own prince ; above all,
it had its own special god or goddess, with their attend
ant deities, their college of priests, their ceremonies and
their festivals. \Up to the age of the Hyksos conquest
the hereditary princes of the nomes were feudal lords,
owning a qualified obedience to the Pharaoh, and furnish
ing him with tribute and soldiers when called upon to
do so. It was not till after the rise of the Eighteenth
Dynasty that the old feudal nobility was replaced by
court officials and a bureaucracy which owed its position
to the king; and even then the descendants of the ancient
princes were ever on the watch to take advantage of
the weakness of the central authority and recover the
power they had lost. Up to the last, too, the gods of
the several nomes preserved a semblance of their inde
pendent character. \It was only with the rise of the
new kingdom and the accession of the Eighteenth Dynasty
that that process of fusion set in to any real purpose
which identified the various deities one with another,
and transformed them into kaleidoscopic forms of Amon
or Ea. The loss of their separate and independent
character went along with the suppression of the feudal
families with whom their worship had been associated
for unnumbered generations. The feudal god and the
feudal prince disappeared together : the one became
absorbed into the supreme god of the Pharaoh and his
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 39
priests, the other into a functionary of the court. It
was only in the hearts and minds of the people that
Thoth remained what he had always been, the lord and
master of Hermopolis, and of Hermopolis alone. /
The principalities of primitive Egypt gradually be
came unified into two or three kingdoms, and eventually
into two kingdoms only, those of Upper and Lower
Egypt. Kecent discoveries have thrown unexpected
light on this early period of history. At one time the
capital of the southern kingdom was Nekhen, called
Hierakonpolis in the Greek period, the site of which is
now represented by the ruins of Kom el-Ahmar, opposite
El-Kab. Here, among the foundations of the ancient
temple, Mr. Quibell has found remains which probably
go back to an age before that of Menes and the rise of
the united Egyptian monarchy. Among them are huge
vases of alabaster and granite, which were dedicated by
a certain king Besh in the year when he conquered the
people of Northern Egypt. On the other hand, on a
stela now at Palermo a list is given of kings who seem
to have reigned over Northern Egypt while the Pharaohs
of Nekhen were reigning in the south. 1
For how many centuries the two kingdoms existed
side by side, sometimes in peaceful intercourse, some
times in hostile collision, it is impossible to say. The
fact that Egypt had once been divided into two kingdoms
was never forgotten ; down to the last days of the
Egyptian monarchs the Pharaoh bore the title of " lord
of the two lands," and on his head was placed the two
fold crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Nekhen was
under the protection not only of Horus, the god of the
Pharaonic Egyptians, but also of Nekheb, the tutelary
goddess of the whole of the southern land. From the
Cataract northward her dominion extended, but it was
1 See Sethe in the Zcitschriftfur Aeyyptischcr Sprachc, 1897, 1.
40 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
at El-Kab opposite Nekhen, where the road from the
Eed Sea and the mines of the desert reached the Nile,
that her special sanctuary stood. Besh calls himself
on his vases " the son of Nekheb " ; and even as late as
the time of the Sixth Dynasty the eldest son of the
king was entitled " the royal son of Nekheb." ]
Nekheb, the vulture, was the goddess of the south, in
contradistinction to Uazit, the serpent, the goddess of the
north. But in both the south and the north the same
dominant race held rule, the same customs prevailed, and
the same language was spoken. The Pharaonic Egyp
tians, in their northern advance, had carried with them
a common legacy of ideas and manners. Their religious
conceptions had been the same, and consequently the
general form assumed by the religious cult was similar.
In spite of local differences and the self-centred character
of the numerous independent principalities, there was,
nevertheless, a family likeness between them all. Ideas
and customs, therefore, which grew up in one place
passed readily to another, and the influence of a particular
local sanctuary was easily carried beyond the limits of
the district in which it stood.
\0ne of the most fundamental of the beliefs which the
Pharaonic Egyptians brought with them was that in the
1 Similarly the "chief Khcr-hcb " of the Pharaoh, in the age of the Old
Empire, bore the title of "Chief of the city of Nekheb" (Ebers, Life in
Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 90). The Pyramid texts speak of the White
Crown of Southern Egypt as well as of the royal urseus "in the city of
Nekheb " (Pepi 167) ; and the goddess of the city is described as "the cow
Samet-urt" who was crowned with the two feathers (Teta 359). Else
where mention is made of "the souls of On, Nekhen, and Pe" (Pepi 168,
182 ; see also Tcta 272). By the " souls of On" Ra or rather Turn was
meant ; Pe and Dep constituted the twin-city of the Delta called Buto
by the Greeks, over a part of which (Dep) Uazit the serpent-goddess of
the north presided, while the other half (Pe) acknowledged Horns as
its chief deity. In Tela 88 "the doubles in Pe"are said to be "the
double of Horus."
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 41
divine origin of certain individuals. The prince who led
them was not only the son of a god or goddess, he was
an incarnation of the god himself. \ The belief is one of
the many facts which link the ^haraonic civilisation
with the culture of primitive Babylonia. In Babylonia
also the king was divine. One of the early kings of
Ur calls himself the son of a goddess, just as Besh
does at Nekhen ; and the great conquerors of primeval
Asia, Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin, give
themselves the title of " god " in their inscriptions ;
while Naram-Sin is even invoked during his lifetime
as " the god of the city of Agade " or Akkad. For
many generations the Babylonian kings continued to
receive divine honours while they were still alive ; and
it was not until after the conquest of Babylonia by a
tribe of half-civilised foreigners from the mountains of
Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the reigning
king ceased to be a god. Like the doctrine of the
divine right of kings in England, which could not survive
the fall of the Stuarts, the doctrine of the divine nature
of the monarch did not survive in Babylonia the fall of
the native dynasties.
In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to
be invoked as a god after his death. Chapels and priests
were consecrated to his memory, and stated sacrifices and
offerings made to him. It was not necessary that the
deified prince should be the supreme sovereign, it was
sufficient if he were the head of a feudal principality.
Thus, while Dungi, the supreme sovereign of Babylonia,
receives in his inscriptions the title of " god," his vassal
Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city
of Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult
lasted for many centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in
race, but most of the Babylonian kings who were thus
deified were Semites. It is therefore possible that the
42 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
deification of the ruler was of Semitic origin, and only
adopted from them by the older Sumerian population, as
in the case of Gudea ; it is also possible that it was one
of the consequences of that fusion of the two races,
Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later popula
tion and culture of Babylonia. However this may be,
the apotheosis of the Babylonian king during his life
time can be traced back as far as Sargon and Naram-Sin,
3800 B.C. Sargon incorporated Palestine, " the land of
Mhe Amorites," as it was then called, into his empire,
while Naram-Sin extended his conquests to Magan or
the Sinaitic Peninsula, thus bringing the arms and
civilisation of Babylonia to the very doors of Egypt.
The precise nature of the connection which existed
between the Babylonian and the Egyptian belief in the
divinity of the ruler must be left to future research.
yln the Egyptian mind, at all events, it was a belief
that was deeply implanted. The Pharaoh was a god
upon eartriS^ Like the Incas of Peru, he belonged to the
solar race, and the blood which flowed in his veins was
the ichor of the gods. The existence of a similar belief
in Peru shows how easy it was for such a belief to grow
up in regard to the leader of a conquering people who
brought with them a higher culture and the arts of life.
But it presupposes religious conceptions which, though
characteristic of Babylonia, are directly contrary to those
which seem to underlie the religion of Egypt. Among
the Babylonians the gods assumed human forms ; man
had been made in the likeness of the gods, and the gods
therefore were of human shape^The converse, however,
was the case in Egypt. Here the gods, with few
exceptions, were conceived of as brute beasts. Horus
was the hawk, N&kheb the vulture, Uazit of Buto the
deadly urrcus snaked
\There is only one way of explaining the anomaly.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 43
The conception of the gods which made them men must
have come from outside, and been imposed upon a people
whose gods were the brute beasts. It must have been
the Pharaonic invaders from Asia to whom the leader
they followed was an incarnate god. Hence it was just
this leader and no other who was clothed with divinity.
Hence, too, it was that the older worship of animals was
never really harmonised with the worship of the Pharaoh.
The inner contradiction which existed between the new
religious conceptions remained to the end, in spite of all
the efforts of the priestly colleges to make them agree.
Eeligious art might represent the god with the head of a
beast or bird and the body of a man, the sacred books
might teach that the deity is uuconfined by form, and so
could pass at will from the body of a man into that of a
beast ; but all such makeshifts could not hide the actual
fact. Between the deity who is human and the deity
who is bestial no true reconciliation is possibleX
We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh
back to Asia, and the Asiatic element in the Egyptian
population. The Pharaonic conquerors of the valley of
the Nile were those " followers of Horus " who worshipped
their leader as a god. It was a god in human form who
had led them to victory, and Horus accordingly con
tinued to be represented as a man, even though the
symbolism of the hieroglyphs united with the creed of
the prehistoric races of Egypt in giving him the head of
a hawk.
At first the ruler of each of the small kingdoms into
which prehistoric Egypt was divided, was honoured as a
god, like Gudea in Babylonia. When the kingdoms
became, first, vassal principalities under a paramount
lord, and then nomes, the old tradition was still main
tained. Divine titles were given to the nomarchs even
in the later times of the united monarchy, and after their
44 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
death worship continued to be paid to them. 1 Christian
writers tell us how at Anabe particular individuals were
regarded as gods, to whom offerings were accordingly
brought ; and Ptah, the tutelary deity of Memphis, was
pictured as a man in the wrappings of a mummy, while
to Anhur of This the human figure was assigned.
With the coalescence of the smaller principalities into
two kingdoms, the deification of the ruler was confined
within narrower bounds. But for that very reason it
became more absolute and intense. The supreme
sovereign, the Pharaoh as we may henceforth call him,
was a veritable god on earth. To his subjects he
was the source, not only of material benefits, but of
spiritual blessings as well. He was " the good god," the
beneficent dispenser of all good things. 2 The power of
life and death was in his hand, and rebellion against him
was rebellion against the gods. The blood that flowed
in his veins was the same as that which flowed in the
veins of the gods; it was even communicated to him
from time to time by his divine brethren ; and the bas-
reliefs of a later age, when the traditional belief had
become little more than a symbolical allegory, still depict
him with his back towards the statue of the god, who is
transfusing the ichor of heaven through his veins. 3
Menes, the king of Upper Egypt, first united under
one sceptre the two kingdoms of the Nile. The divinity
which had hitherto been shared between the Pharaohs
of Upper and Lower Egypt now passed in all it fulness
to him. He became the visible god of Egypt, just as
1 Wiedemann, in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology,
iv. p. 332.
2 The title of "good god" went back to a very early date, and stands
in contrast to that of nefer mdt-Jcher, "good and true of voice," applied to
the ordinary individual on early seal-cylinders.
3 See the illustration from the temple of Amon-hotep in. at Luxor, in
Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 111.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION 45
Sargon or Naram-Sin was the visible god of Akkad.
All the attributes of divinity belonged to him, as they
were conceived of by his subjects, and from him they
passed to his successors. Legitimacy of birth was
reckoned through the mother, and through the mother
accordingly the divine nature of the Pharaoh was handed
on. Only those who had been born of a princess of the
royal family could be considered to possess it in all its
purity ; and where this title was wanting, it was necessary
to assume the direct intervention of a god. The mother
of Amon-hotep in. was of Asiatic origin; we read,
therefore, on the walls of the temple of Luxor, that he
was born of a virgin and the god of Thebes. Alexander,
the conqueror of Egypt, was a Macedonian ; it was
needful, accordingly, that he should be acknowledged as
a son by the god of the oasis of Ammon. 1
But such consequences of the old Egyptian belief in
the incarnation of the deity in man are leading us away
into a field of investigation which will have to be
traversed in a future lecture. For the present, it is
sufficient to keep two facts steadily before the mind :
\ on the one side, the old Egyptian belief in the divinity
of the brute beast ; on the other, the equally old belief
in the divinity of man. The two beliefs are not really
to be harmonised one with the other ; they were, in fact,
derived from different elements in the Egyptian popula
tion ; but, with his usual conservative instinct and avoid
ance of abstract thought, the Egyptian of later days
co-ordinated them together, and closed his eyes to their
actual incompatibility^
1 The Westcar Papyrus, which was written in the time of the Middle
Empire, already describes the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty as
born of Ruddadt (the wife of a priest of the sun-god) and the god Ra of
Sakhab (Erman, "Die Marchen des Papyrus Westcar," i. p. 55, in the
Mittheilungen aus den orientalischen Sammlungcn zu Berlin, 1890).
LECTUEE III.
THE IMPEKISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER
WOKLD.
IT has sometimes been asserted by travellers and ethno
logists, that tribes exist who are absolutely without any
idea of God. It will usually be found that such asser
tions mean little more than that they are without any
idea of what we mean by God : even the Zulus, who saw
in a reed the creator of the world, 1 nevertheless believed
that the world had been created by a power outside
themselves. Modern research goes to show that no race
of man, so far as is known, has been without a belief in
a power of the kind, or in a world which is separate from
the visible world around us ; statements to the contrary
generally rest on ignorance or misconception. The very
fact that the savage dreams, and gives to his dreams the
reality of his waking moments, brings with it a belief in
what, for the want of a better term, I will call " another
world."
This other world, it must be remembered, is material,
as material as the " heavenly Jerusalem " to which so
many good Christians have looked forward even in our
own day. The savage has no- experience of anything
else than material existence, and he cannot, therefore, rise
to the conception of what we mean by the spiritual, even
if he were capable of forming so abstract an idea. His
1 Callaway, UnJculunkulu ; or, the Tradition of the Creation as existing
ammw the Amazuln and other Tribes of South Africa, pt. i. pp. 2, 7, 8.
46
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 47
spiritual world is necessarily materialistic, not only to be
interpreted and apprehended through sensuous symbols,
but identical with those sensuous symbols themselves. The
Latin anima meant " breath " before it meant " the soul."
This sensuous materialistic conception of the spiritual
has lingered long in the human mind ; indeed, it is
questionable whether, as long as we are human, we shall
ever shake ourselves wholly free from it. The greater
is naturally its dominance the further we recede in
history. There is " another world," but it is a world
strangely like our own.
Closely connected with this conception of " another
world " is the conception which man forms concerning
his own nature. There are few races of mankind among
whom we do not find in one shape or another the belief
in a second self. Sometimes this second self is in all
respects a reflection and image of the living self, like the
images of those we see in our dreams ; and it is more
than probable that dreams first suggested it. Sometimes
it is a mere speck of grey vapour, which may owe its
origin to the breath which issues from the mouth and
seems to forsake it at death, or to the misty forms seen
after nightfall by the savage in the gloom of the forest
and by the edge of the morass. At times it is conceived
of as a sort of luminous gas or a phosphorescent flash of
light, such as is emitted by decaying vegetation in a damp
soil. Or, again, it may be likened to the bird that flies
to heaven, to the butterfly which hovers from flower to
flower, or even to insects like the grasshopper which hop
along the ground. But however it may be envisaged, it
is at once impalpable and material, something that can
be perceived by the senses and yet eludes the grasp.
^The Egyptian theory of the nature of man in the
historical age of the nation was very complicated. Man
was made up of many parts, each of which was capable
48 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
of living eternally. The belief in his composite character
was due to the composite character of the people as
described in the last lecture, added to that conservative
tendency which prevented them from discarding or even
altering any part of the heritage of the past. Some at
least of the elements which went " to the making of
man " were derived from different elements in the popu
lation. They had been absorbed, or rather co-ordinated,
in the State religion, with little regard to their mutual
compatibility and with little effort to reconcile them.
Hence it is somewhat difficult to distinguish them all
one from another ; indeed, it is a task which no Egyptian
theologian even attempted ; and when we find the list of
them given in full, it is doubtless to secure that no com
ponent part of the individual should be omitted, the name
of which had been handed down from the generations of olo^
\ There were, however, certain component parts which
v^ere clearly defined, and which occupied an important
place in the religious ideas of Egypt. Foremost amongst
these was the Ka or " Double." Underneath the con
ception of the Ka lay a crude philosophy of the universe.
The Ka corresponded with the shadow in the visible
world. Like the shadow which cannot be detached from
the object, so, too, the Ka or Double is the reflection of
the object as it is conceived of in the mind. But the
Egyptian did not realise that it was only a product of the
mind. For him it was as real and material as the shadow
itself ; indeed, it was much more material, for it had an
independent existence of its own. It could be separated
from the object of which it was the facsimile and present
ment, and represent it elsewhere. Nay, more than this,
it was what gave life and form to the object of which it
was the image ; it constituted, in fact, its essence and
personality. Hence it was sometimes interchanged with
the " Name " which, in the eyes of the Egyptian, was -the
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 49
essence of the thing itself, without which the thing could
not exist. In a sense the Ka was the spiritual reflec
tion of an object, but it was a spiritual reflection which
had a concrete form?\
The " ideas " of Plato were the last development of
the Egyptian doctrine of the Ka. They were the arche
types after which all things have been made, and they
are archetypes which are at once abstract and concrete.
Modern philosophers have transformed them into the
thoughts of God, which realise themselves in concrete
shape. But to the ancient Egyptian the concrete side
of his conception was alone apparent. X^That the Ka was
a creation of his own mind never once occurred to him.
It had a real and substantial existence in the world of
gods and men, even though it was not visible to the out
ward senses. Everything that he knew or thought of
had its double, and he never suspected that it was his
own act of thought which brought it into bein^x
\ It was symbolism again that was to blame. Once
more the symbol was confused with that for which it
stood, and the abstract was translated into the concrete.
The abstract idea of personality became a substantial
thing, to which all the attributes of substantial objects
were attached. Like the " Name," which was a force
with a concrete individuality of its own, the Ka was as
much^an individual entity as the angels of Christian
belief. X
\Between it and the object or person to which it be
longed, there was the same relation as exists between the
conception and the word. The one presupposed the
other. Until the person was born, his Ka had no exist
ence ; while, on the other hand, it was the Ka to which
his existence war owed. But once it had come into
being the Ka was immortal, like the word which, once
formed, can exist independently of the thought which gave
4
50 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
it birth. As soon as it left the body, the body ceased
to live, and did not recover life and consciousness until
it was reunited with its Ka. But while the body re
mained thus lifeless and unconscious, the Ja led an
independent existence, conscious and alive./
\ This existence, however, was, in a sense, quite as
material as that of the body had been upon earth. The
Ka needed to be sustained by food and drink. Hence
came the offerings which were made to the dead as well
as to the gods, each of whom had his Ka, which, like the
human Ka, was dependent on the food that was supplied
to it. But it was the Ka of the food and the Ka of the
drink upon which the Ka of man or god was necessarily
fed. Though at first, therefore, the actual food and drink
were furnished by the faithful, the Egyptians were event
ually led by the force of logic to hold that models of the
food and drink in stone or terra-cotta or wood were as
efficacious as the food and drink themselves. Such
models were cheaper and more easily procurable, and
had, moreover, the advantage of being practically imperish
able. Gradually, therefore, they took the place of the
meat and bread, the beer and wine, which had once been
piled up in the dead man s tomb, and from the time of
the Eighteenth Dynasty onwards we find terra-cotta
cakes, inscribed with the name and titles of the deceased,
substituted for the funerary bread. \
V The same idea as that which led to the manufacture
of these sham offerings had introduced statues and
images into the tomb at an early date. In the tombs
of the Third and Fourth and following Dynasties, statues
have been found of a very high order of art. No effort
has been spared to make them speaking likenesses of the
men and women in whose tombs they M ere placed ; even
the eyes have been made lifelike with inlaid ivory and
obsidian. Usually, too, the statues are carved out of the
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 51
hardest, and therefore the most enduring, of stone, so
that, when the corpse of the dead was shrivelled beyond
recognition, his counterpart in stone still represented him
just as he was in life. But the statue had its Ka like
the man it represented, and if the likeness were exact,
the Ka of the statue and the Ka of the man would be
one and the same. Hence the Ka could find a fitting
form in which to clothe itself whenever it wished to
revisit the tomb and there nourish itself on the offerings
made to the dead by the piety of his descendants. And
even if the mummv perished, the statue would remain
for the homeless Ka. 1 >
Ndit was probably on this account that we so often find
more than one statue of the dead man in the same tomb.
The more numerous the statues, the greater chance there
was that one at least of them would survive down to the
day when the Ka should at last be again united to its
body and soul. And the priests of Heliopolis discovered
yet a further reason for the practice. From time im
memorial Ea the sun-god had been invoked there under
the form of his seven birdlike " souls " or spirits, and
double this number of Kas was now ascribed to him, each
corresponding with a quality or attribute which he could
bestow upon his worshippers. 2 Symbols already existed
in the hieroglyphics for these various qualities, so that
it was easy to regard each of them as having a serrate
and concrete existence, and so being practically a Ka.
\ The funerary statue and the ideas connected with it
seem to have been characteristic of Memphis and the
school of theology which existed there. At all events,
1 Professor Maspero, to whom, along with Sir P. Le Page Renouf, we owe
the explanation of what the Egyptians meant by the Ka, first pointed
out the meaning of the portrait statues which were buried in the tomb
(Jiecueil de Travaiix, i. pp. 152-160).
2 Renouf, TSBA. vi. p. 504 sqq. ; Lepsius, Dcnkmalcr, iii. 194. 13 ;
Diimichen, Tempclinschriften, i. pi. 29.
52 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
no similar statues have been discovered at Abydos in the
tombs of the first two (Thinite) dynasties ; they make
their appearance with the rise of Memphite influence
under the Third Dynasty. And with the disappearance
of the old Memphite empire, they too tend to disappear.
The disturbed condition of Egypt after the fall of the
Sixth Dynasty was not favourable to art, and it was
probably difficult to find artists any longer who could
imitate with even approximate accuracy the features of
the dead, v
But under the Theban dynasties another kind of
image becomes prominent. This was the Ushebti or
" Kespondent," hundreds of which may be seen in most
museums. They are usually small figures of blue or
green porcelain, with a mattock painted under each arm,
and a basket on the back. The name and titles of the
deceased are generally inscribed upon them, and not
unfrequently the 6th chapter of the Egyptian funerary
ritual or Book of the Dea& The chapter reads as fol
lows : " these ushebtis, whatever be the work it is
decreed the Osirified one must do in the other world,
let all hindrances to it there be smitten down for him,
even as he desires ! Behold me when ye call ! See
that ye work diligently every moment there, sowing the
fields, filling the canals with water, carrying sand from
the West to the East. Behold me when ye call ! "
v The chapter explained what the ushebti-figuiGS were
intended for. Before the dead man, justified though he
had been by faith in Osiris and his own good deeds,
could be admitted to the full enjoyment of the fields of
paradise, it was necessary that he should show that he
was worthy of them by the performance of some work.
He was therefore called upon to cultivate that portion
of them which had been allotted to him, to till the
ground and water it from the heavenly Nile. Had lie
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 53
been a peasant while on earth, the task would have been
an easy one ; had he, on the contrary, belonged to the
wealthier classes, or been unaccustomed to agricultural
labour, it would have been hard and irksome. Thanks
to the doctrine of the Ka, however, means were found
for lightening the obligation. The relatives of the dead
buried with him a number of ushebti- figures, each of
which represented a fellah with mattock and basket, and
their Kas, it was believed, would, with the help of the
sacred words of the Ritual, assist him in his work.
Sometimes, to make assurance doubly sure, the images
were broken ; thus, as it were, putting an end to their
earthly existence, and setting their Kas free^
\When once the tomb was closed and the mummy
hidden away in the recesses, it was necessary to find a
way by which the Ka could enter the abode of the dead,
and so eat and drink the food that had been deposited
there. For it must be remembered that the Ka from
its very nature was subject to the same limitations as
the person whom it represented. If there was no door
it could not enter. Where it differed from the living
person was in its existing in a world in which what are
shams and pictures to us were so many concrete realities.
Consequently all that was needed in order to allow the
Ka free entrance into the tomb was to paint a false
door on one of its walls ; the Ka could then pass in and
out through the Ka of the door, and so rejoin its mummy
or its statue when so it wished!\
This false door, in front of which the offerings to the
dead were originally laid, must go back to a primitive
period in Egyptian history. Professor Flinders Petrie
has shown that it is presupposed by the so-called Banner
name of the Egyptian Pharaohs. 1 Ever since the first
days of hieroglyphic decipherment, it has been known
1 A Season in Egypt, 1887, pp. 21, 22.
54 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
that besides the name or names given to the Pharaoh at
birth, and commonly borne by him in life, he had
another name not enclosed in a cartouche, but in some
thing that resembled a banner, and was surmounted by
the hawk of the god Horus. It actually represented,
however, not a banner, but the panel above the false
door of a tomb, and the name written within it was the
name of the Ka of the Pharaoh rather than of the
Pharaoh himself. It was accordingly the name by which
he was known after death, the name inscribed on the
objects buried in his tomb, and also the name under
which he was worshipped whether in this life or in the
next. As the Horus or deified leader who had sub
jugated the older inhabitants of Egypt and founded the
Pharaonic dynasties, it was right and fitting that he
should be known by the name of his Ka. It was not
so much the Pharaoh that was adored by his subjects,
as the Ka of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was god
because the blood of Horus flowed in his veins.
The earliest monuments of the Pharaohs yet dis
covered give almost invariably only the Ka-name of the
king. The fact is doubtless due in great measure to
their general character. With few exceptions they con
sist of tombstones and other sepulchral furniture. But
the objects found in the foundations of the temple of
Nekhen are also examples of the same fact. The fusion
was not yet complete, at all events in the south, between
the Pharaoh as man and the Pharaoh as god ; it was
his Ka that was divine, rather than the bodily husk in
which it sojourned for a time.
The Ka accordingly occupies a prominent place in the
names of the Pharaohs of the Old Empire, while the
sacred art of the temples continued the ancient tradition
down to the latest times. Horus and the Nile-gods, for
instance, present the Ka of Amon-hotep in. along with
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 55
the infant prince to the god of Thebes ; and at Soleb the
same Pharaoh is represented as making offerings to his
own double. 1 Indeed, it is not unfrequent to find the
king and his Ka thus separated from one another and
set side by side ; and at times the Ka becomes a mere
symbol, planted like a standard at the monarch s back.
It was the Ka, therefore, which in the early days of
Egyptian religious thought was more especially associated
with the divine nature of the king. The association of
ideas was assisted by the fact that the gods, like men,
had each his individual Ka. And in the older period of
Egyptian history the Ka of the god and not the god
himself was primarily the object of worship. The sacred
name of Memphis was Ha-ka-Ptah, " the temple of
the Ka of Ptah," which appears as Khikuptdkh in the
Tel el-Aniarna letters, and from which the Greeks
derived their Aiguptos, " Egypt." Even in the last
centuries of Egyptian independence the prayers ad
dressed to the bull - god Apis are still made for the
most part to his Ka.
V The Ka, in fact, was conceived of as the living principle
which inspired both gods and men. Its separation from
the body meant what we call death, and life could return
only when the two were reunited. That reunion could
take place only in the other world, after long years had
passed and strange experiences had been undergone by
the disembodied Ka^The 105th chapter of the Book of
the Dead contains the words with which on the day of
resurrection the Ka was to be greeted. " Hail," says
the dead man, " to thee who wast my Ka during life !
Behold, I come unto thee, I arise resplendent, I labour, I
1 Cf. the illustrations in Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 259 ; and
Lepsius, Denkmalcr, iii. 87. In Bonomi and Arundale, Gallery of
Antiquities, pt. i. pi. 31, is a picture of Thothmes II. with his Ka
standing behind him.
56 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
am strong, I am hale, I bring grains of incense, I am
purified thereby, and I thereby purify that which goeth
forth from thee." Then follow the magical words by
which all evil was to be warded off : "I am that amulet
of green felspar, the necklace of the god Ea, which is
given unto them that are on the horizon. They flourish,
I flourish, my Ka flourishes even as they, my duration of
life flourishes even as they, my Ka has abundance of
food even as they. The scale of the balance rises, Truth
rises high unto the nose of the god Ka on the day on
which my Ka is where I am (?). My head and my arm
are restored to me where I am (?). I am he whose eye
seeth, whose ears hear ; I am not a beast of sacrifice.
The sacrificial formulae for the higher ones of heaven are
recited where I am."
X As might be expected, the Ka is often represented
with the symbol of life in its hands. At the same time,
it is important to remember that, though under one
aspect the Ka was identical with the principle of life, in
the mind of the Egyptian it was separate from the
latter, just as it was separate from consciousness and
from the divine essence. These were each of them
independent entities which were possessed by the Ka
just as they were possessed by its human counterpart.
Life, consciousness, and relationship to the gods were all
attributes of the Ka, but they were attributes, each of
which had a concrete and independent existence of its owV
^\At the outset, doubtless, the Ka was practically
identical with the vital principle. Primitive man does
not distinguish as we do between the animate and the
inanimate. He projects his own personality into the
things he sees about him, and ascribes to them the same
motive forces as those which move himself. He knows
of only one source of movement and activity, and that
source is life. The stars which travel through the
IMPERISHABLE PAET OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 57
firmament, the arrow that flies through the air, are either
alive or else are directed and animated by some living
power. Movement, in fact, implies life, and the moving
object, whatever it may be, is a living thing, u
The old belief or instinct is still strong in the child.
He revenges himself upon the ball or stone that has
struck him as though it too were a living being. In the
Mosaic law it is laid down that "if an ox gore a man or
a woman that they die, then the ox shall be surely
stoned"; and similar penalties were enforced against
animals which had injured man, not only in the Middle
Ages, but even in the eighteenth century. Thus a pig
was burned at Fontenay-aux-Boses, in 1266, for having
devoured a child ; and in 1 3 8 9 a horse was brought to
trial at Dijon for the murder of a man, and condemned
to death. In Brazil, in 1713, an action was brought
against the ants who had burrowed under the foundations
of a monastery, and, after counsel had been heard on
both sides, they were solemnly condemned to banish
ment by the judge; while, in 1685, the bell of the
Protestant chapel at La Eochelle was first scourged for
having abetted heresy, then catechised and made to
recant, and finally baptized. 1
The early Egyptians were not more enlightened than
the orthodox theologians of La Eochelle. For them, too,
action must have implied life, and the distinction between
object and subject had not yet been realised.V Hence the
belief that objects as well as persons had each its Ka, a
belief which was strengthened by the fact that they all
alike cast shadows before them, as well as the further
belief that the nature of the Ka was in either case the
same. Hence it was, moreover, that the usJiebti-figuies
and other sepulchral furniture were broken in order that
their Kas might be released from them, and so accompany
1 Baring Gould, Curiosities of Olden Times, 2nd ed., p. 57 sqq.
58 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the Ka of the dead mail in his wanderings in the other
world. As life and the power of movement deserted the
corpse of the dead man as soon as his Ka was separated
from it, so too the Ka of the ushebti passed out of it
when its form was mutilated by breakage. The life that
was in it had departed, as it were, into another worltfV
It is even possible that the very word Ka had origin
ally a connection with a root signifying " to live." At
any rate, it was identical in spelling with a word which
denoted " food " ; and that the pronunciation of the two
words was the same, may be gathered from the fact that
the Egyptian bas-reliefs sometimes represent the offerings
of food made to the dead or to the gods inside the arms
of the symbol of the Ka. 1 When we remember that
vivande is nothing more than the Latin vivenda, " the
things on which we live," there arises at least the possi
bility of an etymological connection between the double
and the principle of life which it once symbolised. 2
Now, in my Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the
Ancient Babylonians, I pointed out that the early
Sumerian inhabitants of Babylonia held a belief which is
almost precisely the same as that of the Egyptians in
regard to the Ka. In Babylonia also, everything had its
Zi or " double," and the nature of this Zi is in no way
distinguishable from that of the Egyptian Ka. As in
Egypt, moreover, the gods had each his Zi as well as
men and things, and, as in Egypt, it was the Zi of the
god rather than the god himself which was primarily
worshipped. So marked is the resemblance between the
i It is noticeable that while the Tel el-Amarna letters show that the
actual pronunciation of the word Ka was Ku, Ha-ka-Ptah, the sacred
name of Memphis, being written Khi-ku-Ptakh (Aiguptos), ku was
"food" in the Sumerian of primitive Babylonia.
- In his titudcs de Mythologic ct d ArcMologie tgyptiennes, i. p. 61,
Professor Maspero gives "cake" as the original sense of Ka, which, how
ever, he explains as "a cake of earth," and hence "substance."
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 59
two conceptions, that in working it out on the Babylonian
side, I could not resist the conviction that there must
have been some connection between them. That was
sixteen years ago. Since then discoveries have been
made and facts brought to light which indicate that a
connection really did exist between the Babylonia and
the Egypt of the so-called prehistoric age, and have led
me to believe, with Hommel, de Morgan, and others,
that Babylonia was the home and cradle of the Pharaonic
Egyptians. In Sumerian the word Zi signified " life,"
and was denoted by the picture of a flowering reed. It
was the life on which was imprinted the form of the
body that was for a time its home, and its separation
from the body meant the death of the latter. The
Sumerians never advanced to the further stage of making
the vital principle itself a separable quality ; perhaps the
original signification of the word which it never lost
would have prevented this. But they did go on to
transform the Zi into a spirit or demon, who, in place of
being the counterpart of some individual person or
tiling, could enter at will into any object he chose.
Even in Egypt, traces of the same logical progress in
ideas may perhaps be found. If Professor Maspero is
right in his interpretation of certain passages in the
Pyramid texts and Ptolemaic papyri, "The double did
not allow its family to forget it, but used all the means
at its disposal to remind them of its existence. It
entered their houses and their bodies, terrified them,
waking and sleeping, by its sudden apparitions, struck
them down with disease or madness, and would even
suck their blood like the modern vampire." 1 Such a
1 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 114. The Ka, however, is here iden
tified with the Khu, and it is questionable whether the passages referred to
in the Pyramid texts really embody old ideas which are to be interpreted
literally, or whether they are not rather to be taken metaphorically.
60 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
conception of the Ka, however, if ever it existed, must
have soon passed away, leaving behind it but few vestiges
of itself.
I have dwelt thus long on the doctrine of the Ka or
double on account both of its importance and of the
difficulties it presents to the modern scholar. \ Its dis
covery by Professor Maspero and Sir P. Le Page Eenouf
cleared away a host of misconceptions, and introduced
light into one of the darkest corners of Egyptian religion. 1
And however strange it may seem to us, it was in
thorough accordance with the simple logic of primitive
man. Given the premisses, the conclusion followed. It
was only when the Egyptian came to progress in know
ledge and culture, and new ideas about his own nature
were adopted, that difficulties began to multiply and the
theory of the Ka to become complicated^
V Among these new ideas was that of the Khu or
"luminous" part of man. On the recently discovered
monuments of the early period, the Khu holds a place
which it lost after the rise of Memphite influence with
the Third Dynasty. We find it depicted on the tomb
stones of Abydos embraced by the down-bent arms of
the Ka. The Khu, therefore, was conceived of as com
prehended in the human Ka, as forming part of it,
though at the same time as a separate entity. It was,
in fact, the soul of the human Ka, and was accordingly
symbolised by the crested ibis. 2 It may be that it was
in the beginning nothing more than the phosphorescent
light emitted by decaying vegetation which the belated
1 Maspero, Comptcs rendus du Congres provincial des Orientalistes d
Lyon, 1878, pp. 235-263 ; Renouf, Transactions of the Society of Biblical
Archeology (1879), vi. pp. 494-508.
2 This particular bird was chosen because its name was similar in sound
to that of the Khu. For the same reason the plover (ba) denoted the Ba
or soul. On objects found by de Morgan in the tomb of Menes at Negada,
the "soul" is represented by an ostrich.
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 61
wayfarer took for a ghost; the ginn (jinn) of the
modern Egyptian fellah are similar lights which flash up
suddenly from the ground. But the earliest examples of
its use on the monuments are against such an ignoble
origin, and suggest rather that it was the glorified spirit
which mounted up like a bird in the arms of its Ka
towards the brilliant vault of heaven. It is not until
we come to the decadent days of the Greek and Eoman
periods that the Khu appears in a degraded form as a
malignant ghost which enters the bodies of the living in
order to torment them. No traces of such a belief are
to be found in older days. The Pyramid texts speak of
" the four Khu of Horus," who live in Heliopolis," and
were at once male and female, and of the Khu who
brandish their arms and form a sort of bodyguard
around the god of the dead. They are identified with
the fixed stars, and more especially with those of the
Great Bear, and in the euhemeristic chronicles of Egyptian
history they become the " Manes " of Manetho, the semi-
divine dynasty which intervened between the dynasties
of the gods and of menX.
\The Khu thus forms a link between men and the gods,
and participates in the divine nature. It is the soul
regarded as a godlike essence, as coming down from
heaven rather than as mounting up towards it. It is
not only disembodied, but needs the body no longer ; it
belongs to the Ka, which still lives and moves, and not
to the mummified corpse from which the vital spark has
fled. It ts on the god of the dead, not on the dead
themselves/^
It seems probable, therefore, that in the part of Egypt
m which the doctrine of the Khu grew up, mummification
was not practised ; and the probability is strengthened by
the fact that, before the rise of the Third Dynasty,
1 See Chassinat, Rccucil, xix. p. 23 sqq.
62 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
embalming was apparently not frequent in Upper Egypt,
even in the case of the kings. But, however this may
be, one thing is certain. \The conception of the Khu
cannot have originated in the same part of the country,
or perhaps among the same element in the population,
as a parallel but wholly inconsistent conception which
eventually gained the predominance. According to this
conception, the imperishable part of man which, like the
Ka, passed after death into the other world, was the Ba
or " soul." Like the Khu, the Ba was pictured as a bird ;
but the bird is usually given a human head and some
times human hands. 1 But, while the Khu was essentially
divine, the Ba was essentially human. It is true that
the Ba, as well as the Khu, was assigned to the gods
Ka of Heliopolis was even credited with seven; but
whereas man possessed a Khu or luminous soul because
he was likened to the gods, the gods possessed a Ba
because they were likened to meiv^
\ The relation between the two is brought out very
dearly in the philosophy of the so-called Hermetic
books, which endeavoured to translate the theology of
Egypt into Greek thought. There we are told that the
Khu is the intelligence (i/oO?), of which the Ba or soul
(^vyr)) is as it were the envelope. As long as the soul
is imprisoned in the earthly tabernacle of the body, the
intelligence is deprived of the robe of fire in which
it should be clothed, its brightness is dimmed, and its
purity is sullied. The death of the body releases it from
its prison-house; it once more soars to heaven and
becomes a spirit (Safawv), while the soul is carried to
the hall of judgment, there to be awarded punishment
1 From the fifteenth to the eleventh century B.C., it was fashionable to
substitute for the bird a beetle with a ram s head, the phonetic value of
the hieroglyph of ram being la, and that of the beetle l-hcprr, "to
become."
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 63
or happiness in accordance with its deserts. 1 The Khu,
in other words, is a spark of that divine intelligence
which pervades the world and to which it must return ;
the Ba is the individual soul which has to answer after
death for the deeds committed in the bodyN
\ The plover was the bird usually chosen to represent
the Ba, but at times the place of the plover is taken by
the hawk, the symbol of Horus and the solar gods.
That the soul should have been likened to a bird is
natural, and we meet with the same or similar symbol
ism among other peoples. Like the bird, it flew between
earth and heaven, untrammelled by the body to which
it had once been joined. From time to time it visited
its mummy; at other times it dwelt with the gods
above. Now and again, so the inscriptions tell us, it
alighted on the boughs of the garden it had made for
itself in life, cooling itself under the sycamores and eat
ing their fruits. For the Ba was no more immaterial
than the Ka ; it, too, needed meat and drink for its sus
tenance, and looked to its relatives and descendants to
furnish theinX
\ But, as Professor Maspero 2 has pointed out, there was
a very real and fundamental difference between the idea
of the Ka_or_jdouble, and that of- the Ba or soul. The
Kajwas originally nourisjiej^oj^theactual offerings that
were p1acftjjjri_thglf.npib of t.hft (fcg.fj_jTm;n ; it passed W LJ
into it t-hr^iigh_thjgL .false door P-T! pnnanrnprj^f.ViP food V
that it found there. But the soul had ascended to the i
gods in heaven ; it lived in_thejight of day, not in the \$/
darkness of the tomb ; and it is doubtful if it was ever
supposed to ^return there. To the godsaccordingly was
committecLjbhe care ofJ^he_J3a, and of seeing thaFTtf was
properly provided for. By the power of prayer and
1 Hermes Trismeg., Pozmanclres, ed. Parthey, clis. i. and x.
- titudes de Mythologie, i. p. 166.
64 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
magical incantation, the various articles of food, or, more
strictly speaking, their doubles, were identified with the
gods, and communicated by the gods to the soul. Long
before the days when the Pyramid texts had been com
piled, this theory of the nourishment of the soul was
applied also to the nourishment of the Ka, and the older
belief in the material eating and drinking of the Ka had
passed away. All that remained of it was the habitual
offering of the food to the dead, a custom which still
lingers among the fellahin of Egypt, both Moslem and
CoptS
\ Besides the double and Jhe two souls, there was yet
another immo^al~eIe^Ht^n_Jhe^hmnj,n frame. This
was the heartTtn^Tea^FTiotirof the" fMillgs_and_of the
_mind. But it was not the material heart, but its
immaterial double, which passed after death into the
other world. The material heart was carefully removed
from the mummy, and with the rest of the intestines
was usually cast into the Nile\ Porphyry * tells us that
in his time, when the bodies of the wealthier classes
were embalmed, the Egyptians " take out the stomach
and put it into a coffer, and, holding the coffer to the
sun, protest, one of the embalmers making a speech on
behalf of the dead. This speech, which Euphantos
translated from his native language, is as follows : *
Lord the Sun, and all ye gods who give life to man,
receive me and make me a companion of the eternal
gods. For the gods, whom my parents made known to
me, as long as I have lived in this world I have con
tinued to reverence, and those who gave birth to my
body I have ever honoured. And as for other men, I
have neither slain any, nor defrauded any of anything
entrusted to me, nor committed any other wicked act ;
but if by chance I have committed any sin in my life,
1 DC Abst. iv. 10.
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 65
by either eating or drinking what was forbidden, not of
myself did I sin, but owing to these members, at the
same time showing the coffer in which the stomach was.
And having said this, he throws it into the river, and
embalms the rest of the body as being pure. Thus they
thought that they needed to excuse themselves to God
for what they had eaten and drunken, and therefore so
reproach the stomach." l
Now and then, however, the heart and intestines
were replaced in the mummy, but under the protection
of wax images of the four genii of the dead the four
Khu of the Book of the Dead. More often they were
put into four vases of alabaster or some other material,
which were buried with the dead. 2 Though the latter
practice was not very common, probably on account of
its expense, it must go back to the very beginnings of
Egyptian history. The hieroglyphic symbol of the heart
is just one of these vases, and one of the two names
applied to the heart was hati, " that which belongs to
the vase." After ages even endeavoured to draw a
distinction between ab " the heart " proper, and hati " the
heart-sack." 3
\From the time of the Twelfth Dynasty 4 onwards, the
place of the material heart in the mummy was taken
by an amulet, through the influence of which, it was
supposed, the corpse would be secured against all the
dangers and inconveniences attending the loss of its
1 Cf. also Plutarch, De Esu carnium Or. ii. p. 996, and Sept. Sapient.
C&nviv. p. 159 B.
2 The four vases were dedicated to the man-headed Amset (or Smet), the
jackal-headed Dua-mut-ef, the ape-headed Hapi, and the hawk-headed
Qebh-sonu-f, who are identified with the planets in the Pyramid texts
(Maspero, "Pyramide du roi Ounas" in the Recueil de Travaux, iii. p. 205).
3 See the Book of the Dead, chs. xxvi. and sqq.
4 It is still a moot question whether any scarabs go back to the age of
the Old Empire. Personally, I am inclined to agree with Prof. Flinders
Petrie in thinking that they do so.
5
66 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
heart until the day of resurrection. The amulet was in
the form of a beetle or scarab, the emblem of " becoming "
or transformation, and on the under side of it there was
often inscribed the 30th chapter of the Book of the
Dead, to the words of which were ascribed a magical
effectx The chapter reads as follows : " heart (al) of
my mbther, heart (liati) of my transformations ! Let
there be no stoppage to me as regards evidence (before
the judges of the dead), no hindrance to me on the part
of the Powers, no repulse of me in the presence of the
guardian of the scales ! Thou art my Ka in my body,
the god Khnum who makes strong my limbs. Come
thou to the good place to which we are going. Let not
our name be overthrown by the lords of Hades who
cause men to stand upright ! Good unto us, yea good is
it to hear that the heart is large (and heavy) when the
words (of life) are weighed ! l Let no lies be uttered
against me before God. How great art thou ! "
\Meanwhile the immaterial heart, the " Ka " of it,
which is addressed in the words just quoted, had made
its way through the region of the other world, until it
finally reached the place known as " the Abode of
Hearts." Here in the judgment-hall of Osiris it met the
dead man to whom it had formerly belonged, and here,
too, it accused him of all the evil words and thoughts he
had harboured in his lifetime, or testified to the good
thoughts and words of which he had been the author.
For the heart, though the organ through which his
thoughts and words had acted, was not the cause of
them ; in its nature it was essentially pure and divine,
and it had been an unwilling witness of the sins it had
been forced to know. Eventually it was weighed in the
balance against the image of Truth, and only if the
1 Or, according to Renoufs translation : Pleasant unto us, pleasant
unto the listener, is the joy of the weighing of the words."
\ \
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 67
scales turned in favour of the dead man could it rejoin
its former body and live with it for ever in the islands
of the Blest\
\ The scales and judgment-hall, however, belong to the
religious conceptions which gathered round the name of
Osiris, like the Paradise which the risen mummy looked
forward to enjoy. It was only after the worship of
Osiris had become universal throughout Egypt, and the
older or local ideas of the future life had been accom
modated to them, that it was possible for an Egyptian
to speak of meeting his disembodied heart, or of the
testimony it could give for or against him before the
judges of the dead. The fact that the use of the scarab
does not seem to extend further back than the age of
the Memphite or Theban dynasties, may imply that it
was only then that the Osirian beliefs were officially
fitted on to earlier forms of faitH\ However this may
be, the worship of Osiris and the beliefs attaching to
it must be left to another lecture, and for the present
we must pass on to the mummy itself, the last part of
man which it was hoped would be immortal.
\The mummy or Sfihu has to be carefully distinguished
from the Khat or natural body. The latter was a mere
dead shell, seen by the soul but not affording a resting-
place for it. The mummy, on the other hand, contained
within itself the seeds of growth and resurrection. It
could be visited by the soul and inspired by it for a few
moments with life, and the Egyptian looked forward to
a time when it would once more be reunited with both
its heart and its soul, and so rise again from the dea^\
It is impossible to say how far back in the history of
the Egyptian religion this belief in the immortality of
the mummy may go. It can hardly have originated in
the same circle of ideas as the doctrine of the Ka,
though the doctrine of the Ka could easily be reconciled
G8 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
with it. On the one hand, it seems connected, as we
shall see, with the cult of Osiris ; but, on the other hand,
there are no traces of mummification in the prehistoric
graves, and it is doubtful whether there are any in the
royal tombs of Negada and Abydos which belong to the
age of the First and Second Dynasties. At all events,
the scarab, whicli accompanied embalmment, first appears
at a much later date, and perhaps had a Memphite origin.
There are, however, indications that the process of
embalming first arose among the pre-Menic rulers of
Nekhen, in the neighbourhood of El-Kab. The soil of
El-Kab literally effloresces with the natron, which, it
was discovered, preserved the bodies buried in it ; and
even as late as the time of the Pyramid texts of the
Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the northern sources
of natron were known, it was still necessary for cere
monial purposes that the materials used by the em-
balmer should contain some of the natron of El-Kab. 1
V What was difficult to harmonise with the belief in the
resurrection of the mummy was the belief which made
the risen man an " Osiris," identified, that is to say, in
substance with the god Osiris, and not his old material
self. In the days, therefore, when Greek philosophy
took it in hand to systematise and interpret the theology
of Egypt, the risen mummy drops out of sighu^ The
Khu, as we have seen, becomes the divine intelligence,
which for a time is enshrouded in the human soul ; and
this again needs the envelope of the spirit, which sends
the breath of life through the veins before it can taber
nacle in the body of man. The Hermetic books tell us
1 Three grains of the natron of the city of Nekheb had to be used,
while only two grains of that of the north were required (Maspero,
" Pyramide du roi Ounas " in the Hecueil de Travaux, iii. p. 182). The
Horus of Nekhen, opposite El-Kab, was represented by a mummified
hawk (akhem).
IMPERISHABLE PART OF MAN AND THE OTHER WORLD 69
that while body, spirit, and soul are common to man and
the beasts, the divine intelligence is his alone to possess,
stripped, indeed, of its native covering of ethereal fire,
but still the veritable spirit of God. Ever is it seeking
to raise the human soul to itself, and so purify it from
the passions and desires with which it is inspired by the
body. But the flesh wages continual war against it, and
endeavours to drag the soul down to its own level. If
the soul yields, after death the intelligence returns to its
original state, while the soul is arraigned before the
judgment-seat of heaven, and there being accused by its
conscience, the heart, is condemned to the punishment
of the lost. First it is scourged for its sins, and then
handed over to the buffetings of the tempests, suspended
between earth and sky. At times in the form of an
evil demon it seeks alleviation of its torments by enter
ing the body of a man or animal, whom it drives to
murder and madness. But at last, after ages of suffer
ing, the end comes ; it dies the second death, and is
annihilated for ever.
The good soul, on the other hand, which has listened
in life to the voice of the divine intelligence, and
struggled to overcome the lusts and passions of the
flesh, obtains after death its reward. Guided by the
intelligence, it traverses space, learning the secrets of the
universe, and coming to understand the things that are
dark and mysterious to us here. At length its educa
tion in the other world is completed, and it is permitted
to see God face to face and to lose itself in His ineffable
glory.
I need not point out to you how deeply this Hellenised
philosophy of Egypt has affected the religious thought
of Christian Alexandria, and through Alexandria of
Christian Europe. It may be that traces of it may be
detected even in the New Testament. At any rate,
70 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
much of the psychology of Christian theologians is
clearly derived from it. We are still under the influ
ence of ideas whose first home was in Egypt, and whose
development has been the work of long ages of time.
True or false, they are part of the heritage bequeathed
to us by the past.
LECTUEE IV.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD.
!N my last lecture, when speaking of the form under
which the soul of man was pictured by the Egyptians, I
mentioned that it was often represented by a hawk, the
symbol of the sun-god. Why the hawk should have
thus symbolised the sun is a question that has often
been asked. The Egyptians did not know themselves ;
and Porphyry, in the dying days of the old Egyptian
faith, gravely declares that it was because the hawk was
a compound of blood and breath ! One explanation has
been that it was because the hawk pounces down from
the sky like the rays of the sun, which, like the eagle,
he can gaze at without blinking ;\and a passage in the
Odyssey of Homer (xv. 525) has been invoked in favour
of this view, where the hawk is called "the swift
messenger of Apollo." But if there is any connection
between the Homeric passage and the Egyptian symbol,
it would show only that the symbol had been borrowed
by the Greek poet. \ Originally, moreover, it was only
the sun-god of Upper Egypt who was represented even
bythe Egyptians under the form of a haw8>
\his was Horus, often called in the later texts " Horus
the elder" (Hor-ur, the Greek Aroeris), in order to
distinguish him from a wholly different god, Horus the
younger, the son of Isis. His symbol, the hawk, is found
on the early Pharaonic monuments which recent excava
tions have brought to light. \Sometimes the hawk stands
72 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
on the so-called standard, which is really a perch, some
times on the crenelated circle, which denoted a city in
those primitive days. The standard is borne before the
Pharaoh, representing at once his own title and the nome
or principality over which he held rule; and its resemblance
to the stone birds perched on similar supports, which Mr.
Bent found in the ruins of Zimbabwe, suggests a connection
between the prehistoric gold miners of Central Africa
and the early inhabitants of Southern Egypt. On one
of the early Egyptian monuments discovered at Abydos,
two hawks stand above the wall of a city which seems
to bear the name of " the city of the kings," l and a slate
plaque found by Mr. Quibell at Kom el-Ahmar shows us
on one side the Pharaoh of Nekhen inspecting the
decapitated bodies of his enemies with two hawks on
standards carried before him, while, on the other side, a
hawk leads the bridled " North " to him under the guise
of a prisoner, through whose lips a ring has been passed. 2
In the first case, the hawks may represent the districts
of which the god they symbolised was the protecting
deity ; 3 in the second case, the god and the king must
be identified together. It was as Horus, the hawk, that
the Pharaoh had conquered the Egyptians of the north,
and it was Horus, therefore, who had given them into his
hand.
If Dr. Naville is right, Horus the hawk-god is again
represented on the same plaque, with the symbol of
" follower," above a boat which is engraved over the
bodies of the decapitated slain. 4 Countenance is given
1 De Morgan, Hccherches sur Us Origines de Vtigyptc, ii. pi. iii. line 2.
2 Zeitschrift fur Aegyptischc Sprachc, xxxvi. pis. xii. and xiii. ; Quibell,
Hierakonpolis, pt. i. pi. xxix.
3 Professor Maspero, however, proposes to see in them a symbol of the
king of Upper Egypt destroying a hostile city.
4 Rccueil de Travaux, xxi. pp. 116, 117. Dr. Naville points out that
on the Palermo Stela the festival of the Shcsh-Hor, with the determinative
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 73
to this view by a drawing on the rocks near El-Kab, in
which the cartouches of two kings of the Fourth Dynasty,
Sharu and Khufu, are carried in boats on the prows of
which a hawk is perched, while above each name are two
other hawks, standing on the hieroglyph of " gold," and
with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt on their
heads. The title " follower of Horus " would take us
back to the earliest traditions of Egyptian history. The
" followers of Horus," according to the later texts, were
the predecessors of Menes and the First Dynasty of united
Egypt, the Pharaohs and princes of the southern kingdom
whose very names were forgotten in after days. Never
theless, it was remembered that they had founded the
great sanctuaries of the country ; thus an inscription at
Dendera declares that in the reign of king Pepi of the
Sixth Dynasty there was found in the wall of the palace
a parchment on which was a plan of the temple drawn
upon it in the time of " the followers of Horus." The
legends of Edfu told how these followers of Horus had
been smiths, armed with weapons of iron, and how they
had driven the enemies of their leader before them until
they had possessed themselves of the whole of Egypt. 1
of a sacred bark, occurs repeatedly in that part of the inscription which
relates to the festivals of the kings of the first two dynasties. Professor
Petrie has found the same festival mentioned on two ivory tablets from
the tomb of a king of the First Dynasty at Abydos (Petrie, The Eoyal
Tombs of the First Dynasty, pt. i. pi. xvii.) ; and it may be added that in
the Pyramid texts (Pepi 670 ; Eecueil de Travaux, viii. p. 105) the Mat
or Madit bark of the sun-god is identified with the bark of the Shesh-Hor,
while the Semkett or bark in which the sun-god voyages at night be
comes a bark in which the place of the hawk is taken by a picture of the
ben or tomb of Osiris here identified with that of Akhem the mummified
hawk, which forms part of the symbol for the Thinite nome. Elsewhere
: is the Semkett or day-bark of the sun which is identified with the
festival of the Shesh-Hor (Recueil de Travaux, iii. p. 205).
1 On the mesnitiu or "blacksmiths" of Horus, see Maspero, titudes de
Mythologie, ii. p. 313 and sqq. The Mcsnit or "Forge" was the name
given to the passage opening into the shrine of the temple of Edfu.
74 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
But many hard-fought battles were needed before this
could be accomplished. Again and again had the foe
been crushed at Zadmit near Thebes, at Neter-Khadu
near Dendera, at Minia, at Behnesa and Ahnas on the
frontier of the Fayyum, and finally at Zaru on the Asiatic
borders of the Delta. Even here, however, the struggle
was not over. Horus and his followers had to take ship
and pursue the enemy down the Eed Sea, inflicting a
final blow upon them near Berenice, from whence he
returned across the desert in triumph to Edfu.
\ In this legend, which in its present form is not older
than the Ptolemaic period, echoes of the gradual conquest
of Egypt by the first followers of the Pharaohs have
probably been preserved, though they have been combined
with a wholly different cycle of myths relating to the
eternal struggle between Horus the son of Isis and his
twin brother Set. But the confusion between the two
Horuses must have arisen at an early time. Already a
king of the Third Dynasty, whose remains have been
found in the ruins of Nekhen, and who bore the title of
him " who is glorified with the two sceptres, in whom
the two Horus gods are united," has above his name the
crowned emblems of Horus and Set. 1 The titles of the
queens of the Memphite dynasties make it clear that by
the two Horuses are meant the two kingdoms of Upper
and Lower Egypt, and we must therefore s^ in Horus
and Set the symbols of the South and North.^
In the rock drawing, south of El-Kab, to which I have
alluded a few minutes ago, the two Horus hawks stand
on the symbol of " gold," the one wearing the crown of
Southern Egypt, the other that of the North. The
" Golden Horus " was, in fact, one of the titles assumed
1 Quibell, HieraJconpoIis, pt. i. pi. ii.
- See de Rouge, Rccherches sur les Monuments qiCon pent attribuer aux
six premieres dynasties, pp. 44, 45.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 75
by the Pharaoh at an early date. Whether the epithet
applied to the god represented originally the golden
colour of the wings of the sparrow-hawk, or whether, as
is more probable, it denoted the Horus-hawk of gold who
watched over the destinies of the kings of Upper Egypt
in their ancient capital of Nekhen, it is now impossible
to say. 1 Later ages explained it as referring to the
golden rays of the morning sun.
In the time of the Fourth Dynasty the title was
attached indifferently to the Ka or death name given to
the Pharaoh after his death, and to the living name given
to him at his birth into this world. The Horus-hawk,
without the symbol of " gold," surmounted, so far as we
know, only the Ka name. It was the double of the
Pharaoh, rather than the Pharaoh himself, in whom the
god had been incarnated. Horus brings the captive
northener to the king, and presides over his kingdom ;
but it is only over the royal Ka that he actually watches.
At Nekhen, the Horus-hawk, to whom the city was
dedicated, was represented under the form of a mummy.
It was here, perhaps, that the natron of El-Kab was first
employed to preserve the dead body from decay, and that
Horus was supposed to be entombed, like Osiris at
Abydos. At any rate, there is clearly a connection
between the dead and mummified Horus and the Horus
who stands above the name of the Pharaoh s double.X It
is probable, therefore, that the identification of Horus
with the kings of Upper Egypt originated at Nekhen.
The Horus-hawk was the token under which they fought
and ruled ; it was Horus who had led them to victory,
1 Mr. Quibell found a large bronze hawk with a head of solid gold and
eyes of obsidian along with two bronze figures of Pepi, in the foundation
of the temple of Nekhen (Kom el-Ahmar) ; see Quibell, Hierakonpolis,
pt. i. pi. xlii. Hor-nubi, "the golden Horus," was the god of the
Antreopolite nome.
76 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and in whose name the Pharaonic Egyptians, with their
weapons of metal, overcame the neolithic population of
the NileX
\ That Horus, accordingly, in one shape or another,
should have become the patron god of so many princi
palities in Southern Egypt, is in no way astonishing. 1
He represented the Pharaonic Egyptians ; and as they
moved northward, subduing the older inhabitants of the
country, they carried his worship with them. At Helio-
polis he was adored as Hor-em-Khuti or Harrnakhis,
" Horus issuing from the two horizons," and identified
with Ea, the sun-god, the patron of the city. His image
may still be seen in the sphinx of Giza, with its human
head and lion s body. At Edfu, where the Pharaonic
invaders appear to have first established themselves, he
was worshipped as Hor-behudet under the form of a
winged solar disc, a combination of the orb of the sun
with the wings of the hawkX A legend inscribed on the
walls of the temple, which is a curious mixture of folk
lore and false etymologising, worked up after the fashion
of Lempriere by the priests of the Ptolemaic period,
1 The 1st (Ombitc) and 2nd (Apollinopolite) nomes, the 3rd noine
(originally) with its capital Nckhen, the nomes of the "Eastern and
Western Horus" (Tuphium and Asphynis), Qus "the city of Horus the
elder," the 5th (Coptite) nome, the 6th nome of Dendera in so far as
Hathor was daughter and husband of Horus, the 10th (Antseopolite) and
12th (Hierakopolite) nomes, and finally the 15th, 18th, and 20th (Hera-
kleopolite) nomes. In the Delta also Horus was god of the 3rd, 5th, 7th,
8th, llth, 19th, 25th, 27th, and 30th nomes, of which the 7th and 8th
were close to the Asiatic frontier.
2 When this emblem was first invented we do not know ; it probably
goes back to the prse-Menic period, like the composite animals on the early
monuments of Nekhen and Abydos. Its first dateable occurrence is on a
boulder of granite in the island of Elephantine above the name and figure
of Unas of the Fifth Dynasty. It is also engraved above the double
figure of an Old Empire king on a great isolated rock near El-Kab, which
is probably of the same date. The tablet on which it is engraved faces
south-east.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 77
knows exactly when it was that this emblem of the god
came into existence. It was in the three hundred and
sixty-third year of the reign of Ea-Harmakhis on earth,
when he fled from the rebels who had risen against
him in Nubia and had landed at Edfu. Here Hor-
behudet, the local deity, paid homage to his suzerain
and undertook to destroy his enemies. But first, he
flew up to the sun " as a great winged disc," in order
that he might discover where they were. Then in his
new form he returned to the boat of Harmakhis, and
there Thoth addressed Ea, saying : " lord of the gods,
the god of Edfu (JJehudet) came in the shape of a great
winged disc : from henceforth he shall be called Hor-
behudet." It was after this that Horus of Edfu and his
followers, " the smiths," smote the foe from the southern
to the northern border of Egypt.
^The legend, or rather the prosaic fiction in which it
has been embodied, has been composed when the original
character of Horus had long been forgotten, and when
the sun-god of Heliopolis had become the dominant god
of Egypt. It belongs to the age of theological syncretism,
when the gods of Egypt were resolved one into the other
like the colours in a kaleidoscope, and made intangible
and ever-shifting forms of Ea. But it bears witness to
one fact, the antiquity of the worship of Horus of
Edfu and of the emblem which was associated with him.
The winged solar disc forms part of his earliest histof^
\The fact is difficult to reconcile with the view of
Professor Maspero, that Horus was originally the sky,
and is in favour of the general belief of Egyptologists,
that he was from the outset the sun-god. Such, at all
events, was the opinion of the Egyptians themselves in
the later period of their history. In the Pyramid texts
Horus already appears as a solar deity, and it is only as
the sun-god that his identification with the Pharaohs can
78 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
be explained It was not the sky but the suii who
watched over the names of their doubles. It is true
that the two eyes of Horus were said to be the sun and
the moon, and that a punning etymology, which con
nected his name with the word her or " face," caused him
to be depicted as the face of the sky, the four locks of
hair of which were the four cardinal points. But the
etymology is late, and there is no more difficulty in
understanding how the solar and lunar discs can be
called the eyes of the sun-god, than there is in under
standing how the winged disc was distinguished from
him, or how even in modern phrase the " eye " may be
used as a synonym of the whole man. When we speak
of " the eye of God," we mean God Himself. 1
There is, however, one newly-discovered monument
which may be claimed in support of Professor Maspero s
theory. Above the Horus-hawk which surmounts the
name of the Third Dynasty king found at Nekhen, is the
hieroglyph of the sky. But the explanation of this is
not difficult to find. On the one hand, the hieroglyph
embraces the hawk as the sky does the sun ; on the other
hand, it gives the pronunciation of the name of Horus,
the sky in Egyptian being her or hor, " the high " and
uplifted. And the name of Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis,
" the Horus who issues from the two horizons," must be
quite as old as the monument of Nekhen. What the
two horizons were is shown us by the hieroglyph which
depicts them. They were the twin mountains between
which the sun came forth at dawn, and between which
he again passes at sunset.
1 Hor-merti, " Horus of the two eyes," was worshipped at Shedemm in
the Pharbsethite nome of the Delta. Grebaut s view, that the two eyes
originally represented the light, seems to me too abstract a conception
foran early period (Recueil de Travaux, pp. 72-87, 112-131). In the
Pyramid texts (Rec. iv. p. 42), mention is made of Horus with "the blue
eyes."
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 79
The hieroglyph belongs to the very beginning of
Pharaonic Egyptian history. It may have been brought
by the Pharaonic immigrants from their old home in the
East. It is at least noticeable that in the Sumerian
language of primitive Babylonia the horizon was called
kharra or kliurra, a word which corresponds letter for
letter with the name of Horus. The fact may, of course,
be accidental, and the name of the Egyptian god may
really be derived from the same root as that from which
the word for " heaven " has come, and which means " to
be high." But the conception of the twin-mountains
between which the sun-god comes forth every morning,
and between which he passes again at nightfall, is of
Babylonian origin. On early Babylonian seal-cylinders
we see him stepping through the door, the two leaves of
which have been flung back by its warders on either
side of the mountains, while rays of glory shoot upward
from his shoulders. The mountains were called Mas,
" the twins," in Sumerian ; and the great Epic of Chaldsea
narrated how the hero Gilgames made his way to them
across the desert, to a land of darkness, where scorpion-
men, whose heads rise to heaven while their breasts
descend to hell, watched over the rising and the setting
of the sun. It is difficult to believe that such a con
ception of the horizon could ever have arisen in Egypt.
There the Delta is a flat plain with no hills even in
sight, while in the valley of Upper Egypt there are
neither high mountains nor twin peaks.
Horus himself is, I believe, to be found in the Baby
lonian inscriptions. Mention is occasionally made in
them of a god Khar or Khur, and in contracts of the
time of Khamrnurabi (B.C. 2200) we find the name of
Abi-Khar, " my father is Khar." But the age of Kham-
murabi was one of intercourse between Babylonia and
Egypt, and the god Khar or Horus is therefore probably
80 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
borrowed from Egypt, just as a seal-cylinder informs us
was the case with Anupu or Anubis. 1
But though the name of Khar or Khur is and must
remain Egyptian, Horus has much in common with the
Babylonian sun - god Nin-ip. They are both warrior-
gods ; and just as the followers of Horus were workers
in iron, so Nin-ip also was the god of iron. One of his
titles, moreover, is that of " the southern sun " ; and on a
boundary-stone the eagle standing on a perch is stated
to be " the symbol of the southern sun." 2
The goddess with whom Horus of Nekhen was associ
ated was Nekheb with the vulture s head. Her temple
stood opposite Nekhen at El-Kab on the eastern bank of
the Nile, and at the end of the long road which led
across the desert from the Eed Sea. It was at once a
sanctuary and a fortress defending Nekhen on the east.
But Nekheb was the goddess not only of Nekhen, but of
all Southern Egypt. We find her in the earliest inscrip
tions on the sacred island of Sehel in the Cataract, where
she is identified with the local goddess Sati. We jfind
her again at Thebes under the name of Mut, " the
mother." Her supremacy, in fact, went back to the
days when Nekhen was the capital of the south, and its
goddess accordingly shared with it the privileges of
domination. When Nekhen fell back into the position
of a small provincial town, Nekheb also participated in
its decline. Under the Theban dynasties, it is true, the
name of Mut of Karnak became honoured throughout
Egypt, but her origin by that time had been forgotten.
The Egyptian who brought his offering to Mut never
1 Cf. Sayce, TSBA., Nov. 1898. In one case the name of the god is
written Kha-ar. In WAI. ii. 55. 36, Khur-galzu, "Horus, thou art
great ! " is given as the name of a Sumerian goddess.
2 Nin-ip was identified Avith the planet Saturn, like "Horus the
bull."
c
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 81
realised that behind the mask of Mut lay the features of
Nekheb of Nekhen.
Mut, however, continued to wear the vulture form,
and the titles assumed by the king still preserved a
recollection of the time when Nekheb was the presiding
goddess of the kingdom of the south. From the days
of Menes onward, in the title of " king of Upper and
Lower Egypt," while the serpent of Uazit symbolised
the north, the vulture of Nekheb symbolised the south.
At times, indeed, the urieus of Uazit is transferred to
Nekheb ; but that was at an epoch when it had come
to signify " goddess," as the Horus-hawk signified " god."
From the earliest ages, however, the plant which denoted
the south, and formed part of the royal title, was used
in writing her name. She was emphatically " the
southerner," the mistress of the south, just as her
consort, the mummified Horus, was its lord.
"XThe euhemerising legends of Edfu made Horus the
faithful vassal of his liege lord Ra Harmakhis of Helio-
polis. But from a historical point of view the relations
between the two gods ought to have been reversed, and
the legends themselves contained a reminiscence that
such was the case. In describing the victorious march
of Horus and his followers towards the north, they tell
us how he made his way past Heliopolis into the Delta,
and even established one of his " forges " on its eastern
most borders. The Horus kings of Upper Egypt made
themselves masters of the northern kingdom, introducing
into it the divine hawk they worshipped and the Horus
title over their names. ^
\The sun-god of Heliopolis was represented, like the
goos of Babylonia, as a man and not as a hawk. He
was known as Turn or Atmu, who, in the later days of
religious syncretism, was distinguished from the other
forms of the sun-god as representing the setting sun.
6
82 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
But Turn was the personal name of the sun-god ; the
sun itself was called Ea. As time went on, the attri
butes of the god were transferred to the sun ; Ea, too,
became divine, and, after being first a synonym of Turn,
ended by becoming an independent deity. While Turn
was peculiarly the setting sun, Ea denoted the sun-god
in all his forms and under all his manifestations. He
was thus fitted to be the common god of all Egypt, with
whom the various local sun-gods could be identified, and
lose in him their individuality. Ea was a word which
meant " the sun " in all the dialects of the country, and
its very want of theological associations made it the
starting-point of a new phase of religious thoughtS^
\ It was not until the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty that
a Special temple was built to Ea in Heliopolis. 1 Up to
that time Ea had been content to share with Turn the
ancient temple of the city, or rather had absorbed Turn
into himself and thus become its virtual possessor. But
his religious importance goes back to prehistoric times.
The temple of Heliopolis became the centre of a theo
logical school which exercised a great influence on the
official religion of Egypt. It was here that the sun-
worship was organised, and the doctrine of creation by
generation or emanation first developed ; it was here,
too, that the chief gods of the State religion were formed
into groups of nine.X^
V The doctrine of these Enneads or groups of nine was
destined to play an important part in the official creed.
From Heliopolis it spread to other parts of Egypt, and
eventually each of the great sanctuaries had its own
1 It was then that the two obelisks were erected in front of the temple
by Userteson i., which caused it to be known as Hat-Benbeni, "the
house of the two obelisks."
2 The members of the Ennead of Heliopolis or On are named in the
Pyramid texts (Pepl ii. 666) Turn, Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Isis,
Set, and Nebhat.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 83
Ennead, formed on the model of that of Heliopolis. At
Heliopolis the cycle of the nine supreme gods contained
Shu and Tefnut, Seb and Mut, Osiris and Isis, Set
and Nebhat, the four pairs who had descended by suc
cessive acts of generation from Turn, the original god of
the nome. N^Ve owe the explanation and analysis of the
Ennead to Professor Maspero, who has for the first time
made the origin of it clear. 1
^Tum, who is always represented in human form, was
the ancient sun-god and tutelary deity of Heliopolis.
To him was ascribed the creation of the world, just as it
was ascribed by each of the other nomes to their chief
god. But whereas at the Cataract the creator was a
potter who had made things from clay, or at Memphis
an artist who had carved them out of stone, so it was as
a father and generator that Turn had called the universe
into being. In the Book of the Dead it is said of him
that he is " the creator of the heavens, the maker of (all)
existences, who has begotten all that there is, who gave
birth to the gods, who created himself, the lord of life
who bestows upon the gods the strength of youth." An
origin, however, was found for him in Nu, the primeval
abyss of waters, though it is possible that Professor
Maspero may be right in thinking that Nu really owes his
existence to the goddess Nut, and that he was introduced
into the cosmogony of Heliopolis under the influence of
Asiatic ideas. However this may be, Shu and Tefnut,
who immediately emanated from him, apparently repre
sented the air. Later art pictured them in Asiatic style
as twin lions sitting back to back and supporting be
tween them the rising or setting sun. 2 But an old
1 See his Etudes de Mythologie c.t d Archeologie tyyptiennes, ii. p.
337 sqq.
2 Similarly, on early Babylonian seal-cylinders the leaves of the folding
doors through which the sun-god comes forth at daybreak are surmounted
84 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
legend described Shu as having raised the heavens above
the earth, where he still keeps them suspended above
him like the Greek Atlas. A text at Esna, which
identifies him with Khnum, describes him as sustaining
" the floor of the sky upon its four supports " or cardinal
points ; " he raised Nut, and put himself under her like
a great column of air." Tefnut, his twin sister, was the
north wind, which gives freshness and vigour to the
x The next pair in the Ennead of Heliopolis were Seb
arm Nut, the earth and the firmament, who issued from
Shu and Tefnut. Then came Osiris and Isis, the
children of the earth and sky, and lastly Set and
Nebhat, the one the representative of the desert land
in which the Asiatic nomads pitched their tents, the
other of the civilised Egyptian family at whose head
stood Neb-Jidt, " the lady of the house." Upon the
model of this Ennead two other minor Enneads were
afterwards formed.^
\ But it was only its first father and generator who was
the god of the nome in which the temple of Heliopolis
stood. The deities who were derived from him in the
priestly cosmogony were fetched from elsewhere^ They
were either elementary deities like Shu and Seb, or else
deities whose worship had already extended all over
Egypt, like Osiris and Isis. The goddess Nebhat seems
to have been invented for the purpose of providing Set
with a sister and a consort ; perhaps Tefnut, too, had
originally come into existence for the same reason.
\The Ennead, once created, was readily adopted by the
other nomes of Egypt. It provided an easy answer to
that first question of primitive humanity : what is the
by lions. See the illustration in King, Babylonian Religion and Mytho-
logie, p. 32. (The genuineness of this cylinder has been questioned
without good reason.)
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 85
origin of the world into which we are born ? The
answer was derived from the experience of man himself ;
as he had been born into the world, so, too, it was
natural to suppose that the world itself had been born.
The creator must have been a father, and, in a land
where the woman held a high place in the family, a
mother as well. Though Turn continued to be pictured
as a man, no wife was assigned him ; father and mother
in him were orieX
It is impossible not to be reminded of similar supreme
gods in the Semitic kingdoms of Asia. Asshur of Assyria
was wifeless ; ! so also was Chemosh of Moab. Nor does
the analogy end here. Creation by generation was a
peculiarly Semitic or rather Babylonian doctrine. The
Babylonian Epic of the Creation begins by describing the
generation of the world out of Mummu or Chaos. And
the generation is by pairs as in the Ennead of Heliopolis.
First, Mummu, the one primeval source of all things ; then
Lakhmu and Lakhamu, who correspond with Shu and
Tefnut ; next, Ansar and Kisar, the firmament and the
earth ; and lastly, the three great gods who rule the
present world. Of one of these, Ea, the ruler of the
deep, Bel-Merodach the sun-god was born.
Between the Babylonian and the Egyptian schemes
the differences are slight. In the Ennead of Heliopolis,
Turn, the offspring of Nu, takes the place of Mummu, the
watery chaos ; but this was because he was the god of
the State, and had therefore to be made the creator and
placed at the head of the gods. It merely interposes
another link in the chain of generation, separating Nu
from the two elemental deities which in the Babylonian
scheme proceeded immediately from it. For Nu was
1 The wife occasionally provided for Assliur by the scribes was a mere
grammatical abstraction, like Tnmt, the feminine of Turn, whose name is
now and then met with in late Egyptian texts.
86 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the exact equivalent of the Babylonian Mummu. Both
denote that watery chaos out of which, it was believed,
all things have come. And what makes the fact the
more remarkable is, that though the conception of a
primeval watery chaos was natural in Babylonia, it was
not so in Egypt. Babylonia was washed by the waters
of the Persian Gulf, out of which Ea, the god of the deep,
had arisen, bringing with him the elements of culture, and
the waves of which at times raged angrily and sub
merged the shore. But the Egyptians of history lived on
the banks of a river and not by the sea ; it was a river,
too, whose movements were regular and calculable, and
which bestowed on them all the blessings they enjoyed.
So far from being an emblem of chaos and confusion, the
Nile was to them the author of all good. I do not see
how we can avoid the conclusion that between the
Ennead of Heliopolis with its theory of cosmology, and
the cosmological doctrines of Babylonia, a connection of
some sort must have existed. 1
Indeed, the native name of Heliopolis is suggestive of
Asiatic relations. It is the On of the Old Testament,
and was called On of the north to distinguish it from
another On, the modern Erment, in the south. It was
symbolised by a fluted and painted column of wood, 2 in
which some have seen an emblem of the sun-god, like
the sun-pillars of Semitic faith. But the name of On
was not confined to Egypt. There was another Helio
polis in Syria, called On of the Beka a by Amos (i. 5),
where the sun-god was worshipped under the form of a
stone. And in Palestine itself Beth-el, " the house of
1 One of the old formulae embedded in the Pyramid texts (Teta 86) reads
like a passage from a Sumerian hymn : " Hail to thee, great deep (ageb),
moulder of the gods, creator of men." It belongs to Babylonia rather
than to Egypt, where the " great deep" could have been a matter only of
tradition.
2 See Petrie, Medum, p. 30.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 87
God," was known in earlier ages as Beth-On. It is true
that the name of On may have been carried into Asia in
the days when the Hyksos dynasties ruled over Egypt,
but it is more probable that both Beth-On and the On
near Damascus go back to an older date. In any case
they testify to some kind of contact between the sun-
worship of Heliopolis in Egypt and that of Syria and
Palestine. 1
\Between Turn, the sun-god of Northern Egypt, and
Horus, the sun-god of the South, there was one notable
difference. While Horns was a hawk, Turn was a man.
In this respect, again, he resembled the gods of Babylonia,
who are always depicted in human form. It is difficult
to find any other Egyptian deity who was similarly
fortunate. Osiris, indeed, was originally a man, but at
an early date he became confounded with his symbol, the
ram, in his title of " lord of Daddu." Professor Maspero
thinks that Khnum at the Cataract may also have been
originally a man ; but if so, he too became a ram before
the beginning of history. Ptah of Memphis and Anher
of This are the only other gods who appear consistently
in human shape, and JPtah is a mummy, while Anher,
like Turn, was the sun. 2 \
> ^\ r ith the adoption of the Ennead and the cosmological
ideas it embodied, a new element entered into the theology
of the Egyptian temples. This was the identification of
one god with another, or, to speak more exactly, the loss
of their individuality on the part of the gods. The
1 The existence of other cities of the name in Upper Egypt, "On of the
south," now Erment, and On, now Dendera, shows that it must go back
to the earliest epoch of Pharaonic Egypt. I believe that it is the
Sumerian unu, "city," and that the column which represented it hiero-
glyphically denoted "a foundation" or "settlement."
2 It will be shown in a future lecture that Osiris was the mummified
Anher. One is tempted to ask whether Ptah is not similarly the
mummified Turn ?
88 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
process was begun when the priests of Heliopolis took
such of the divinities as were recognised throughout
Egypt, and transmuted them into successive phases in
the creative action of their local god. It was completed
when other religious centres followed the example of
Heliopolis, and formed Enneads of their own. In each
case the local god stood of necessity at the head of the
Enneacl, and in each case also he was assimilated to Turn.
Whatever may have previously been his attributes, he
thus became a form of the sun-god. A dual personality
was created, which soon melted into one?
>JJut it was not as Turn that the sun-god of Heliopolis
thus made his way victoriously through the land of
Egypt. It was under the more general and undefined
name of Ea that he was accepted in the Egyptian
sanctuaries. Turn remained the local god of Heliopolis,
or else formed part of a solar trinity in which he re
presented the setting sun. But Ka became a (Divine
Pharaoh, in whom the world of the gods was unifiedN
The kings of the Fifth Dynasty called themselves his
sons. Hitherto the Pharaohs had been incarnations of
the sun-god, like the earlier monarchs of Babylonia;
henceforward the title of Horus was restricted to their
doubles in the other world, while that of " Son of the
Sun " was prefixed to the birth-name which they bore on
earth. The same change took place also in Babylonia.
There it was due to the invasion of foreign barbarians,
and the establishment of a foreign dynasty at Babylon,
where the priests refused to acknowledge the legitimacy
of a king who had not been adopted as son by the
sun-god Bel-Merodach. Perhaps a similar cause was
at work in Egypt. The Fifth Dynasty came from
Elephantine, an island which was not only on the
extreme frontier of Egypt, but was inhabited then as
now by a non-Egyptian race ; it may be that the price of
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 89
their acknowledgment by the priests and princes of
Memphis was their acceptance of the title of " Son of
Ka." - It narrowed their pretensions to divinity, and at
the same time implied their submission to the god of
the great sanctuary which stood in such close relations
with Memphis. As we have seen, the first monument
on which the winged solar disc is found is that of a king
of the Fifth Dynasty; it there overshadows his figure
and his two names; but though the hawk of Horus
stands above the name of his double, his birth-name is
without the title of " Son of Ka."
\ When once the principle had been adopted that the
leading gods of Egypt were but varying forms of the
sun-god, it was easy to construct Enneads, whatever
might be the number of the deities it was wished to
bring into them. Thus at Heliopolis itself Horus the
son of Isis was introduced, his confusion with the sun-
god Horus facilitating the process. At This, Anher was
identified with Shu ; at Thebes, Amon was made one with
Turn and Ka, with Mentu and Mut. Where a goddess
was at the head of the local Pantheon the process was
the same ; she interchanged with the other goddesses of
the country, and even with Turn himself. At all events,
Horapollo (i. 12j states that Nit of Sais was at once
male and female/X
XOue result of all this kaleidoscopic interchange was
the growth of trinities in which the same god appears
under three separate forms. At Heliopolis, for example,
Harmakhis became identified with Turn, and the trinity
of Turn, Ka, and Harmakhis grew up, in which Harmakhis
was the sun of the morning and Turn of the evening, while
Ka embodied them both. From one point of view, in
fact, Harmakhis and Turn were but different aspects under
which Ka could be envisaged; from another point Ka,
Turn, and Harmakhis were three persons in one godlV
90 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
I believe that Professor Maspero is right in holding
that the. Egyptian trinity is of comparatively late origin
and of artificial character. 1 He points out that it pre
supposes the Ennead, and in some cases, at least, can be
shown to have been formed by the union of foreign
elements. Thus at Memphis the triad was created by
borrowing Nefer-Tum from Heliopolis and Sekhet from
Latopolis, and making the one the son of the local god
Ptah, and the other his wife. The famous trinity of Osiris,
Isis, and Horus, which became a pattern for the rest of
Egypt, was formed by transferring Nebhat and Anubis,
the allies of Osiris, to his enemy Set, and so throwing
the whole of the Osirian legend into confusion. The
trinity of Thebes is confessedly modern; it owed its
origin to the rise of the Theban dynasties, when Thebes
became the capital of Egypt, and its god Amon neces-
J: sarily followed the fortunes of the local prince. Mut,
" the mother," a mere title of the goddess of Southern
Egypt, was associated with him, and the triad was
"Completed by embodying in it Ptah of Memphis, who
had been the chief god of Egypt when Thebes was still
a small provincial town. At a subsequent date, Khons.^-
the moon-god, took the place of Ptah. 2
- \We can thus trace the growth of the Egyptian trinity
ana the ideas and tendencies which lay behind it. It
was the culminating stage in the evolution of the re
ligious system which took its first start among the
priests of Heliopolis. First creation by means of
generation, then the Ennead, and lastly the triad and
the trinity such were the stages in the gradual pro-
1 fitudes de Mythologie et d Archdologie 6yyptiennes, ii. p. 270 sqq.
2 This has been proved by a stela of Antef iv. of the Eleventh Dynasty,
discovered by M. Legrain in 1900, in the temple of Ptah. Khonsu was
a mere epithet of the moon-god, meaning "wanderer." In a later age
Khonsu was himself superseded by Mentu.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 91
cess of development. And the doctrine of the trinity
itself Breached its highest point of perfection in that
worsjim--ol Osiris of which I shall spe^k in a future
But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyp
tian doctrine of the trinity. Generation in the case of
a god could not be the same as in the case of a man.
The very fact that Turn was wifeless proved this. It was
inevitable, therefore, that it should come to be conceived
of as symbolical like the generation of thought, all the
more since the deities who had proceeded from Turn
were all of them symbols representing the phenomena
of the visible world. Hence the idea of generation
passed naturally into that of emanation, one divine
being emanating from another as thought emanates from
thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of sym
bolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the ex
pression of an idea meant a concrete form. Seb and
Nut were the divine ideas which underlay the earth
and the firmament and kept them in existence, but they
were at the same time the earth and the firmament
themselves. They represented thought in a concrete
form, if we may borrow a phrase from the Hegelian
philosophy>\
The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon
by Greek thinkers in the days when Alexandria was
the meeting-place of the old world and the new. It
afforded an explanation not only of creation, but also
of the origin of evil, and had, moreover, behind it the
venerable shadow of Egyptian antiquity. It became
the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the Gnostic
systems, and through them made its way into Christian
thought. From another point of view it may be re
garded as an anticipation of the doctrine of evolution.
v The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was
92 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
accomplished long before the Pyramid texts were written
under the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. The
Ennead appears in them as a long established doctrine,
with all its consequences. The solar faith had laid firm
hold of Egyptian religion, and gained a position from
which it was never to be dislodged. Henceforward
Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and be
liefs which flowed from it, and the gods and goddesses of
the land assumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth
Dynasty, if not before, a new view of the future life
obtained official sanction, which substituted the sun-gqd
for Osiris and the solar bark for the Osirian paradiseS
But I must leave an account of it to another occasion,
and confine myself at present to the last and most
noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.
It is perhaps hardly correct to apply to it the term
development. It was rather a break in the religious
tradition of Egypt, an interruption in the normal evolu
tion of the Egyptian creed, which accordingly made but
little permanent impression on the religious history of
the nation. But in the religious history of mankind
it is one of the most interesting of episodes. Like
Mosaism in Israel, it preached the doctrine of mono
theism in Egypt; but unlike Mosaism, its success was
only temporary. Unlike Mosaism, moreover, it was a
pantheistic monotheism, and it failed accordingly in its
struggle with the nebulous polytheism of Egypt.
One of the last Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty
was Amon-hotep iv. Since the conquest of Syria by
his ancestor Thothmes in., and the establishment of an
empire which extended to the banks of the Euphrates,
Asiatic manners and customs had poured into Egypt in
an ever-increasing flood, and with them the ideas and
religious beliefs of the Semitic East. Amon-hotep IIL,,
the father of Amon-hotep iv., had maintained the older
\J
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 93
traditions of the Egyptian court, so far at least as
religion was concerned, though his mother and wife had
alike been foreigners. But his son appears to have been
young at the time of his father s death. He was accord
ingly brought up under the eye and influence of his
mother Teie, and his temperament seems to have
seconded the teaching he received from her. His
features are those of a philosophic visionary rather
than of a man of action, of a religious reformer rather
than of a king. \He flung himself eagerly into a re
ligious movement of which he was the mainspring and
centre, and for the first time in history there was per
secution for religion s sakeX^
\ For numberless centuries the Egyptian had applied the
title of " the one god " to the divinity he was adoring at
the moment, or who presided over the fortunes of his
city or nome. But he did not mean to exclude by it the
existence of other deities. The " one god " was unique
only to the worshipper, and to the worshipper only in
so far as his worship for the moment was addressed to
this " one god " alone. When with the growth of the
solar theory the deities of Egypt began to be resolved
into one another, the title came to signify that attribute
of divinity which unified all the rest. But to the
Egyptian, it must be remembered, the attribute was a
concrete thing ; and though in one sense Amon and
Khnum and Horus denoted the attributes of Ea, in
another sense they were distinct personalities with a
distinct history behind them. The result was what I
have called a nebulous polytheism, in which the indi
vidual deities of the Egyptian Pantheon had melted
like clouds into one another ; they had lost their several
individualities, but had not gained a new individuality
in return. The conservative spirit, which forbade the
Egyptian to break with the traditions of the past and
94 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
throw aside any part of his heritage, prevented him from
taking the final step, and passing out of polytheism into
monotheism^
v It was just this step, however, that was taken by
Amon-hotep IV. and his followers, and which at once
stamps the non-Egyptian character of his religious re
formation. Henceforward there was to be but one God
in Egypt, a God who was omnipresent and omniscient,
existing everywhere and in everything, and who would
brook no rival at his side. He was not, indeed, a new
god, for he had already revealed himself to the generations
of the past under the form of Ea, and his visible symbol
was the solar disc. But Ea had been ignorantly wor
shipped ; unworthy language had been used of him, and
he had been confounded with gods who were no gods at
all. The new and purified conception of the supreme
divinity needed a new name under which it could be
expressed, and this was found in Aten, " the solar disc,"
or Aten-Ea, " the disc of the sunN
\ It was not probable that Amon of Thebes and his
Worshippers would bow their heads to the new faith
without a struggle. It was Amon who had led the fathers
of Amon-hotep iv. to victory, who had given them their
empire over the world, and upon whose city of Thebes
the spoils of Asia had been lavished. A fierce con
test broke out between the Theban priesthood and the
heretical king. The worship of Amon was proscribed, his
very name was erased from the monuments on which it
was engraved, and a shrine of the rival deity was erected
at the very gates of his ancient temple. The Pharaoh
changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, " the glory
of the solar disc," and thereby publicly proclaimed his re
nunciation of the religion of which he was the official
XBut in the end the priests of Amon prevailed. Khu-
n-Aten was forced to leave the capital of his fathers,
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 95
and, carrying with him the State archives and the
adherents of the new faith, he built a new city for
himself midway between Minia and Siut, where the
mounds of Tel el-Amarna now mark its siiX Here,
surrounded by a court which was more than half Asiatic
in blood and belief, he raised a temple to the new God
of Egypt, and hard by it a palace for himself. The new
creed was accompanied by a new style of art ; the old
traditions of Egyptian art were thrown aside, and a
naturalistic realism, sometimes of an exaggerated char
acter, took their place. The palace and temple were
alike made glorious with brilliant painting and carved
stone, with frescoed floors and walls, with columns and
friezes inlaid with gold and precious stones, with panels
of pictured porcelain, and with statuary which reminds
us of that of later Greece. 1 Gardens were planted by
the edge of the Nile, and carriage roads constructed in
the desert, along which the king and his court took
their morning drives. Then, returning to his palace,
the Pharaoh would preach or lecture on the principles
and doctrines of the new faith.
It was officially called " the doctrine/ which, as
Professor Erman remarks, shows that it possessed a
dogmatically-formulated creed. Its teachings are em
bodied in the hymns inscribed on the walls of the tombs
of Tel el-Amarna. ^The God, whose visible symbol is the
solar disc, is He, as we learn from them, who has created
all things,^ the far-off heavens, mankind, the animals and
the birds ; our eyes are strengthened by his beams, and
when he reveals himself all flowers grow and live ; at
his rising the pastures bring forth, they are intoxicated
before his face ; all the cattle skip on their feet, and the
birds in the marshes flutter with joy." It is he " who
1 For the avchitectxiral plan of the temple, see Erman, Life in
Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 287.
96 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
brings in the years, creates the months, makes the days,
reckons the hours ; he is lord of time, according to whom
men reckon." l \Beside Him, " there is no other " God>
" Beautiful is thy setting," begins another hymn, "
living Aten, thou lord of lords and king of the two
worlds ! When thou unitest thyself with the heaven at
thy setting, mortals rejoice before thy countenance, and
give honour to him who has created them, and pray to
him who has formed them in the presence of Khu-n-
Aten, thy son, whom thou lovest, the king of Egypt who
liveth in truth. All Egypt and all lands within the
circle that thou treadest in thy glory, praise thee at thy
rising and at thy setting. God, who in truth art the
living one, who standest before our eyes, thou Greatest
that which was not, thou formest it all ; we also have
come into being through the word of thy mouth."
1 Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 262.
3 Another strophe of the Hymn to Aten, as translated by Professor
Breasted (De Hymnis in SoUmsub rcge Amcnophide iv. conccptis, p. 47), is
equally explicit : " Thou hast created the earth according to thy pleasure,
when thou wast alone, both all men and the cattle great and small ; all
who walk upon the earth, those on high who fly with wings ; the foreign
lands of Syria (Khar) and Gush as well as the land of Egypt ; each in its
place thou appointest, thou providest them with all that they need ; each
has his granary, his stores of grain are counted. Diverse are the
languages of men, more different, than their shape is the colour of their
skin, (for) thou hast distinguished the nations of the world (one from the
other)." In the succeeding strophe the monotheism of the worshipper of
Aten, in whose eyes even the sacred Nile was the creature of the one true
God, appears in striking contrast to the ordinary polytheism of Egypt
(Breasted, I.e. p. 53) : "Thou Greatest the Nile in the other world, thou
bringest it at thy pleasure to give life to mankind ; for thou hast made
them for thyself, lord of them all who art ever with them, lord of all
the earth who risest for them, sun of day (the mighty one in ?) the
remotest lands, thou givest them their life, thou sendest forth the Nile in
heaven, that it may descend for them ; it raises its waves mountain high
like the sea, it waters the fields of their cities. How glorious are thy
counsels ! lord of eternity, thou art a Nile in heaven for foreign men
and cattle throughout all the earth ! They walk on their feet, (and) the
Nile cometh to Egypt from the other world.
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 97
vThe solar disc was thus, as it were, the mask through
wmch the supreme Creator revealed himself. And this
Creator was the one true living God, living eternally,
brooking the worship of no other god at his side, and,
in fact, the only God who existed in truth. All other
gods were false, and the followers of Aten-Ea were
accordingly called upon to overthrow their worship and
convert their worshippers. At the same time, Aten
was the father of all things ; he had called all things
into existence by the word of his mouth, men equally
with the beasts and birds, the flowers and the far-off
heaven itself. If, therefore, men refused to worship him,
it was because they had been led astray by falsehood
and ignorance, or else were wilfully blincfS
Whatever measure of success the reforms of Khu-n-
Aten attained among the natives of Egypt, they must
have possessed in so far as they represented a reforma
tion, and not the introduction of a new and foreign cult.
There must have been a section of the people, more
especially among the educated classes, whose religious
ideas were already tending in that direction, and who
were therefore prepared to accept the new " doctrine."
The language often used of the gods, if strictly inter
preted, implied a more or less modified form of mono-
theism\the Egyptian deities, as we have seen, had come
to be resolved into manifestations of the sun-god, and
the symbol of the new faith enabled it to be connected
with the ancient worship of Ea. The old sun-worship
of Heliopolis formed a bridge which spanned the gulf
between Amon and Aten. Indeed, the worship of the
solar disc itself was not absolutely strange!" An Egyp
tian, for instance, who was buried at Kom el-Ahmar,
opposite El-Kab, in the reign of Thothmes in., speaks of
being " beloved by the beams of the solar disc " (Aten-
; and though no determinative of divinity is attached
7
98 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
to the words, it was but a step forward to make the
disc the equivalent of the sun-god.
\ Nevertheless, between the " doctrine " of Khu-n-Aten
1
and the older Egyptian ideas of the sun-god there was a
vast, if not impassable, distance. The " doctrine " was no
result of a normal religious evolution. That is proved
not only by the opposition with which it met and the
violent measures that were taken to enforce it, but still
more by its rapid and utter disappearance or extermina
tion after the death of its royal patron. It came from
Asia, and, like the Asiatic officials, was banished from
Egypt in the national reaction which ended in the rise
of the Nineteenth DynastyS,
The god of Khu-n-Aten, in fact, has much in common
with the Semitic Baal. Like Baal, he is the " lord of
lords," whose visible symbol is the solar orb. Like Baal,
too, he is a jealous god, and the father of mankind. It
is true that Baal was accompanied by the shadowy Baalat ;
but Baalat, after all, was but his pale reflection, necessi
tated by the genders of Semitic grammar ; and in some
parts of the Semitic world even this pale reflection was
wanting. Chemosh of Moab, for instance, and Asshur
of Assyria were alike wifeless.
On the other hand, between Aten and the Semitic
Baal there was a wide and essential difference. The
monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was pantheistic, and as a
result of this the god he worshipped was the god of the
whole universe. The character and attributes of the
Semitic Baal were clearly and sharply defined. He
stood outside the creatures he had made or the children
of whom he was the father. His kingdom was strictly
limited, his power itself was circumscribed. He was the
" lord of heaven," separate from the world and from the
matter of which it was composed.
Aten was in the things which he had created ;
THE SUN-GOD AND THE ENNEAD 99
he was the living one in whom all life is contained, and
at whose command they spring into existence. There
was no chaos of matter outside and before him ; he had
created " that which was not," and had formed it all.
He was not, therefore, a national or tribal god, whose
power and protection did not extend beyond the locality
in which he was acknowleged and the territory on
which his high places stood ; on the contrary, he was
the God of the whole universe ; not only Egypt, but " all
lands " and all peoples are called upon to adore him, and
even the birds and the flowers grow and live through
him. For the first time in history, so far as we know,
the doctrine was proclaimed that the Supreme Being was
the God of all mankind. /
The fact is remarkable from whatever point of view
it may be regarded. The date of Khu-n-Aten is about
1400 B.C., a century before the Exodus and the rise of
Mosaism. More than once it has been suggested that
between Mosaism and the " doctrine " of Aten there
may have been a connection. But in Mosaism we look
in vain for any traces of pantheism. The Yahveh of
the Commandments stands as much outside His creation
as the man whom He had made in His own image ; His
outlines are sharply defined, and He is the God of the
Hebrews rather than of the rest of the world. The
first Commandment bears the fact on its forefront : other
nations have their gods whose existence is admitted,
but Yahveh is the God of Israel, and therefore Him only
may Israel serve.
LECTUEE V.
ANIMAL WORSHIP.
ST. CLEMENT of Alexandria thus describes the religion of
his Egyptian neighbours (Pcedag. iii. 2) : " Among (the
Egyptians) the temples are surrounded with groves and
consecrated pastures ; they are provided with propylrea,
and their courts are encircled with an infinite number
of columns ; their walls glitter with foreign marbles and
paintings of the highest art ; the sanctuary is resplendent
with gold and silver and electrum, and many-coloured
stones from India and Ethiopia ; the shrine within it is
veiled by a curtain wrought with gold. But if you pass
beyond into the remotest part of the enclosure in the
expectation of beholding something yet more excellent,
and look for the image which dwells in the temple, a
pastophorus or some other minister, singing a paean in
the Egyptian language with a pompous air, draws aside a
small portion of the curtain, as if about to show us the
god ; and makes us burst into a loud laugh. For no god
is found therein, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent
sprung from the soil, or some such brute animal . . .
and the Egyptian deity is revealed as a beast that rolls
itself on a purple coverlet."
VSt. Clement was a Christian philosopher and apologist,
but the animal worship of the Egyptians was quite as
much an object of ridicule to the pagan writers of Greece
and Eome.\"Who has not heard," says Juvenal (Sat.
100
ANIMAL WORSHIP 101
xv.), "who has not heard, where Egypt s realms are
named
" What monster gods her frantic sons have framed ?
Here Ibis gorged with well-grown serpents, there
The crocodile commands religious fear ; . . .
And should you leeks or onions eat, no time
Would expiate the sacrilegious crime ;
-Religious nations sure, and blest abodes,
Where every orchard is o errun with gods ! :)
A Koman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was
torn to pieces by the mob before the eyes of Diodorus,
although the Eomans were at the time masters of the
country, and the reigning Ptolemy did his utmost to save
the offender. 1 For the majority of the people the cat
was an incarnate god.
This worship of animals was a grievous puzzle to
the philosophers of the classical age. The venerable
antiquity of Egypt, the high level of its moral code, and,
above all, the spiritual and exalted character of so much
of its religion, had deeply impressed the thinking world
of the Eoman Empire. That world had found, in a
blending of Egyptian religious ideas with Greek meta
physics, a key to the mysteries of life and death ; in the
so-called Hermetic books the old beliefs and religious
conceptions of Egypt were reduced to a system and
interpreted from a Greek point of view, while the
Neo-Platonic philosophy was an avowed attempt to
combine the symbolism of Egypt with the subtleties of
Greek thought. But the animal worship was hard to
reconcile with philosophy; even symbolism failed to
explain it away, or to satisfy the mind of the inquirer.
Plutarch had boldly denied that the worship of an animal
was in any way more absurd than that of an image ; the
deity, if so he chose, could manifest himself in either
1 Diod. Sic. i. 83.
102 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
equally well. Porphyry had recourse to the doctrine of
the transmigration of souls. If the soul migrated after
death into the body of some lower animal, he urged, it
would communicate to the latter a portion of the divine
essence. But after all this was no explanation of the
worship paid to the animal ; the soul had not been
worshipped while it was still in the body of its original
possessor, and there was therefore no reason why it
should be worshipped when it was embodied in another
form. Moreover, metempsychosis in the Greek sense was
never an Egyptian doctrine. \A11 the Egyptian held was
that the soul, after it had been justified and admitted to
a state of blessedness, could enter for a time whatever
material form it chose ; could fly to heaven, for instance,
in the body of a swallow, or return to the mummified
body in which it had once dwelt. But such embodi
ments were merely temporary, and matters of free choice ;
they were like a garment, which the soul could put on
and take off at will./
Modern writers have found it as difficult to explain
the animal worship of ancient Egypt as the philosophers
and theologians of Greece and Eome. Creuzer declared
that it was the result of a poverty of imagination, and
that the beasts were worshipped because they embodied
certain natural phenomena. Lenormant argued, on the
other hand, that it was due to a high spiritual conception
of religion, which prevented the Egyptians from adoring
lifeless rocks and stones like the other nations of
antiquity. Of late the tendency has been to see in it a
sort of totemism which prevailed among the aboriginal
population of the country, and was tolerated by the
higher religion of the Pharaonic immigrants. In this
case it would represent the religion of the prehistoric
race or races, and its admittance into the official religion
would be paralleled by the history of Brahmanism, which
ANIMAL WORSHIP 103
has similarly tolerated the cults and superstitions of the
aboriginal tribes of India. Indeed, it is possible to dis
cover an analogous procedure in the history of Chris
tianity itself. The lower beliefs and forms of worship
can be explained away wherever needful with the help
of symbolism and allegory, while the mass of the people
are left in the undisturbed enjoyment of the religious
ideas and rites of their forefathers.
\ Eecent discoveries, however, have cast a new light on
the matter. The early monuments of Egyptian history,
found in the neolithic graves and among the remains of
the first dynasties, have shown that the animal worship
of Egypt was only part of a larger system. Slate plaques,
on which are represented the actions of Pharaohs who
preceded Menes or were his immediate successors, prove
that the prevailing system of religion must have been one
closely akin to African fetishism. The gods appear
frequently, but they always appear under the form of
what in later times were regarded as their symbols.
Sometimes the symbol is an animal or bird, but some
times also it is a lifeless object. The human forms, to
which we are accustomed in later Egyptian art, are
absent ; l there is nothing to tell us that the religion of
the time was in any way Distinguished from the fetishism
of Dahomey or the Congo\
Thus on a slate plaque from Kom el-Ahmar (opposite
El-Kab 2 ) we see the Pharaoh entering the hall in which
lie the bodies of his decapitated foes, while four standards
are borne before him. On the first two are the hawks
of Horus, on the third the jackal of Anubis, on the last
Except in the case of Osiris at Abydos ; Petrie, The Royal Tombs of
the First Dynasty, pt. i. pi. xv. 16 ; comp. also at Kom el-Ahmar, Hiera-
konpolis, pt. i. pi. xxvi. B, though here it seems to be the Pharaoh who
is represented.
2 Quibell in the Zeitschrift fiir Aegyptlsche Sprache, xxxvi. pis. xii.,
xiii. ; Ilierakonpolis, pt. i. pi. xxix.
104 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
an object which may be intended for a lock of hair. 1 On
the reverse of the plaque the god is bringing before him
the prisoners of the north. But the god is a hawk,
whose human hand grasps the rope by which the con
quered enemy is dragged along. On a plaque of equally
early date, found at Abydos, five standards are depicted,
the foot of each of which is shaped like a hand holding a
rope. Above the first two standards are the jackals of
Anubis, on the next the ibis of Thoth, then the hawk
of Horns, and, finally, the curious object which is the
emblem of Min. On a still older plaque from the same
locality the names of the cities ruled (or conquered) by
the Pharaoh are inscribed, each within its battlemented
wall, while above is the animal god by which it is said
to be " beloved " or perhaps " destroyed." The last of
the cities is " the royal " capital, above which stand the
two hawks of Horus, who are perched on the standards
of the king ; behind it are the names of the other towns
under the protection of the scorpion of Selk, the lion of
Sekhet, and the hawk of Horus. 2
But we can trace the standards and the symbols upon
1 On a stela in the Wadi Maghara, in the Sinaitic Peninsula, Sahu-Ra
of the Fifth Dynasty, divided into two figures, one with the crown of Lower
Egypt the other with that of Upper Egypt, is standing before a standard
on which are the two emblems of Southern and Northern Egypt, Set and
Horus. Set is represented by his usual animal, but Horus by an uraeus
serpent and the same symbol as that on the plaque (de Morgan, Recherches
sur les Origines de VEgypte, i. p. 233). As we learn from the legend of
Seb recounted at At-Nebes (Saft el-Henna), the two relics preserved there
were the uraeus and lock of hair of Ra. The lock of hair has practically
the same form as the symbol we are considering here, and long before the
legend had been concocted, Ra and Horus had been identified together
(see Griffith, Antiquities of Tell cl-Yahudiych, Seventh Memoir of the
Egypt Exploration Fund, pi. xxiii. ).
2 De Morgan, Recherches sur les Origines de I Egypte, ii. pis. ii. and iii. ;
Sayce in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archccology, Feb.
1898. It will be noticed that Thoth is represented by the ibis and not by
the ape.
ANIMAL WORSHIP 105
them still farther back. M. de Morgan has pointed out
that the rude and primitive boats painted on the pottery
of the prehistoric graves have their prows ornamented
with standards which are precisely the same in shape as
the standards that were borne before the Pharaoh. On
the top of one is perched a hippopotamus, on another a
fish ; on another is a flowering branch, on another the
sail of a ship. lN v We may conclude, therefore, that both
standards and symbols were characteristic of the older
population of the country whom the Pharaonic Egyptians
found when they entered it. But the symbols had no
connection with any kind of writing ; we look in vain,
either on the pottery or on any other object of prehistoric
art, for hieroglyphic signs. The standard may have been
adopted by the invading race from their conquered
subjects, and so introduced into their system of writing ;
originally it was nothing but a primeval flagstaff at the
prow of a boat. And, like the flagstaff, the symbol that
served as a flag must have been of aboriginal invention./
\ Such, then, is the conclusion to which we are led by
the newly-found monuments of early Egypt. On the
Pharaonic monuments of that remote age the gods are
not yet human ; they are still represented by animals
and other fetishes. And these fetishes have been
borrowed from the older population of the valley of the
Nile, along with the so-called standard on the top of
which they were placeclN
N^The standard with the emblem upon it denoted a
nome in the historical days of Egypt. The emblem
represented the god of the nome, or rather of the chief
sanctuary in the nome. Where the god of the nome
was Horus, the hawk appeared upon the standard ; where
two Horus-gods were worshipped, there were two hawks.
As the prehistoric boat had been placed under the pro-
1 De Morgan, JRcchcrches sur Us Origines de VEgyptc, p. 93.
106 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
tection of the deity whose fetish or symbol was planted
at its prow, so the nome was under the protection of the
god whose emblem was erected on its standard. The
standards borne before the Pharaoh on the plaque of Kom
el-Ahmar were the standards of the nomes over which
he claimed rule. \
v It would seem, then, that the god of a nome was in
most instances the god of the aboriginal tribe which
originally inhabited it, and that the symbols by which
these gods were known were primitively the gods them
selves. On the plaque of Abydos it is not Selk or
Sekhet who is the protecting deity of the city, but the
scorpion and the lion. And by the side of animals and
birds, as we have seen, we find also inanimate objects
which are on exactly the same footing as the animals
and birds. The primitive religion of Egypt must have
been a form of fetishism. /
X But in passing from the older population to the Asiatic
immigrants it underwent a change. The same slate
plaques which portray Horus as a hawk and Anubis as a
jackal, represent the king under the likeness of a bull.
It is a literal pictorial rendering of the phrase so often
met with in the inscriptions, in which the Pharaoh is
described as a bull trampling on his enemies. The
animal has ceased to represent the actual reality, and has
become a symbol.^
And this symbolism, it will be noticed, accompanies
the introduction of symbolic writing. The figure of the
bull which denotes the Pharaoh, is as much a symbol as
the fish which forms part of his name. It is therefore
fair to conclude that the hawk whichbrings the captured
enemy to the. king is also a symbol.^ The fetish has be
come symbolic ; the hawk is no longer a god in and for
itself, but because it is the embodiment of the divine
Horus. \
ANIMAL WORSHIP 107
V It was but a step further to unite the symbol with the
human form. The process involved the disuse of inani
mate objects ; only the living could be fitly joined to
gether. Horus could be depicted as a man with a hawk s
head ; it was less easy to combine the symbol of Min
with a man s limbs. Such anthropomorphising followed
necessarily from the deification of the Pharaoh. The
race which turned its human leader into a god was bound
to represent its gods under human form. In Egypt,
however, the older element in the population, with its
religious ideas, was too strong to be wholly disregarded
by the ruling caste. The compromise, which had trans
formed the fetish into a symbol, ended by retaining the
animal forms of the gods, but in subordination to the
form of man. Henceforth, for the State religion, Horus
wore merely the mask of a hawkX
N^That the official figures of the gods were thus a com
promise between two antagonistic currents of religious
thought,/appears very clearly when we compare Egypt
with Babylonia. In Babylonia, also, there were symbols
attached to the gods, some of them representing animals
and birds, others inanimate objects. In Babylonia, more
over, the king was a god, both in his lifetime and after
1 For late examples of the worship of animals like the cat, ram, swallow,
or goose, as animals and not as incarnations of an official god, see Maspero,
fctudcs de Mythologie et <K Archiologie tgyptiennes, ii. p. 395 sqq. The
rarity of them is due to their representing private and domestic cults not
recognised by the religion of the State. "The worship of the swallow,
cat, and goose, which had commenced as the pure and simple adoration of
these creatures in themselves, always remained so for the multitude. We
must not forget that Orientals regard beasts somewhat differently from
ourselves. They ascribe to them a language, a knowledge of the future,
an extreme acuteness of the senses which allows them to perceive objects
and beings invisible to man. It was not, indeed, all Egypt that worshipped
in the beast the beast itself; but a considerable part of it which belonged
almost entirely to the same social condition, and represented pretty much
the same moral and intellectual ideas."
108 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
his death. But in Babylonia the figures of the gods of
the State religion were all human ; it was only the
demons of the popular cult who were allowed to retain
the bodies of beasts and birds. The gods themselves
were all depicted in human form. The reason of this
is simple : in Babylonia the Semitic conception of the
deity was predominant ; there was no fetishism to be
conciliated, no animal worship to be reconciled with a
higher faith. The emblems of the gods remained em
blems, and the gods of heaven clothed themselves with
the same form as the human god on earth.
^ In the retention of the primitive animal worship,
therefore, we must see an evidence not only of the
strength of that portion of the population to whom it
originally belonged, but also of the conservative spirit
which characterised the Egyptians. In this case, how
ever, the conservative spirit was the result of the influ
ence of the conquered race ; art continued to represent
Horus with the head of a hawk, just because those who
believed him to be a bird continued to form an im
portant part of the population. The popular cult and
the popular superstitions were too widely spread to be
disregarded^
\ Egyptian orthodoxy found a ready way in which to
explain the animal forms of its gods. The soul, once
freed from its earthly body, could assume whatever shape
it chose, or rather, could inhabit as long as it would
whatever body it chose to enter. And what was true of
the human soul was equally true of the gods. They
too were like men, differing indeed from men only in so
far as they were already in the other world, and thus
freed from the trammels and limitations of our present
existence. The soul of Ra, which was practically Ea
himself, could appear under the form of a bird, if so he
willed. Transmigration from one body to another, in-
ANIMAL WORSHIP 109
deed, never presented any difficulty to the Egyptian
mind. It could be effected by the magician by means
of his spells /and there were stories, like the folk-tales of
modern Europe, which told how the life and individuality
of a man could pass into the bodies of animals, and even
into seeds and trees. The belief is common to most
primitive peoples, and is doubtless due to the dreams in
which the sleeper imagines himself possessed of some
bodily form that is not his own.
^X^ e must then regard the animal worship of Egypt
as the survival of an early fetishism. But it is a sur
vival which has had to accommodate itself to the antagon
istic conceptions of an anthropomorphic faith. By the
side of the deified king the deified animal was allowed to
remain, and man and beast were mixed together in re
ligious art. It was parallel to the juxtaposition of
pictorial ideographs and phonetically-spelt words in the
writing of a later day. And just as it was only the
cultivated classes to whom the written characters were
symbols with a meaning other than that which they bore
to the eye, so too it was only these same cultivated
classes to whom the sacred animals were symbols and
embodiments of the deity, rather than the deity itself.
The masses continued to be fetish-worshippers like the
earlier inhabitants of the country from whom most of
them drew their descenj/
V To this fact we must ascribe the extraordinary hold
wnich the worship of animals had upon the Egyptian
people as a whole up to the period of their conversion to
Christianity. While the walls of the temple were covered
with pictures in which the gods were represented in
human or semi-human form, the inner shrine which they
served to surround and protect contained merely the
beast or bird in which the deity was believed to be in
carnated for the time. When the god revealed himself
110 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
to his worshipper, it was as a hawk or a crocodile. The
fact would be inexplicable if the priests alone were privi
leged to see him, as has often been maintained. Such,
however, was not the case. Every Egyptian, whatever
might be his rank and station, could follow the proces
sions in the temple, could enter its inner chambers, and
gaze upon the incarnated deity, provided only that he
had conformed to the preliminary requirements of the
ritual and were not unclean. 1 The temple was not the
exclusive property of a privileged caste ; it was only the
foreigner and the unbeliever who was forbidden to tread
its courts. It was open to the Egyptian populace, and
to the populace the sacred animals were the gods them
selves.^
We do not know whether the hawk which represented
Horus, and in which the soul of the god tabernacled for
a time, was distinguished from other hawks by special
marks. We know, however, that this was the case with
some of the sacred animals. According to Herodotus
(iii. 28), the bull Apis of Memphis was required to be
black, with a white triangle on his forehead, an eagle on
his back, double hairs in his tail, and a beetle on his
tongue ; and though the extant figures of the god do not
support the precise description given by the Greek writer,
they show that certain characteristic marks were really
required. In this way the incarnation of the god was
separated from other animals of the same species, upon
whom, however, some part of his divinity was reflected.
Since any bull might have become the habitation of the
deity, it was necessary to treat the whole species with
respect.
The bull Apis was an incarnation of Ptah, " the new
life of Ptah," as he is often called on the votive tablets.
We must see in him accordingly the local fetish of the
1 See Wiedemann, Die Religion der alien Acgypten, pp. 108, 109.
ANIMAL WORSHIP 111
pre-dynastic Egyptians who lived in the district where
Memphis afterwards arose. In fact the bull was sacred
throughout the whole of this region. In the neighbour
ing city of Heliopolis the place of Apis was taken by
another bull, Ur-mer, or Mnevis, as the Greeks miscalled
him. Mnevis was the incarnation of the sun-god, and,
like Apis, it was needful that he should be black. Nor
was the worship of the bull confined to the north. At
Erment also, near Thebes, Mentu, the god of the nome,
was incarnated in the bull Bakis. 1 The sanctity of the
bull is not difficult to understand among an agricultural
people in an early stage of development. In India the
bull is still sacred ; and Sir Samuel Baker tells us that
the tribes of the Upper Nile still abstain from eating the
flesh of the ox. In Phrygia the slaughter of an ox was
punishable with death; 2 the first king of the country
was supposed to have been a peasant, and his ox -drawn
cart was preserved in the temple of Kybele. Among
the Egyptians themselves, as we have seen, the Pharaoh
was symbolised under the form of a bull at the very
beginning of history.
N^The bull, then, must have been worshipped in the
neighbourhood of Memphis and Heliopolis before it be
came the incarnation of Ptah or Ea. It follows, more
over, that as yet it was no one particular bull to whom
divine honours were paid ; there was no one particular
bull into whom the soul of one of the gods of the
: Late inscriptions call Bakli or Bakis "the living soul of Ra," but
this was when Mentu and Ra had been identified together. Stela? of the
Roman period, however, from Erment represent the sacred bull without
any solar emblem, while by the side of it stands a hawk-headed crocodile
crowned with the orb of the sun. It is possible that the latter may be
connected with the hawk-headed crocodile, with the orb of the sun on its
head and an urfeus serpent at the end of its tail, which in Greek graffiti
at Philaj is called Ptiris.
2 Nicolaus Damascen., FT. 128, eel. Miiller.
112 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Pharaonic Egyptians had as yet entered, thus setting
it apart from all others. The bull was still a fetish
pure and simple; it was the whole species that was
sacred, and not a single member of it.^^
That this was indeed the case, is proved by a custom
which lasted down to the latest times. Not only was
the sacred bull or the sacred hawk mummified after
death, but other bulls and hawks also. There were
cemeteries of mummified animals, just as there were
cemeteries of mummified men. Vast cemeteries of cats
have been found at Bubastis, at Beni-Hassan, and other
places; so too there were cemeteries of hawks and
crocodiles, of jackals and bulls. We are still ignorant
of the exact conditions under which these creatures were
embalmed and buried. It is impossible to suppose that
a solemn burial was provided for all the individual mem
bers of a species which was accounted sacred in a par
ticular nome, much less for all its individual members
throughout Egypt, as seems to have been imagined by
Herodotus (ii. 41) ; there must have been certain limita
tions within which such a burial was permitted or or
dained. And sometimes there was no burial at all ; the
mummy of the sacred animal of Set, for instance, has
never been found.
\Still the fact remains that not only were the bodies of
the Apis or the Mnevis mummified and consigned to a
special burying-place, but the bodies of other bulls as
well. Doubtless the Egyptian of the Pharaonic period
had an excellent reason to give for the practice. Just
as the servants of the prince were buried around their
master, or as the usliebti-figures were placed in the tomb
of the dead, so the ordinary bull was interred like the
divine incarnations of Ptah and Ea, in the hope that its
double might accompany the spirit of the god in the
other world. The scenes of country life painted on the
ANIMAL WOKSHIP 113
walls of the tombs contain pictures of sheep and cattle
whose kas were, in some way or other, believed to exist
in the Egyptian paradise, and a mummified bull had as
much right to the hope of a future existence as a
mummified man. The very act of embalming implied
the possibility of its union with Osiris. /
VEgyptian logic soon converted the possibility into a
fact. With the growth of the Osirian cult the dead
Apis became, like the pious Egyptian, one with Osiris,
the lord of the other world. His identity k with Ptah
paled and disappeared before his newer identity with
Osiris. At first he was Osiris-Apis, " the Osirified bull-
god," as guardian only of the necropolis of Memphis ;
then as god also of both Memphis and Egypt in life as
well as in deaftfcx Under the Ptolemies, Greek ideas
gathered round the person of a deity who thus united in
himself the earlier and later forms of Egyptian belief,
and out of the combination rose the Serapis of the
classical age, whose worship exercised so great an in
fluence on the Koman world. In the features of the
human Serapis, with his majestic face and flowing beard,
it is difficult to recognise the bull-god of primitive Egypt.
The history of Serapis is on a large scale what that of
the other sacred animals of Egypt is on a smaller scale.
Mnevis was a lesser Apis ; as Heliopolis waned before
Memphis, so did its divine bull before the rival deity of
the capital. They had both started on an equal footing,
and had followed the fortunes of the cities where they
were adored. At Mendes it was not a bull, but a ram,
that was the object of worship, and in which the priests
beheld an incarnation of Pta, 1 though the accidental fact
that the word la meant alike " ram " and " soul " caused
later generations to identify it with the " soul " of Osiris.
In the Fayyum it was the crocodile which naturally be-
1 De Rouge, Monnaies de nomcs, p. 40.
114 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
came the god Sebek or Sukhos, and at a later time Pete-
sukhos, " the gift of Sukhos." In the latter name we
read the signs of a growing disinclination to see in the
animal the god himself or even his soul or double ; the
Sukhos becomes " the gift of Sukhos," separate from the
god, and bestowed by him upon man.
There were other nomes besides the Fayyum in which
the crocodile was worshipped. It was the sacred animal
of Onuphis in the Delta, and of Ombos in the far south of
Egypt. But we must not expect to find a Sebek and a
sacred crocodile always accompanying one another. There
could be cases in which the crocodile was identified with
other gods than Sebek, with Set, for example, as at Nubti,
near Dendera. The sacred animal existed before the god
whose incarnation he afterwards became)^ The neolithic
races were in the valley of the Nile before the Pharaonic
Egyptians, and the deities they adored were consequently
also there before the gods of the intruding race. Ptah,
with his human figure, would not have been transformed
into the bull Apis if the bull had not been already in
possession. X
NChe name of the god Thoth is itself a proof of this.
Thoth was the god of Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunen,
and his patronage of writing and books shows that he
must have been the deity of the Pharaonic race. The
god to whom the invention of the hieroglyphs was ascribed,
could not have been the god of an illiterate population.
Now the Egyptian form of the name Thoth is Deliuti
(or Zehuti), " he who belongs to the ibis." l Thoth, there-
1 Griffith (Proc. of Society of Biblical Archeology, xxi. p. 278) has
recently proposed to see in Dehuti a derivative from the name of the nome
Dehut, like Anzti, the title of Osiris at Busiris, from the name of the
nome Anzet. But this is "putting the cart before the horse." It was
not the nomes that were birds or men, but the deities worshipped in
them. Anz (perhaps from the Semitic az, "the strong one") meant
" king," and represented the human Osiris.
ANIMAL WORSHIP 115
fore, was not originally the ibis, and, in spite of his bird s
head, the human body which he retained was a traditional
evidence of the fact. He was merely " attached to the
ibis," attached, that is to say, to the place where the ibis
was the fetish of the aborigines.
V^ccording to Manetho, it was not until the reign of
the second king of the Second Dynasty that Apis, Mnevis,
and Mendes "were adjudged to be gods." This must
mean that it was then that the State religion admitted
for the first time that the official gods of Memphis, Helio-
polis, and Mendes were incarnated in the sacred animals
of the local cults. That the statement is historically
correct, may be gathered from the fact that the temples
of Memphis and Heliopolis were dedicated to Ptah and
Turn, and not to Apis and Mnevis. When they were
built the divinity of the bull had not yet been officially
recognised. The gods in whose honour they were founded
were gods of human form, and gods of human form they
continued to be. Down to the last days of Egyptian
paganism the sun-god of Heliopolis was not a bull, but
a man ; and though the mummified Apis watched over
the cemeteries of Memphis, the god of its great temple
remained a mummified man and not a mummified bull!^
One of the legends elaborately concocted in the temples
out of old folk-tales and etymological puns explained
the animal forms of the gods as the result of the murder
of Osiris by Typhon or Set. The fear of sharing his fate
made them hide themselves, it was related, in the bodies
of the beasts. 1 But the explanation must belong to an
age when the introduction of foreign ideas had thrown
discredit on the old worship of animals. XIn earlier
times no explanation was needed. The belief in the
power possessed by the soul of migrating from one body
into another, and the symbolism of which the hieroglyphic
1 Plutarch, De hide et Osiride, ed. Leemans, Ixxii. p. 126.
116 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
writing was at once the expression and the cause, formed
an easy bridge by which the fetishism of neolithic Egypt
and the anthropomorphism of historical Egypt could be
joined together. Horus is a hawk and the Pharaoh is
a bull on the earliest monuments we possess, and such
visible symbols necessarily reacted on a people, one half
at least of whom already acknowledged the hawk and the
bull as their gods. The official recognition of Apis and
Mnevis and Mendes was the last step in the process of in
corporating the aboriginal superstitions and practices into
the State religion, and giving them official sanctioH^ The
parallelism with Brahmanism in India is complete.
\ But we have still to ask why it was that the bull was
worshipped in one district of prehistoric Egypt, the hawk
in another ? Why was it that a particular fetish was
the protecting deity of a particular sanctuary or nome ?
To this there can be but one answer. A modified form
of totemism must once have been known in the valley of
the Nile. The sacred animal must have been the last
representative of the totem of the tribe or clan. The
emblems borne on the flagstaffs of the prehistoric boats,
like the emblems on the standards of the several nomes,
must have been the animals or objects in which the
clans saw the divine powers which held them together,
and from which, it may be, they were derived. The
subsequent history of animal worship in Egypt is a con
tinuous drifting away from this primitive totemism. The
inanimate objects first fall into the background ; then,
under the influence of a higher form of religion, the
animals become symbols, and assume semi-human shapes,
and finally one only out of a species is selected to become
the incarnation of a god. But the god of whom he is
the incarnation is a very different god from the divinity
that was believed to reside in the original fetish. It is a
god in the Asiatic and not in the African sense, a god
ANIMAL WORSHIP 117
whose nature is spiritual and free from the limitations of
our earthly existence, so that he can enter at any moment
into whatsoever form he desires. The old fetishes sur
vived, indeed, but it was as amulets and charms ; and to
these the multitude transferred its faith as the State
religion became more and more unintelligible to it. The
magic lock of hair and image of a serpent preserved at
Saft el-Henna, and said by the priests to have belonged
to the sun-god, had doubtless come down from the days
of fetishism.^
It has often been asserted that besides the bull or the
ram or the crocodile, there were other creatures of a com
posite or fabulous character which were also accounted
sacred by the Egyptians. It is true that the sacred
animal and symbol of Set seems to be of this nature.
His forked tail and ass-like ears make it difficult to
believe that any existing beast ever served for his
portrait. But the sphinx, in whom the men of the
Eighteenth Dynasty saw the image of Harmakhis, the
rising sun, or the phoenix in whom the sun-god of Helio-
polis was incarnated, belongs to a different category.
They are not sacred animals in the sense in which Apis
and Mnevis were so.
The sphinx, like the symbol of Set, is one of those
composite creatures which meet us from time to time in
Egyptian art. It has been said that such composite
creatures were as real to the Egyptian as the cattle and
sheep he tended in the fields ; that he was quite as much
prepared to meet with them in the desert, as the ancient
Greek would have been to meet with a satyr in the
woods or a Highlander with a kelpie by the waterside.
Very possibly that was the case ; it will not, however,
explain their origin, or the forms that were assigned to
them. Why, for instance, should the sphinx of Giza be
in the form of a lion with a human head ?
118 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Once more we must look to Asia for an explanation.
The sphinx of Giza was the guardian of the tombs of the
dead ; it protected them from the spiritual foes whose
home was in the desert. " I protect thy sepulchral
chapel," it is made to say in an inscription, " I watch
over thy sepulchral chamber, I keep away the stranger
who would enter, I overthrow the foe with their weapons,
I drive the wicked from thy tomb, I annihilate thy
opponents ... so that they return no more." l The
sphinx, in fact, performed precisely the same office as the
winged bulls that guarded the entrance to an Assyrian
palace, or the cherubim who stood at the gates of the
garden of Eden.
The winged bulls and the cherubim were composite
creatures, and came originally from Babylonia. Babylonia
was the primal home, indeed, of all such animal com
binations. They were painted on the walls of the
temple of Bel at Babylon, and their existence formed
an essential part of the Babylonian cosmogony. That
cosmogony rested on the doctrine of a contest between
the powers of light and darkness, of order and chaos, and
on the final victory of the gods of light. There was a
world of chaos as well as a world of order ; and before
the present creation could be evolved with its settled
laws and definite boundaries, there had been of necessity
another creation in which all things were confused and
chaotic. The brood of Tiamat, the dragon of chaos,
corresponded with the creatures of the actual world
which the gods of light had called into existence ; they
were abortive attempts at creation, composed of limbs
which matched not together, " men with the body of
birds, or the faces of ravens."
This brood of chaos were the demons who were the
enemies of Bel-Merodach and his followers. In order to
1 Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Sprache (1880) p. 50.
ANIMAL WORSHIP 119
oppose them successfully, it was needful that there
should be similarly composite creatures, who, instead of
being on the side of evil, were under the orders of the
gods. By the side of the evil demon, therefore, there
was the " good cherub," who protected the pious Baby
lonian, and barred the way to the spirits of wickedness.
The winged bull with his human head defended the
approach to a temple or house ; men with the bodies of
scorpions guarded the gateways of the sun.
This curious similarity in the functions assigned to the
images of composite animals both in Egypt and Babylonia,
raises the presumption that the composite forms them
selves were ultimately derived from a Babylonian source.
That such was the case we now have proof.
On the slate plaques and mace-heads of Nekhen and
Abydos we find composite forms similar to those of
Babylonia. What afterwards became the Hathor-headed
column appears as a human face with a cow s ears and
horns. Below are two monsters with a dog s body and a
lion s head, whose intertwined necks are snakes. What
makes the latter representation the more interesting is,
that M. Heuzey has pointed out exactly the same figures
on an early Babylonian seal now in the Louvre. 1 Like
the seal-cylinder, therefore, which distinguishes the early
period of Egyptian history, the composite monsters of
which the sphinx and the symbol of Set were surviving
examples indicate direct communication with Chalda?a.
And, it must be remembered, it is only in Chalda?a
that they find their explanation. Here they originated
in the religious and cosmological ideas associated with
the physical features of the country. The sphinx of
1 Rev. Archeologique, xxxiv. p. 291. On the seal-cylinder they are
accompanied by the lion-headed eagle of primitive Babylonian art. The
Egyptian figures are given in the Zeitschrift fur Acgypiische Sprache,
xxxvi. pi. xii.
120 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Giza still guards the desert of Giza, because ages ago the
flooding waves of the Persian Gulf made the Babylonians
believe that the world had arisen out of a watery
chaos peopled by unformed creatures of monstrous
shape.
The case of the phoenix or lennn is somewhat different.
Here we have to do not with a fabulous monster, but
with an existing bird of which a fabulous story was told.
The bird was not an eagle, as Herodotos supposed, but a
heron, which at an early date seems to have been con
founded with the crested ibis, the symbol of the kliu or
luminous soul. It was, in fact, the spirit of the sun-god,
and later legends declared that it stood and sang on the
top of a tree at Heliopolis, while a flame burst forth
beside it, and the sun rose from the morning sky. With
sunset it became an Osiris, whose mummy was interred at
Heliopolis, to awake again to life with the first rays of
the rising sun. It was thus for Christian writers an
emblem of the resurrection, and as such its story is told
by St. Clement of Home : l " There is a certain bird which
is called the phoenix. This is the only one of its kind,
and it lives five hundred years. When the time of its
dissolution draws near that it must die, it builds itself a
nest of frankincense and myrrh and other spices, into
which, when the time is fulfilled, it enters and dies. But
as the flesh decays a certain kind of worm is produced,
which, being nourished by the juices of the dead bird,
brings forth feathers. Then, when it has acquired
strength, it takes up the nest in which are the bones of
its parent, and, bearing these, it passes from the land of
Arabia into Egypt, to the city called Heliopolis. And,
flying in open day in the sight of all men, it places them
on the altar of the sun, and, having done this, it hastens
back to its former abode. The priests then inspect the
1 Ep. ad Cor. 25.
ANIMAL WORSHIP 121
chronological registers, and find that it has returned
exactly when the five hundredth year is completed." l
The legend of the phoenix has grown up round the
belief that the disembodied soul could enter at will into
the body of a bird. The phoenix was allied to the hawk
of Horus, and probably was originally identical with that
primitive symbol of the soul (Jehu), the name of which
means literally " the luminous." It will be remembered
that the Pyramid texts speak of the " four khu " or
" luminous souls of Horus " " who live in Heliopolis,"
and the sun-god of that city was usually invoked by his
~bau or " souls," figured as three birds which appear as
three ostriches on objects found in the tomb of Menes. 2
On an early seal-cylinder of Babylonian type the ~bennu
or khu is termed " the double of Horus." 3
VThe story of the phoenix illustrates the influence
exercised by the pictorial character of Egyptian writing
upon the course of religious thought. The soul was
first symbolised by a bird. It passed out of the
corpse and into the air like a bird ; it was free to
.enter whatever body it chose, and the body of a bird
was that which it would naturally choose. Even to
day the belief is not extinct in Europe that the spirits
of the dead pass into the forms of swallows or doves.
But at first it was immaterial what bird was selected
to express pictorially the idea of a soul. It was the
ostrich when the latter still existed in Southern Egypt ;
1 See also Herodotos, ii. 73 ; Pliny, N. H. x. 2 ; Tertullian, De Resurr.
13.
" Do Morgan, Recherclies stir les Origines de Vtigypte, ii. p. 165.
3 Sayce, Proc. SB A., Feb. 1898, No. 8. On a monument discovered
at San (Petrie, Tunis, pt. ii. pi. x. 170), we read of " Horus in the
bennu as a black bull," "Horus in the bennu as a horned bull." The
cemetery of Tanis was called "the city of the phoenix " (bennu). At
Edfu it is said that the phcenix (bennu} "comes forth from the holy
heart " of Osiris.
122 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
then it became the plover, in consequence, probably, of a
similarity in sound between the name of the plover and
that of the soul. At other times the favourite symbol
was the crested ibis, whose name was identical with a
word that signified " light." Around the conception of
the soul there accordingly gathered associations with the
light, and more especially with the light of the sun. The
sun-god, too, had a double and a soul ; what could be
more fitting, therefore, than that they should be repre
sented by the crested ibis ? It was but a step farther to
see in the bird an incarnation of the sun-god himselrt
A The subsequent development of the myth was due to
the\fact that the god of Heliopolis continued to be de
picted as a man. His human form was too stereotyped
in religious art to be changed, and the phoenix conse
quently was never actually identified with him. It was
his soul, but it was not Ea himself. The combination of
the man and the beast could be tolerated only when
both were co-ordinate survivals from a distant past.
The inner contradiction between the human and the
bestial god was then obscured or ignored^
VWith the human god was closely connected the
ancestor worship, which was quite as much a char
acteristic 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. N^o 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 tombV.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
ANIMAL WORSHIP 123
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, 1
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\
\\Vhen 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.
V 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-
1 On a stela in the Louvre a certain Psamtik, son of Uza-Hor, calls
himself prophet of Khufu, Khaf-Ra, and Dadef-Ra, as well as of Tanen,
Isis, and Harmakhis.
124 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
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 exist
ence. 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.^
^n fact, the death of the god was a necessary accom
paniment of an anthropomorphic form of religioh. In
Babylonia the temples of the gods were also their tombs,
and even among the Greeks the sepulchre of Zeus was
pointed out in Krete. The same cult was paid to the
dead Naram-Sin or the dead Gudea in Chaldsea that was
paid to the dead Khufu in Egypt. We have no need to
seek in any peculiarly Egyptian beliefs an explanation of
the ancestor worship which, along with the deification of
the king, it shared with Babylonia.
The euhemerism of the Egyptian priesthood sounded
the knell of the old faith. As the centuries passed,
purer and higher ideas of the Godhead had grown up,
and between the " formless " and eternal Creator of the
world and the man who had become a god, the distance
was too great to be spanned. On the one side, the gods
of the national creed had been resolved one into another,
till no distinctive shape or character was left to any one
of them ; on the other side, they had been transformed
into mere human kings who had ruled over Egypt long
ago. The pantheistic Creator and the deified Egyptians
of vulgar and prosaic history could not be harmonised
together. The multitude might be content with its
sacred animals and its amulets, but the thinking portion
of the nation turned to Greek metaphysics or a despair
ing scepticism. Already, in the time of the Eleventh
ANIMAL WORSHIP 125
Dynasty, the poet who composed the dirge of king
Aiitef gives pathetic expression to his doubts l
"What is fortune? say the wise.
Vanished are the hearths and homes,
What he does or thinks, who dies,
None to tell us comes.
Have thy heart s desire, be glad,
Use the ointment while you live ;
Be in gold and linen clad,
Take what gods may give.
For the day shall come to each
When earth s voices sound no more ;
Dead men hear no mourners speech,
Tears can not restore.
I The versification is Canon Rawnsley s, Notes for the Nile, pp. 188, 189.
Professor Erman s literal translation is as follows (Life in Ancient Egypt,
Eng. tr., pp. 386, 387)
II I heard the words of Imhotep and Har-dad-ef,
Who both speak thus in their sayings :
Behold the dwellings of those men, their walls fall down,
Their place is no more,
They are as though they had never existed.
No one comes from thence to tell us what is become of them,
Who tells us how it goes with them, who nerves our hearts,
Until you yourselves approach the place whither they arc gone.
With joyful heart forget not to glorify thyself
And follow thy heart s desire, so long as thon livest.
Put myrrh on thy head, clothe thyself in fine linen,
Anointing thyself with the marvellous things of God.
Adorn thyself as beautifully as thou canst,
And let not thy heart be discouraged.
Follow thy heart s desire and thy pleasures
As long as thou livest on earth.
Follow thy heart s desire and thy pleasures
Till there conies to thee the day of mourning.
Yet he, whose heart is at rest, hears not their complaint,
And lie who lies in the tomb understands not their mourning.
With beaming face keep holiday to-day,
And rest not therein.
For none carries his goods away with him,
Yea, none returns again, who has journeyed thither."
126 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Eat and drink in peace to-day,
When you go, your goods remain ;
He who fares the last long way
Comes not back again."
Still more hopeless are the words put into the mouth of
the wife of the high priest of Memphis at the close of
the first century before our era
" my brother, my spouse, and my friend,
High priest of Memphis !
Cease not to drink and to eat,
To fill thyself with wine, and to make sweet love :
Enjoy each festive day and follow thy desire,
Let not care enter thy heart
All the years that on earth thou remainest.
The underworld is a land of thick darkness,
A sorrowful place for the dead.
They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken
And behold their comrades.
Their father and their mother they know not,
No yearning for their wives and their children do
they feel." l
1 Brugsch s translation (Die Acgyptologie, i. p. 163).
LECTUKE VI.
THE GODS OF EGYPT.
IN the language of ancient Egypt the word neter sig
nified " a god." Sir P. le Page Eenouf endeavoured to
show that the word originally meant " strong," and that
the first Egyptians accordingly pictured their gods as
embodiments of strength. 1 But it has been pointed
out 2 that where neter is used in the sense of " strong,"
it is rather the lustiness of youth that is meant, and
that a better rendering would be " fresh and vigorous."
The verb neter signifies " to flourish " and " grow up."
Moreover, it is a question whether between this verb
and the word for " god " there is any connection at all.
It is difficult to understand how the gods could be
described as " growths " unless they were conceived of
as plants ; and of this there is no evidence in ancient
Egypt. We must be content with the fact that as far
back as we can trace the history of the word neter, it
meant " god " and " god " only.
\ But we must also beware of supposing that the
Egyptians attached the same ideas to it that we do, or
that it had the same connotation at all periods of their
history or among all classes of the people. The pan
theistic deity of Khu-n-Aten was a very different being
from the sun-god of whom the Pharaohs of the Fifth
Dynasty had called themselves the sons, and between
1 Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt (1879), pp. 93-100.
2 Brugsch, Die Acgyjitologie, p. 167.
128 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the divinity which the multitude saw in the bull Apis
and the formless and ever-living Creator of the priest
hood there was a gulf which could hardly be bridged.
But even the conception of the Creator formed by the
priesthood is difficult for us to realise. Eighteen cen
turies of Christianity have left their impress upon us,
and we start from a different background of ideas from
that of the Egyptian, to whatever class he may have
belonged. It is impossible that we can enter exactly
into what the Egyptian meant by such expressions as
" living for ever " or " having no form " ; even the words
" life " and " form " would not have had the same con
notation for him that they have for us. All that we
can do is to approximate to the meaning that he gave
to them, remembering that our translation of them into
the language of to-day can be approximative onlyS^
Khe hieroglyphic writing which preserved memories
time that the Egyptians themselves had forgotten,
represents the idea of a " god " by the picture of an axe.
The axe seems originally to have consisted of a sharpened
flint or blade of metal hafted in a wooden handle, which
was occasionally wrapped in strips of red, white, and black
cloth. 1 It takes us back to an age of fetishism, when
inanimate objects were looked upon as divine, and perhaps
reflects the impression made upon the natives of the country
by the Pharaonic Egyptians with their weapons of metal.
Horus of Edfu, it will be remembered, was served by
smiths, and the shrines he founded to commemorate his
conquest of Egypt were known as " the smithies." The
double-headed axe was a divine symbol in Asia Minor, 2
1 See Beni-Hasan, pt. iii. (Archccoloyical Survey of Egypt), pi. v. fig.
75.
2 The double-headed axe is carved repeatedly on the walls of the
"palace of Minos," discovered by Dr. A. J. Evans at Knossos, and seems to
have been the divine symbol which was believed to protect the building
from injury. On the coins of Tarsus the sun-god Samdan carries an axe.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 129
and both in the old world and in the new the fetisli
was wrapped in cloths. Even at Delphi a^ sacred stone
was enveloped in wool on days of festival./
In the sacred axe, therefore, which denoted a god,
we may see a parallel to the standards on the prow of
the prehistoric boat or to the symbols of the nomes. It
would have represented the gods of those invaders of
the valley of the Nile who brought with them weapons
of copper, and have been the symbol of the conquering
race and the deities it worshipped. As the Pharaonic
Egyptians appropriated the fetishes of the older popula
tion in their sculptures and their picture-writing, so too
would they have appropriated what had become to the
neolithic people the sign and emblem of superior power.
\We have already dealt with an important class of
goas, those which had a solar origin. There were other
gods of an elemental character, whose worship does not
seem to have been originally confined to one particular
locality. Such were Seb, the earth, Nut, the sky, and
Nu, the primeval deep. But they played only a small
part in the religion of the country. Seb was known in
later days chiefly as the father of Osiris ; at an earlier
epoch he had been the rpd, or " hereditary prince, of the
gods," a title which takes us back to the feudal period of
Egypt, when as yet there was no Pharaoh who ruled over the
whole of the land. The animal sacred to him was the goose,
perhaps on account of some similarity in its name ; but
he was never identified with it, and continued to the last
to be depicted in human form. His symbol, however,
gave rise to a cosmological myth. The goose becam^^be
mother of the egg out of which the universe was born.
ut was the wife of Seb, wedded to him as the sky is
wedded to the earth. It seems reasonable to see in her
the feminine form of Nu, the primeval chaos of waters ;
and so the Egyptians of the historical period believed,
9
130 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
since they identified her with the wife of the Nile, and
represented her as sitting in the sycamore and pouring
the water of life on the hands of a soul at the foot of
the tree./ It has been suggested, however, that Nu was
of later origin than Nut, who became a Nile goddess
with the head of a snake only when Nu himself had been
changed into the Nile. 1 But the idea of a watery chaos
is not one which would have grown up on Egyptian soil.
There it was rather the desert which represented the un
formed beginning of things ; the Nile spread itself over
the already existing land at regular intervals, and was
no dreary waste of waters, out of which the earth
emerged for the first time. The geographical home of
the idea was in Babylonia, on the shores of the ever-
retreating Persian Gulf. And from Babylonia we find
that the belief in a primeval deep spread itself over
Western Asia. The Egyptian Nu is the counterpart of
the Babylonian Mummu, the mother of gods, as Nu was
their father. Professor Hommel may even be right in
identifying the name with the Babylonian Nun or Nunu,
the lord of the deep.
X But Nu survived only in the theological schools, more
especially in that of Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunen.
The god of Hermopolis was Thoth, the Egyptian Dehuti.
Thoth seems to have been at the outset the moon, which
was thus, as in Babylonia, of the male sex. ^ A legend,
repeated by Plutarch, 2 relates how he gained the five
intercalatory days of the Egyptian year by playing at
dice with the moon ; and he was at times identified with
the moon-gods Aah and Khonsu. The first month of
the year was his, and he was the measurer of time, who
had invented arithmetic and geometry, music and astro
nomy, architecture and letters. He knew the magic
formulae which could bind the gods themselves, and as
1 See above, p. 83. 2 De Isid. 12.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 131
minister of the Pharaoh Thames had introduced writing
and literature into Egypt. Henceforward he remained the
patron of books and education, on which the culture of Egypt
so largely rested. He was, in fact, the culture-god of the.
Egyptians to whom the elements of civilisation were du^f
It is curious that we do not know his true name, for
Dehuti means merely the god " who is attached to the
ibis." Was it really Nu ? and is Thoth really a com
pound of a moon-god and a sun-god ? At all events
the culture-god of Babylonia who corresponded to Thoth
was Ea, the deep, and one of the earliest names of Ea
was " the god Nun." Moreover, the son of Ea was
Asari, the Osiris of Egypt ; and just as Asari instructed
mankind in the wisdom and laws of Ea, so Thoth acted
as the minister of Osiris and adjudged his cause against
Seb. Like Ea, too, Thoth wrote the first books from
which men derived their laws. 1
\However this may be, Thoth was the creator of the
world through the word of his mouth. In the cosmogony
of Hermopolis the universe and the gods that direct it
are the creation of his word, which later ages refined
into the sound of his voice. From Hermopolis the
doctrine passed to other parts of Egypt, and under the
Theban dynasties tended to displace or absorb the older
Heliopolitan doctrine of creation by generatioi^ But
the doctrine was known also in Babylonia, where the
god whose word is creative was Asari, the Merodach
of the Semites. In the Babylonian Epic of the Creation
the " word " of Merodach creates and destroys, like the
" word " of Yahweh in the Old Testament. I must leave
to another lecture the consideration as to how far the
1 As Thoth writes the name of the king upon the sacred sycamore in
order to ensure him everlasting life, so the name of Ea is written upon
the core of the sacred cedar-tree ( WAI. iv. 15, Rev. 10-13) ; Sayce,
Hibbert Lectures on the Religion of the Ancient Babylonians, p. 240.
132 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Logos of Alexandrine philosophy has been influenced by
the theology of Hermopolis.
Whether Thoth were originally Nu or not, Nu at all
events forms the second member of the Hermopolitan
Ennead. Professor Maspero has shown that it was
modelled on the Ennead of Heliopolis. 1 But in accord
ance with the more abstract character of the cosmogony
of which it was a part, the divinities of which it is com
posed are abstractions that look strangely out of place in
the Egyptian Pantheon.
\Nu is provided with the feminine Nut, who is not
to be confounded with the old goddess of the sky, and
from them are derived the successive pairs Hehui and
Hehet, Kek and Keket, Nini and Ninit, " eternity,"
" darkness," and " inertia." 2 The whole scheme is
Asiatic rather than Egyptian, but the gods composing
it are already mentioned in the Pyramid textsV
\The four pairs of abstract deities constituted " the
eight " gods after whom Hermopolis received one of its
names (Khmunu, now Ashmunen), and who were often
addressed as " the god eight," like " the god seven " in
BabyloniaX Professor Maspero sees in them a philo
sophical development of the four cynocephalous apes
who accompanied Thoth and saluted the first streak of
dawn. But the development is difficult to follow, and
the apes who are the companions of the god probably
had another origin. They certainly must have come
from the Sudan ; no apes were indigenous in Egypt in
historical times. Moreover, it was only the Thoth of
Hermopolis in Upper Egypt in whose train they
were found ; the Thoth of Hermopolis Parva in the
1 fitudes de Mythologie et d" Arch&ologie egyptiennes, ii. pp. 381-385.
2 This is Brugsch s translation (Religion und Mythologie der alien
Aegypter, p. 123 sqq.) ; but the meaning of the last name is doubtful,
and the first is rather "time" than "eternity."
THE GODS OF EGYPT 133
Delta, properly speaking, knew them not. But from
an early epoch " the five gods" Thoth and his four
ape-followers, whose likeness he sometimes adopted
had been worshipped at Eshmunen. Its temple was
called " the Abode of the Five," and its high priest
" the great one of the House of the Five." 1
\ How the half-human apes of Central Africa came to
b& associated with Thoth we do not know. Between the
baboons who sing hymns to the rising and setting sun
and the moon, or the culture-god, there is little or no
connection. But a curious biography found in a tomb at
Assuan throws light upon it. Herkhuf, the subject of
the biography, was sent by Hor-em-saf of the Sixth
Dynasty on an exploring expedition into the Libyan
desert south of the First Cataract, and he brought back
with him a Danga dwarf " who danced the dances of the
god," like another Danga dwarf brought from Punt in
the neighbourhood of Sufikim or Massawa in the time of
the Fifth Dynasty. The dwarf was evidently regarded by
Herkhuf as a species of baboon, if we may judge from
the account he gives of the way in which he was treated ;
even to-day the ape in the zoological gardens of Giza is
called by the lower classes at Cairo " the savage man."
Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of
troops of apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up
the earth, and it was natural for primitive man to sup
pose that the dancing was in honour of the return of the
god of day. Dances in honour of the gods have been
common all over the world ; indeed, among barbarous
^ See Maspero, titudcs de Mythologie ct d Archtologie, ii. pp. 257 sqq. and
375 sqq. In an inscription discovered by Professor Petrie in the tombs
of the first two dynasties at Abydos, Thoth is represented as a seated ape
(The Royal Tombs of Abydos, pt. i. pi. xvii. 26). On the other hand,
on ^ the broken Abydos slate figured in de Morgan, Recherches sur les
Origines de I tigi/ptc, pi. ii., which is probably prehistoric, Thoth appears
as an ibis.
134 THE KELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and savage peoples the dance is essentially of a religious
character./ Even David danced before the ark, and boys
still dance before the high altar in the cathedral of
Seville. That dances are represented on the prehistoric
pottery of Egypt, has been pointed out by M. de Morgan ; l
and since the Danga dwarf came from the half-mythical
country in the south which was known to the Egyptians
as " the land of the gods," and where, too, the apes of
Thoth had their home, it was reasonable to believe that*
heknew the dance that would be pleasing to the gods. 2/ ^
/I believe, therefore, that the apes of Thoth were at the
outset the dwarf -like apes or ape-like dwarfs who danced
his honour in the temple of Hermopolis. Gradually
they were taken hold of by that symbolism which was
inseparable from a religion so intimately bound up with
a pictorial system of writing ; from dancers they became
the followers of the god, who sang to the rising and
setting sun the hymns which Thoth had composed. But
this would have been when the worship of the sun-god
of Heliopolis had already spread to Hermopolis, and the
cult of Thoth was mingling with that of Ea. The mutual
influence of the theories of creation taught by the priests
of the two cities shows at what a comparatively early
date this would have happened^
It is possible that there was actually a connection
between the four baboons and the four elemental gods of
Hermopolitan theology. But it was not in the way of
development. It was rather that as the gods were four
in number, the dancers in their temple were four also.
To each god, as it were, an ape was assigned.
The influence of Hermopolis belongs to the pre-Meuic
age of Egypt ; we can hardly any longer call it pre
historic. So, too, does the influence of Nek hen, once
1 Recherclies sur les Origlnes de I Egyptc, p. 65.
2 Maspero, fitudes de Mythologic ct d Archeologic, p. 429 sqq.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 135
the capital of the kingdom of Upper Egypt. In a former
lecture I have already spoken of its vulture-headed
goddess Nekheb, the consort of the hawk Horus, whose
temple at El-Kab guarded the outlet of the road from
the Keel Sea, and who was known as Mut, " the mother,"
at Thebes. She was, in fact, the goddess of all Upper
Egypt, whose worship had spread over it in the days
when Nekhen was its ruling city. The gods of the
Pharaoh followed the extension of his power.
In the early inscriptions of the First Cataract the
vulture-headed goddess sitting on her basket is identified
with the local divinity Sati (more correctly Suti), " the
Asiatic." From her the island of Sehel received its
name, and there her sanctuary stood before Isis of Philre
ousted her from her supremacy. She was symbolised by
the arrow, the name of which was the same as that of
the goddess, and which was, moreover, a fitting emblem
of the hostile tribes of the desert. It already appears
on the prehistoric pottery as a sacred fetish on the
" flagstaff " or standard at the prow of the boat.
The name of Sati, or rather Suti, is remarkable. It
was not only the name of the goddess of the First
Cataract, it was also the name given by the Egyptians
to the nomadic tribes of Asia. But it was not the
Egyptians only who used it in this sense. From time
immemorial the name Sute had precisely the same mean
ing among the Babylonians. The fact cannot be acci
dental ; and as Sute is of Babylonian origin, we have in it
a fresh proof of the relations of the Pharaonic Egyptians
with primeval Babylonia.
But the goddess Sati does not stand alone. There was
also a god Set (or Sut), the twin-brother and enemy of
Osiris, and, like Esau in Hebrew history, a representative
of the desert ; while at the Cataract another goddess,
Anuqet by name, is her companion. Now Anuqet is the
136 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
feminine of Anuq, the Anaq of the Old Testament. The
foreign nature of Anuqet has long been recognised, for
she wears on her head the non-Egyptian head-dress of a
cap fringed with feathers. It is the same head-dress as
that worn by the god Bes, whom the Egyptians derived
from the land of Punt on the shores of the Ked Sea. A
similar cap is worn by the Zakkal on the coast of Pales
tine, in the near neighbourhood of " the sons of Anaq,"
as well as by the Babylonian king Merodach-nadin-akhi,
on a monument now in the British Museum. 1 Everything,
therefore, points to its having been an Asiatic character
istic ; perhaps it was made of the ostrich feathers which
are still collected in Arabia and even on the eastern side
of the Jordan.
The Greeks identified Anuqet with Hestia, and Sati
with Hera, This was probably because Sati was the
wife of Khnum (or Kneph), the god of the Cataract. As
such Sati was also known as Heket, " the frog," which
was supposed to be born from the mud left by the inun
dation of the Nile. It thus became, a symbol of the
resurrection, and was consequently adopted by the Chris
tians of Egypt. Hence the frequency with which it is
represented on lamps of the late Eoman period.
^Khnum, like the god of Thebes, was a ram, and is
accordingly usually depicted with a ram s head. But he
could not originally have been so. Once more the old
fetish of the district, the sacred animal of the nome, must
have been fused with the god whom the Pharaonic
invaders brought with them. For Khnum was a potter,
as his name signifies, and at Philre it is said of him that
he was " the moulder (khnum) of men, the modeller of
1 The same cap is worn by the god who sits behind a scorpion-man on a
stone containing a grant of land by the Babylonian king Nebuchadrezzar I.
(B.C. 1100). The stone was found at Abu-Habba, and is now in the British
Museum ( WAT. v. 57).
THE GODS OF EGYPT 137
the gods." l Hence he is called " the creator of all this,
the fashioner of that which exists, the father of fathers,
the mother of mothers," " the creator of the heaven and
the earth, the lower world, the water and the mountains,"
" who has formed the male and female^of fowl and fish,
wild beasts, cattle, and creeping things.^
In Babylonia, Ea, the culture-god and creator, was also
termed the " potter," and it was thus that he moulded
the gods as well as men. 2 At the same time, like
Khnum, he was a god of the waters. While the Cataract
of the Nile was the home of Khnum, the Persian Gulf
was the dwelling-place of Ea. The connection between
the water and the modeller in clay is obvious. It is
only where the water inundates the soil and leaves the
moist clay behind it that the art of the potter can
flourish. 3
But was there also a connection between the Baby
lonian god who was worshipped in the ancient seaport
of Chaldsea and the god of the Egyptian Cataract ? \We
have seen that the wife of Khnum was entitled "the
Asiatic," the very form of the name being Babylonian.
We have further seen that her companion Inuqet was also
1 Maspero (Dawn of Civilisation, p. 157) reproduces a picture in the
tomple of Luxor representing Khnum moulding Amon-hotep in. and his
Ka on a potter s table.
2 See Scheil, Recueil dc Travaux, xx. p. 124 sqq.
3 The khnum or " pot " is often used to express the name of Khnum in
the hieroglyphics. It reminds us of the vase on early Babylonian seal-
cylinders from the two sides of which flow the rivers Tigris and Euphrates,
and which is often held in the hands of the water-god Ea. The design is
reproduced with modifications on early Syrian cylinders, and the name of
the zodiacal sign Aquarius shows to what an antiquity it must reach back.
The primitive Egyptians believed that the Nile issued from a grotto to
which the gerti or "two gulfs" of the Cataract gave access (Maspero,
Dawn of Civilisation, pp. 19, 38, 39), and Khnum was the god of the
Cataract. Perhaps the classical representation of the Tiber and other
rivers holding urns from which a stream of water flows is derived from
Egypt.
138 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
from Asia, and that her traditional head-dress preserved
a memory of the fact. There is a road from the Ked
Sea to Assuan as well as to El-Kab ; it may be that it
goes back to those prehistoric times when the Pharaonic
Egyptians made their way across the desert into the
valley of the Nile, as their SemitioAinsfolk did in later
days into the tablelands of AbyssiniaJ
^The creator who was worshipped at Memphis, at the
otfier end of the Nile valley, was a potter also. 1 This
was Ptah, whose name is derived from a root which
means to " open." According to Porphyry, he had sprung
from an egg which had come from the mouth of Kneph.
But the reference in the name is probably to the cere
mony of " opening the mouth " of a mummy, or the
statue of the dead man with a chisel, a finger, or some
red pebbles, in order to confer upon it the capability of
receiving the breath of life, and of harbouring the double
or the soul. 2 Ptah was represented as a mummy ; he
was, in fact, one of the gods of the underworld, who, like
Osiris or the mummified Horus of Nekhen, had their
tombs as well as their temples. He must have been the
creative potter, however, before he became a mummy.
Perhaps his transformation dates from the period of his
fusion with Sokaris, who seems to have been the god of
the cemetery of Memphis. 3 At any rate, Ptah and
1 Men-nofer (Memphis), "the good place," is the equivalent of the name
of the ancient seaport of Babylonia, Eridu, the Sumerian Eri-duga or
"good city." Ea, the culture-god and creator, was the god of Eridu.
In the Deluge tablet (1. 9) Ea says that he had not "opened (patu] the
oracle of the great gods." It is hardly worth while to mention that the
antiquity of Memphis has been disputed by some philologists.
2 Ptah is stated in the Book of the Dead to have been the original author
of the ceremony which he first performed on the dead gods.
3 This is Maspcro s view (fitudcs de Mytliologie et d Archtologic, ii. pp.
21, 22). Wiedemaim (lldig-ion der alien Aegypter, p. 75) makes Sokaris a
sun-god ; but his solar attributes belong to the time when he was identified
with Ka of Hcliopolis.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 139
Khnum are alike forms of the same primitive deity, and
the names they bear are epithets merely. At Philae,
Ptah is pictured as about to model man out of a lump of
clay, and the Khnumu, or " creators ^who helped him to
fashion the world, were his children. 1 ^
V The Khnumu are the Pateeki of Herodotos (iii. 37),
wnose figures, the Greek writer tells us, were carved by
the Phoenicians on the prows of their vessels, probably
to ward off the evil eye. They were dwarfs, like the
Danga dwarf of Herkhuf or the god Bes, with thick
heads, bowed legs, long arms, and bushy beards ; and their
terra-cotta figures have often been met with in the tombs.
From the name Patreki we might infer that they had
been borrowed by the Phoenicians from Egypt. But it
is also possible that both Egypt and Phoenicia derived
them from the same source\ Dr. Scheil has pointed out
that a similar figure occurs on early Babylonian seal-
cylinders, where its Sumerian name is given as " the god
Nugidda " or " the Dwarf," and it is sometimes represented
as dancing before the goddess Istar. 2 Thus far, however,
no text has been discovered which associates the god
Nugidda with the creator of the world.
\When Memphis became the capital of Egypt and the
seat* of the Pharaoh, its god also became supreme in the
Egyptian pantheon. But he was no longer Ptah the
creator simply. He was already amalgamated with
Sokaris, and probably with Osiris as well. It was not
difficult to identify two mummified gods whose domain
was among the dead. With the spread of the sun-
worship of Heliopolis and the spirit of pantheistic syn
cretism which accompanied it, the individuality of the
old god of Memphis became still further lost. He was
1 It was only when the sun-god had absorbed the other deities that they
became the children of Ra.
2 Rccucil dc Travaux, xix. pp. 50, 54.
140 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
merged into Tanen or Tatunen, a local god of the earth,
as well as into Ea. He had already been made into the
chief of an Ennead, and now the Ennead was resolved
into a trinity. Nofer-Tum, " beautified by Turn," was
brought from Heliopolis, and was made into a son of
Ptah, afterwards to be superseded, however, by another
abstraction, Im-hotep, " he who comes in peace." l Im-
hotep was reputed the first kJier-heb or hierophant ; he
it was who recited and interpreted the liturgy of the
dead and the magic formulae which restored health to
the sick and raised the dead to life. The Greeks conse
quently identified him with Asklepios. 2 Both Im-hotep
and Nofer-Tum were the sons of Sekhet, the lion-headed
goddess of Letopolis, from whence she must have been
borrowed by the Memphite priests when the ancient
potter god had become a generator, and a wife was needed
for him^^
^With the decline of the Memphite dynasties and the
fall of the Old Empire, the commanding part played by
Ptah in the Egyptian pantheon was at an end. The god
of the imperial city had been identified with the gods of
the provincial nomes ; his temple at Memphis had taken
precedence of all others, and the local priesthoods were
content that their deities should have found a shelter in
it as forms of Ptah. He was even identified with Hapi,
the Nile, though perhaps the similarity in sound between
the sacred name of the river and that of the bull Apis
(Hapi) may have assisted in the i
1 To "come in peace" is still a common expression in Egyptian Arabic,
and means "to return safely." The name seems to be taken from the
office of Im-hotep, which was to conduct the dead safely back to a second
life.
2 Nofer-Tum and Im-hotep had human forms like their father. The
first is a man with a lotus flower on the head, the second a youth with a
papyrus roll on the knee.
3 There was a difference only in the vowel of the first syllable.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 141
t the Nile should have been worshipped throughout
the land of Egypt is natural. The very land itself was
his gift, the crops that grew upon it and the population
it supported all depended upon his bounty. When the
Nile failed, the people starved ; when the Nile was full,
Egypt was a land of contentment and plenty. It is
only wonderful that the cult of the Nile should not have
been more prominent than it was. The temples built in
its honour were neither numerous nor important, nor
were its priests endowed as the priests of other gods.
But the cause of this is explained by history. The
neolithic population of the country lived in the desert ;
the Nile was for them little more than the creator of
pestilential swamps and dangerous jungles, where wild
beasts and venomous serpents lurked for the intruder.
The Pharaonic Egyptians brought their own gods with
them, and these naturally became the divinities of the
nomes. When the river had been embanked and its
waters been made a blessing instead of a curse, the sacred
animals and the gods of the nomes were too firmly
established to be displace3^L
^But the backwardness of tfte State religion was made
up for by the piety of individuals. Hymns to the Nile,
like those which were engraved on the rocks of Silsilis
by Meneptah and Ramses in., breathe a spirit of gratitude
and devotion which can hardly be exceeded-^
" Hail to thee, Nile !
who manifestest thyself over this land,
1 The Nile-gods, representing the Nile and the canals, are depicted as
stout men with large breasts, crowned with flowers, and wearing only the
narrow girdle of prehistoric Egypt. The human form agrees well with
the fact that the Nile was first engineered, and so made a source of life
for Egypt, by the Pharaonic Egyptians. Babylonia was the country, it
must be remembered, where river engineering and irrigation were originally
developed.
142 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and comest to give life to Egypt !
Mysterious is thy issuing forth from darkness,
011 this day whereon it is celebrated !
Watering the orchards created by Ra
to cause all cattle to drink,
thou givest the earth to drink, inexhaustible one ! ...
Lord of the fish, during the inundation,
no bird alights on the crops.
Thou Greatest the wheat, thou bringest forth the barley,
assuring perpetuity to the temples.
If thou ceasest thy toil and thy work,
then all that exists is in anguish.
If the gods suffer in heaven,
then the faces of men waste away . . .
No dwelling (is there) which may contain thee !
None penetrates within thy heart !
Thy young men, thy children, applaud thee
and render unto thee royal homage.
Stable are thy decrees for Egypt
before thy servants of the north.
He dries the tears from all eyes,
and guards the increase of his good things . . .
Establish er of justice, mankind desires thee,
supplicating thee to answer their prayers ;
thou answerest them by the inundation !
Men offer thee the first-fruits of corn ;
all the gods adore thee ! . . .
A festal song is raised for thee on the harp,
with the accompaniment of the hand.
Thy young men and thy children acclaim thee,
and prepare their exercises.
Thou art the august ornament of the earth,
letting thy bark advance before men,
lifting up the heart of women in labour,
and loving the multitude of the flocks.
When thou shinest in the royal city,
the rich man is sated with good things,
even the poor man disdains the lotus ;
all that is produced is of the choicest ;
all plants exist for thy children.
If thou refusest nourishment,
the dwelling is silent, devoid of all that is good,
THE GODS OF EGYPT 143
the country falls exhausted . . .
O Nile, come (and) prosper !
thou that makest men to live through his flocks,
and his flocks through his orchards ! )J l
\ The supremacy of Memphis was replaced by that of
Thebes, and under the Theban dynasties, accordingly,
Amon, the god of Thebes, became paramount in the State
religion of Egypt. But before we trace the history of
liis rise to supremacy, it is necessary to say a few words
regarding the Egyptian goddesses. The woman occupied
an important position in the Egyptian household ; purity
of blood was traced through her, and she even sat on the
throne of the Pharaohs. The divine family naturally
corresponded to the family on earth. The Egyptian
goddess was not always a pale reflection of the god, like
the Semitic consort of Baal ; on the contrary, there were
goddesses of nomes as well as gods of nomes, and the
nome-goddess was on precisely the same footing as the
nome-god. Nit of Sais or Hathor of Dendera differed in
no way, so far as their divine powers were concerned,
from Ptah of Memphis or Khnum of the Cataract. Like
the gods, too, they became the heads of Enneads, or were
embodied in Trinities, when first the doctrine of the
Ennead, and then that of the Trinity, made its way
through the theological schools. They are each even
called " the father of fathers " as well as " the mother of
mothers," and takethe place of Turn as the creators of
heaven and earth. 2 "^
\Nit rose to eminence with the Twenty-sixth Dynasty.
Her city of Sais had previously played no part in his
tory, but both its goddess and its sanctuary were of old
" Hymn to the Nile," translated by P. Guieysse, Eecords of the Past,
new series, iii. p. 46 sqq. The hymn was composed by Anna or Annana
in the time of Meneptah u.
" Brugsch, Religion und Mythologic, pp. 3, 248, 348.
144 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
date. 1 Of the nature of the goddess, however, we know
little. She is represented as a woman with a shuttle as
her emblem, and in her hands she carries a bow and
arrow, like Istar of Assyria or Artemis of Greece. But
the twin arrow was also a symbol of the nome, which
was a border district, exposed to the attacks of the
Libyan tribes. The Greeks identified her with tl^eir
Athena on account of a slight similarity in the names. \
\ Sekhet, or Bast of Bubastis, is better known. Some
times she has the head of a lion, sometimes of a cat.
At Philas it is said of her that " she is savage as Sekhet
and mild as Bast." 2 But the lion must have preceded
the cat. The earlier inhabitants of the valley of the
Nile were acquainted with the lion ; the cat seems to
have been introduced from Nubia in the age of the
Eleventh Dynasty. In the time of the Old Empire
there was no cat-headed deity, for there were no cats.
But the cat, when once introduced, was from the outset
a sacred animal. 3 The lion of Sekhet was transformed
into a cat ; and as the centuries passed, the petted and
domesticated annual was the object of a worship that
became fanatical/V^ Herodotos maintains that when a
house took fire the Egyptians of his time thought only
of preserving the cats ; and to this day the cat is
1 Her name is already mentioned in the Pyramid texts, and in Pepi ii.
131 she is described as the eye of Horus and "the opener of the paths,"
the ordinary title of Anubis as god of the dead.
2 In the Speos Artemidos near Beni-Hassan, where a large cemetery of
mummified cats has been found, she is called Pakht, an older form of Bast.
3 On a slab discovered by Professor Petrie at Koptos, Usertesen I.
of the Twelfth Dynasty already appears standing before a cat-headed
goddess who is called " Bast, the lady of Shel." Shel is perhaps Ashel
at Karnak, where the temple of Mut stood, in which so many figures of
Bast or Sekhet have been found (Petrie, Koptos, pi. x. 2). The name
of Bast also occurs in the Pyramid texts (Pepi 290) ; but here it is an
epithet of Uazit, the goddess of Dep or Buto, once the capital of the
kingdom of Northern Egypt, who is contrasted with the goddess of Nekheb.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 145
honoured above all other animals on the banks of the
Nile. yThe chief sanctuary of Bast was at Bubastis,
where, however, the excavations of Dr. Naville have
shown that she did not become the chief divinity before
the rise of the Twenty-second Dynasty. 1 ^
s^The goddesses passed one into the other even more readily
than the gods. Sekhet developed by turns into Uazit and
Mut, Selk the scorpion, and Hathor of Dendera. Pemi.,
even at Bubastis, still calls himself the son of Hathor. "
\Hathor played much the same part among the god
desses that Pia played among the gods. She gradually
absorbed the other female divinities of Egypt. They
were resolved into forms of her, as the gods were resolved
into forms of Ka. The kings of the Sixth Dynasty
called themselves her sons, just as they also called them
selves sons of the sun-god. She presided over the under
world ; she presided also over love and pleasure. The
seven goddesses, who, like fairy godmothers, bestowed all
good things on the newborn child, were called by her
name, and she was even identified with Mut, the starry
sky. Her chief sanctuary was at Dendera, founded in
the first days of the Pharaonic conquest of Egypt.
Here she was supreme ; even Horus the elder and the
younger, 2 when compelled to form with her a trinity,
remained lay figures and nothing more>v
\She was pictured sometimes as a cow, sometimes as a
woman with the head of a cow bearing the solar disc
between her horns : for from the earliest days she was
associated with the sun. Sometimes she is addessed as
the daughter of Ea ; 3 sometimes the sun-god is her son.
1 Naville, Bulastis (Egypt Exploration Fund), i. pp. 44, 47, 48.
2 Horus Ahi. The meaning of Alii, the local title assigned to Horus
the younger, is doubtful.
3 Thus at Dendera we read: "Ancestral mother of the gods, thou
unitest thyself with thy father Ka in thy festal chamber."
10
146 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
\At Dendera the solar orb is represented as rising from
her lap, while its rays encircle her head, which rests
upon Bakhu, the mountain of the sun. In another
chamber of the same temple we see her united with her
son Horus as a hawk with a woman s head in the very
middle of the solar disc, which slowly rises from the
eastern hills. When Isis is figured as a cow, it is
because she is regarded as a form of HathoiN
The original character of Hathor has been a matter of
dispute. Some scholars have made her originally the
sky or space generally, others have called her the
goddess of light, while she has even been identified with
the moon. In the legend of the destruction of mankind
by Ea, she appears as the eye of the sun-god who plies
her work at night ; and a text at Dendera speaks of her
as " resting on her throne in the place for beholding the
sun s disc, when the bright one unites with the bright
one." N{n any case she is closely connected with the
rising sun, whose first rays surround her head.
Egyptian tradition maintained that she had come
from the land of Punt, from those shores of Arabia and
the opposite African coast from which the Pharaonic
immigrants had made their way to the valley of the
Nile. She was, moreover, the goddess of the Semitic
nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula ; in other words, she
was here identified with the Ashtoreth or Istar of the
Semitic world. 2 Now the name of Hathor does not
seem to be Egyptian. It is written with the help of a
sort of rebus, so common in ideographic forms of writing.
1 The so-called Hathor head with the horns of a cow is already found
on the slate plaque of Kom el-Ahmar, which is either of the time of the
First Dynasty or pre-Menic (Zeits. f. Aeyypt. Spr. xxxvi. pi. xii.). A
head of similar type is engraved under the name of Pepi u., discovered at
Koptos (Petrie, Koptos, pi. v. 7).
2 Horus and Hathor, that is to say, Baal and Ashtoreth, were, according
to the Egyptians, the deities of Mafket, the Sinaitic Peninsula.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 147
The pronunciation of the name is given by means of
ideographs, the significations of which have nothing in
common with it, though the sounds of the words they
express approximate to its pronunciation. The name
of Hathor, accordingly, is denoted by writing the hawk
of Horus inside the picture of a " house," the name of
which was Hat. A similar method of representing
names is frequent in the ideographic script of ancient
Babylonia ; thus the name of Asari, the Egyptian Osiris,
is expressed by placing the picture of an eye (ski) inside
that of a place (eri).
The name of Hathor, therefore, had primitively
nothing to do with either Horus or the house of Horus,
whatever may have been the speculations which the
priests of a later day founded upon the written form of
the name. It was only an attempt, similar to those
common in the early script of Babylonia, to represent
the pronunciation of a name which had no meaning in
the Egyptian language. But it is a name which we
meet with in the ancient inscriptions of Southern Arabia.
There it appears as the name of the god Atthar. But
Atthar itself was borrowed from Babylonia. It is the name
of the Babylonian goddess Istar, originally the morning
and evening stars, who, an astronomical text tells us, was
at once male and female. As a male god she was adored
in South Arabia and Moab ; as the goddess of love and
war she was the chief goddess of Babylonia, the patron
of the Assyrian kings, and the Ashtoreth of Canaan.
When, with the progress of astronomical knowledge, the
morning and evening stars were distinguished from one
another, in one part of Western Asia she remained
identified with the one, in another part with the other.
Hathor is then, I believe, the Istar of the Babylonians.
She agrees with Istar both in name and in attributes.
The form of the name can be traced back to that of
148 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Istar through the Atthar of South Arabia, that very
land of Punt from which Hathor was said to have come.
In Egypt as in Babylonia she was the goddess of love
and joy, and her relation to the sun can be explained
naturally if she were at the outset the morning star. 1
Even her animal form connects her with Chaldsea. Dr.
Scheil has published a Babylonian seal of the age of
Abraham, oh which the cow, giving milk to a calf,
appears as the symbol of Istar, and a hymn of
of Assur-bani-pal identifies the goddess with a
I have left myself but little time in which to speak of
the gods who interpenetrated and transfigured Egyptian
theology in the period of whicfiAwe know most. V s These
are the gods of Thebes. For centuries Thebes was the
I dominant centre of a powerful and united Egypt, and its
Ichief god Amon followed the fortunes of his cityX^
^s the word amon meant " to conceal," the priests
/ discovered in the god an embodiment of a mysterious
and hidden force which pervades and controls the
universe, and of which the sun is as it were the material
organ. But such discoveries were the product of a later
day, when the true meaning of the name had been long
since forgotten, and Theban theology had become pan
theistic. What Amon reallv signified the priests did
Xnot know, nor are we any wisen
Amon was, however, the local god of Thebes, or rather
of Karnak, and he seems from the first to have been a
sun-god. But he had a rival in the warrior deity Mentu
1 It must be remembered that in Egypt the place occupied by the
morning star in the astronomy and myths of other peoples was taken
by Sirius on account of its importance for the rising of the Nile. And
Sirius was identified with I sis.
2 Recueil de Travaux, xx. p. 62. Dr. Scheil further points out that
the sacred bark of Ban, with whom Istar is identified, was called "the
ship of the holy cow." At Dendera also, Isis, in her bark as goddess of
the star Sirius, becomes Hathor under the form of a cow.
THE GODS OF EGYPT 149
of Hermonthis, who also probably represented the sun.
At any rate, Mentu had the head of a hawk, and there
fore must have been a local form of Horus of that
Horus, namely, of whom the Pharaonic Egyptians were
the followers. 1 Like Horus, too, he was a fighting god,
and was accordingly identified in the texts of the & Nine-
teenth Dynasty with the Canaanitish Baal, " the Lord of
hosts." But he was also incarnated in the sacred bull
which was worshipped at Erment, and of which I have
spoken in an earlier lecture. He thus differed from Amon,
who was identified with the ram, the sacred animal of
the aboriginal population, not at Karnak only, but in
the whole of the surrounding district.^,
\ But Amon was usually of human form, with two lofty
feathers rising above his crown. Under the Theban
dynasties he became the supreme god, first of Egypt, then
of the Egyptian empire. All other gods had to give way
before him, and to lose their individuality in his. His
supremacy began with the rise of the Eleventh and Twelfth
Dynasties ; it was checked for a moment by the Hyksos
conquest of Egypt, but in the end the check proved only
a fresh impulse. It was the princes of Thebes, the
servants of Amon, who raised the standard of revolt
against the Asiatic intruder, and finally drove him back
to Asia. Amon had been their helper in the war of
independence, and it was he who afterwards gained their
victories for them in Syria and Ethiopia. The glory and
wealth of Egypt were all due to him, and upon his
temple and city accordingly the spoils of Asia were
1 Professor Wiedemann has suggested that the name of Men-tu or
ti-tu is connected with that of A-mon. It is, however, more reasonable
to associate it with that of the Mentiu or Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic
Peninsula.
2 Hence the ram-headed sphinxes that lined the roads leading to the
temple of Karnak. The flesh of the ram was tabooed at Thebes, an in-
;ion that the animal was originally a totem (cf. Herod, ii. 42).
150 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
lavished, and trains of captives worked under the lash.
The Hyksos invasion, moreover, and the long war of
independence which followed, destroyed the power of the
old feudal princes, while it strengthened and developed
that of the Pharaoh. The influence of the provincial
gods passed away with the feudal princes whose patrons
they had been ; the supremacy of the Pharaoh implied
also the supremacy of the Pharaoh s god. There was
none left in Egypt to dispute the proud boast of the
Theban, that Amon was " the one god.^
\But he became the one god not by destroying, but by
absorbing the other gods of the country. The doctrines
of the Ennead and the Trinity had prepared the way.
They had taught how easily the gods of the State religion
could be merged one into the other ; that their attributes
were convertible, and yet, at the same time, were all that
gave them a distinct personality. The attributes were to
the Egyptian little more than the concrete symbols by
which they were expressed in the picture writing; the
personality was little more than a name. And both
symbols and name could be changed or interchanged
at will.\
\ The process of fusion was aided by the identification
or Amon with Ea. The spread of the solar cult of
Heliopolis had introduced the name and worship of Ea
into all the temples of Egypt ; the local gods had, as it
were, been incorporated into him, and even the god
desses forced to become his wives or his daughters. The
Pharaoh, even the Theban Pharaoh, was still " the son of
the sun-god " ; as Amon was also his " father," it was a
necessary conclusion that Amon and Ea were one and
the same\
\ In the Theban period, accordingly, Amon is no longer
a^simple god. He is Amon-Ea, to whom all the attri
butes of Ea have been transferred. The solar element is
THE GODS OF EGYPT 151
predominant in his character ; and, since the other gods
of the country are but subordinate forms of Amon, in
their characters also. Most of the religious literature of
Egypt which we possess belongs to the Theban period oi
ls derived from it; it is not astonishing, therefore, if
Egyptologists have been inclined to see the sun -god
everywhere in Egyptian theology \
^The Theban trinity was modelled on the orthodox
lines. Mut, " the mother," a local epithet of the goddess
of Southern Egypt, was made the wife of Amon, while
Khonsu, a local moon-god, became his son. But in acquir
ing this relationship Khonsu lost his original nature. 1
Since the divine son was one with his divine father, he
too became a sun-god, with the solar disc and the hawk s
head. As the designer of architectural plans, however,
he still preserved a reminiscence of his primal character.
But he was eventually superseded by Mentu, a result of
the decadence of Thebes and the rise of Erment to the
headship of the nome. It is needless to say that Mentu
had long before become Mentu-Ea. \
We can trace the evolution of Amon, thanks to the
multiplicity of the texts which belong to the period when
his city was supreme. We can watch him as he rises
slowly from the position of an obscure provincial deity to
that of the supreme god of all Egypt, and can follow the
causes which brought it about. We can see him uniting
himself with the sun-god, and then absorbing the rest of
the Egyptian gods into himself. The theological thought,
of which he was the subject and centre, gradually but
inexorably passes from a narrow form of polytheism into
a materialistic pantheism. There, however, it ends. It
never advances further into a monotheism in which
1 A stela of Antef iv., found by M. Legrain in 1900, shows that Khonsu
was preceded by Ptah as the third member of the trinity. See above,
P. 90.
152 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the creator is separate from his creation. With all its
spirituality, the Egyptian conception of the divine re
mained concrete ; the theologians of Egypt never escaped
the influence of the symbol or recognised the god behind
and apart from matter. It was through matter that
they came to know God, and to the last it was by matter
that their conception of the Godhead was bounded.^
I
LECTUEE VII.
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH.
^THE legend of Osiris as it existed at the end of the first
century is recorded by Plutarch. It has been pieced
together from the myths and folk-tales of various ages
and various localities that were current about the god.
The Egyptian priests had considerable difficulty in fitting
them into a consistent stores had they been Greek or
Roman historiographers, they would have solved the pro
blem by declaring that there had been more than one
Osiris ; as it was, they were contented with setting the
different accounts of his death and fortunes side by side,
and harmonising them afterwards as best they might.
\ As to the general outlines of the legend, there was no
dispute. Osiris had been an Egyptian Pharaoh who had
devoted his life to doing good, to introducing the elements
of art and culture among his subjects, and transforming
them from savages into civilised men. He was the son
of the sun-god, born on the first of the intercalatory
days, the brother and husband of Isis, and the brother
also of Set or Sut, whom the Greeks called Typhon.
Typhon had as wife his sister Nephthys or Nebhat, but
lier son Anubis, the jackal, claimed Osiris as his fathers
\0siris set forth from his Egyptian kingdom to subdue
the world by the arts of peace, leaving Isis to govern in
his absence. On his return, Set and his seventy-two fellow
conspirators imprisoned him by craft in a chest, which
was thrown into the Nile. In the days when Canaan had
153
154 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
become a province of the Egyptian empire, and there were
close relations between the Phoenician cities and the Delta,
it was said that the chest had floated across the sea to
Gebal, where it became embedded in the core of a tree,
which was afterwards cut down and shaped into one of
the columns of the royal palace. Isis wandered from
place to place seeking her lost husband, and mourning
for him ; at last she arrived at Gebal, and succeeded
in extracting the chest from its hiding-place, and in
carrying it back to Egypt. But the older version of the
legend knew nothing of the voyage to Gebal. The chest
was indeed found by Isis, but it was near the mouths of
the Nile. Here it was buried for awhile ; but Set, while
hunting by night, discovered it, and, tearing open its lid,
cut the body inside into fourteen pieces, which he scattered
to the winds. Then Isis took boat and searched for the
pieces, until she had recovered them all save one. Wher
ever a piece was found, a tomb of Osiris arose in later
days. Carefully were the pieces put together by Isis
and Nephthys, and Anubis then embalmed the whole
body. It was the first mummy that was made in the
world. \L
\ Meanwhile Horus the younger had been born to Isis,
and brought up secretly at Buto, in the marshes of the
Delta, out of reach of Set. As soon as he was grown to
man s estate he gathered his followers around him, and
prepared himself to avenge his father s death. Long and
fierce was the struggle. Once Set was taken prisoner,
but released by Isis ; whereupon Horus, in a fit of anger,
struck off his mother s head, which was replaced by Thoth
with the head of a cow. According to one account, the
contest ended with the victory of Horus. The enemy
were driven from one nome to another, and Horus sat on
the throne of his father. But there were others who
said that the struggle went on with alternating success,
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 155
until at last Thotli was appointed arbiter, and divided
Egypt between the two foes. Southern Egypt was given
to Horus, Northern Egypt to Sefe^
x It is somewhat difficult to disentangle the threads out
ofNvhich this story has been woven. Elements of various
sorts are mixed up in it together. Horus the younger,
the posthumous son of Osiris, has been identified with
Horus the elder, the ancient sun-god of Upper Egypt,
and the legends connected with the latter have been
transferred to the son of Isis. The everlasting war be
tween good and evil has been inextricably confounded
with the war between the Pharaonic Egyptians and the
older population. The solar theology has invaded the
myth of Osiris, making him the son of Ea, and investing
him with solar attributes. Anubis the jackal, who
watched over the cemeteries of Upper Egypt, has been
foisted into it, and has become the servant and minister
of the god of the dead who superseded him. The doctrine
of the Trinity has been applied to it, and Anubis and
Nephthys, who originally were the allies of Osiris, have
been forced to combine with Set. Here and there old
forgotten customs or fragments of folk-lore have been
embodied in the legend: the dismemberment of Osiris,
for example, points to the time when the neolithic in
habitants of Egypt dismembered their dead ; and the pre
servation of the body of Osiris in the heart of a tree has
its echo in the Tale of the Two Brothers, in which the
individuality of the hero was similarly preserved. The
green face with which Osiris was represented was in the
same way a traditional reminiscence of the custom of
painting the face of the dead with green painLwhich was
practised by the neolithic population of Egypt%
\JThere are three main facts in the personality of Osiris
which stand out clearly amid the myths and theological
inventions which gathered round his name. He was a
156 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
humangod ; he was the first mummy ; and he became
the god~of__the dead. And the paradise over whTcIf Be
ruled/ ami to which the faithful souls who believed in
him were admitted, was the field of Alu, a land of light
and happiness.\
SeJchet Alu, " the field of Alu," seems to have been the
cemetery of Busiris among the marshes of the Delta. 1
The name meant " the field of marsh-mallows," the
" asphodel meadows " of the Odyssey, and was applied
to one of the islands which were so numerous in the
north-eastern part of the Delt^ Here, then, in the
nome of which Osiris was the feudal god, the paradise
of his followers originally lay, though a time came
when it was translated from the earth to the sky. But
when Osiris first became lord of the dead, the land to
which they followed him was still within the confines of
Egypt. N
\ It would seem, therefore, that Professor Maspero is
right in holding that Osiris was primarily the god of
Busiris in the Delta. It is the only nome of which he
was formally the presiding deity, under the title of Anz,
" the king," and it bordered on Hermopolis, which was
dedicated to the ibis-god Thoth, who is so closely con
nected with the story of Osiris. 2 To the north stood the
temple of Isis-Eennet, 3 to the south-west was Pharbrcthos
(Horbet), which worshipped Set, while Horus was the
god of many of the neighbouring nomes. The whole
cycle of Osirian deities is thus to be found within the
confines of a small tract of the Del4.
1 So Lauth, Aus Acgypten s Voi^zeit, p. 61 ; Brugsch, Dictionnaire
geograpkiquc, pp. 61, 62 ; Maspero, The Dawn of Civilisation, p. 180.
The evidence, however, is not quite clear.
2 The bronze figures of the ibis found at Tel el-Baqliya, on the east bank
of the Damietta branch of the Nile, opposite Abusir or Busiris, have
shown that it is the site of the capital of the Hennopolite nome.
3 At Behbet near Mansura.
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 157
\ The name Busiris means simply " the place of Osiris."
Primitively it had been called Daddu, " the two colon
nades," l and Osiris became known as its lord. It was
under this title that he was incarnated in the ram of the
neighbouring town of Mendes on the eastern boundary
of Hermopolis. The ram became his soul ; all the more
easily since the Egyptian words for " ram " and " soul "
had the same or a similar pronunciation. At Dendera
it is said that in the ram of Mendes Osiris grew young
again ; and in the later days of solar syncretism the four
souls of Ra and Osiris, of Shu and Khepera, were united
in its bodyV How far back this identification of the god
and the sacred animal may reach we do not know. But
it is significant that it was not at Daddu itself, but at
a neighbouring city, that the animal was worshipped,
though a seal-cylinder which belongs to the oldest period
of Egyptian history already declares that Daddu was
" the city of the ram." 2
Nebhat and Anubis had originally nothing to do with
the god of Busiris. Nebhat, in fact, is merely a title
which has been fossilised into the name of a deity. It
is merely the ordinary title of the Egyptian lady as " the
mistress of the house," who thus stands on the same
footing as " the lord of the house," her husband. The
title could have been given to any goddess who was
conceived of in human form, and was doubtless applied
1 This, at least, is how the name is usually written. But on an early
seal-cylinder which I have published in the Proc. SB A., Feb. 1898,
No. 2, where we read, "The city of the ram, the city which is called
Dad," the name is written D-d, and on a libation-table of the Sixth
Dynasty from El-Kab we find Dad-d-u (Quibell, El-Kcib, pi. iv. 1). The
earlier pronunciation of the name as found in the Pyramid texts is
Zaddu or Zadu.
2 As early as the age of the Pyramid texts the column Dad had come
to be explained as a picture of the spine, or rather spinal column (zad), of
Osiris, which was supposed to be preserved at Daddu or Pi-Asar-neb-Daddu
or Abusir. See Unas 7.
158 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
to Isis the wife of Osiris. He was " the lord " of the
city ; she, " the lady of the house." It reminds us of the
way in which the deities of Babylonia were addressed.
There, too, the god was " the lord," the goddess " the
lady." The old titles of Osiris and Isis which have
thus survived in the Osirian myth are essentially
Babylonian.
V Nebhat or Nephthys was individualised in order to
complete the trinity of Set, of which Set was the
central figure. We can tell, accordingly, when she
thus developed into a separate goddess. It was when
the doctrine of the Trinity first became dominant in the
Egyptian schools of theology, and all the chief deities of
the country were forced to conform to it. Anubis, the
second person in the trinity of Set, must have already
been attached to the cult of Osiris. How this came
about is not difficult to discover. Anubis the jackal
was the god of the underworld. Like his symbol, the
jackal, he watched over the tombs, more especially in
" the mountain " far away from the cultivated land. His
sacred animal already appears mounted on its standard
on the early slate plaques of Nekhen and Abydos by the
side of the Horus-hawk. He was, in fact, worshipped in
many of the nomes, above all at Siiit, where he was
adored as " the opener of the paths " to the world below.
He was the inventor of the art of embalming ; he
must therefore have been the god of the dead when
the Pharaonic Egyptians first settled themselves in
Upper Egypt. In one sense, indeed, he was younger
than Horus, since " the followers of Horus " had not
brought the art with them from their earlier home ; but
he was already god of the dead, and the discovery of the
art was accordingly ascribed to hirn^^
XThe acceptance of Osiris as the god of the underworld
meant the displacement of Anubis. He had to make
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 159
way for " the lord of Daddu." The fact is a striking
illustration of the influence which the Osirian teaching
must have possessed. Osiris was the feudal god only of
a nome in the north of the Delta; Anubis had been
adored from time immemorial throughout the valley of
the Nile. The cities which recognised him as their
chief deity were numerous and powerful. Nevertheless
he had to yield to the rival god and take a subordinate
place beside him. He remained, indeed, in the pantheon,
for the Egyptians never broke with their past ; but the
part he had played in it was taken by another, and he
was content to become merely the minister of Osiris and
the guardian of the cemeteries of the deaoV
\Meanwhile Osiris, like the Greek Dionysos, had
pursued his victorious march. Wherever his worship
extended his temple rose by the side of his tomb like
the temples attached to the Pyramids. Like Ptah of
Memphis or the mummified Horus of Nekhen, he was a
dead god, and it was to a dead god consequently that
the offering was made and the priest dedicated. It was
at Abydos in Upper Egypt, however, that his fame was
greatest. Abydos was the sepulchral temple of Osiris
attached to the city of This, and This was not only the
seat of a powerful kingdom, which probably succeeded
that of Nekhen, but the birthplace of Menes, the founder
of the united monarchy. Around the tomb of the Osiris
of Abydos, accordingly, the kings and princes of the
Thinite dynasties were buried, and where the Pharaoh
was buried his subjects wished to be buried too. From
all parts of Egypt the bodies of the dead were brought
to the sacred ground, that they might be interred as near
as possible to the tomb of the god, and so their mum
mies might repose beside him on earth as they hoped
their souls would do in the paradise of the Blest. Even
the rise of the Memphite dynasties did not deprive
160 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Abydos of its claim to veneration. Its sanctity was
too firmly established ; hundreds of Egyptians still con
tinued to be buried there, rather than in the spacious
necropolis of the Memphite Pharaohs. 1 Abydos, with its
royal memories, threw the older city of Osiris into the
shade. He still, it is true, retained his ancient title of
" lord of Daddu," but it was an archaism rather than a
reality, and it was as " lord o^Abydos " that he was now"
with preference addressed, jr
But other sanctuaries disputed with Abydos its claim
to possess the tomb of the god of the dead. Wherever a
temple was erected in his honour, his tomb also was
necessarily to be found. An attempt was made to
harmonise their conflicting claims by falling back on the
old tradition of the custom of dismembering the dead :
the head of the god was at Abydos, his heart at Athribis,
his neck at Letopolis. But even so the difficulty re
mained : the separate limbs would not suffice for the
number of the tombs, and the same member was some
times claimed by more than one locality. At Memphis,
for example, where Osiris was united with Apis into the
compound Serapis, his head was said to have been
interred as well as at Abydos.
Abydos, at the outset, was the cemetery, or rather one
of the cemeteries, of This. And the god of This was the
sun-god Anher, who was depicted in human form. In
the age which produced the doctrine of the Ennead,
Anher was identified with Shu, the atmosphere, or, more
strictly speaking, the god of the space between sky and
earth was merged into the god of the sun. But it was
1 Not un frequently a rich Egyptian who was buried at Saqqara had a
cenotaph at Abydos. I believe that the fashion had been set by the
founder of the united monarchy himself, and that besides the tomb of
Menes at Ncgada there was also a cenotaph of the king at Abydos. At
all events clay impressions of his Ka-name Aha have been found there in
the Omm el-Ga ab.
7
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 161
not only at This that Anher was worshipped. He was
also the god of Sebennytos, which adjoined the Busirite
nome, and where, therefore, the human sun-god was in
immediate contact with the human god of the dead.
What the mummy was to the living man, that Osiris was
to Anher. 1 \
\^The doubleVelation between Osiris and Anher in both
Lower and Upper Egypt cannot be an accident. Osiris
became the god of Abydos, because Abydos was the
cemetery of This, whose feudal god was Anher. The
relation that existed in the Delta, between Anher the
sun-god of Sebennytos, and Osiris the god of the dead at
Z^ isiris, was transferred also to Southern Egypt\
Whom or what did Osiris originally represent ? To
is many answers have been given. Of late Egypto
logists have seen in him sometimes a personification of
mankind, sometimes the river Nile, sometimes the cul
tivated ground. After the rise of the solar school of
theology the Egyptians themselves identified him with
the sun when it sinks below the horizon to traverse the
dark regions of the underworld. Horus the sun-god of
morning thus became his son, born as it were of the sun-
god of night, and differing from his father only in his
form of manifestation. 2 \
1 The title borne by Osiris at Abydos was Khent-amentit, " the ruler of
the west." There is no need of turning the title into a separate god who
was afterwards identified with Osiris : he was as much Osiris as was Neb-
Daddu, " the lord of Daddu." Professor Maspero says with truth that
" Khent-amentit was the dead Anher, a sun which had set in the west"
(Etudes de Mytholoyie et d * Archiologie tgyptiennes, ii. p. 24) or rather,
perhaps, a sun that was setting in the west, as his domain was the
necropolis of Omni el-Ga ab, immediately eastward of the western boundary
of hills. When "Osiris of Daddu" is distingtushed from " Khent-
Amentit of Abydos," as on a stela of the Eleventh Dynasty (Daressy in
the Recueil de Travaux, xiv. p. 23), this is only in accordance with the
Egyptian habit of transforming a divine epithet into a separate deity.
2 Already in the Pyramid texts Horus is said to have assisted in the
II
162 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
have, however, one or two facts to guide us in
determining the primitive character of the god. He was
a mummified man like Ptah of Memphis, and he was the
brother and enemy of Set. Set or Sut became for
the later Egyptians the impersonation of evil. He was
identified w r ith Apophis, the serpent of wickedness, against
whom the sun-god wages perpetual war ; and his name
was erased from the monuments on which it was en
graved. But all this was because Set was the god and
the representative of the Asiatic invaders who had
conquered Egypt, and aroused in the Egyptian mind a
feeling of bitter animosity towards themselves. As late
as the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the Pharaohs
who restored Tanis, the Hyksos capital, to something of
its former glory, called themselves after the name of the
Hyksos deity. Thothmes in. of the Eighteenth Dynasty
built a temple in honour of Set of Ombos, who was
worshipped near Dendera ; and if we go back to the
oldest records of the united monarchy, we find Set
symbolising the north while Horus symbolises the south.
Before the days of Menes, Set was the god of Northern
Egypt, Horus of Southern Egypt. In the prehistoric
burial of Osiris, who goes to the plains of Alu with the great gods that
proceed from On" (Pepi ii. 864-872); and we have perhaps a reminiscence
of the spread of the Osiriari cult to the south and the identification of
Osiris with Akhem, the mummified Horus of Nekhen, in Pepi ii. 849, where
we read : Seb installs by his rites Osiris as god, to whom the watchers
in Pe make offering, and the watchers in Neklien venerate him " (Maspero
in the llecueil de Travaux, xii. p. 168). Pe and Nekhen were the capitals
of the two pre-Menic kingdoms of Northern and Southern Egypt, and on a
stela from Nekhen (Kom el-Ahmar) in the Cairo Museum, " Horus of
Nekhen" is identified with Osiris (Recmil de Travaux, xiv. p. 22, No.
xx.). In the inscriptions of the Pyramid of Pepi II., lines 864-5, it is
said that Isis and Nebhat wept for Osiris at Pe along with " the souls of
Pe." Pe with its temple of the younger Horus, and Dep with its temple
of Uazit the goddess of the north, together formed the city called Buto
by the Greeks.
OSIRIS AND THE OSIIUAN FAITH 163
wars of the two kingdoms the two, gods would be hostile
to one another, and yet brethren/
X It was the armies of Set that were driven by Horns
and his metal-bearing followers from one end of Egypt
to the other, and finally overcome. 1 Set therefore re
presents in the legend the older population of the valley
of the Nile. The reason of this is not far to seek^, Set
or Sut, like Sati, denotes the Semitic or African nomad
of the desert, the Babylonian Sutu. He is the equivalent
of the Bedawi of to-day, who still hovers on the Egyptian
borders, and between whom and the fellah there is
perpetual feud. The same cause which made Horus the
brother and yet the enemy of Set must have been at
work to place Osiris in the same relation to him\ Osiris
too must have typified the Pharaonic Egyptian, and like
Horus have been the first of the Pharaohs. Hence his
human body, and hence also the confusion between him
self and Horus, which ended in making Horus his son
and in generating a new Horus Horus the younger
by the side of the older Horus of the Egyptian
yThe position of Osiris in respect to Anher is now
clear. He is the sun-god after his setting in the west,
when he has passed to the region of the dead in the
underworld. He stands, therefore, in exactly the same
relation to Anher that the mummified hawk stands to
the Horus-hawk. The one belongs to the city of the
living, the other to the city of the dead. But they are
both the same deity under different forms, one of which
presides over the city, the other over its burying-ground.
Like Horus, Osiris must have been a sun-god of the
1 So in the Pyramid texts (e.g. Teta 171, 172).
2 The origin of the name of Set had already been forgotten in the age of
the Pyramid texts, where it is explained by the determinative set, " a
stone."
164 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Pharaonic Egyptians, but a sun-god whj^ was connected
for some special reason with the deadly
Now Mr. Ball has drawn attention to the fact that
there was a Sumerian god who had precisely the same
name as Osiris, and that this name is expressed in both
cases by precisely the same ideographs. 2 The etymology
of the name has been sought in vain in Egyptian. But
the cuneiform texts make it clear. Osiris (As-ar) is the
Asari of ancient Babylonia, who was called Merodach by
the Semites, and whose ordinary title is " the god wha
does good to man." The name of Asari is written with
two ideographs, one of which denotes " a place " and the
other " an eye," and the forms of the two ideographs, as
well as their meanings, are identical with those of the
hieroglyphic characters which represent Osiris. Such a
threefold agreement cannot be accidental : both the name
and the mode of writing it must have come from Baby
lonia. And what makes the agreement the stronger is
the fact that the ideographs have nothing to do with the
signification of the name itself ; they express simply its
pronunciation. In the Sumerian of early Babylonia the
name signified " the mighty one." 3
Asari was the sun-god of Eridu, the ancient seaport
of Babylonia on the Persian Gulf. He was the son of
Ea, the chief god of the city, of whose will and wisdom
he was the interpreter. It was he who communicated to
men the lessons in culture and the art of healing, which
1 When the hieroglyphic name of the Busirite nome was first invented,
Osiris was still the living "lord of Daddu " rather than the mummified
patron of its necropolis, since it represents him as a living Pharaoh with
the title of dnz or " chieftain."
2 Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology.
3 The origin of the name of Osiris had been forgotten by the Egyptians
long before the age of the Pyramid texts, where we find (Unas 229) the
grammatical goddess User-t invented to explain Osiris, as if the latter were
the adjective user, "strong"! M. Gre"baut long ago expressed his belief
that Osiris was of foreign origin (Recueil de Travaux, i. p. 120).
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 165
Ea was willing they should learn. Just as Osiris spent
his life in doing good, according to the Egyptian legend,
so Asari was he " who does good to man." He was ever
on the watch to help his worshippers, to convey to them
the magic formulce which could ward off sickness or evil,
and, as it is often expressed, to " raise the dead to
life."
\[n this last expression we have the key to the part
yed by Osiris. Osiris died, and was buried, like Asari
or Merodach, whose temple at Babylon was also his tomb ;
but it was that he might rise again in the morning
with renewed strength and brilliancy. And through the
spells he had received from his father all those who
trusted in him, and shared in his death and entomb
ment, were also " raised to life." Both in Egypt and
in Babylonia he was the god of the resurrection,
whether that took place in this visible world or in
the heavenly paradise, which was a purified reflection of
the earth. ^
In Babylonia, Asari or Merodach was the champion of
light and order, who conquered the dragon of chaos and
her anarchic forces, and put the demons of darkness to
flight. In Egypt that part was taken by Horus. But
both Anher and Osiris were merely local forms local
names, if the phrase should be preferred of Horus and
the mummified hawk. Anher is sometimes represented,
like Horus, with the spear in his hand, overthrowing the
wicked ; but his figure was eclipsed by thar^f Osiris, who
had come to be regarded as the benefactor of mankind,
and to whom men prayed in sickness and death. A
god of the dead, however, could not be a conqueror ; it
was he, and not his foe, who had died, and consequently
the victories gained by Horus could not be ascribed to
him. But the difficulty was not insoluble ; Horus
became his son, who was at the same time his father,
166 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and the old struggle between Horus and Set was
transferred to the Osirian cult, f
It is significant, however, that in the recently-recovered
monuments of the Thinite dynasties Set is still the twin-
brother of Horus. He still represents the north, until
lately the antagonist of the south ; and a king whose
remains have been found at Nekhen and Abydos, and
who calls himself " the uniter of the two sceptres " of
Egypt, still sets the Horns-hawk and the animal of Set
above his name.
Set, as I have already said, is the Sutu or Bedawi.
He was adored elsewhere than in Egypt ; the Moabites
called themselves his children (Num. xxiv. 17), and in
the cuneiform texts Sutu-sar (" Sutu the king ") and
Nabu-rabe (" Nebo the great ") are described as twins. 1
But in Egypt he represented the population which had
been conquered by the Pharaonic Egyptians or continued
to live on the desert frontiers of the country, and which
was stronger in the Delta than in the south. The old
struggle, therefore, between light and darkness, order and
confusion, which formed the background of Babylonian
mythology, became the struggle which was waged for
such long centuries, first between the Pharaonic Egyptians
and the neolithic races, then between the kingdoms of
the south and north, and finally between the united
monarchy and the Bedawin of the desert or assailants
from Asia. Where the foreign element prevailed, Set
was an honoured god; where the ruling Egyptian was
dominant, his place was taken by his brother and his
antagonist.
Njt has been thought that the struggle between Horus
and Set\ typified the struggle that is ever going on
1 Xebo or Xabium (Nahu), "the prophet," was the interpreter of the
will of Merodach, just as Merodach was the interpreter of the will
of Ea,
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 167
between the desert and the cultivated land. But such
an idea is far too abstract to have formed the basis
of an Egyptian religious myth. It might have been
elaborated subsequently by some theological school out
of the contrast between the Sutu of the desert and
the god of the agriculturists ; but it could never have
been there originally. The interpretation is as little
justifiable as that which sees in Osiris the seed that
is buried in the ground.
It is indeed true that the Egyptians of a later period,
when the Osirian doctrine of the Resurrection was fully
developed, found an analogy to it in the seed that is
sown in order to grow again. The tomb of Ma-her-
pa-Ra, the fan-bearer of Amon-hotep n. of the Eighteenth
Dynasty, discovered by M. Loret in the valley of the
Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, contains a proof of this.
In it was a rudely-constructed bed with a mattress, on
which the figure of Osiris had been drawn. On this
earth was placed, and in the earth grains of corn had
been sown. The corn had sprouted and grown to the
height of a few inches before it had withered away.
But such symbolism is, like the similar symbolism of
Christianity, the result of the doctrine of the resurrection
and not the origin of it. It is not till men believe that
the human body can rise again from the sleep of cor
ruption, that the growth of the seed which has been
buried in the ground is invoked to explain and confirm
their creed.
VHow came this doctrine of the resurrection to be
attached to the cult of Osiris and to become an integral
part of Egyptian belief ? There is only one answer that
can be given to this : the doctrine of the resurrection
was a necessary accompaniment of the practice of
mummification, and Osiris was a mummified god. \
We have already seen that old Babylonian hymns
168 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
describe Asari or Merodach as the god " who raises the
dead to life." We have also seen that Osiris was not
the only mummified god known in Egypt. Ptah of
Memphis was also a mummy ; so too was the mummi
fied Horus of Nekhen, who was worshipped even in the
Delta in the " Arabian " nome of Goshen on the borders
of Asia. Whether or not the practice of embalming
first originated at Nekhen, where it was discovered that
bodies buried in the nitrogenous soil of El-Kab were
preserved undecayed, it is certain that, like the art of
writing, it characterised the Pharaonic Egyptians from
the earliest times. In no other way can we explain
the existence among them of their mummified gods.
But its adoption by the older races who still formed
the bulk of the people was but gradual. It did not
become universal before the age of the Eighteenth
Dynasty.
Vlt was not, however, the bulk of the people, but the
ruling classes, who worshipped Osiris, and among whom
his cult spread and grew. He became for them Un-
nefer, " the good being," ready to heal for them even
the pains of death, and to receive them in his realm
beyond the grave, where life and action would be re
stored to them. The sun shone there as it did here,
for was not Osiris himself a sun-god ? the fields of the
blessed were like those of Egypt, except that no sickness
or death came near them, that no blight ever fell on
fruit or corn, that the Nile never failed, and that the
heat was always tempered by the northern breeze.V
The " field of Alu," the Elysion of the Greeks, was at
first in the marshes of the Delta near the mouths of the
Nile, like the paradise of early Babylonia, which too
was " at the mouth of the rivers& But it soon migrated
to the north-eastern portion of the sky, and the Milky
Way became the heavenly Nile. Here the dead lived
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 169
in perpetual happiness under the rule of Osiris, working,
feasting, reading, even fighting, as they would below,
only without pain and eternally. 1 X"
ut, in order to share in this state of bliss, it was
ssary for the believer in Osiris to become like the
god himself. He must himself be an Osiris, according
to the Egyptian expression. His individuality remained
intact; as he had been on earth, so would he be in
heaven. The Osiris, in fact, was a spiritualised body
in which the immortal parts of man were all united
together. Soul and spirit, heart and double, all met
together in it as they had done when the individual was
on earth. \
\It is clear that the doctrine of the Osiris in its de-
vafoped form is inconsistent with the idea of the ha.
But it is also clear that without the idea of the ka it
would never have been formed. Both presuppose an
individuality separate from the person to which it
belongs, and yet at the same time material, an indi
viduality which continues after death and manifests
itself under the same shape as that which characterised
the person in life. The popular conception of the ghost,
which reproduces not only the features but even the
dress of the dead, is analogous. Fundamentally the
Osiris is a ka, but it is a 1m which represents not only
the outward shape, but the inner essence as well. The
whole man is there, spiritually, morally, intellectually,
as well as corporeally. The doctrine of the Osiris
thus absorbs, as it were, the old idea of the ka, and
spiritualises it, at the same time confining it to the life
after death. X
1 The constellation of Osiris was called "the soul of Osiris," and
Professor Maspero notes that the Pyramid texts place his kingdom near
the Great Bear (titudcs de Mythologie et d Arckeologic, ii. p. 20). Isis
became Sirius, and Horns the morning star.
170 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
\ But if the conception of a double, unsubstantial and
yet materialised, underlay the belief in the Osiris, the
practice of embalming was equally responsible for it.
The continued existence of the double was dependent
on the continued existence of the body, for the one
presupposed the other, and it was only the mummified
body which could continue to exist. As long as the
double was believed to haunt the tomb, and there receive
the food and other offerings which were provided for it,
the connection between it and the mummy presented no
difficulties. But when the Egyptian came to look for
ward to the heaven of Osiris, first on this nether earth
and then in the skies, the case was wholly altered. The
mummy lay in the tomb, the immortal counterpart of
the man himself was in another and a spiritual world.
The result was inevitable: the follower of Osiris soon
assured himself that one day the mummified body also
would have life and action again breathed into it and
rejoin its Osiris in the fields of paradise. Had not the
god carried thither his divine body as well as its counter
part ? and what the god had done those who had become
even as he was could also do. /
s. In this way the doctrine of the resurrection of the
bo&y became an integral part of the Osirian faith. The
future happiness to which its disciples looked forward
was not in absorption into the divinity, or contemplation
of the divine attributes, or a monotonous existence of
passive idleness. They were to live as they had done
in this life, only without sorrow and suffering, without
sin, and eternally. But all their bodily powers and
interests were to remain and be gratified as they could
not be in this lower world. The realm over which
Osiris ruled was the idealised reproduction of that Egypt
which the Egyptian loved so well, with its sunshine and
light, its broad and life-bearing river, its fertile fields,
OSIRIS AND THE OSIEIAN FAITH 171
(^\
and its busy towns. Those who dwelt in it could indeed
feast and play, could lounge in canoes and fish or hunt,
could read tales and poems or write treatises on morality,
could transform themselves into birds that alighted among
the thick foliage of the trees ; but they must also work
as they had done here, must cultivate the soil before
it would produce its ears of wheat two cubits high,
must submit to the corvee and embank the canals.
The Osirian heaven had no place for the idle and
inactive. /
^ No sooner, indeed, had the dead man been pronounced
worthy of admittance to it, than he was called upon to
work. At the very outset of his new existence, before
any of its pleasures might be tasted, he was required to
till the ground and guide the plough. This was no hard
ship to the poor fellah who had spent his life in agri
cultural labour. But it was otherwise with the rich
man whose lands had been cultivated by others, while
he himself had merely enjoyed their produce. In the
early days of Egyptian history, accordingly, it was
the fashion for the feudal landowner to surround his
tomb with the graves of his servants and retainers,
whose bodies were mummified and buried at his expense.
What they had performed for him in this world, it was
believed they would perform for him in the world to
come. There, too, the Osiris of the fellah would work
for the Osiris of the wealthy, whose necessary task would
thus be performed vicariouslj^
Ny But as time went on a feeling grew up that in the
sight of Osiris all those who were assimilated to him
were equal one to the other. Between one Osiris and
another the distinctions of rank and station which pre
vail here were no longer possible. The old conception of
the hi came to the help of the believer. The place of
the human servant was taken bv the ushebti, that little
172 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
figure of clay or wood which represented a peasant, and
whose double, accordingly, was sent to assist the dead in
his tasks above. The human Osiris, whatever his lot in
this life had been, was henceforth free from the toils
which had once awaited him in the fields of Alu ; he
could look on while the ka of the ushebti performed his
work. The usheUi-figures become especially numerous
after the expulsion of the Hyksos. The domination of
the foreigner and the long war of independence which
put an end to it, had destroyed the feudal nobility,
and therewith the feudal ideas which regarded mankind
as divided, now and hereafter, into two classes. From
thenceforth the Egyptians became the democratic people
that they still are. As the Pharaoh on earth ruled a
people who before him were all equal, so between the
subjects of Osiris, the Pharaoh in heaven, no distinctions
of rank were known except such as were conferred by
himself. X
The same belief which had substituted the ushebti for
^jie human peasant had filled the tombs with the objects
which, it was thought, would best please the dead man.
Besides the meat and drink which had been provided for
the ka from time immemorial, there was now placed beside
the mummy everything which it was imagined he would
need or desire in the other world. Even the books
which the dead man had delighted in during his earthly
existence were not forgotten. It was not necessary,
however, that the actual objects should be there. It
was the ka only of the object that was wanted, and
that could be furnished by a representation of the object
as well as by the object itself. And so, besides the
actual clothes or tools or weapons that are buried in
the tombs, we find imitation clothes and tools, like the
" ghost-money " of the Greeks, or even paintings on the
wall, which, so long as the object was correctly depicted
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRTAN FAITH 173
in them, were considered quite sufficient, \0iie of the
most touching results of this thorough-going realism has
been noticed by Professor Wiedemann. 1 " The soles of
the feet (of the mummy) which had trodden the mire
of earth were removed, in order that the Osiris might
tread the Hall of Judgment with pure feet ; and the gods
were prayed to grant milk to the Osiris that he might
bathe his feet in it and so assuage the pain which the
removal of the soles must needs have caused him. And,
finally, the soles " were then placed within the mummy,
that he might find them at hand on the day of resurrec
tion, and meantime make use of their Tea.
\The doctrine of the resurrection of the body involved
also a doctrine of a judgment of the deeds committed by
the body. Those only were admitted into the kingdom
of Osiris who, like their leader, had done good to men.
A knowledge of the Eitual with its divine lore and in
cantations was not sufficient to unlock its gates. The
Osiris who entered it had to be morally as well as
ceremonially pure. Osiris was not only a king; he
was a judge also, and those who appeared before him
had to prove that their conduct in this life had been
in conformity with one of the highest of the moral
codes of antiquity, x
^his moral test of righteousness is the most remark
able fact connected with the Osirian system of doctrine.
The Egyptian who accepted it was called on to acknow
ledge that orthodoxy in belief and practice was not
sufficient to ensure his future salvation ; it was needful
that he should have avoided sin and been actively
benevolent as well. Unlike most ancient forms of faith,
morality and that too of a high order was made an
integral part of religion, and even set above it. It was
not so much what a man believed as what he had done,
1 The Ancient Egyptian Doctrine of Immortality, p. 48.
174 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
that enabled him to pass the awful tribunal of heaven
and be admitted to everlasting bliss\
/ \The Book of the Dead was the guide of the dead man
orr his journey to the other world. Its chapters were
inscribed on the rolls buried with the mummy, or were
painted on the coffin and the walls of the tomb. It
was the Eitual which prescribed the prayers and incanta
tions to be repeated in the course of the journey,
and described the enemies to be met with on the other
side of the grave. Thanks to its instructions, the dead
passed safely through the limbo which divides this earth
from the kingdom of Osiris, and arrived at last at the
Judgment Hall, the hall of the Twofold Truth, where
Mat, the goddess of truth and law, received him. Here
on his judgment throne sat Osiris, surrounded by the
forty-two assessors of divine justice from the forty-two
nomes of Egypt, while Thoth and the other deities of
the Osirian cycle stood near at hand. Then the dead
man was called upon to show reason why he should be
admitted to the fields of Alu, and to prove that during
his lifetime he had practised mercy and justice and had
abstained from evil-doing. The negative confession put
into his mouth is one of the most noteworthy relics of
\ ancient literature. ^ Praise be to thee (0 Osiris)," he was
made to say, " lord of the Twofold Truth ! Praise to thee,
great god, lord of the Twofold Truth ! I come to thee,
my lord, I draw near to see thine excellencies. 1 . . .
1 Renoufs translation of the 125th chapter of the Book of the Dead
(Papyrus of Ani) is as follows: "I am not a doer of what is wrong.
I am not a plunderer. I am not a robber. I am not a slayer of men.
I do not stint the measure of corn. I am not a niggard. I do not desire
the property of the gods. I am not a teller of lies. I am not a mono
poliser of food. I am no extortioner. I am not unchaste. I am not
the cause of others tears. I am not a dissembler. I am not a doer of
violence. I am not a domineering character. I do not pillage cultivated
land. I am not an eavesdropper. I am not a chatterer. I do not
OSIRIS AND THE OSTRIAX FAITH 175
I have not acted with deceit or done evil to
men.
I have not oppressed the poor.
I have not judged unjustly.
I have not known ought of wicked things.
I have not committed sin.
I have not exacted more work from the labourer than
was just.
I have not been anxious. I have not been feeble of
purpose.
I have not defaulted. I have not been niggardly.
I have not done what the gods abhor.
I have not caused the slave to be ill-treated by his
master.
I have made none to hunger.
I have made none to weep.
I have not committed murder.
I have not caused any man to be treacherously mur
dered.
I have not dealt treacherously with any one.
I have not diminished the offerings of bread in the
temples.
I have not spoiled the shewbread of the gods.
I have not robbed the dead of their loaves and cere
cloths.
I have not been unchaste.
dismiss a case through self-interest. I am not unchaste with women or
men. I am not obscene. I am not an exciter of alarms. I am not hot
in speech. I do not turn a deaf ear to the words of righteousness. I am
not foul-mouthed. I am not a striker. I am not a quarreller. I do not
revoke my words. I do not multiply; clamour in reply to words. I am
not evil-minded or a doer of evil. I aiVnot a reviler of the king. I put
no obstruction on (the use of the Nile) water. I am not a bawler. I am
not a reviler of the god. I am not fraudulent. I am not sparing in
offerings to the gods. I do not deprive the dead of the funeral cakes. I
take not away the cakes of the child, or profane the god of my locality.
I do not kill sacred animals."
176 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
I have not defiled myself in the sanctuary of the god
of my city.
I have not stinted and been niggardly of offerings.
I have not defrauded in weighing the scales.
I have not given false weight.
I have not taken the milk from the mouth of the
child.
I have not hunted the cattle in their meadows.
I have not netted the birds of the gods.
I have not fished in their preserves.
I have not kept the water (from my neighbour) in the
time of inundation.
I have not cut off a water channel.
I have not extinguished the flame at a wrong
time.
I have not defrauded the Ennead of the gods of the
choice parts of the victims.
I have not driven away the oxen of the temple.
I have not driven back a god when he has left the
temple.
I am pure ! I am pure ! I am pure ! " l
XThe negative confession ended, the dead man turned to
the forty-two assessors and pleaded that he was innocent
, of the particular sin which they had been severally
appointed to judge. Then he once more addressed
Osiris with a final plea for justification \ Hail to you,
ye gods who are in the great hall of the Twofold Truth,
who have no falsehood in your bosoms, but who live on
truth in On, and feed your hearts upon it before the
lord god who dwelleth in his solar disc. Deliver me
from the Typhon who feedeth on entrails, chiefs ! in
this hour of supreme judgment ; grant that the deceased
may come unto you, he who hath not sinned, who hath
1 Wiedemann, Die Religion der alien Aegypter, pp. 132, 133 ; and
Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, pp. 188-190.
OSIRIS AND THE OSI1UAN FAITH 177
neither lied, nor done evil, nor committed any crime, who
hath not borne false witness, who hath done nought
against himself, but who liveth on truth, who feedeth on
truth. He hath spread joy on all sides ; men speak of
that which he hath done, and the gods rejoice in it. He
hath reconciled the god to him by his love ; he hath
given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, clothing
to the naked ; he hath given a boat to the shipwrecked ;
he hath offered sacrifices to the gods, sepulchral meals to
the dead. Deliver him from himself, speak not against
him before the lord of the dead, for his mouth is pure
and his hands are pure ! " l
\ Meanwhile the heart of the dead man his conscience,
as we should call it in our modern phraseology was
being weighed in the balance against the image of truth.
Something more convincing was needed than his own
protestation that he had acted uprightly and done no
wrong. The heart was placed in the scale by Thoth, who,
knowing the weakness of human nature, inclined the
balance a little in its favour. Anubis superintended
the weighing, while Thoth recorded the result. If the
verdict were favourable, he addressed Osiris in the fol
lowing wordsV " Behold the deceased in this Hall of
the Twofold Truth, his heart hath been weighed in the
balance, in the presence of the great genii, the lords of
Hades, and been found true. No trace of earthly im
purity hath been found in his heart. Now that he
leaveth the tribunal true of voice (justified), his heart is
restored to him, as well as his eyes and the material
cover of his heart, to be put back in their places, each
in its own time, his soul in heaven, his heart in the
other world, as is the custom of the followers of Horus.
Henceforth let his body lie in the hands of Anubis, who
presideth over the tombs ; let him receive offerings at
1 Maspero, Dawn of Ciciiisation, p. 190.
12
178 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the cemetery in the presence of (Osiris) Un-nefer (the
Good Being) ; let him be as one of those favourites who
follow thee ; let his soul abide where it will in the
necropolis of his city, he whose voice is true before
the great Ennead." l
x In the judgment - hall of Osiris we find the first
expression of the doctrine which was echoed so many
ages later by the Hebrew prophets, that what the gods
require is mercy and righteousness rather than orthodoxy
of belief. And the righteousness and mercy are far-
reaching. The faith that is to save the follower of
Osiris is a faith that has led him to feed the hungry, to
give drink to the thirsty, to clothe the naked, to abstain
from injuring his neighbour in word or thought, much
less in deed, and to be truthful in both act and speech.
Even the slave is not forgotten ; to have done anything
which has caused him to be ill-treated by his master, is
sufficient to exclude the offender from the delights of
paradise. Man s duty towards his fellow-man is put on
a higher footing even than his duty towards the gods,
for it comes first in the list of righteous actions required
from him. It is not until the dead man has proved
that he has acted with justice and mercy towards his
fellows, that he is allowed to pass on^p prove that he
has performed his duty towards the gods?^
VAnd the Osirian confession of faith was not a mere
conVentional formulary, without influence on the life and
conduct of those who professed it. There are already
allusions to it in the Pyramid texts, and in the tombs of
a later period the deceased rests his claim to be re
membered upon the good deeds he had done while on
earth. To feed the hungry, to clothe the naked, and to
deal justly, are duties which are constantly recognised in
them.\ " I loved my father," says Baba at El-Kab, " I
1 Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation, p. 191.
OSIRIS AND THE OSIRIAN FAITH 179
honoured my mother. . . . When a famine arose, last
ing many years, I distributed corn to the needy." The
Egyptian sepulchres contain few records of war and
battles ; of deeds of kindness and righteous dealing there
is frequent mention. 1
\0f the fate of the wicked, of those whose hearts
were overweighed in the balance and who failed to
pass the tribunal of Osiris, we know but little. Typhon,
m the form of a hideous hippopotamus, stood behind
Ihoth m a corner of the hall, ready to devour their entrails
In the Book of the Other World, of which I shall have
to speak in another lecture, the tortures of the lost are
depicted quite in medieval style. We see them plunged
m water or burned in the fire, enclosed in vaulted
chambers filled with burning charcoal, with their heads
struck from their necks or their bodies devoured by
serpents. But the Book of the Other World is the ritual
of a religious system which was originally distinct from
the Osman, and it is probable that most Egyptians
expected the final annihilation of the wicked rather than
their continued existence in an eternal hell. The divine
elements in man, which could not die, were equally
incapable of committing sin, and consequently would
eturn to the God who gave them, when the human
individuality to which they had been joined was pun-
hed for its offences in the flesh. The soul could
un united only to that individuality which had been
Professor Maspero (Rccucil de Travavx,
et ? " Neverhas said of me, What is that
uff t fr^ , G "^ lnJUred T haVe 110t ^mitted evil ; none has
on, rT g T aUlt the 11C haS neVCr entered into me since I was
of the t i * 1W TV d ne that which true in the sight of the lord
Iked nT J V^ ^ Unlted iU hcart t0 the g d > r have
nvsonir g /I S f JUStiC6 10V6 and a11 ^e virtues. Ah, let
von 1 , i f r beh ld J am C me to this laild so ^> to be
you in the tomb, I am become one of you who detest sin."
180 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
purified from all its earthly stains, and had become as the
god Osiris himself. The individuality which was con
demned in the judgment of Osiris perished eternally,
and in the mind of the Egyptian the individuality and
the individual were one and the same. \
LECTUEE VIII.
THE SACRED BOOKS.
\\LiKE all other organised religions, that of ancient Egypt
nad its sacred books. According to St. Clement of Alex
andria, the whole body of sacred literature was contained
in a collection of forty-two books, the origin of which was
ascribed to the god Thoth. The first ten of these " Her
metic " volumes were entitled " the Prophet," and dealt
with theology in the strictest sense of the term. Then
followed the ten books of " the Stolist," in which were to
be found all directions as to the festivals and processions,
as well as hymns and prayers. Next came the fourteen
books of " the Sacred Scribe," containing all that was
known about the hieroglyphic system of writing, and the
sciences of geometry and geography, astronomy, astrology,
and the like. These were followed by two books on music
and hymnology ; and, finally, six books on the science and
practice of medicine. 1 \^
The Hermetic books were written in Greek, and were
a compilation of the Greek age. Such a systematic epi
tome of the learning of ancient Egypt belonged to the
period when Egyptian religion had ceased to be creative,
1 Clem. Alex. Strom, vi. p. 260, ed. Sylb. See Lepsius, EinUiiung znr
Chronologic der Aegypter, pp. 45, 46. The remains ascribed to Hermes
Trismegistos , including the Dialogue called Pcemandres, have been trans
lated into English by J. D. Chambers (1882). The Dialogue is already
quoted by Justin Martyr (Exhort, ad Grcccos, xxxviii.).
181
182 THS RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
or even progressive, and the antiquarian spirit of Greek
Alexandria had laid hold of the traditions and institutions
of the past. But they were derived from genuine sources,
and represented with more or less exactitude the beliefs
and practices of earlier generations. They were, it is
true, a compilation adapted to Greek ideas and intended
to satisfy the demands of Greek curiosity, but it is no less
true that the materials out of which they were compiled
went back to the remotest antiquity .\The temple libraries
were filled with rolls of papyri relating not only to the
minutest details of the temple service, but also to all
the various branches of sacred lore. Among these were
the books which have been called the Bibles of the ancient
Egyptians. X
v Foremost amongst the latter is the Kitual to which
Lepsius gave the name of the Book of the Dead. It was
first discovered by Champollion in the early days of
Egyptian decipherment, and a comparative edition of the
text current during the Theban period has been made by
Dr. Naville. Papyri containing the whole or portions of
it are numberless ; the chapters into which it is divided
are inscribed on the coffins, and even on the wrappings of
the dead, as well as on the scarabs and the usheltis that
were buried with the mummy. It was, in fact, a sort of
passport and guide-book combined in one, which would
carry the dead man in safety through the dangers that
confronted him in the other world, and bring him at last
to the judgment-hall of Osiris and the paradise of .Alu.
It described minutely all that awaited him after death ;
it detailed the words and prayers that would deliver him
from his spiritual enemies ; and it put into his mouth the
confession he would have to make before the tribunal of
the dead. Without it he would have been lost in the
strange world to which he journeyed, and hence the need
of inscribing at least some portions of it on his tomb or
THE SACRED BOOKS 183
sepulchral furniture, where their ghostly doubles could be
ead by his ka and soul\
he Book of the Dead was the Bible or Prayer-book
of the Osirian creed. Its universal use marks the triumph
of the worship of Osiris and of the beliefs that accom
panied it. It was for the follower of Osiris that it was
originally compiled; the judgment with which it threatened
him was that of Osiris, the heaven to which it led him
was the field of Alu. The Pyramid texts of the Fifth
and Sixth Dynasties imply that it already existed in some
shape or other ; the Osirian creed is known to them in
all its details, and the " other world " depicted in them
is that of the Book of the Dead.\
\ But the Book of the Dead is a composite work. Not
only are the religious conceptions embodied in it com
posite and sometimes self-contradictory, on the literary
side it is composite also. It was, moreover, a work of
slow growth ; glosses have been added to it to explain
passages which had become obscure through the lapse of
time ; the glosses have then made their way into the
text, and themselves become the subject of fresh com
mentary and explanation. Chapters have been inserted,
paragraphs interpolated, and the later commentary com-
1 The extraordinary care with, which the sacred texts were handed
down through long periods of time is illustrated by certain of the Pyramid
texts, which are reproduced word for word down to the close of the
Egyptian monarchy. Thus passages at the beginning of the inscriptions
in the Pyramid of Unas are repeated in the Ritual of Abydos, and another
portion of the same text is found on a stela of the Thirteenth Dynasty,
as well as in one of the courts of the temple of queen Hatshepsu at Der
el-Bahari, where, as Professor Maspero remarks, "we have three identical
versions of different epochs and localities." The invocations against
serpents (Unas 300-339) recur in the tomb of Bak-n-ren-ef of the Twenty-
sixth Dynasty. See Maspero, Recueil de Travanx, iii. pp. 182, 195, 220.
The fact gives us confidence in the statements of the Egyptian scribes,
that such and such chapters of the Book of the Dead had been " found "
or written in the reigns of certain early kings.
184 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
bined with the original text. The Book of the Dead
as it appears in the age of the Thebau dynasties had
already passed through long centuries of growth and
modification. 1 \
\The Pyramid texts show the same combination of the
doctrines of the Osirian creed with those of the solar
cult as the Book of the Dead. 2 But the combination is
that of two mutually exclusive systems of theology which
have been brought forcibly side by side without any
attempt being made to fuse them into a harmonious
whole. They display the usual tendency of the Egyptian
mind to accept the new without discarding the old, and
without troubling to consider how the new and old can
be fitted together. It was enough to place them side by
side ; those who did not think the Osirian creed sufficient
to ensure salvation, had the choice of the solar creed
offered them with its prayers and incantations to the
sun-god. But it was not an alternative choice; the
heaven of the solar bark in its passage through the world
of the night was attached to the heaven of Alu with its
^fields lighted by the sun of da^V
\ It is evident that the chapters which introduce the
doctrines of the solar cult are a later addition to the
original Book of the Dead. That was the text-book of
1 There is much to be said for the view of Professor Piehl, that we have in
it an amalgamation of the rituals and formulae of the various chief sanctu
aries of Egypt, which have been thrown side by side without any attempt
at arrangement or harmony. One of such rituals would be that mentioned
on the sarcophagus of Nes-Shu-Tefnut, where we read of "the sacred
writings of Horus in the city of Huren " in the Busirite nome (Recueil dc
Travaux, vi. p. 134). On the sarcophagus of Beb, discovered by Professor
Petrie at Dendera, and belonging to the period between the Sixth and
the Eleventh Dynasties, we have not only "early versions " of parts of the
Book of the Dead, but also chapters which do not occur in the standard
text (Petrie, Denderch, 1898, pp. 56-58).
2 We even read in them of Ra being "purified in the fields of Alu"
THE SACRED ROOKS 185
the Osirian soul, with whose beliefs the doctrines of the
solar cult were absolutely incompatible. While the one
taught that the dead, without distinction, passed to the
judgment-hall of Osiris, where, after being acquitted, as
much on moral as on religious grounds, they were ad
mitted to a paradise of light and happiness, the other
maintained that only a chosen few, who were rich and
learned enough to be provided with the necessary theo
logical formula?, were received in the solar bark as it
glided along the twelve hours of the night, thus becoming
companions of the sun-god in his passage through a realm
of darkness that was peopled by demoniac forms. The
Osirian and solar creeds issued from two wholly different
religious systems, and the introduction of conceptions
derived from the latter into the Book of the Dead, how
ever subordinate may be the place which they occupy,
indicates a revision of the original work. It was not
until the book had gained a predominant position in
Egyptian religious thought that it would have been need
ful to incorporate into it the ideas of a rival theology.
But the incorporation had taken place long before the
Pyramid texts were compiled, perhaps before the day
when Menes united the two kingdoms of Egypt into
one. \
There are yet other evidences of a composite theology
in the Book of the Dead. In one chapter we have the
old doctrine of the Ka confined to the dark and dismal
tomb in which its body lies ; in another we see the soul
flying whithersoever it will on the wings of a bird, sitting
on the branches of a tree under the shade of the foliage,
or perched on the margin of flowing water. But such
theological inconsistencies probably go back to the age
when the book was first composed. The conceptions of
the Ka and of the soul, however inconsistent they may
be, belong to so early a period, that they lay together
186 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
at the foundation of Egyptian religious thought long
before the days when an official form of religion had
come into existence, or the Book of the Dead had
been compiled.
In some instances it is possible to fix approximately
the period to which particular portions of the book be
long. Professor Maspero has shown thaXthe 64th chapter,
once considered one of the oldest, is in reality one of the
latest in date. It sums up the different formula} which
enabled the soul of the dead man to quit his body in safety ;
and accordingly its title, which, however, varies in different
recensions, is a repetition of that prefixed to the earlier
part of the work, and declares that it makes " known in
a single chapter the chapters relating to going forth from
day\ According to certain papyri, it was " discovered "
either in the reign of Usaphaes of the First Dynasty or
in that of Men-kau-Ea of the Fourth Dynasty, under the
feet of Thoth in the temple of Eshmunen, written in
letters of lapis-lazuli on a tablet of alabaster. The de
tails of the " discovery " are not sufficiently uniform to
allow us to put much confidence in them ; the tradition
proves, however, that the Egyptians considered the chapter
to be at least as old as the Fourth Dynasty; and the
belief is supported by the fact that on the monuments of
the Eleventh Dynasty it is already an integral part of the
book. If, then, a chapter which is relatively modern was
nevertheless embodied in the book in the age of the
earlier dynasties, we can gain some idea of the antiquity
to which the book itself must reach back, even in its
composite form. 1
\ The first fifteen chapters, as Champollion perceived,
form a complete whole in themselves. In the Theban
texts they are called the " Chapter of going before the
1 Maspero, titudes de Mythologie ct d ArchMogie eyypticnnes, pp. 367-
370.
THE SACRED BOOKS 187
divine tribunal of Osiris." In the Saite period this is
replaced by the more general title of " Beginning of the
Chapter of going forth from day. " l They describe how
the soul can leave its mummy, can escape forced labour
in the other world through the help of the whebti, can
pass in safety " over the back of the serpent Apophis, the
wicked," and can acquire that " correctness of voice "
which will enable it to repeat correctly the words of
the ritual, and so enter or leave at will the world
beyonoytfie grave. The loth chapter is a hymn to the
Sun.
X^The 17th chapter begins a new section. It sums
up in a condensed form all that the soul was required
to know about the gods and the world to come. But
it has been glossed and reglossed until its first form
has become almost unrecognisable. The commentary
attached to the original passages became in time itself so
obscure as to need explanation, and the chapter now
consists of three strata of religious thought and exposition
piled one on the top of the other. As it now stands it
unites in a common goal the aspirations of the followers
of Osiris and of those of the solar cult ; the dead man is
identified with the gods, and so wends his way to the
divine land in which they dwell, whether that be the
fields of Alu or the bark of the Sun\,
\The chapters which follow are intended to restore
voice, memory, and name to the dead man. With the
restoration of his name comes the restoration of his
individuality, for that which has no name has no in
dividuality. Then follows (in chapters xxvi.-xxx.) the
restoration of his heart, which is regarded first as a mere
organ of the body, and then in the Osirian sense as the
1 Various interpretations have been given of the phrase per m hru. I
have adopted that which seems to me most consonant with both grammar
and logical probability.
188 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
equivalent of the conscience. As an organ, the figure of
a heart placed in the tomb was sufficient to ensure its
return ; as the living conscience and principle of life,
something of a more mysterious and symbolic nature was
needed. This was found in the scarab or beetle, whose
name Meper happened to coincide in sound with the word
that signified "to become." "yr
V In a series of chapters the soul is now protected
against the poisonous serpents, including " the great
python who devours the ass," which it will meet with in
its passage through the limbo of the other worRk As
Professor Maspero remarks, the large place occupied by
these serpents among the dangers which await the soul
on its first exit from the body, make it plain that in the
days when the Book of the Dead was first being compiled,
venomous snakes were far more plentiful than they ever
have been in the Egypt of historical times. Indeed, the
python, whose huge folds are still painted on the walls of
the royal tombs of Thebes, had retired southward long
before the age of the Fourth Dynasty. To an equally
early period we may refer the forty-second chapter, in
which the soul is taught how to escape the slaughter of
the enemies of Horus, which took place at Herakleopolis
1 The inscribed scarab does not seem to be older than the age of the
Eleventh Dynasty, when it began to take the place of the cylinder as a
seal. At all events there is no authentic record of the discovery of one in
any tomb of an earlier date, and the scarabs with the names of Neb-ka-ra,
Khufu, and other early kings, were for the most part made in the time of
the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. It is possible, however, that some at least of
the scarabs which bear the name of Ra-n-ka of the Eighth Dynasty are
contemporaneous with the Pharaoh whose name is written upon them.
If so, they are the oldest inscribed scarabs with which we are acquainted.
Uninscribed scarabs, however, go back to the prehistoric age. The use
of the scarab as an amulet is already referred to in the Pyramid texts.
And Dr. Reisner has discovered green porcelain beetles in the prehistoric
graves of Negadiya, along with other green porcelain amulets, such as
turtles, etc.
THE SACKED BOOKS 189
during the Osirian wars, a chapter, however, in which,
it may be observed, the elder Horus is already confounded
with the sou of Osiris. 1
Y Chapters tfliv. to liii. are occupied in describing how
the dead ina^ is thus preserved from " the second death."
Illustrations, are drawn both from the punishments
undergone By the enemies of the sun-god in the story
of his passage through the world of night, and from the
old beliefs connected with the lot of the Ka. He was
neither to be beheaded, nor cast head downwards into
the abyss, nor was he to feed on filth like the Ka for
which no offerings of food had been provided. The
dangers from which he is thus preserved are next con
trasted with the joys tlrat await him in the paradise of
tfie Blest (chs. liv.-lxiii.)\
\The 64th chapter, which sums up the preceding
part of the book, and constitutes a break between it and
what follows, has already been considered. The ten
chapters which succeed it are all similarly concerned
with " coming forth from the clay." They thus traverse
the same ground as the first fifteen chapters of the book,
but they deal with the subject in a different way and
from a different point of view.X They are a fresh proof
of the composite character of the work, and of the desire
of its authors to incorporate in it all that had been
written on the future life of the soul up to the time of
its composition. Professor Maspero believes that they
embody the various formulas relating to the severance
of soul and body which were current in the priestly
schools. 2
\ Equally separate in tone and spirit are the next six
chapters (lxxv.-xc.), which have emanated from the
school of Heliopolis. They deal with the destiny of the
1 As is also the case in the Pyramid texts.
2 Maspero, Etudes de Myllwlogie ct d Arclieoloyic, p. 369.
190 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Ba or " soul " rather than with that of the Osiriau, and
describe the transformations which it can undergo if
fortified with the words of the ritual. It may at will
transform itself into a hawk of gold, a lotus flower, the
moon-god or Ptah, even into a viper, a crocodile, or a
goose. But first it must fly to Heliopolis and the solar
deities who reside there, and it is in Heliopolis that its
transformation into the god Ptah is to take placeX
NkThe next chapter, the 91st, transports us into a
different atmosphere of religious thought. It deals with
the reunion of the soul and the body. But the two
which follow forbid the Egyptian to believe that this
meant a sojourn of the soul in the tomb. On the
contrary, the soul, it is said, is not to be " imprisoned " ;
while the 93rd chapter "opens the gates of the
sepulchre to the soul and the shadow (khaib), that they
may go forth and employ their limbs." And, the land
to which they were to go was a land of sunlightN
\ From this point onwards the Book of the Dead is
purely Osirian in character. But beliefs derived from
the solar cult have been allowed to mingle with the
Osirian elements ; thus the bark of the sun-god has
been identified with the bark which carried the Osirian
dead to the fields of Alu, and Osiris is even permitted
to assign a place to his faithful servants in the boat of
Ea instead of in the paradise over which he himself
rules. And the Osirian elements themselves belong to
two different periods or two different schools of thought.
In the earlier chapters the paradise of Osiris is gained
like the paradise of Ea, by the magical power of the
words of the ritual and the offerings made by the friends
of the dead; from the 125th chapter onwards the test
of righteousness is a moral one ; the dead man has to be
acquitted by his conscience and the tribunal of Osiris
before he can enter into everlastin
THE SACRED BOOKS 191
The bark which carried the followers of Osiris has
been explained by the Pyramid texts. When the dead
man had ascended to heaven, either by the ladder which
rose from the earth at Hermopolis or in some other way,
he found his path barred by a deep lake or canal.
According to one myth, he was carried across it on the
wings of the ibis Thoth, but the more general belief
provided for him the boat of the ferryman Nu-Urru, 1
the prototype of the Greek Charon. The fusion of the
Osirian creed with the solar cult, however, caused the
boat of Nu-Urru and the bark of the sun-god to be
confounded together, and accordingly three chapters
(c.-cii.) have been added to that in which the boat
of the Egyptian Charon is referred to, " in order
to teach the luminous spirit (khu) how to enter the
bark among the servants of Ea." In the next
chapter, Hathor, " the lady of the west," is the object
of prayer.
Two chapters (cv. and cvi.) are now interpolated from
the ritual of Ptah. They take us back to the age when
offerings were made to the ka of the dead and not to
the gods, and declare that abundant food should be given
it " each day in Memphis." They have little to do with
the destinies of the Osirian in the paradise of Alu.
These are once more resumed in the 107th chapter : the
fields of Alu are described, and the life led by those who
enjoy them.
YWith the 125th chapter we enter the "Hall of the
Two Truths," where Osiris sits on his throne of judg
ment, and the soul is justified or condemned for the deeds
it had done in the flesh. It is no longer ceremonial, but
moral purity that is required : the follower of Osiris is
1 Maspero, "La Pyramide cle Pepi l ei " in Itecucil de Travaux, vii. pp.
161, 162. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgames the place of Nu-Urru is
taken by Ur-Ninnu.
192 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
to be saved not by the words and prayers of the ritual,
however correctly they may be pronounced, but by his
acts and conduct in this lower world. We are trans
ported into a new atmosphere, in which religion and
morality for the first time are united in one : the teach
ing of the prophet has taken the place of the teaching of
the priest.\
VAU the blessings promised to the disciples of other
cre\ds than the Osirian are now granted to the soul who
has passed unscathed through the hall of judgment. Not
only the fields of Alu are his, but the solar bark as well,
to which the school of Heliopolis looked forward ; even
the old belief which confined the Ka to the narrow
precincts of the tomb was not forgotten, and the 132nd
chapter instructs the Osirian how to " wander at will to
see his house." Like Osiris himself, he can take part in
the festival of the dead, and share in the offerings that
are presented at it. Free access is allowed him to all
parts of the other world : whatever heaven or hell had
been imagined in the local sanctuaries of Egypt was
open to him to visit as he would/^
\The later chapters of the Book of the Dead take us
back to the earth. They are concerned with the mummy
and its resting-place, with the charms and amulets
which preserved the body from decay, or enabled the
soul to inspire it once more with life. They form
a sort of appendix, dealing rather with the beliefs
and superstitions of the people, than with the ideas
of ttie theologians, about the gods and the future
The order in which I have referred to the chapters
of the book are those of the Theban texts as edited by
Dr. Naville. But it must not be supposed that it con-
1 The Book of the Dead has been analysed by Maspero, Etudes dc Mytho-
logie ct d Arclieoloyie egypticnncs, i. pp. 325-387.
<r
THE SACRED BOOKS 193
stitutes an integral part of the original work. As a
matter of fact there are very few copies of the book,
even among those which belong to the Theban period,
in which anything like all the chapters is to be found.
Indeed, it is difficult to say how many chapters a com
plete edition of it ought to contain. Pierret made them
one hundred and sixty-five ; the latest editors raise them
to over two hundred. The reason of this is easy to
explain. The separate chapters are for the most part
intended for special purposes or special occasions, and
each, therefore, has had a separate origin. They have
been collected from all sides, and thrown together with
very little attempt at arrangement or order. They
belong to different periods of composition and different
schools of religious thought : some of them mount back
to the remotest antiquity, others are probably even later
than the foundation of the united monarchy. Hence, as
a rule, only a selection of them was inscribed on the
rolls of papyrus that were buried with the dead, or on
the coffin and sepulchral objects deposited in the tomb ;
it was only the most important of them that the Osirian
was likely to need in the other world. Indeed, in some
cases only the semblance of a text seems to have been
thought necessary. The copies made for the dead usually
abound with errors, and some have actually been found
in which the text is represented by a number of un
meaning signs. The Book of the Dead, moreover, was
continually growing. The oldest texts are the shortest
and most simple, the latest are the longest and most
crowded with chapters. As fresh prayers and formulae
i for protecting the dead in the other world, or directing
them on their journey, were discovered in the local
! sanctuaries, they were added in the form of chapters ;
no precaution, it was felt, should be omitted which might
secure the safety of those who had passed beyond the grave.
.194 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
The Book of the Dead was thus a growth, and a
growth it remained. It never underwent the systematic
revision which has been the lot of most other sacred
books. We look in it in vain for traces of an individual
editor. And on this account its form and even its
language were never fixed. The prayers and formula
it contained were, it is true, stereotyped, for their success
depended on their correct recitation ; but beyond this
the utmost latitude was allowed in the way of addition
or change. A Masoretic counting of words and syllables
would have been inconceivable to the Egyptian.
\ In later days, more especially in the Greek period,
the "Book of the Dead served as a basis for other religious
compositions which claimed divine authorship, and the
authority due to such an origin. Of these the most
popular was the Book of Eespirations (SM-n-Sensenu),
which derives its inspiration from chapters liv. to Ixiii.
of the Book of the Dead, and is ascribed to the god
ThothA In anticipation of the apocalyptic literature of
the Jews, the writer describes the condition of the soul
in the next world, following closely the indications of
the old ritual, and declaring how the " Respirations " it
contains were first " made by Isis for her brother Osiris
to give life to his soul, to give life to his body, to
rejuvenate all his members anew." The soul of the
Osirian is said to " live " by means of the book that is
thus provided for him, for he " has received the Book of
Eespirations, that he may breathe with his soul . . .
that he may make any transformation at his will . . .
that his soul may go wherever it desireth." l We are
reminded in these words of the last chapter of the Book
of Revelation (xxii. 7, 18, 19).
\ The Book of the Dead was the oldest of the sacred
books of Egypt. It was also in universal use. What-
1 Translated by P. J. de Horrack.
THE SACKED BOOKS 195
ever other articles of belief he may have held, the
Egyptian of the historical age was before all things else
a follower of Osiris. It was as an Osirian that he
hoped to traverse the regions that lay beyond the tomb,
and whose geography and inhabitants were revealed to
him in the Osirian ritual. From this point of view,
accordingly, the Book of the Dead may be termed the
Bible of the Egyptians. But it was not without rivals.
We have seen that even in the Book of the Dead the
heaven of Osiris is not the only heaven to which the
dead may look forward. Osiris has a rival in the sun-
god, and a place in the solar bark seems almost as much
coveted as a place in the fields of Alu. The solar cult
of Heliopolis had indeed to yield to the more popular
cult of Osiris, but it was on condition that the cult of
Osiris recognised and admitted it. To be a follower of
Osiris did not prevent the believing Egyptian from being
also a follower of the god Ea\
\In the latter part of the Theban period the solar
cult received a fresh impulse and developed a new life.
The attempt of Khu-n-Aten to establish a new faith, the
outward symbol of which was the solar disc, was but an
indication of the general trend of religious thought, and
the Asiatic conquests of the Eighteenth Dynasty intro
duced into Egypt the worship and creed of the sun-god
Baal. One by one the gods were identified with Ea ;
Amon himself became Amon-Ea, and the local deity of
Thebes passed into a pantheistic sun-god. It was under
these conditions that a new ritual was compiled for the
educated classes of Egypt, or at all events was adopted
by the religion of the State. Th^s was the Book Am
Duat, the Book of the Other World\
\ Copies of it are written on the walls of the dark
chambers in the rock-cut labyrinths wherein the kings of
the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties were laid to rest.
196 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
In the tonib of Seti i. we find two versions, one in which
the text is given in full, another in which the usual plan
is followed of giving only the last five sections com
pletely, while extracts alone are taken from the first
seven. The text is profusely illustrated by pictures, in
order that the dead might have no difficulty in under
standing the words of the ritual, or in recognising the
friends and enemies he would meet in the other world.\
V Unlike the Book of the Dead, the Book Am Duat is
a systematic treatise, which bears the stamp of individual
authorship. It is an apocalypse resting on an astro
nomical foundation, and is, in fact, a minute and detailed
account of the passage of the sun-god along the heavenly
river Ur-nes during the twelve hours of the night.
Each hour is represented by a separate locality in the
world of darkness, enclosed within gates, and guarded by
fire-breathing serpents and similar monsters. As the
bark of the sun-god glides along, the gates are suc
cessively opened by the magical power of the words
he utters, and their guardians receive him in peace.
Immediately he has passed the gates close behind him,
and the. region he has left is once more enveloped in
darknessX
\ But though he is thus able to illuminate for the brief
space of an hour the several regions of the other world,
it is not as the living sun-god of day that he voyages
along the infernal river, but as " the flesh of Ea " that is
to say, as that mortal part of his nature which alone
could die and enter the realm of the dead. The river is
a duplicate of the Nile, with its strip of bank on either
side, its fields and cities, even its nomes, wherein the god,
like the Pharaoh, assigns land and duties to his followers.
For the followers of Ea have a very different lot before
them from that which awaited the followers of Osiris.
There was no land of everlasting light and happiness to
THE SACRED BOOKS 197
which they could look forward, nor was their destiny
hereafter dependent on their conduct in this life. Their
supreme end was to accompany the sun-god in his bark
as he passed each night through the twelve regions of
the dead, and this could be attained only by a knowledge
of the ritual of Am Duat and the mystic formulas it
contained. Few, however, of those who started with the
sun-god on his nocturnal voyage remained with him to
the last ; most of them were stopped in the regions
through which he passed, where fields were granted them
whose produce they might enjoy, and where each night for
a single hour they formed as it were a bodyguard around
the god and lived once more in the light. Even the
kings of Upper and Lower Egypt were condemned to
dwell for ever in this gloomy Hades, along with Osiris
and the Kim or luminous souls of an earlier faith.
Those who were happy enough by virtue of their know
ledge and spells to emerge with Ea into the dawn of a
new day, henceforth had their home in the solar bark, and
were absorbed into the person of the gocIK
\JBut it was not only the friends and followers of Ea
who thus accompanied him in his journey through the
other world ; his enemies were there also, and the
horrible punishments they had to endure, as depicted
on the walls of the royal tombs, were worthy of the
imagination of a Dante. The banks of the infernal river
were lined with strange and terrible monsters, some of
them the older deities and spirits of the popular creed,
others mere creations of symbolism, others creatures of
composite form to whose invention the older mythology
contributed. Fire - breathing serpents are prominent
among them, lighting up the darkness for the fronds of
Ea, and burning his foes with their poisonous flameN
l For a translation and analysis of the Book of Am Duat, see Maspero,
Etudes de Mythologic ct d Archeologie egyptiemies, ii. pp. 1-163.
198 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
\T1
he artificial character of this picture of the other
world is clear at the first glance. With the pedantic
attention to details which characterised the Egyptian,
every part of it has been carefully elaborated. The
names and forms of the personages who stand on the
banks of the infernal river or enter the boat of Ra, as
with each successive hour he passes into a new region,
are all given ; even the exact area of each region is
stated, though the measurements do not agree in all the
versions of the book. But the best proof of its artificial
nature is to be found in a fact first pointed out by
Professor Maspero. Two of the older conceptions of
the other world and the life beyond the grave, which
differed essentially from the solar doctrine, are embedded
in it, but embedded as it were perforce. In the fourth
and fifth hours or regions we have a picture of the
future life as it was conceived by the worshippers of
Sokaris in the primitive days of Memphis ; in^he sixth
and seventh, the tribunal and paradise of Osiris.
;The kingdom of Sokaris represented that dreary con
ception of an after-existence which was associated with
the ka. Like the mummy, the ka was condemned to
live in the dark chamber of the tomb, whence it crept
forth at night to consume the food that had been offered
to it, and without which it was doomed to perish. Long
before the age when the Book of Am Duat was written,
this primitive belief had passed away from the minds of
men ; but the tradition of it still lingered, and had secured
a permanent place in the theological lore of Egypt. It
has accordingly been annexed as it were by the author
of the book, and transformed into two of the regions of
the night through which the solar bark has to pass.
But the terms in which the kingdom of Sokaris had
been described were too stereotyped to be ignored or
altered, and the solar bark is accordingly made to pass
TUP: SACRED BOOKS 199
above the primitive Hades, the voices of whose inhabit
ants are heard rising up in an indistinct murmur though
their forms are concealed from view. A memory is
preserved even of the sandy desert of Giza and Saqqtira,
where the inhabitants of Memphis were buried, and over
which Sokaris ruled as lord of the dead. The realm of
Sokaris is pictured as an enclosure of sand, flanked on
either side by a half-buried sphin^
^The author of the Book of Am Duat has dealt with
the heaven of Osiris as he has done with the Hades of
Sokaris. Osiris and his paradise have been transported
bodily to the nocturnal path of the sun-god, and con
demned to receive what little light is henceforth allowed
them from the nightly passage of the solar bark. Thoth
guides the bark to the city which contains the tomb
of Osiris, that mysterious house wherein are the four
human forms of the god. On the way the serpent
Neha-hir has to be overcome ; he is but another form
of the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ea, who thus
takes the place of Set, the enemy of Osiris. When the
sixth region is passed, which is a sort of vestibule to the
" retreat " of Osiris in the seventh, other enemies of Osiris
of whom, however, the Osirian doctrine knew but little
are being put to death in true solar fashion. Per
haps the most noteworthy fact in this description of the
kingdom of Crisis is, that not only all the gods of the
Osirian cycle are relegated to it, including the hawk
Horus, but also the Khu or luminous manes and the
ancient kings of Upper and Lower Egypt. The fact
points unmistakably to the great antiquity of the Osirian
creed. It went back to a time when as yet the
Egyptian monarchy was not united, and when the khU
or luminous soul held the same place in Egyptian
thought as had been held at an earlier time by the ka
and later by the soul or la. So undoubted was the
200 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
fact that the old Pharaohs of primeval Egypt had died in
the Osirian faith, that the author of the Book of Am
Duat could not disregard it; he was forced to place the
predecessors of a Seti or a Bamses, for whom the book
was copied, in one of the murky regions of the other
world instead of in the solar bark. They had been
followers of Osiris and not of Ea, and there was accord
ingly no place for them in the boat of the sun-goo^
^v Osiris is thus subordinated to the sun. The god of
the dead is not allowed to rule even in his own domains.
Such light and life as are graciously permitted to him
come from the passing of the solar bark once in each
twenty-four hours. He has lost the bright and happy
fields of Alu, he has had to quit even the judgment-
hall where he decided the lot of man. Osiris and his
creed are deposed to make way for another god with
another and a lower form of doctrine.\
4 The fact was so patent, that a second solar apocalypse
wSs written in order to smooth it away. This was the
Book of the Gates or of Hades, a copy of which is also
inscribed in the tomb of Seti. It differs only in details
from the Book Am Duat ; the main outlines of the
latter, with the passage of the solar bark through the
twelve hours or regions of the night, remain unaltered.
But the details vary considerably. The gates which
shut the hours off one from the other become fortified
pylons, guarded by serpents breathing fire. The Hades
of Sokaris is suppressed, and the judgment-hall of
Osiris is introduced between the fifth and sixth hours.
The object of the judgment, however, seems merely the
punishment of the enemies of the god, who are tied
to stakes and finally burned or otherwise put to death
in the eighth hour. Among them appears Set in the
form of a swine, who is driven out of the hall of judg
ment by a cynocephalous ape. As for the righteous,
THE SACRED BOOKS 201
they are still allowed to cultivate the fields of the
kingdom of Osiris ; but it is a kingdom which is plunged
in darkness except during the brief space of time when
the bark of the sun-god floats through it. Osiris, never
theless, is acknowledged as lord of the world of the dead,
in contradistinction to the Book Am Duat, which assigns
him only a portion of it ; and when the sun-god emerges
into the world of light at the end of the twelfth hour, it
is by passing through the hands of Nut, the sky, who
stands on the body of Osiris, " which encircles the other
world." Nor is the serpent Apophis, the enemy of Ea,
confounded with Set ; his overthrow by Turn takes place
in the first hour, before the tribunal of Osiris is reached
The theology of the two books resembles the Taoism
of China in its identification of religion with the know
ledge of magical formulae. \ The moral element which
distinguished the Osirian faith has disappeared, and
salvation is made to depend on the knowledge of a
mystical apocalypse. Only the rich and cultivated have
henceforth a chance of obtaining it. And even for them
the prospect was dreary enough. A few the inner
most circle of disciples might look forward to absorp
tion into the sun-god, which practically meant a loss of
individuality; for the rest there was only a world of
darkness and inaction, where all that made life enjoyable
to the Egyptian was absent. The author of the Book
of the Gates gives expression to the fact when he tells
us that as the last gate of the other world closes behind
the sun-god, the souls who are left in darkness groan
heavily. To such an end had the learned theology of
JSgypt brought both the people and their godsX,
\ We need not wonder that under the influence of such
teaching the intellectual classes fell more and more into
a hopeless scepticism, which saw in death the loss of
all that we most prize here belowv On the one side,
202 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
we have sceptical treatises like the dialogue between the
jackal and the Ethiopian cat, where the cat, who repre
sents the old-fashioned orthodoxy, has by far the worst
of the argument ; l on the other side, the dirge on the
death of the wife of the high priest of Memphis, which
I have quoted in an earlier lecture
"The underworld is a land of thick darkness,
A sorrowful place for the dead.
They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken."
It was better, indeed, that it should be so than that
they should awaken only to lead the existence which
the Book of Am Duat describes.
v How far the doctrines of the solar theology extended
beyond the narrow circle in which they originated, it is
difficult to say. In the nature of the case they could
not become popular, as they started from an assumption
of esoteric knowledge. We know that the majority of
the Egyptians continued to hold to the Osirian creed up
to the last days of paganism or at all events they
professed to do so and as long as the Osirian creed was
retained the moral element in religion was recognised.
In one respect, however, the solar theology triumphed.
The gods of Egypt, including Osiris himself, were identi
fied with the sun-god, and became forms or manifesta
tions of Ka. Egyptian religion became pantheistic ; the
divinity was discovered everywhere, and the shadowy
and impersonal forms of the ancient deities were mingled
together in hopeless confusion. It seemed hardly to
matter which was invoked, for each was all and all were
each. ^
Gnosticism was the natural daughter of the solar
theology. The doctrine that knowledge is salvation and
1 Revue egyptologique, i. 4, ii. 3 (1880, 1881), where an account of the
demotic story is given by E. Revillout.
THE SACRED BOOKS 203
that the gods of the popular cult are manifestations of
the sun-god, was applied to explain the origin of evil.
Evil became the result of imperfection and ignorance,
necessarily inherent in matter, and arising from the fact
that the creation is due to the last of a long series of
eeons or emanations from the supreme God. The rcons
are the legitimate descendants of the manifold deities
whom the Egyptian priests had resolved into forms of
Ea, while the identification of evil with the necessary
imperfection of matter deprives it of a moral element,
and finds a remedy for it in the gnosis or " knowledge "
of the real nature of things. Even the strange monsters
and symbolic figures which play so large a part in the
solar revelation are reproduced in Gnosticism. Abraxas
and the other curiously composite .creatures engraved on
Gnostic gems have all sprung from the Books of Am Duat
and the Gates, along with the allegorical meanings that
were read into them. However much the solar school
of theology may have been for the old religion of Egypt
a teaching of death, in the Gnosticism of the first
Christian centuries it was born anew.
LECTUEE IX.
THE POPULAH RELIGION OF EGYPT.
\TIIUS far I have dealt with the official religion of
\ncient Egypt, with the religion of the priests and
princes, the scribes and educated classes. This is
naturally the religion of which we know most. The
monuments that have come down to us are for the
most part literary and architectural, and enshrine the
ideas and beliefs of the cultivated part of the community.
The papyri were written for those who could read and
write, the temples were erected at the expense of the
State, and the texts and figures with which they were
adorned were engraved or painted on their walls under
priestly direction. The sculptured and decorated tomb,
the painted mummy-case, the costly sarcophagus, the roll
of papyrus that was buried with the dead, were all alike
the privilege of the wealthy and the educated. The grave
that contained the body of the poor contained little else
than the coarse cere-cloths in which it was wrapped.
Our knowledge, therefore, of the religion of the people,
of the popular religion as distinguished from the religion
of official orthodoxy, is, and must be, imperfect. We
have to gather it from the traces it lias left in the
religion of the State, from stray references to it in
literature, from a few rare monuments which have come
down to us, from its survivals in the modern folk-lore
and superstitions of Egypt, or from its influence on the
decaying faith of the classical age. J
204
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 205
There was, however, a popular religion by the side of
the official religion, just as there is in all countries which
possess an organised faith. And if it is difficult to
understand fully the religion of the uneducated classes
in Western Europe to-day, or to realise their point of
view, it must be much more difficult to do so in the
case of ancient Egypt. Here our materials are scanty,
and the very fact that we know as much as we do about
the religion of the upper class makes it additionally
harder to estimate them aright.
A considerable portion of the fellahin were descended
from the earlier neolithic population of Egypt, whom the
Pharaonic Egyptians found already settled in the country.
In a former lecture I have endeavoured to show that
they were fetish - worshippers, and that among their
fetishes animals were especially prominent. They had
no priests, for fetishism is incompatible with a priest
hood in the proper sense of the term. Neither did they
embalm their dead ; all those beliefs and ideas, therefore,
which were connected with a priesthood and the practice
of embalming must have come to them from without;
the gods and sacerdotal colleges of the State religion, the
Osirian creed, and the belief in the resurrection, must
have been for them of foreign origin. And of foreign
origin they doubtless remained to the bulk of the nation
down to the last days of paganism.
Amon and Ea and Osiris were indeed familiar names, the
temple festivals were duly observed, and the processions
in honour of the State gods duly attended ; and after the
age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, when the fusion between
the different elements in the population was completed,
the practice of mummification became general ; but the
names of the State gods were names only, to which the
peasant attached a very different meaning from that
which official orthodoxy demanded. He still worshipped
206 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the tree whose shady branches arose on the edge of the
desert or at the corner of his field, or brought his offer
ings to some animal, in which he saw not a symbol or an
incarnation of Horus and Sekhet, but an actual hawk
and cat.
How deeply rooted this belief in the divinity of
animals was in the minds of the people, is shown by the
fact that the State religion had to recognise it just as
Mohammed had perforce to recognise the sanctity of the
" Black Stone " of the Kaaba. As we have seen, the
second king of the Second Thinite Dynasty is said to
have legalised the worship of the bull Apis of Memphis,
Mnevis of Heliopolis, and the ram of Mendes ; and
though the official explanation was that these animals
were but incarnations of Ptah and Ea to whom the
worship was really addressed, it was an explanation
about which the people neither knew nor cared. The
divine honours they paid to the bulls and ram were
paid to the animals themselves, and not to the gods of
the priestly cult.
Here and there a few evidences have been preserved
to us that such was the fact. In the tomb of Ea-zeser-
ka-seneb, for instance, at Thebes, the artist has intro
duced a picture of a peasant making his morning prayer
to a sycamore which stands at the end of a corn-field,
while offerings of fruit and bread and water are placed
on the ground beside it. 1 The official religion endea
voured to legalise this old tree worship much in the same
way as Christianity endeavoured to legalise the old
worship of springs, by attaching the tree to the service
of a god, and seeing in it one of the forms in which the
deity manifested himself. Thus " the sycamore of the
south " became the body of Hathor, whose head was
1 Scheil, " Torabeaux thebains " in M&noircs de la Mission archeoloyiquc
franqaise du Caire, v. 4, pi. 4.
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 207
depicted appearing from its branches, while opposite
Siut it was Hor-pes who took the goddess s place. 1
Like other beliefs and practices which go back to the
neolithic population of Egypt, the ancient tree worship
is not yet extinct. On either side of the Nile sacred
trees are to be found, under which the offering of bread
and water is still set, though the god of the official cult
of Pharaonic Egypt, to whom the worship was nominally
paid, has been succeeded by a Mohammedan saint. By
the side of the tree often rises the white dome of the
tomb of a " shekh," to whom the place is dedicated,
reminding us of a picture copied by Wilkinson in a
sepulchre at Hu, in which a small chapel, representing
the tomb of Osiris, stands by the side of a tree on
whose branches is perched the lennu or phoenix. 2 The
most famous of these trees, however, that of Matariya,
is an object of veneration to the Christian rather than
to the Mohammedan. The Holy Family, it is said, once
rested under its branches during their flight into Egypt ;
in reality it represents a sycamore in which the soul of
Ea of Heliopolis must have been believed to dwell.
Professor Maspero has drawn attention to certain
stelae in the museum of Turin, which show how, even
in the lower middle class, it was the animal itself and
not the official god incarnated in it that was the object
of worship. On one of them, which belongs to the age
of the Eighteenth Dynasty, huge figures of a swallow
and a cat are painted, with a table of offerings standing
before them, as well as two kneeling scribes, while the
accompanying inscriptions tell us that it was to " the
1 So in the Pyramid texts (Unas 170) reference is made to " the bctqt," or
"ben-nut tree which is in On." The tree is the Moringa a-ptera Gartner,
from the fruit of which the myrobalanum oil was extracted (Joret, Les
Plantcs dans VAntiquiW et au Moyen Aye, i. pp. 133, 134).
2 Ancient Egyptians, iii. p. 349. The bennu is described as "the sou
of Osiris."
208 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
good " swallow and the " good " cat, and not to any of
the State gods who may have hidden themselves under
these animal forms, that flowers were being offered and
prayers made. On another stela we find two pet cats,
who are sitting on a shrine and facing one another, and
whom their mistresses two of the women who wailed
at funerals adore in precisely the same language as
that which was used of Osiris or Amon. 1 In the
quarries north of Qurna is a similar representation of
a cow and a cobra, which stand face to face with a
table of offerings between them, while a worshipper
kneels at the side, and a half - obliterated inscription
contains the usual formulae of adoration. 2 Still more
curious is a stela, now in the museum of Cairo, on
which an ox is represented inside a shrine, while under
neath it is a Greek inscription declaring that the
" Kretan " who had dedicated the monument could
interpret dreams, thanks to the commandment of " the
god." The god, it will be noticed, is not Apis, but an
ordinary ox.
But of all the animals who thus continued to be the
real gods of the people in spite of priestly teaching and
State endowments, none were so numerous or were so
universally feared and venerated as the snakes. The
serpent was adored where Amon was but a name, and
where Ea was looked upon as belonging, like fine horses
and clothes, to the rich and the mighty. The prominence
1 titudes de Mythologie et d ArchMogie, ii. p. 395 sqq.
2 The influence of the State religion is visible in the picture, as the cow
has the solar disc between its horns, and the cobra is crowned not only
with horns, but also with the solar disc. Behind the cobra is the leafy
branch of a tree. There is no reason for supposing with Wiedemann
(Musfon, 1884) that the monument is Ethiopian : what is decipherable in
the inscription is purely Egyptian. Professor Wiedemann calls the animal
on the left a ram, but my drawing made it a cow. At the feet of the
cow, which has a garland round the neck, are two vases.
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 209
of the serpent in Egyptian mythology and symbolism
indicates how plentiful and dangerous it must have been
in the early days of Egypt, and what a lasting impression
it made upon the native mind. When the banks of the
Nile were an uninhabitable morass, and the neolithic
tribes built their huts in the desert, the snake must
indeed have been a formidable danger. The most deadly
still frequent the desert; it is only in the cultivated
land that they are comparatively rare. In Egypt, as
elsewhere, the cultivation of the soil and the habits of
civilised life have diminished their number, and driven
them into the solitudes of the wilderness. But when
the Pharaonic Egyptians first arrived in the valley of
the Nile, when the swamps were being drained, the
jungle cleared away, and the land sown with the wheat
of Babylonia, the serpent was still one of the perils of
daily life. A folk-tale which has been appropriated and
spoilt by the priestly compilers of the legend of Ea, tells
how the sun-god was bitten by a venomous snake which
lay in his path, and how the poison ran through his
veins like fire. The symbol of royalty adopted by the
earliest Pharaohs was the cobra ; it symbolised the irre
sistible might and deadly power of the conquering chief
tain which, like the dreaded cobra of the desert, overcame
the inhabitants of the country, and compelled them to
regard him with the same awe and terror as the serpent
itself.
Down to the last the embalmers and gravediggers and
others who had to attend to the funeral arrangements of
the dead, and consequently lived in the neighbourhood of
the necropolis, were more exposed to the chances of
snake-bite than the inhabitants of the cultivated land.
The necropolis was invariably in the desert, and the
nature of their occupation obliged them to excavate the
sand or visit the dark chambers of the dead where the
14
210 THE KELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
snake glided unseen. It is not surprising, therefore,
that the veneration of the snake was especially strong
among the population of the cemeteries. Those who
inhabited the necropolis of Thebes have left us prayers
and dedications to the goddess Mert-seger, who is repre
sented as a cobra or some equally deadly serpent,
though at times she is decently veiled under the name
of an official deity. Once her place is taken by two
snakes, at another time by a dozen of them. She was,
in fact, the tutelary goddess of the necropolis, and hence
received the title of " the Western Crest " that is to say,
the crest of the western hills, where the earliest tombs
of Thebes were situated. Professor Maspero has trans
lated an interesting inscription made in her honour by
one of the workmen employed in the cemetery. " Adora
tion to the Western Crest," it begins, " prostrations before
her double ! I make my adoration, listen ! Ever since I
walked on the earth and was an attendant in the Place
of Truth (the cemetery), a man, ignorant and foolish,
who knew not good from evil, I committed many sins
against the goddess of the Crest, and she punished me.
I was under her hand night and day ; while I cowered
on the bed like a woman with child, I cried for breath,
and no breath came to me, for I was pursued by the
Western Crest, the mightiest of all the gods, the goddess
of the place ; and behold I will declare to all, great and
small, among the workmen of the necropolis : Beware of
the Crest, for there is a lion in her, and she strikes like
a lion that bewitches, and she is on the track of all who
sin against her ! So I cried to my mistress, and she
came to me as a soft breeze, she united herself with me,
causing me to feel her hand ; she returned to me in
peace, and made me forget my troubles by giving me
breath. For the Western Crest is appeased when the
cry is made to her ; so says Nefer-ab, the justified.
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 211
He says : Behold, hear, all ears who live on earth, be
ware of the Western Crest ! " l
It is clear that Nefer-ab suffered from asthma, that
he believed it had been inflicted upon him by the local
goddess for some sin he had committed against her, and
that he further believed his penitence and cry for help
to have induced her to come to him and cure him.
And this goddess was a snake. Here, in the necropolis
of Thebes, therefore, the snake played the same part as
a healer that it did in the worship of Asklepios. It will
be remembered that the first temple raised to ^scula-
pius at Koine was built after a plague, from which the
city was supposed to have been delivered by a serpent
hidden in the marshes of the Tiber. The serpent that
destroys also heals ; by the side of Kakodrcmon there is
also the good snake Agathodajinon.
Mert-seger, the serpent of the necropolis, did not
wholly escape the patronage of the State religion. Like
the local cults of aboriginal India over which Brah-
manisin has thrown its mantle, the cult of Mert-seger
was not left wholly unnoticed by the organised religion
of the State. A chapel was erected to her in the
orthodox form, and it is from this chapel that most of
the stehe have come which have revealed the existence
of the old worship. In some of them Mert-seger is
identified with Mut, or even with Isis ; but such an
identification was never accepted or understood by her
illiterate worshippers. For them she continued to be
what she had been to their forefathers, simply a serpent
and nothing more. The old faith has survived centuries
of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a modified form.
Professor Maspero discovered that the local Mohammedan
1 See the very interesting study of Maspero on La De csse Miritskro et
ses guerisons miraculeuses " in titudes de Mytholoyic et d Archeologie, ii.
pp. 40-2-419 ; Recucil de Travaux, ii. p. 109 sqq.
212 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
saint, whose tomb is not far from the ancient chapel of
Mert-seger, is still believed to work miracles of healing.
He has taken the place of the serpent goddess ; that is
all. 1
The serpent, however, was not always venerated be
cause it was feared. It lived underground, and was thus,
in a special sense, the oldest inhabitant of the land, and
the guardian of the soil. The Telmessians told Krcesus
that it was " a child of the earth." fz The harmless
snakes that frequent the village houses of modern
Egypt are still regarded as the " protectors " of the
household. The bowl of milk is provided for them as
regularly as it once was in Wales for the fairies, and
many tales are told of the punishment a neglect of the
household Jiarrds or " guardian " will entail. For its
poison continues to exist, though held in reserve, and is
communicable by other means than the fangs. At
Helwan near Cairo, for instance, I was told of one of
these guardian snakes which once missed its female mate
and supposed it had been killed. Thereupon it crept
into the ztr or jar in which water is kept, and poisoned
the water in it. But the female having soon afterwards
made its appearance, it was observed to glide into a
basin of milk, then to crawl along the ground so that
the clotted dust might adhere to its body, and again to
enter the ztr. As the dust fouled the water, the people
of the house knew that the latter must have been
poisoned, and accordingly poured it on the ground. In
1 The Belmore collection of Egyptian antiquities contains several stelse
which commemorate the popular worship of the serpent ; see Bdmore
Collection, pis. 7, 8, and 12. In one of them the urseus has the human
head of the official deity ; in another it stands on the top of a shrine ;
but on one (given in pi. 7) the worshipper is kneeling before a coluber of
great length, which has none of the attributes of the State gods, and
whose numerous coils remind us of Apophis.
2 Herodotos, i. 78.
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 213
this case the snake provided the remedy for the mischief
it had the power to cause. 1
But the Agathodsemon or serpent guardian of the
house not only still survives among the fellahiu of
Egypt, serpent worship still holds undiminished sway
in the valley of the Nile. In a crater-like hollow of the
mountain cliff of Shekh Heridi there are two domed
tombs, dedicated not to a Christian or a Mohammedan
saint, but to a snake and his female mate. Shekh
Heridi, in fact, is a serpent, and the place he inhabits is
holy ground. Pilgrimages are made annually to it, and
the festival of the " Shekh," which takes place in the
month that follows Eamadan, is attended by crowds of
sailors and other devout believers, who encamp for days
together in the neighbourhood of the shrine.
They have no doubt about the miraculous powers
possessed by the snake. It is as thick as a man s thigh,
and, if treated irreverently, breathes flames of fire into
the face of the spectator, who immediately dies. If it is
cut in pieces, the pieces reunite of their own accord,
and the blood flowing from them marks a spot where
gold is hidden in the ground.
Paul Lucas, in the early part of the eighteenth
century, tells us that in his time it was called " the
angel," and that shortly before his visit to the Nile it had
cured a woman of Ekhmim of paralysis, from which she
had suffered for eight years, by simply crawling up into
her litter when she was brought to its dwelling-place.
Paul Lucas himself was a witness of its supernatural
gifts. It was brought to him by the keeper of the
shrine when he was visiting a Bey on the opposite side
of the river. Suddenly it disappeared, and was nowhere
to be found ; but a messenger, who was sent post haste
1 Sayce, "Serpent Worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt," in the Con
temporary Review, Oct. 1893.
214 THE RELIGION OF AXCIENT EGYPT
to the shrine, returned with the information that " the
angel was already there, and had advanced more than
twenty steps to meet the dervish who takes care of it." l
Norden, a few years later, has a similar tale to relate.
He was told that the serpent-saint " never dies," and
that it " cures and grants favours to all those who
implore its aid and offer sacrifices to it." The cures
were effected by the mere presence of the snake, which
came in person to those who desired its help. The
Christians, he adds, admit the miraculous powers of the
Shekh equally with the Mohammedans, only they ex
plain them as due to a demon who clothes himself in
a serpent s form. 2
Saint or demon, however, Shekh Heridi is really the
lineal descendant of a serpent which has been wor
shipped in its neighbourhood since the prehistoric days
of Egypt. A bronze serpent with the head of Zeus
Serapis has been found in the mounds of Benawit, on
the western side of the Nile, which face the entrance to
the shrine of the Shekh ; and the nome in which the
shrine is situated was that of Du-Hefi, " the mountain of
the snake." The serpent of Shekh Heridi, with his
miraculous powers of healing, must thus have been
already famous in the days when the nomes of Upper
Egypt first received their names. The old neolithic
population of the desert must have already venerated
the snake that dwelt in the cleft of the rock above
which now rises the sacred " tomb " of Shekh Heridi. 3
1 Voyage da Sieur Paul Lucas, fait en mdccxiv etc., par Ordrc de
Louis XIV., ii. pp. 83-86.
2 Voyage d figypte et de NuUe, nouv. <$dit. par L. Langles, ii. pp.
64-69.
3 See my article on "Serpent Worship in Ancient and Modern Egypt," in
the Contemporary Review, Oct. 1893. On a rock called Hagar el-Ghorfib, a
few miles north of Assuan, I have found graffiti of the age of the Twelfth
Dynasty, which show that a chapel of "the living serpent" stood on the
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 215
The faith of the people dies hard. The gods and
goddesses, the theology and speculations of the official
religion of Egypt, have passed away, but the old beliefs
and superstitions which were already in possession of the
land when the Pharaonic Egyptians first entered it, have
survived both Christianity and Mohammedanism. The
theological systems of Heliopolis or Thebes are like the
sacred trees, which, according to Dr. Schweinfurth, 1 were
brought from Southern Arabia along with the deities
with whose cult they were associated ; when the deities
themselves ceased to be worshipped, the trees also ceased
to be cultivated, and so disappeared from a soil wherein
they had been but exotics. But the religion of the great
mass of the people remained rooted as it were in the
soil, like the palm or the acacia. It flowed like a strong
current under the surface of the theology of the State,
contemptuously tolerated by the latter, and in its turn
but little affected by it. The theology of the State
might incorporate and adapt the beliefs of the multitude ;
to the multitude the State theology was a " tale of little
meaning, though the words were strong."
If we would know what the bulk of the people thought
of those deities whom the higher classes regarded as
manifestations of a single ineffable and omnipotent divine
power, we must turn to the folk-tales which were taken
up and disfigured by the rationalising priests of a later
period, when they combined together in a connected
story all that had been said about the gods of the local
sanctuaries. Each sanctuary came to possess its euhemer-
spot ; and a native informed me that the rock is still haunted by a
monstrous serpent, "as long as an oar and as thick as a man," which
appears at night and destroys, with the fire that blazes from its eyes,
whoever is unfortunate enough to fall in its way. See Recucil de
Tmvaux, xvi. p. 174.
1 In the Vcrhandlungcn der GeseUscliaft fur Erdkunde zu Berlin, 1889,
No. 7.
216 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
ising legend of the chief divinity to whom it was con
secrated ; the divinity was transformed into an earthly
king, and his history was concocted partly out of popular
tales, associated for the most part with particular relics
and charms, partly from forced etymologies of proper
names. At how early a date these artificial legends first
came into existence we do not know, but we already
meet with examples of them in the time of the Nine
teenth and Twentieth Dynasties. They belong, however,
to the age when the rationalistic process of resolving the
gods into human princes had already begun, the counter
side of the process that had turned the Pharaoh into a
god^ anc i their artificial character is betrayed by the
attempt to extract history from learned but unscientific
explanations of the origin of local and other names.
Here, for instance, is one which was compiled for the
temple of the sun-god at Heliopolis, and is contained in
a Turin papyrus of the age of the Twentieth Dynasty :
" Account of the god who created himself, the creator of
heaven, of earth, of the gods, of men, of wild beasts, of
cattle, of reptiles, of fowls, and of fish ; the king of men
and gods, to whom centuries are but as years : who
possesses numberless names which no man knoweth, no,
not even the gods.
" Isis was a woman, more knowing in her malice than
millions of men, clever among millions of the gods, equal
to millions of spirits, to whom as unto Ea nothing was
unknown either in heaven or upon earth.
" The god Ea came each day to sit upon his throne; he
had grown old, his mouth trembled, his slaver trickled
down to the earth, and his saliva dropped upon the
ground. Isis kneaded it witli her hand along with the
dust that had adhered to it ; she moulded therefrom a
sacred serpent, to which she gave the form of a spear-
shaft. She wound it not about her face, but flung it on
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 217
the road along which the great god walked, as often as
he wished, in his twofold kingdom.
" The venerable god went forth, the (other) gods accom
panied him, he walked along as on other days. Then
the sacred serpent bit him. The divine god opened his
mouth, and his cry rang to heaven. His Ennead of gods
called : < What is it ? and the gods cried, Look there !
He could make no answer, his jaws chattered, his limbs
shook, the venom took hold of his flesh as the Nile
covers its banks (with water).
" When the heart of the great god was quieted, he
called to his followers : Come to me, ye children of my
limbs, ye gods who have emanated from me ! Something
painful hath hurt me ; my heart perceiveth it, yet my
eyes see it not ; my hand hath not wrought it, nothing
that I have made knoweth what it is, yet have I never
tasted suffering like unto it, and there is no pain which is
worse. ... I went forth to see what I had created, I
was walking in the two lands which I have made, when
something stung me which I knew not. Was it fire,
was it water ? My heart is in flames, my limbs tremble,
all my members shiver. Let there be brought unto me
the children of the gods of beneficent words, who have
understanding mouths, and whose power reaches unto
heaven.
" The children of the gods came, full of woe ; Isis came
with her magic ; with her mouth full of the breath of
life, whose recipes destroy pain, whose word gives life to
the dead. She said : What is it, what is it, father of
the gods ? A serpent hath wrought this suffering in thee,
one of thy creatures hath lifted up his head against thee.
Surely he shall be overthrown by beneficent incantations ;
I will make him retreat at the sight of thy rays.
" The holy god opened his mouth : I walked along the
road, travelling through the two lands of the earth, after
218 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the desire of my heart, that I might see what I had
created ; then was I bitten by a serpent that I saw not.
Is it fire, is it water ? I am colder than water, I am
hotter than fire, all my limbs sweat, I tremble, my eye
is unsteady, I see not the sky, drops roll from my face
as in the season of summer/
" Isis replied to Ea : tell me thy name, father of
the gods, then shall he live who is released (from pain)
by thy name. But Ea answers : * I have created
heaven and earth, I have set the hills in order, and made
all beings that are thereon. I am he who created the
water, and caused the primeval ocean to issue forth. I
created the spouse of his (divine) mother. I created the
heavens and the secrets of the two horizons, and have
ordered the souls of the gods. I am he who illuminates
all things at the opening of his eyes ; if he closes his
eyes, all is dark. The water of the Nile rises when he
bids it ; the gods know not his name. I make the hours
and create the days, I send the year and create the
inundation, I make the fire that lives, I purify the house.
I am Khepera in the morning, Ea at noon, and Turn at
evening.
" The venom departed not, it advanced further, the
great god became no better. Then Isis said to Ea :
Thy name was not pronounced in the words thou hast
repeated. Tell it to me and the poison will depart ;
then shall he live whose name is (thus) named.
" The poison glowed like fire ; it was hotter than the
flame of fire. The majesty of Ea said : I grant thee
leave that thou shouldest search within me, mother
Isis ! and that my name pass from my bosom into
thine.
" So the god hid himself from the (other) gods ; his
everlasting bark was empty. When the moment arrived
for extracting the heart (whereon the name was written),
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 219
Isis said to her SOLI Horns : He must yield up unto
thee his two eyes (the sun and moon).
" So the name of the great god was taken from him,
and Isis, the great enchantress, said : Depart, poison,
leave Ea : let the eye of Horus go forth from the god
and shine out of his mouth. I, I have done it ; I throw
on the earth the victorious poison, for the name of the
great god is extracted from him. Let Ea live and the
poison die ! So spake Isis, the great one, the regent of
the gods, who knows Ea and his true name."
The writer of the papyrus adds that the recital of this
legend is an excellent charm against the poison of a
snake, especially if it is written and dissolved in water,
which is then drunk by the patient ; or if it is inscribed
on a piece of linen, and hung around his neck. 1
The contrast is striking between the introduction to
the legend and the euhemeristic spirit that elsewhere
prevails in it, and can be explained, even in the case of
such disregarders of consistency as the Egyptians, only
on the supposition that the Ea of folk-lore and the Ea
of theology were held to be the same merely in name.
Not even a pretence is made of regarding Isis as a
goddess ; she is simply a common witch, who resorts to
magic in order to force Ea to hand over his name and
therewith his powers to her son Horus. The virtue of
the name, and the power conferred by a knowledge of it,
are features common to the folk-lore of most countries.
They take us back to that primitive phase of thought
which not only identifies the name with the person or
thing it represents, but makes it a separate entity with
an existence of its own.
The legend of the sun-god of Edfu is equally instruct-
1 The legend was first published by Pleyte and Rossi, " Les Papyrus
hie"ratiques de Turin," pis. 31, 77, 131-8. It was translated by Lefe"bure
in the Zeitschrift fur Aegyptisclie Spraclic, 1883, pp. 27-33.
220 THE TIELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
ive, though in its present form it is not earlier than the
Ptolemaic age. This begins as follows : " In the three
hundred and sixty-third year of the reign of Ra-
Harmakhis, the ever-living, Ra was in Nubia with his
soldiers. Enemies, however, conspired (uu) against him ;
hence the country has ever since borne the name of the
land of Conspirators (Uaua). Then the god Ra went
his way in his bark along with his followers, and landed
in the nome of Edfu. Here the god Hor-Behudet (the
winged disc) entered the bark of Ra and said to his
father : Harmakhis, I see how the enemy have con
spired against their lord. Then said the Majesty of
Ra-Harmakhis to the person of Hor-Behudet : son of
Ra, exalted one, who hast emanated from me, smite the
enemy before thee forthwith. Hor-Behudet flew up to
the sun in the form of a great winged disc ; on that
account he is ever since called the great god, the lord of
heaven. He espied the enemy from the sky, he followed
them in the form of a great winged disc. Through the
attack which he made upon them in front, their eyes
saw no longer, their ears heard no longer, each slew his
neighbour forthwith, there remained not one alive. Then
Hor-Behudet came in a many-coloured form as a great
winged disc into the bark of Ra-Harmakhis. And Thoth
said to Ra : Lord of the gods, the god of Behudet (Edfu)
has come in the form of a great winged disc : from this
day forth he shall be called Hor-Behudet (Horus of Edfu).
And he said (again) : From this day forth the city of
Edfu shall be called the city of Hor-Behudet. Then Ra
embraced the form of Hor, and said to Hor-Behudet :
Thou makest the water of Edfu (red with blood like)
grapes, and thy heart is rejoiced thereat. Hence this
water of Edfu is called (the water of grapes).
"And Hor-Behudet said: March on, Ra, and
behold thine enemies under thy feet in this land.
THE POPULAR KELIGION OF EGYPT 221
When the Majesty of Ea had turned back, and the
goddess Astarte with him, he saw the enemy lying on
the ground, each extended like a prisoner. Then said
Ka to Hor-Behudet: That is a suitable life. Hence
the seat of Hor-Behudet has ever since been called the
place of the Suitable Life. And Thoth said : It was a
piercing (deb) of my enemies. So the nome of Edfu
(Deb) has been called ever since by that name. And
Thoth said to Hor-Behudet : Thou art a great pro
tection (mdJc da). Great in Protection (da mdk) accord
ingly has the sacred bark of Horus been ever since
called.
" Then Ea spake to the gods who were with him : Let
us voyage (khen) in our bark on the Nile ; we are re
joiced, for our enemies lie on the ground. The (canal)
in which the great god was has ever since been called
the Water of Voyaging (Pc-khen).
" Then the enemies of Ea entered the water : they
changed themselves into crocodiles and hippopotamuses.
But Harmakhis voyaged on the water in his bark.
When the crocodiles and hippopotamuses came up to
him, they opened their jaws in order to destroy the
Majesty of Harmakhis. Then came Hor-Behudet with
his followers the blacksmiths (mesniu) ; each held an iron
lance and chain in his hand, wherewith he smote the
crocodiles and the hippopotamuses. Then three hundred
and eighty-one of the enemy were brought to the spot,
who had been killed in sight of the city of Edfu.
" And Harmakhis said to Hor-Behudet : Let my image
be in Southern Egypt, since there it is that the victory
was gained (nckht dh). So the dwelling-place of
Hor-Behudet (at Edfu) has ever since been called the
Victorious (Nekht-dli). And Thoth said, when he had
seen the enemy lying on the ground : Glad are your
hearts, gods of heaven ; glad are your hearts, gods of
222 THE KELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
earth ! Horus the younger is come in peace ; he has
wrought wonders in his journey which he undertook iu
accordance with the Book of the Slaying of the Hippo
potamus. Ever since was there (at Edfu) a forge
(mescn) of Horus. 1
" Hor-Behudet changed his form into that of a winged
solar disc, which remained there above the prow of the
bark of Ea. He took with him Nekheb, the goddess of
the south, and Uazit, the goddess of the north, in the
form of two serpents, in order to annihilate the enemy
in their crocodile and hippopotamus bodies in every
place to which he came, both in Southern and in Northern
Egypt.
" Then the enemy fled before him, they turned their
faces towards the south, their hearts sank within them
from fear. But Hor-Behudet was behind them in the
bark of Ea, with an iron lance and chain in his hand.
With him were his followers, armed with weapons and
chains. Then beheld he the enemy towards the south
east of Thebes in a plain two schoeni in size."
Here follows an account of the several battles which
drove the enemies of Horus from place to place until
eventually all Egypt passed under his sway. The first
battle, that which took place south-east of Thebes, was
at Aa-Zadmi, so called from the " wounds " inflicted on
the foe, which henceforth bore the sacred name of
Hat-Ea, " the House of Ea." The second was at Neter-
khadu, " the divine carnage," to the north-east of
1 The shrine of Horus, whom the legend here identifies with the son oi
Osiris, was called Meseu at Edfu. The winged solar disc, which seems to
have originated there, is called sometimes "the lord of the city of
Behudet," sometimes "the lord of the city of Mesen." Behudet was
formerly read Hud, and it is possible that this was really the pronuncia
tion of the name in later days. At all events it seems to be the origin of
the modern Edfu, which, of course, has nothing to do with the verb deb,
" to pierce."
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 223
Uendera ; the third at Hebnu, near Minia, iu the nome
of the Gazelle ; and others followed at Oxyrrhynchus or
Behnesa, and Herakleopolis or Ahnas, where a twofold
Mesen or " Forge " was established. Then the foe were
driven through the Delta and defeated at Zaru on its
eastern frontier, whence they fled in ships down the Keel
Sea, but were finally overthrown at Shas-her, near the
later Berenike, at the end of the road that led across the
desert from the Nile.
Meanwhile, on the 7th of Tybi, their leader "Set
had come forward and cried horribly, uttering curses
upon the deed of Hor-Behudet in slaying the enemy.
And Ea said to Thoth : The horrible one cries loudly
on account of what Hor-Behudet has done against him.
Thoth replied to Ka : Let the cries be called horrible
from this day forward. Hor-Behudet fought long with
Set ; he flung his iron at him, he smote him to the ground
in the city which henceforward was called Pa-Eehehui
(the House of the Twins). 1 When Hor-Behudet re
turned, he brought Set with him ; his spear stuck in his
neck, his chain was on his hand ; the mace ef Horus had
smitten him, and closed his mouth. He brought him
before his father Ea.
" Then Ea said to Thoth : Let the companions of Set
be given to Isis and Horus her son, that they may deal
with them as they will. ... So Horus the son of Isis
cut off the head of Set and his confederates before his
1 "The City of the Twins" scorns to be the same as Ha-Zaui, "the
House of the Twins," which Diimichen identifies with the Greek Khnubis,
close to Esna. An inscription at Esna says that it was also termed Pa-
Sahura, " the House of Sahara" (of the Fifth Dynasty), a name which
Diimichen finds in that of tire modern village of Sahera, south of Esna.
On a prehistoric slate found at Abydos the name of the city appears to be
indicated by the figures of two twins inside the cartouche of a town
(de Morgan, Rcclierches sur les Origincs de V&jypte, i. pi. iii., first
register).
224 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
father Ea and all the great Ennead. He carried him
under his feet through the land, with the axe on his
head and in his back."
Set, however, .was not slain. He transformed himself
into a serpent, and the battles succeeded which ended
with the victory at Shas-her in the land of Uaua. After
this " Harmakhis came in his bark and landed at Thes-
Hor (the Throne of Horus or Edfu). And Thoth said :
The dispenser of rays who cometh forth from Ea has
conquered the enemy in his form (of a winged disc) ;
let him be named henceforward the dispenser of rays
who cometh forth from the horizon. And Ea said to
Thoth : Bring this sun (the winged disk) to every place
where I am, to the seats of the gods in Southern Egypt,
to the seats of the gods in Northern Egypt, (to the seats
of the gods) in the other world, that it may drive all evil
from its neighbourhood. Thoth brought it accordingly
to all places, as many as exist where there are gods and
goddesses. It is the winged solar disc which is placed
over the sanctuaries of all gods and goddesses in Egypt,
since these sanctuaries are also that of Hor-Behudet." l
The legend is a curious combination of the traditions
relative to the conquest of the neolithic population by
the Pharaonic Egyptians, of the myth of Osiris, of
etymological speculations about the meaning of certain
proper names, and of an attempt to explain the origin of
the winged solar disc. We may gather from it that the
disc was first used as an ornament at Edfu, and that it
was believed, like the winged bulls of Assyria, to have
the power of preventing the demons of evil from passing
the door over which it was placed. Whether, however,
this was one of the superstitions of the older people, or
whether it was brought by the conquerors from their
1 Naville, My the cC Horus, pis. 12-18 ; Bmgsch, Alkandlunyen der
Gotting. gelelirt. Akadcmic, xiv.
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 225
Babylonian home, is doubtful; perhaps the fact that the
disc was a symbolic and architectural ornament, and was
confined, so far as we know, to the temples of the official
gods, points in the latter direction. It is otherwise with
the temple relics mentioned in a legend which has been
preserved on a granite shrine of the Ttolemaic epoch,
that long served as a water-trough by the side of the
well at El-Arish. The temple from which it originally
came was that of At-Nebes, the sacred name of the city
of Qesem or Goshen, now Saft el-Henna. The legend
begins by describing the reign of Shu, who fortified At-
Nebes against " the children of Apophis," the Semites of
" the red desert," who came from the East " at nightfall
upon the road of At-Nebes " to invade Egypt. Here he
dwelt in. his palace, and from hence he " ascended into
heaven," when he had grown old and the time had come
for him to die. He was succeeded by his son Seb, who
" discussed the history of the city with the gods who
attended him, (and they told him) all that happened
when the Majesty of Ea was in At-Nebes, the conflicts
of the king Turn in this locality, the valour of the
Majesty of Shu in this city . . . (and the wonders that)
the serpent-goddess Ankhet had done for Ea when he
was with her; the victories of the Majesty of Shu,
smiting the evil ones, when he placed her upon his brow.
Then said the Majesty of Seb : I also (will place) her
upon my head, even as my father Shu did. Seb entered
the temple of Aart (Lock of Hair) together with the gods
that were with him ; then he stretched forth his hand to
take the casket in which (Ankhet) was; the serpent
came forth and breathed its vapour on the Majesty of
Seb, confounding him greatly ; those who followed him
fell dead, and his Majesty himself was burned in that
day. When his Majesty had fled to the north of At-
Nebes, with the fire of the cobra upon him, behold, when
15
226 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
he came to the fields of henna, the pain of his burn was
not yet assuaged, and the gods who followed him said
unto him : Come, let them take the lock (aart) of
Ea which is there, when thy Majesty shall go to see
it and its mystery, and his Majesty shall be healed (as
soon as it is placed) upon thee. So the Majesty of Seb
caused the magic lock of hair to be brought to Pa-Aart
(the House of the Lock), for which was made that reli
quary of hard stone which is hidden in the secret place
of Pa-Aart, in the district of the divine lock of the god
Ea ; and behold the fire departed from the limbs of the
Majesty of Seb. And many years afterwards, when this
lock of hair was brought back to Pa-Aart in At-Nebes,
and cast into the great lake of Pa-Aart, whose name is
the Dwelling of Waves, in order that it might be purified,
behold the lock became a crocodile ; it flew to the water
and became Sebek, the divine crocodile of At-Nebes/ 1
Inside the shrine is a picture of the two relics, the
cobra which adorned the head-dress of the Pharaoh, and
the aart or lock of hair which was supposed to give its
name to the temple. They were doubtless preserved at
At-Nebes, and shown to the faithful as the veritable
objects which had proved the bane and the antidote of
the god Seb. They introduce us to a side of Egyptian
religion which, though essentially characteristic of the
popular faith, had also received the sanction of the
official creed. The belief in amulets and charms was too
deeply engrained in the popular mind to be ignored ;
they were consequently taken under the patronage of the
gods, and a theory was invented to explain their efficacy.
Already the later chapters of the Book of the Dead are
concerned with the various amulets which were necessary
1 Griffith, " Minor Explorations," in the Seventh Memoir of the Egypt
Exploration Fund (1890), pp. 71-73 ; Maspero, Dawn of Civilisation,
pp. 169-171.
THE POPULAR RELIGION OF EGYPT 227
to the preservation or resuscitation of the body ; and even
if the latter were regarded as symbolic, they were con
crete symbols symbols, that is to say, which actually
possessed the virtues ascribed to them. Just as the
name was a concrete entity, expressive of the very
essence of the thing to which it was applied, so too the
symbol was an entity with a concrete existence of its
own. The materialistic tendency of Egyptian thought,
added to the fetishism of the earlier stratum of native
religion, produced this result. The doctrine of the Ka
furnished a theory by which the educated classes could
explain the efficacy of the amulet and the active virtues
of the symbol. It was the Ka, the spiritual and yet
materialised double, of the amulet that worked the
charm that made the scarab, for instance, a substitute
for the living heart, or the dad the symbol of stability
a passport to the other world. 1
The amulets buried with the dead, the relics preserved
in the temples, had originally been the fetishes of the
earlier population of Egypt. They hardly changed their
character when they became symbols endowed with
mysterious properties, or relics of the State gods which
still possessed miraculous powers. The peasant might be
told in the ritual of Amon : in " the sanctuary of the
god clamour is an abomination to him : pray for thyself
with a loving heart, in which the words remain hidden ;
that he may supply thy need, hear thy words and accept
thine offering " ; 2 but it was a teaching that was far
1 Of. the 155th chapter of the Book of the Dead : "These words must
be spoken over a gilded dad, which is made from the heart of a sycamore
and hung round the neck of the dead. Then shall he pass through the
gates of the other world." When this chapter was written, however,
the real origin of the dad a row of four columns had been forgotten,
and it was imagined to represent the backbone of Osiris. We are trans
ported by it into the full bloom of religious symbolism.
2 Erman, Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng. tr., p. 273.
228 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
above him. When he entered the sanctuary it was to
see the processions of the priests and the relics preserved
in it, and it was in these relics that he still put his trust.
It was not only in Ethiopia that there were moving
and speaking statues which elected the king by taking
him by the hand ; in Thebes itself, under the priestly
kings of the Twentieth Dynasty, we find wonder-work
ing statues whose reality was guaranteed by the priest
hood. One of them, it was said, was sent to Asia, where
it delivered a king s daughter from the demon that
possessed her, and afterwards returned in a moment to
Thebes of its own accord ; while others answered the
questions addressed to them by nodding the head, or even
pronounced prophecies regarding the future. 1 Indeed, as
we have seen, the old theory of the ka implied that the
statue of the dead man could be reanimated in a sense by
his spirit ; and a text at Dendera speaks of the soul of
Hathor descending from heaven as a human-headed hawk
of lapis-lazuli, and uniting itself with her image. The
peasant, therefore, might be excused if he remained true
to the superstitions and traditions of his ancestors, and
left the official religion, with its one ineffable god, to
those who were cultured enough to understand it. Like
the peasant of modern Italy, he was content with a
divinity that he could see and handle, and about whose
wonder-working powers he had no doubt. Materialism
is the basis of primitive religion ; the horizon of primitive
man is limited, and he has not yet learnt to separate
thought from the senses through which alone his narrow
world is known to him. The simple faith of a child
often wears a very materialistic form.
1 See Maspero, fitudes de Mytliologic et d ArcTieologie egyptiennes, i.
pp. 82-89.
LECTUEE X.
THE PLACE OF EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN THE HISTORY
OF THEOLOGY.
v IN the preceding lectures I have endeavoured to bring
Before you the more salient points in the religion of the
ancient Egyptians, in so far as they illustrate their con
ception of the divine. But we must remember that all
such descriptions of ancient belief must be approximate
only. We cannot put ourselves in the position of those
who held it ; our inherited experiences, our racial ten
dencies, our education and religious ideas, all alike forbid
it. If the Egyptians of the Theban period found it
difficult to understand the ritual of their own earlier
history, and misinterpreted the expressions and allusions
in it, how much more difficult must it be for us to do so.
The most ordinary religious terms do not bear for us the
same meaning that they bore for the Egyptians. The
name of God calls up other associations and ideas ; the
very word " divine " has a different signification in the
ancient and the modern world among Eastern and Western
peoples. In fact, the more literal is our translation of
an old religious text, the more likely we are to mis
understand it. \
And yet in one sense we are the religious heirs of the
builders and founders of the Egyptian temples. Many
of the theories of Egyptian religion, modified and trans
formed no doubt, have penetrated into the theology of
Christian Europe, and form, as it were, part of the woof in
221)
230 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
the web of modern religious thought. Christian theology
was largely organised and nurtured in the schools of
Alexandria, and Alexandria was not only the meeting-
place of East and West, it was also the place where the
decrepit theology of Egypt was revivified by contact with
the speculative philosophy of Greece. The Egyptian,
the Greek, and the Jew met there on equal terms,
and the result was a theological system in which each
had his share. In Philo, we are told, we find Moses
Platonising ; but the atmosphere in which he did so was
that of the old Egyptian faith. And what was true of
the philosophy of Philo was still more true of the philo
sophy of Alexandrine Christianity.
You cannot but have been struck by the similarity of
the ancient Egyptian theory of the spiritual part of man
to that which underlies so much Christian speculation on
the subject, and which still pervades the popular theology
of to-day. There is the same distinction between soul and
spirit, the same belief in the resurrection of a material
body, and in a heaven which is but a glorified counterpart
of our own earth. Perhaps, however, the indebtedness of
Christian theological theory to ancient Egyptian dogma
is nowhere more striking than in the doctrine of the
Trinity. The very terms used of it by Christian theo
logians meet us again in the inscriptions and papyri
of Egypt.
Professor Maspero has attempted to show that the
Egyptian doctrine of the Trinity was posterior to that of
the Ennead. 1 Whether this were so or not, it makes its
appearance at an early date in Egyptian theology, and
was already recognised in the Pyramid texts. Originally
the trinity was a triad like those we find in Babylonian
mythology. Here and there the primitive triads survived
into historical times, like that of Khnum and the two
1 See above, p. 90.
EGYPTIAN KELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 231
goddesses of the Cataract. But more frequently the
trinity was an artificial creation, the formation of which
can still be traced. Thus at Thebes the female element
in it was found in Mut, " the mother " goddess, a title of
the supreme goddess of Upper Egypt ; while Khonsu, the
moon-god, or Mentu, the old god of the nome, became the
divine son, and so took a place subordinate to that of
the local god Amon. Sometimes recourse was had to
grammar, and the second person in the trinity was
obtained by attaching the feminine suffix to the name of
the chief god. In this way Anion-fc was grammatically
evolved from Amon, and even Ea-t from Ea. Elsewhere
an epithet of the god was transformed into his son ; at
Memphis, for example, Imhotep, " he who comes in peace,"
a title of Ptah, became his son and the second person in
the trinity. Other members of the trinity were fetched
from neighbouring cities and nomes ; Nit of Sais had
Osiris as a husband, and Sekhet of Letopolis and Bast of
Bubastis were successively regarded as the wives of Ptah.
The triad consisted of a divine father, wife, and son.
It was thus a counterpart of the human family, and
belonged to the same order of ideas as that which
explained the creation of the world by a process of
generation. This was the cosmology of Heliopolis, and
it is probable that to Heliopolis also we must ascribe the
doctrine of the Trinity. At any rate the doctrine seems
to have been solar in its origin. As Turn, the god of
sunset, was identical with Khepera, the sun of the morn
ing, and Ea, the sun of the noonday, all three being
but one god under diverse forms, so the divine father
was believed to engender himself in the person of the
divine son, and the divine mother to be one with the
divine father and son. The divine essence remained
necessarily the same, whatever might be the forms or
names under which it displayed itself ; and the name, it
232 THE KELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
must be remembered, had for the Egyptian a separate
and real existence. The father became the son and the
son the father through all time, and of both alike the
mother was but another form. It was eternal father
hood, eternal motherhood, and eternal generation. The
development of the doctrine was assisted by that identi
fication of the Egyptian deities with the sun-god which
ended in solar pantheism, as well as by the old theory of
the ka, of a personality distinguishable from that to
which it belonged, identical with that of which it was the
double, and yet at the same time enjoying an independent
existence of its own.
With the spread of the Osirian form of faith the doctrine
of the Trinity became universal throughout Egypt. The
organisation of the faith had included the reduction of
the cycle of divinities connected with Osiris into a trinity.
Thoth and Anubis, Nebhat and Set, were separated from
him, and henceforth he was made the head of a triad,
in which Isis was the second person, and Horus, the
avenger of his father, was the third. How completely
the father and son were merged together may be seen from
a hymn to Horus which has been translated by Chabas l -
" The gods are joyous at the arrival of Osiris,
the son of Home, the intrepid,
the truth-speaking, the son of Isis, the heir of Osiris. The
divine chiefs join him,
the gods recognise the omnipotent child himself . . .
the reign of justice belongs to him.
Horus has found his justification, to him is given the title
of his father ;
he appears with the ^/-crown by order of Seb. He takes
the royalty of the two worlds,
the crown of Upper Egypt is placed upon his head.
He judges the world as he likes,
heaven and earth are beneath his eye,
1 Records of the Past, first series, ii.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 233
he commands mankind the intellectual beings, the race of
the Egyptians and the northern barbarians.
The circuit of the solar disc is under his control ;
the winds, the waters, the wood of the plants, and all vege
tables . . .
Sanctifying, beneficent is his name . . .
evil flies afar off, and the earth brings forth abundantly
under her lord.
Justice is confirmed by its lord, who chases away iniquity.
Mild is thy heart, (Osiris) Un-nefer, son of Isis ;
he has taken the crown of Upper Egypt ; for him is acknow-
leged the authority of his father in the great dwelling of
Seb ;
he is Ra when speaking, Thoth when writing ; the divine
chiefs are at rest."
Here Osiris is identified with Horus, and so becomes the
son of his own wife.
The Egyptian trinity has thus grown out of the triad
under the influence of the solar theology, and of the old
conception of a personality which possessed a concrete
form. Once introduced into the Osirian creed, it spread
with it throughout Egypt, and became a distinguishing
feature of Egyptian theology. Along with the doctrines
of the resurrection of the body and of a judgment to come,
it passed into the schools of Alexandria, and was there
thrown into the crucible of Greek philosophy. The
Platonic doctrine of ideas was adapted to the Egyptian
doctrine of personality, and the three persons of the
trinity became Unity, Mind, and Soul absolute thought,
absolute reason, and absolute energy. 1
But while, on the one hand, there is continuity between
the religious thought of ancient Egypt and the religious
thought of the world of to-day, there is also continuity,
on the other hand, between the religion of Egypt and that
of primitive Babylonia. In the course of these lectures
I have more than once pointed to the fact : the Pharaonic
1 See Cudworth s translation of lamblichus.
234 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Egyptians were of Asiatic origin, and they necessarily
brought with them the religious ideas of their Eastern
home. As we come to know more both of early Baby
lonian civilisation and of the beginnings of Egyptian
history, we shall doubtless discover that the links between
them are closer than we at present imagine, and much
that is now obscure will become clear and distinct.
Meanwhile there is one link which I cannot pass over.
Astro-theology once played a considerable part in the
religion of the Egyptians. In the historical age it has
lost its importance ; the stars have been identified with
the official deities, who have accordingly absorbed their
individual attributes ; but echoes of the worship formerly
paid to them are still heard in the Pyramid texts. Sahu
or Orion is still remembered as a mighty hunter, whose
hunting-ground was the plain of heaven, and whose prey
were the gods themselves. When he rises, it is said in
the Pyramid of Unas, "the stars fight together, and
the archers patrol " the sky which drops with rain ; the
smaller stars which form his constellation pursue and
lasso the gods as the human hunter lassoes the wild bull ;
they slay and disembowel their booty, and boil the flesh
in glowing caldrons. The " greater gods " are hunted
" in the morning," those of less account at mid-day, the
" lesser gods " " at evening, and Sahu refreshes himself
with the divine banquet," feeding on their bodies and
absorbing " their magic virtues." " The great ones
of the sky " launch " the flames against the caldrons
wherein are the haunches of the followers " of the gods ;
the pole-star, " who causes the dwellers in the sky to
march in procession round " Orion, " throws into the
caldron the legs of their wives." l We are transported
to the cannibal s kitchen of some African chieftain, such
1 Maspero, "La Pyramide <lu Roi Ounas," in the Rccucil de Travaux,
iv. pp. 59-61.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 235
as that represented on a curious stela found in Darfur,
and now in the museum of Constantinople. The whole
description takes us back to a period in the history of
Egypt long anterior to that of the Pyramids, when the
Pharaonic invaders were first beginning to mingle with
the older population of the land and become acquainted
with its practices. In the days of Unas the real
meaning of the expressions handed down by theological
conservatism had been forgotten, or was interpreted
metaphorically ; but they remained to prove that the age
when Orion was still an object of worship superior to
the gods of heaven was one which went back to the very
dawn of Pharaonic history. The cult of the stars must
have been brought by " the followers of Horus " from
their Asiatic home. 1
The fame of Orion was eclipsed in later days by that
of Sopd or Sirius. But this had its reason in the physio-
graphical peculiarities of Egypt. The heliacal rising of
Sirius, the Dog Star, that is to say, its first appearance
along with the sun, corresponded with the rise of the Nile
in Upper Egypt, and accordingly became a mark of time,
1 Elsewhere in the Pyramid texts the Akhimu-seku or planets of the
northern hemisphere are identified with the gods (Unas 218-220) ; Unas
himself rises as a star (Unas 391) ; Sirius is the sister of Pepi (Pepi 172);
while the Khu or luminous spirits are identified with the planets (Tcta
289). We hear of the " fields of the stars" (Unas 419), of the morning
star in the fields of Alu (Pepi 80), and of Akhimt, the grammatically-
formed wife of Akhim " planet," who is associated with " Babi, the lord
of night" (Unas 645, 646). One of the constellations frequently men
tioned in the Pyramid texts is " the Bull of heaven," which was also an
important constellation in early Babylonian astronomy, where the name
formed part of an astronomical system ; in Unas 421 the " Bull of
heaven" is called the An or "column" of Heliopolis. We hear also of
"the fresh water of the stars" (Unas 210). With the latter maybe
compared the goddess Qebhu, or " Fresh Water," the daughter of Anubis,
the primitive god of the dead, who poured forth the liquid from four
vases (Pepi 393). With the name of the goddess the symbol of the
Antaeopolite norne of Upper Egypt is associated.
236 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
and the starting-point of the solar year. Its importance
therefore was great, not only for the calendar, but also
for those agricultural operations upon which the very
existence of Egypt depended. We need not wonder,
accordingly, if with the settlement of the Pharaonic
Egyptians in the valley of the Nile the worship and
name of Orion fell more and more into the background,
while that of Sirius became pre-eminent. How far back
the pre-eminence of Sirius reaches may be gathered from
the fact that the twentieth nome of Northern Egypt
that of Goshen derived its name from a combination of
the mummified hawk of Horus and the cone which, as
Brugsch first showed, 1 represents the shaft of zodiacal
light that accompanies the rising of Sirius before the
dawn of day. Sopd or Sirius is thus identified with the
dead Horus who presided over Nekhen in Upper Egypt,
and preceded Osiris as the god of the dead. 2
Of the other stars and constellations we do not know
much. The Great Bear was called " the haunch of beef,"
and was at times identified with Set, and made the abode
of the souls of the wicked. Not far off was the hippo
potamus, which Brugsch would identify with Draco ;
while among other constellations were to be found the
Lion and the Horus-hawk, as well as a warrior armed
with a spear.
All over the world the more prominent stars and con
stellations have received names. But it is only the more
prominent and brilliant among them of which this is
true. So far as we know, the only people who have ever
systematically mapped out the heavens, dividing the stars
into groups, and giving to each group a name of its own,
were the Babylonians ; and it was from the Babylonians
that the constellations as known to Greeks and Romans,
1 In the Proc. SB A. xv. p. 233.
2 Or rather, perhaps, was the Osiris of primeval Egypt.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 237
to Hindus, or to Chinese, were ultimately derived. The
inference, therefore, is near at hand, that the primitive
Egyptians also were indebted for their map of the sky to
the same source. And the inference is supported by
more than one fact.
On the one side, the names of several of the constella
tions were the same among both Babylonians and
Egyptians. Of this the Twins, Aquarius, or the Family,
are examples, while it can hardly be an accident that
Orion in both systems of astronomy is a giant and a
hunter. " The Bull of heaven " was a Babylonian star,
and Jupiter bore the Sumerian name of Gudi-bir, " the
Bull of light " ; in the Pyramid texts also we have a
" Bull of heaven," the planet Saturn according to Brugsch,
Jupiter according to Lepsius. Still more striking are
the thirty-six Egyptian decans, the stars who watched
for ten days each over the 360 days of the ancient
Egyptian year, and were divided into two classes or
hemispheres, those of the day and those of the night. 1
Not only did the early Chaldaean year similarly consist of
360 days; it too was presided over by thirty-six " coun
cillor " stars, half of which were above the earth, while
the other half were below it. 2 Such a coincidence cannot
have been accidental ; the Babylonian and Egyptian
decans must have had the same origin.
But there was yet a further parallelism between the
stellar theology of Egypt and that of Babylonia. In
1 Lepsius, Chronologic der Aeyyptcr, pp. 78, 79. See Brugsch, Die
Aegyptologie, ii. pp. 339-342.
2 Hommel, Ausland, 1892, p. 102 ; Ginzel, Bcitragc zur alien
Geschichte, i. pp. 12-15. Diodorus (ii. 30) states that the "councillor
gods" were only thirty in number; but the list of planetary stations
discovered by Hommel in WAI. v. 46, shows that the text must be
corrected into thirty-six. Indeed, Diodorus himself adds that every ten
days there was a change of constellation, so that in a year of 360 days
there must have been thirty-six constellations in all.
238 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
both countries the worship of the stars passed into an
astro-theology. The official gods were identified with the
planets and fixed stars, and the stellar cult of the people
was thus absorbed into the State religion. But whereas
this astro-theology was characteristic of Babylonia, it
has done little more than leave its traces on the historical
religion of Egypt. Jupiter, Saturn, and Mars were
identified with Horus under different forms, and Mercury
with Set, while Venus became " the bark (za) l of the
phoenix " or soul " of Osiris." Sirius was made the star
of Tsis, Orion the star of Osiris. But, like the cult of
the stars itself, this astro-theology belongs to a far-off age
in Egyptian history. It is the last faint reflection of a
phase of religious thought which had passed away when
the monumental records first begin.
It is the same with a curious echo of ancient Baby
lonian cosmology, to which Prof. Hommel has drawn our
attention. The old Babylonian Epic of the Creation
begins with the words
" At that time the heaven above was not known by name,
the earth beneath was not named,
in the beginning the deep was their generator,
the chaos of the sea was the mother of them all."
The lines are the introduction to a story of the Creation
of which they form an integral part. On the walls of
the Pyramid of Pepi I. we read again almost the same
words. Pepi, it is said, " was born of his father Turn.
At that time the heaven was not, the earth was not,
men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was no
death." f/L But here the words have been introduced
1 The Egyptian za is the Semitic zl, "ship," from which it seems to
have been borrowed.
2 Maspero, "La Pyramide du Roi Pepi l er " in Recueil dc Travaux,
viii. p. 103.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 239
without connection with the context ; they cohere neither
with what precedes nor with what follows them, and
are evidently nothing but an old formula torn from the
cosmogony to which they once belonged, and repeated
without a clear understanding of what they really meant.
The phrases are found again in the later religious litera
ture of Egypt, embedded in it like flies in amber or the
fossils in an old sea- beach. 1 To recover their original
meaning we must betake ourselves to the clay tablets
of Assyria and Babylonia, and the cosmological theories
of early Chaldiva. They presuppose that story of a crea
tion out of the chaos of the deep which was indigenous
in Babylonia alone.
This deep, which lay at the foundation of Babylonian
cosmology, was symbolised in the temples by a " sea "
across which the images of the gods were carried in
" ships " on their days of festival. In Babylonia such
" seas " had a reason for their existence. The Persian
Gulf, it was believed, was the cradle of Babylonian
culture ; it was also the source of that cosmogony which
saw in the deep the " mother " of all things. That it
should have its mimic representatives in the temples of
the country was but natural ; it was from the " deep "
that the gods had come, and the deep was still the home
of the culture-god Ea. 2
In Egypt, on the other hand, the sea was out of place,
nay more, it was altogether unnatural. If water were
needed, the sacred Nile flowed at the foot of the temple,
or else there were canals which conducted the waters
of the river through the temple lands. There was no
primeval deep to be symbolised, no Persian Gulf out of
1 For instance, in the Rhine! Papyrus : Wiedemann, "Ein altagyptischer
Weltschopfungsinythus," in the Urquell, new ser., ii. p. 64, "Heaven
was not, earth was not, the good and evil serpents did not exist."
2 See above, p. 86.
240 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
which the culture-god had risen with the gifts of civilisa
tion. If the gods desired to sail in their barks, it was
reasonable to suppose that they would do so on the Nile
or its tributary canals. And yet the supposition would
be wrong. The gods had indeed their sacred " ships "
as in Babylonia ; but, as in Babylonia, it was on an
artificially-constructed lake that they floated, and not, as
a rule, on the river Nile. Could anything indicate more
clearly the origin of the religious beliefs and practices of
the Pharaonic Egyptians ? Like the brick tombs of the
Old Empire, with their recessed panels and pilasters, it
points to Babylonia and the cosmological theories which
had their birth in the Babylonian plain. 1
The religion of ancient Egypt is thus no isolated fact.
It links itself, on the one hand, with the beliefs and
religious conceptions of the present, and, on the other
hand, with those of a yet older past. But it is a linking
only ; Egyptian religion is no more the religion of ancient
Babylonia than it is modern Christianity. In Egypt it
assumed a form peculiar to itself, adapting itself to the
superstitions and habits of the earlier- inhabitants of
the land, and developing the ideas which lay latent
within it. It was characterised by the inexorable logic
with which each of these ideas was followed to its
minutest conclusions, and at the same time by the want
of any attempt to harmonise these conclusions one with
the other, however inconsistent they might be. It was
also characterised by a spirit of creativeness ; the Egyp-
1 The serpent with the seven necks (Unas 630, Tcta 305) is the Baby
lonian "serpent with the seven heads, and points to Babylonia, where
alone seven was a sacred number. Other coincidences between Egyptian
and Babylonian mythology that maybe noted are "the tree of life"
(Met n dnTcli) which grew in Alu, and was given by the stars to the dead
that they might live for ever (Pejti 431); and the " great house," the
Babylonian e-gal, which is several times referred to in the Pyramid
texts.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 241
tian created new religious conceptions because he was
not afraid to follow his premisses to their end.
But he was intensely practical. Abstractions as such
had little attraction for him, and he translated them into
material form. The symbolism of his system of writing
favoured the process : even such an abstract idea as that
of " becoming " became for him a " transformation " or
" change of outward shape." In spite, therefore, of the
spirituality and profundity of much of his theology, his
religion remained essentially materialistic. The gods
might indeed pass one into the other and be but the
manifold forms under which the ever-changing divine
essence manifested itself, but this was because it was one
with nature and the infinite variety which nature displays.
Even the supreme god of Khu-n-Aten incorporated him
self at it were in the visible orb of the sun.
The incarnation of the deity accordingly presented no
difficulty to the Egyptian mind. It followed necessarily
from the fundamental principles of his creed. The
divinity which permeated the whole of nature revealed
itself more clearly than elsewhere in that which possessed
life. Egyptian religious thought never quite shook itself
free from the influences of the primitive belief that life
and motion were the same. Whatever moves possesses
life, whatever lives must move ; such was, and still is,
one of the axioms of primitive man. And since the deity
manifested itself in movement, it could be recognised in
whatever was alive. Man on the one side became a god
in the person of the Pharaoh, the gods on the other side
became men who had lived and died like Osiris, or had
ruled over Egypt in the days of old. Even the ordinary
man contained within him a particle or effluence of the
divine essence which could never die ; and the bodily
husk in which it was incarnated could, under certain
conditions, acquire the properties of that divinity to
16
242 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
which it had afforded a home. That the divine essence
could thus assume an individual form, was part of the
doctrine which saw, in the manifold varieties of nature,
the manifestations of a " single god." The belief in the
incarnation of the deity was a necessary consequence of
a materialistic pantheism. And it mattered little whether
the incarnation took place under a human or under an
animal shape ; the human and the animal god had alike
been a heritage from elements which, diverse though they
may have been in origin, combined to form the Egyptian
people, and both the man and the beast were alike living
and therefore divine. The beast was more mysterious
than the man, that was all ; the workings of its mind
were more difficult to comprehend, and the language it
spoke was more unintelligible. But on that very account
it was better adapted for the symbolism which literature
and education encouraged, and which became an essential
part of the texture of Egyptian thought.
If, then, we would understand the conception of the
divine formed by the educated Egyptian of the historical
age, we must remember the characteristics of Egyptian
thought which lay behind it. Materialism and symbolism
constituted the background of Egyptian religion. The
one presupposed the other, for the symbol presented the
abstract idea in a material and visible shape, while the
materialism of the Egyptian mind demanded something
concrete which the senses could apprehend. The concep
tion of the ka, with which Egyptian religion begins, is
characteristic of Egyptian religious thought up to the
last. It is like the " materialised spirits " of modern
spiritualism, spirits which are merely matter in an etheri-
alised form. The Egyptian gave not only shape but
substance to his mental and spiritual creations ; like the
" ideas " of Plato, they became sensuous realities like the
written symbols which expressed them. Not only were
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 243
the name and the thing never dissociated from one
another, the name was looked on as the essence of the
thing, and the name included its expression in both sound
and writing. The bird which represented the idea of
" soul " became in time the soul itself.
This very fact assisted in spiritualising Egyptian re
ligion. Ideas and their symbols interchange one with
the other ; the ideas, moreover, develop and pass out of
one form into another. The identification, therefore, of
the abstract and the concrete, of ideas and substantial
existence, made a pantheistic conception of the universe
easy. The divinity clothed itself in as many forms as
there were symbols to express it, and these forms passed
one into the other like phases of thought. The Egyptian
was the first discoverer of the term " becoming," and the
keynote of his creed was the doctrine of transformation.
Transformation, it must be remembered, is not trans
migration. There was no passage of an individual soul
from body to body, from form to form ; the divine essence
permeated all bodies and forms alike, though it manifested
itself at a given moment only under certain ones. It
was in this power of manifestation that the transformation
consisted. Had the Egyptian not been fettered by his
materialistic symbolism, he \vould doubtless have gone
further and concluded that the various manifestations of
the divinity were subjective only existing, that is to
say, only in the mind of the observer ; as it was, he held
them to be objective, and to possess the same substantial
reality as the symbolic pictures by which they were
denoted.
With all this, however, there was no severe literalism
! in the interpretation of the symbol. Whatever may have
been the case at the outset, the symbol was as much a
metaphor in the historical ages of Egyptian history as are
the metaphors of our own language. When the Egyptian
244 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
spoke of " eating " his god, he meant no more than we do
when we speak of " absorbing " a subject. 1 The Pyramid
texts are full of such faded and forgotten metaphors ; the
Egyptian was conservative above all other men, and the
language of religion is conservative above all others.
Doubtless, in some cases, he was the victim of the symbols
and metaphors he used ; but in this respect he does not
stand alone. Where he has no rival is in the magnitude
of the part played in his religion by the symbol and its
logical development.
It was just this symbolism which enabled him to retain,
on the one hand, all the old formula} with their gross
materialism and childlike views of the universe, and, on
the other hand, to attain to a conception of the divine
being which was at once spiritual and sublime. For
Egyptian religion, as we find it in the monuments of the
educated classes before the decay of the monarchy, was,
in spite of its outward show of symbols and amulets, full
of high thoughts and deep emotions. I cannot do better
than quote the words in which it is described by one of its
least prejudiced students, Professor Maspero : 2 " When we
put aside the popular superstitions and endeavour solely
to ascertain its fundamental doctrines, we soon recognise
that few religions have been so exalted in their principles.
The Egyptians adored a being who was unique, perfect,
endowed with absolute knowledge and intelligence, and
incomprehensible to such an extent that it passes man s
powers to state in what he is incomprehensible. He is
the one of one, he who exists essentially, the only one
who lives substantially, the sole generator in heaven and
earth, who is not himself generated. Always the same,
always immutable in his immutable perfection, always
1 Thus in the Pyramid texts (Unas 518) Unas is described as " eating"
the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.
2 Etudes dc Mytlwloyie ct d Arckeoloyic eyyptienncs, ii. pp. 446, 447.
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 245
present in the past as in the future, he fills the universe
without any form in the world being able to give even a
feeble idea of his immensity ; he is felt everywhere, he
is perceived nowhere.
" Unique in essence, he is not unique in person. He
is father because he exists, and the force of his nature
is such that he is eternally begetting, without ever grow
ing weak or exhausted. He has no need to go outside
himself for this act of generation ; he finds in his own
bosom the material of his perpetual fatherhood. Alone
in the plenitude of his being he conceives his offspring ;
and as in him there can be no distinction between con
ception and birth, from all eternity he produces in
himself another self. He is at once the divine father,
mother, and son. Conceived of God, born of God,
without separating from God, these three persons are
God in God, and, far from dividing the primitive unity
of the divine nature, they all three combine to constitute
his infinite perfection.
" Doubtless the mind of the uneducated classes could
neither understand nor rise to such lofty heights. Human
intelligence supports with difficulty so pure an idea of
an absolute being. All the attributes of divinity his
immensity, his eternity, his independence place him at
an infinite distance from ourselves ; to comprehend and
participate in them, we must make him think as we
think, we must lend him our passions and subject him
to our laws. God must take upon him, with human
nature, all the weaknesses that accompany it, all the
infirmities under which it labours ; in a word, the Word
must become flesh. The immaterial god must incarnate
himself, must come to the land of Egypt and people it
with the gods, his children. Each of the persons of
the primitive trinity thus became independent and
formed a new type, from which, in their turn, other
246 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
lower types emanated. From trinity to trinity, from
personification to personification, that truly incredible
number of divinities was soon reached, with forms
sometimes grotesque and often monstrous, who de
scended by almost insensible degrees from the highest
to the lowest ranks of nature. The scribes, the priests,
the officials, all the educated world, in fact, of Egyptian
society, never professed that gross paganism which caused
Egypt to be called with justice the mother of super
stitions. The various names and innumerable forms
attributed by the multitude to as many distinct and in
dependent divinities, were for them merely names and
forms of one and the same being. God, when he
comes as a generator, and brings to light the latent
forces of the hidden causes, is called Ammon ; when he
is the spirit who embodies all that is intelligent, he is
Imhotep ; when he is he who accomplishes all things
with art and verity, he is Phthah ; when he is God good
and beneficent, he is Osiris. What the scribe means by
these words is the mysterious infinite which animates
the universe, the eternal, impenetrable to eyes of flesh,
but perceived vaguely by the eyes of the spirit. Behind
the sensuous appearance, behind the manifestation of the
divine nature wherein the popular imagination fancied
it saw that nature itself, he beheld confusedly a being
obscure and sublime, a full comprehension of whom is
denied him, and the feeling of this incomprehensible
presence lends to his prayer a deep and thrilling accent,
a sincerity of thought and emotion, a thousand times
more touching than that medley of amorous puerilities, of
mystic languors and morbid contrition, which is so often
the substitute for religious poetry."
There were two deep-rooted conceptions in the
Egyptian mind which had much to do with the purity
and sublimity of his religious ideas. One of these was
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 247
the conception of a divine law which governed the
universe, and to which the gods themselves had to sub
mit. The other was that of a moral God, of a " good
being " who rewarded not piety but uprightness, and
punished iniquity. The world was ordered and con
trolled, not by chance or caprice, but by a fixed law,
which was, characteristically enough, impersonated in the
goddess Mat. And this law, unlike the blind destiny of
the Greek or Eoman, was at once divine and moral ; it
not only represented the order of the universe, against
which there was no appeal, but it also represented an
order which was in accordance with justice and truth.
The law which all must obey under penalty of being
cast into outer darkness, was an intelligent and moral
law ; it commended itself necessarily and instinctively
to all intelligent beings whose thoughts, words, and deeds
were alike righteous. Only those who had conformed
to it could be admitted after death into the paradise of
Osiris or into the company of the gods, and the seal of
justification was the pronouncement that the dead man
had " spoken the truth," and that his confession in the
judgment-hall of Osiris had been in agreement with the
truth and with the eternal order of the universe.
Of the moral character of the Osirian creed I have
already spoken. It is the first official recognition by
religion that what God requires is uprightness of conduct
and not ceremonial orthodoxy, the first identification of
religion with morality. And the god who required this
uprightness of conduct was not a " lord of hosts," who
compelled adoration by the display of his power, but
Un-nefer, " the good being," who existed in order to do
good to men. In the conflict with evil he had ap
parently been worsted; but though he had died a
shameful death, his disciples believed that it had been
endured on their behalf, and that for those who followed
248 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
in his footsteps, and whose lives resembled his, he had
provided a better and a happier Egypt in another world,
into which sin and pain and death could not enter, and
where he ruled eternally over the cities and fields of the
blest.
In the Osirian creed, writer after writer has dis
covered " fore-gleams " of Christianity more striking even
than the doctrine of the Trinity, which belongs to the
philosophy of faith. But there is nothing wonderful in
the continuity of religious thought. One of the chief
lessons impressed upon us by the science of the century
which lias just passed away, is that of continuity;
throughout the world of nature there is no break, no
isolated link in the long chain of antecedent and con
sequent, and still less is there any in the world of
thought. Development is but another name for the
continuity which binds the past to the present with
stronger fetters than those of destiny. It is not only
the philosophy of Christianity, or the wider and more
general doctrines of its creed, which find an echo in the
religion of ancient Egypt ; in details also Egypt is
linked with the modem world. Long before the Hebrew
prophets pictured the kingdom of the Messiah, an
Egyptian poet, in the reign of Thothmes in., had said :
" A king shall come from the south, Ameni, the truth-
declaring, by name. He shall be the son of a woman
of Nubia, and will be born in [the south]. ... He
shall assume the crown of Upper Egypt, and lift up the
red crown of the north. He shall unite the double
crown. . . . The people of the age of the son of man
shall rejoice and establish his name for all eternity.
They shall be removed far from evil, and the wicked
shall humble their mouths for fear of him. The Asiatics
shall fall before his blows, and the Libyans before his
flame. The wicked shall wait on his judgments, the
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 249
rebels on has power. The royal serpent on his brow
shall pacify the revolted. A wall shall be built, even
that of the prince, that the Asiatics may no more enter
into Egypt." l
Yet more striking is the belief in the virgin-birth of
the god Pharaoh, which goes back at least to the time of
the Eighteenth Dynasty. On the western wall of one
of the chambers in the southern portion of the temple
of Luxor, Champollion first noticed that the birth of
Amon - hotep m. is portrayed. The inscriptions and
scenes which describe it have since been copied, and we
learn from them that he had no human father ; Amon
himself descended from heaven and became the father
of the future king. His mother was still a virgin when
the god of Thebes "incarnated himself," so that she
might " behold him in his divine form." And then the
hieroglyphic record continues with words that are put
into the mouth of the god. " Amon -hotep," he is made
to say, " is the name of the son who is in thy womb.
He shall grow up according to the words that proceed
out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and
righteousness in this laud unto its very end. My soul
is in him, (and) he shall wear the twofold crown of
royalty, ruling the two worlds like the sun for ever." 2
1 Golenischefl , in the Recueilde Travaux, xv. pp. 88, 89. The passage is
found in Papyrus 1116 of the Hermitage at St. Petersburg. The words
" son of man " are a literal translation of the original si-n-sa.
2 For the scenes accompanying the text, see Gayet, "Le Temple de
Louxor," in the Memoires de la Mission ardieoloyique frangaise au Caire,
xv. 1, pi. Ixxi., where, however, the copy of the inscriptions is very
incorrect. My translation is made from a copy of my own. The whole
inscription is as follows: "Said by Amon-Ra, etc.: He (the god) has
incarnated himself in the royal person of this husband, Thothmes iv., etc. ;
he found her lying in her beauty ; he stood beside her as a god. She has
fed upon sweet odours emanating from his majesty. He has gone to her
that he may be a father through her. He caused her to behold him in
his divine form when he had gone upon her that she might bear a child
250 THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
But Amon-hotep in. was not the first of whom it had
been said that his father was a god. Fragments of a
similar text have been found by Dr. Naville at Der el-
Bahari, from which we may gather that queen Hatshepsu
also claimed to have been born of Amon. How much
further back in Egyptian history the belief may go we
do not know : the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties
called themselves sons of the sun-god, and the Theban
monarchs whose virgin-mothers were wedded to Amon,
incarnate in the flesh, did but work out the old con
ception in a more detailed and definite way.
It was given to the Egyptians to be one among the
few inventive races of mankind. They were pioneers
of civilisation ; above all, they were the inventors of
religious ideas. The ideas, it is true, were not self-
evolved ; they presupposed beliefs which had been be
queathed by the past ; but their logical development and
the forms which they assumed were the work of the
Egyptian people. We owe to them the chief moulds
into which religious thought has since been thrown.
The doctrines of emanation, of a trinity wherein one god
manifests himself in three persons, of absolute thought
as the underlying and permanent substance of all things,
all go back to the priestly philosophers of Egypt.
Gnosticism and Alexandrianism, the speculations of
at the sight of his beauty. His lovableness penetrated her flesh, filling
it with the odour of all his perfumes of Punt.
"Said by Mut-em-ua before the majesty of this august god Amon, etc.,
the twofold divinity : How great is thy twofold will, how [glorious thy]
designs in making thy heart repose upon me ! Thy dew is upon all my
flesh in ... This royal god has done all that is pleasing to him with her.
"Said by Amon before her majesty : Amon-hotep is the name of the son
which is in thy womb. This child shall grow up according to the words
which proceed out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and
righteousness in this land unto its very end. My soul is in him : he shall
wear the twofold crown of royalty, ruling the two lands like the sun
for ever."
EGYPTIAN RELIGION IN HISTORY OF THEOLOGY 251
Christian metaphysic and the philosophy of Hegel, have
their roots in the valley of the Nile. The Egyptian
thinkers themselves, indeed, never enjoyed the full
fruition of the ideas they had created ; their eyes were
blinded by the symbolism which had guided their first
efforts, their sight was dulled by overmuch reverence
for the past, and the materialism which came of a
contentment with this life. They ended in the scepti
cism of despair or the prosaic superstitions of a decadent
age. But the task which dropped from their hands was
taken up by others; the seeds which they had sown
were not allowed to wither, and, like the elements of
our culture and civilisation, the elements also of our
modes of religious thought may be traced back to the
" dwellers on the Nile." We are heirs of the civilised
past, and a goodly portion of that civilised past was the
creation of ancient Egypt.
PART II.
THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS.
LECTURE I.
INTRODUCTORY.
It is now fourteen years ago since I delivered a course
of lectures for the Hibbert Trustees on the religion of
the ancient Babylonians. The subject at that time was
almost untouched ; even such materials as were then
accessible had been hardly noticed, and no attempt
had been made to analyse or reduce them to order,
much less to draw up a systematic account of ancient
Babylonian religion. It was necessary to lay the very
foundations of the study before it could be undertaken,
to fix the characteristic features of the Babylonian faith
and the lines along which it had developed, and, above
all, to distinguish the different elements of which it
was composed. The published texts did not suffice for
such a work ; they needed to be supplemented from that
great mass of unpublished cuneiform documents with
which the rooms of our museums are filled. My lectures
were necessarily provisional and preliminary only, and I
had to content myself with erecting a scaffold on which
others might build. The time had not yet come for
writing a systematic description of Babylonian religion,
and of the phases through which it passed during the
long centuries of its existence.
252
INTRODUCTORY 253
Nor has the time come yet. The best proof of this
is the unsatisfactory nature of the attempts that have
recently been made to accomplish the task. Our evi
dence is still too scanty and imperfect, the gaps in it
are too numerous, to make anything of the sort possible.
Our knowledge of the religious beliefs of Babylonia and
Assyria is at best only piecemeal. Now and again we
have inscriptions which illustrate the belief of a parti
cular epoch or of a particular class, or which throw light
on a particular side of the official or popular religions ;
but such rays of light are intermittent, and they pene
trate the darkness only to be succeeded by a deeper
obscurity than before. All we can hope to do is to
discover the leading conceptions which underlay the
religion of Babylonia in its various forms, to determine
and distinguish the chief elements that went to create
it, and to picture those aspects of it on which our
documentary materials cast the most light. But any
thing like a systematic description of Babylonian religion
will for many years to come be altogether out of the
question ; it must wait until the buried libraries of
Chaldrea have been excavated, and all their contents
studied. We are but at the beginning of discoveries,
and the belief that our present conclusions are final is
the belief of ignorance.
As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, the first
endeavour of the student of ancient Babylonian religion
must be to distinguish between the Semitic and non-
Semitic elements embodied in it. And before we can
do this we must also distinguish between the Semitic
and non-Semitic elements in our sources of information.
This was the principal task to which I applied myself,
and the failure to recognise the necessity of it has been
the main cause of the little progress that has been made
in the study of the subject. Since I wrote the means
254 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
for undertaking the task with success have been multi
plied ; thanks to the excavations of the French and
American explorers, the pre-Sernitic world of Babylonia
has been opened out to us in a way of which we could
not have dreamed ; and numberless texts have been
found which belong to the early days of Sumerian or
non-Semitic culture. We are no longer confined to the
editions of Sumerian texts made in later times by
Semitic scribes ; we now have before us the actual
inscriptions which were engraved when Sumerian princes
still ruled the land, and the Sumerian language was still
spoken by their subjects. We can read in them the
names of the gods they worshipped, and the prayers
which they offered to the spirits of heaven. The
materials are at last at hand for determining in some
measure what is Sumerian and what is Semitic, and
what again may be regarded as a mixture or amalga
mation of both.
But though the materials are at hand, it will be long
before they can all be examined, much less thoroughly
criticised. I cannot emphasise too strongly the pro
visional and imperfect character of our present knowledge
of Babylonian literature. Thousands of tablets are lying
in the museums of Europe and America, which it will
take years of hard work on the part of many students
to copy and read. At Tello, 1 M. de Sarzec found a
library of more than 30,000 tablets, which go back to
the days of the priest-king Gudea ; and the great temple
of Bel at Nippur in Northern Babylonia has yielded five
times as many more to the American excavators. Other
excavations by natives or Turkish officials have at the
same time brought to light multitudinous tablets from
other ancient sites, from Jokha, near the Shatt el-Hai,
1 Also written Telloh, on the assumption that the second syllable
represents loh, " a tablet." But the native pronunciation is Tello.
INTRODUCTORY 255
and from the ruins of the temple of Nebo at Borsippa.
It is true that a large proportion of these tablets are
contracts and similar business documents, but they con
tain much that is of importance not only for the social
history of Babylonia, but for its religious history as well.
Meanwhile the vast number of texts which have come
from the mounds of Nineveh and Sippara is still but
imperfectly known ; it is only within the last three years
that the catalogue of the Kouyunjik collection of tablets,
which have been in the British Museum for almost half
a century, has been at last completed in five portly
volumes ; and there still remain the numberless tablets
from Babylonia which line the Museum shelves. And
even of what has been catalogued there is much which
has not yet been fully copied or examined. The British
Museum, moreover, is no longer the sole repository of
Babylonian literature. The Louvre, the Berlin Museum,
and the American University of Pennsylvania, are equally
filled with the clay tablets of the Babylonian scribes ;
while the collection in the Museum of Constantinople
far exceeds those which have been formed elsewhere.
Even private individuals have their collections of larger
or less extent ; that of Lord Amherst of Hackney, for
example, would have made the fortune of one of the
great museums of the world but a few years ago.
It is evident that it will be long before more than
a fraction of this vast and ever-accumulating literature
can be adequately studied. And what adds to the
difficulty is that it is still increasing year by year. At
present there are as many as three exploring expeditions
in Babylonia, M. de Sarzec s successor on behalf of
the French Government is still carrying on work at
Tello, the ancient Lagas, which was begun as far back
as 1877 ; the Americans are continuing their excavations
at Nippur, where, ever since 1888, they have been
256 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
excavating for the first time on a thoroughly systematic
and scientific plan ; and now the Germans have com
menced work at Babylon itself, and have already fixed
the site of the temple of Bel-Merodach and of that
palace of Nebuchadrezzar in which Alexander the Great
died. 1 Even while I am writing, the news has come
of the discovery of a great library at Nippur, which
seems to have been buried under the ruins of the
building in which it was kept as far back as the
Abrahamic age. The mounds in which it has been
found lie to the south-west of the great temple of Bel.
Already nearly 20,000 tablets have been rescued from
it, and it is calculated that at least 130,000 are yet
to be disinterred. The tablets lie in order upon the
clay shelves on which they were arranged in the days
of Khammurabi, the Amraphel of Genesis ; 2 and, so far
as they have been examined by Professor Hilprecht, it
would appear that they relate to all the various branches
of knowledge which were known and studied at the
time. History, chronology, religion and literature,
philology and law, are all alike represented in them.
When we remember that the catastrophe which over
whelmed them occurred more than two thousand years
before the Christian era, we may well ask what new and
unexpected information the future has in store for us,
and hesitate about coming to conclusions which the
discovery of to-morrow may overthrow. We know but
1 The palace is represented by the mound called El-Qasr, the temple by
that called Tell Ainrau ibn Ali.
2 The name of Khammu-rabi or Ammu-rabi is written Amimi-rapi in
Harper, Letters, iii. p. 257, No. 255 (K 552), as was first noticed by Dr.
Pinches (see the Proc. of the Society of Biblical Archccolot/y, May 1901,
p. 191) ; Dr. Lindl suggests that the final -I of the Hebrew form is derived
from the title ilu, " god," so often given to the king. Professor Hommel
further points out that the character be with which the final syllable of the
royal name is sometimes written also had the value of %ril.
INTRODUCTORY 257
a tithe of what the monuments of Babylonia have yet
to reveal to us, and much that we seem to know to-day
will be profoundly modified by the knowledge we shall
hereafter possess.
The imperfection of his materials places the student
of Babylonian religion at a greater disadvantage than
the student of Babylonian history or social life. The
facts once obtained in the field of history or of social
life remain permanently secured ; the theories based
upon them may have to be changed, but the facts
themselves have been acquired by science once for all.
But a religious fact is to a large extent a matter of
interpretation, and the interpretation depends upon the
amount of the evidence at our disposal as well as upon
the character of the evidence itself. Moreover, the
history of religion is a history of spiritual and intel
lectual development ; it deals with ideas and dogmas
which shift and change with the process of the ages, and
take as it were the colour of each succeeding century.
The history of religion transports us out of what German
metaphysicians would call the " objective " world into
the " subjective " world of thought and belief ; it is not
sufficient to know the literal meaning of its technical
terms, or the mere order and arrangement of its rites
and ceremonies ; we have to discover what were the
religious conceptions that were connected with the
terms, and the dogmas that underlay the performance
of a particular rite. A mere barren list of divine names
and titles, or even the assurance that theology had
identified certain gods with one another, will not carry
us very far ; at most they are but the dry bones of
a theological system, which must be made to live before
they can tell us what that system actually was.
The study of ancient Babylonian religion is thus
beset with many difficulties. Our materials are im-
17
258 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
perfect, and yet at the same time are perpetually grow
ing ; the religious system to which they relate is a
combination of two widely different forms of faith,
characteristic of two entirely different races ; and before
we can understand it properly, we must separate the
elements of which it consists, and assign to each their
chronological position. The very fact, however, that
religious texts are usually of immemorial antiquity, and
that changes inevitably pass over them as they are
handed down in successive editions, makes such a task
peculiarly difficult. Nevertheless it is a task which must
be undertaken before we have the right to draw a con
clusion from the texts with which we deal. We must
first know whether they are originally Sumerian or
Semitic, or whether they belong to the age when
Sumerian and Semitic were fused in one ; whether, again,
they are composite or the products of a single author
and epoch ; whether, lastly, they have been glossed and
interpolated, and their primitive meaning transformed.
We must have a chronology for our documents as well as
an ethnology, arid beware of transforming Sumerian into
Semitic, or Semitic into Sumerian, or of interpreting the
creations of one age as if they were the creations of
another. The critical examination of the texts must
precede every attempt to write an account of Babylonian
religion, if the account is to be of permanent value.
Unfortunately we have nothing in Babylonia that
corresponds with the Pyramid texts of Egypt. We
have no body of doctrine which, in its existing form, is
coeval with the early days of the monarchy, and can
accordingly be compared with the religious belief and
the religious books of a later time. The Pyramid texts
have enabled us to penetrate behind the classical age of
Egyptian religion, and so trace the development of many
of the dogmas which distinguished the faith of later
INTRODUCTORY 259
epochs ; it is possible that similarly early records of the
official creed may yet be discovered in Babylonia; but
up to the present nothing of the sort has been found.
We are confined there to the texts which have passed
through the hands of countless editors and scribes, or
else to such references to religious beliefs and worship
as can be extracted from the inscriptions of kings and
priests. The sacred books of Babylonia are known to
us only in the form which they finally assumed. The
Babylonian religion with which we are acquainted is
that official theology in which the older Sumerian and
Semitic elements were combined together and worked
into an elaborate system. To distinguish the elements
one from the other, and discover the beliefs and concep
tions which underlie them, is a task of infinite labour and
complexity. But it is a task which cannot be shirked if
we would even begin to understand the nature of Baby
lonian religion, and the fundamental ideas upon which it
rested. We must analyse and reconstruct, must compare
and classify and piece together as best we may, the frag
ments of belief and practice that have come down to us.
Above all, we must beware of confusing the old with the
new, of confounding Sumerian with Semitic, or of ascrib
ing to an earlier epoch the conceptions of a later time.
The picture will be at most but a blurred and muti
lated one. But its main outlines can be fixed, and with
the progress of discovery and research they will be
more and more filled in. And the importance of the
picture lies in the fact that Babylonian religion exer
cised a profound influence not only over the lands
immediately adjoining the Babylonian plain, but over
the whole of Western Asia as well. Long before the
days of Abraham, Canaan was a Babylonian province,
obeying Babylonian law, reading Babylonian books, and
writing in Babylonian characters. Along with Baby-
260 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
Ionian culture necessarily came also the religion of
Babylonia and the theological or cosmogonic dogmas
which accompanied it. Abraham himself was born in
a Babylonian city, and the religion of his descendants
was nurtured in an atmosphere of Babylonian thought.
The Mosaic Law shows almost as clear evidences of Baby
lonian influence as do the earlier chapters of Genesis.
Kecent discoveries have gone far towards lifting the
veil that has hitherto covered the beginnings of Baby
lonian history. We have been carried back to a time
when the Edin or " plain " of Babylonia was still in
great measure a marsh, and the waters of the Persian
Gulf extended 120 miles farther inland than they do
to-day. If we take the rate at which the land has grown
since the days of Alexander the Great as a basis of
measurement, this would have been from eight to nine
thousand years ago. At this time there were already
two great sanctuaries in the country, around each of
which a settlement or city had sprung up. One of these
was Nippur in the north, the modern Niffer ; the other
was Eridu, " the good city," 1 now marked by the mounds
of Nowawis or Abu-Shahrain, which stood on what was
then the shore of the Persian Gulf. Now its site is
more than a hundred miles distant from the sea. But
it was once the seaport of Babylonia, whose inhabitants
caught fish in the waters of the Gulf or traded with the
populations of the Arabian coast. Nippur, on the other
hand, was inland and agricultural. It was the primitive
centre of those engineering works which gradually con
verted the pestiferous marshes of Babylonia into a
fruitful plain, watered by canals and rivers, and pro
tected from inundation by lofty dykes. While Eridu
looked seaward, Nippur looked landward, and the
1 Eridti. is a Semitised abbreviation of the Sumerian Eri-dugga, "good
city."
INTRODUCTORY 261
influences that emanated from each were accordingly
diverse from the very outset.
As I pointed out in my Hibbert Lectures, Babylon
must have been a colony of Eridu. Its tutelary god
was a son of Ea of Eridu, and had been worshipped at
Eridu long before his cult was carried northward to
Babylon. Dr. Peters has since suggested that Ur was
similarly a colony of Nippur. The moon-god of Ur was
the son of the god of Nippur, and though Ur lay but a
few miles from Eridu, it was an inland and not a mari
time town. It stood on the desert plateau to the west
of the Euphrates, overlooking the Babylonian plain,
which at the time of its foundation had doubtless not
as yet been reclaimed. But its situation exposed it to
Arabian influences. Unlike the other great cities of
Babylonia, it was in Arabia rather than in Babylonia,
and its population from the outset must have contained
a considerable Arabian element. Semitic settlers from
Southern Arabia and Canaan occupied it, and it was
known to them as Uru, " the city " par excellence}-
Nippur and Eridu were already old when Ur first
rose to fame. They were both great sanctuaries rather
than the capitals of secular kingdoms. The god of
Nippur was El-lil, " the lord of the ghost-world," 2 the
1 Years ago I pointed out that uru was one of the words which (along
with what it signified) was borrowed by the Semites from their Sumerian
neighbours or predecessors (Transactions of Society of Biblical Archceo-
logy, i. 2, pp. 304, 305).
2 Literally, "the lord of the ghost(s)," "the ghost-lord." The name
has been so misunderstood and misinterpreted, that it is necessary to
enter into some details in regard to it, though the facts ought to be
known even to the beginner in Assyriology. The Sumerian lilla or lil
meant a "ghost," "spirit," or "spook," and was borrowed by the
Semites under the form of Hid, from which the feminine lilUu was formed
in order to represent the female lil whom the Sumerians called kiel
lilla, "handmaid of (the male) lil." LilUu is the Hebrew Lilith
(Isa. xxxiv. 14). In the lexical tablets the lil is explained as " a breath
262 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
ruler of the spirits, whose abode was beneath the earth,
or in the air by which we are surrounded. He was the
master of spells and incantations, of the magical formulae
which enabled those who knew them to keep the evil
spirits at bay, or to turn their malice against an enemy.
Nippur was peculiarly the home of the darker side of
Babylonian religion ; the teaching and influences that
emanated from it regarded the spirit-world as a world of
night and darkness, peopled by beings that were, for the
most part, hostile to man. The lit or ghost belonged to
the realm of the dead rather than to that of the living,
and the female lilitu was the ancestress of that Lilith
whom the Jewish Eabbis made a vampire under the form
of a beautiful woman, who lived on the blood of the
children she slew at night.
Eridu, on the contrary, was the seat of the Chaldaean
god of culture. Ea, whose home was in the deep,
among the waters of the Persian Gulf, had there his
temple, and it was there that he had taught the first
inhabitants of Babylonia all the elements of civilisation,
writing down for them the laws they should obey, the
moral code they should follow, and the healing spells
that prevented disease and death. He was the author
of all the arts of life, the all-wise god who knew the
things that benefited man ; and his son and minister
Aari, who interpreted his will to his worshippers, re
ceived the title of him. " who does good to mankind."
While El-lil of Nippur was the lord and creator of the
spirit- world, Ea was the lord and creator of men. He
had made man, like a potter, out of the clay, and to
of wind" (saru), or more exactly as a zaqiqu, or "dust-cloud" (not, of
course, "a fog," as it lias sometimes been translated, in defiance alike of
common sense and of modern Arab beliefs). When the spirit of Ea-bani
rose from the ground, it naturally took the form of a "dust-cloud" ; at
other times, when the spirits appeared in the air, they revealed their
presence by a draught of cold "wind."
INTRODUCTORY 263
him, therefore, man continued to look for guidance and
help.
The character of Ea was doubtless coloured by the
position of his city. The myth which spoke of him as
rising each morning out of the Persian Gulf to bring the
elements of culture to his people, clearly points to that
maritime intercourse with the coasts of Southern Arabia
which seems to have had a good deal to do with the
early civilisation of Babylonia. Foreign ideas made their
way into the country, trade brought culture in its train,
and it may be that the Semites, who exercised so pro
found an influence upon Babylonia, first entered it
through the port of Eridu. However this may be, it w r as
at Eridu that the garden of the Babylonian Eden was
placed ; here was " the centre of the earth " ; here, too,
the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates were poured out
on either side from vases held by the god. 1
Until Eridu, however, is excavated with the same
systematic care as Nippur, we must be content to derive
our knowledge of it and of its influence upon the primit
ive culture and religion of Babylonia from the records
which have been found elsewhere. That its sanctuary
was at least as old as that of Nippur, we may gather
from the fact that it was founded before the coast-line
had receded from the spot on which it stood. Its early
relations to Nippur must be left to the future to
disclose.
That neither Nippur nor Eridu should have been the
seat of a secular kingdom, is not so strange as at first
sight it appears to be. The priesthood of each must
have been too numerous and powerful to surrender its
rights to a single pontiff, or to allow such a pontiff to
1 See Pinches, "Certain Inscriptions and Records referring to Baby
lonia and Elam," in the Journal of the Victoria Institute, xxix. p. 44 :
"between the mouths of the rivers on both sides."
264 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
wrest from it its authority in civil affairs. It is difficult
for a king to establish himself where a theocratic oli
garchy holds absolute sway, and the reverence in which
the temples and worship of El-lil and Ea were held
would have prevented the success of any attempt of the
kind. It was their sanctuaries which made Babylonia a
holy land, wherein all who could were buried after death.
Like Abydos in Egypt, Nippur or Eridu continued to be
a sanctuary, governed by its own hierarchy and enjoying
its own independent existence, while secular kingdoms
grew up at its side. 1
Like Egypt, Babylonia was originally divided into
several independent States. From time to time one of
these became predominant, and obliged the other States
to acknowledge its supremacy. But the centre of power
shifted frequently, and it took many centuries before the
government became thoroughly centralised. The earlier
dynasties which claimed rule over the whole country had
at times to defend their claims by force of arms.
Like Egypt, too, Babylonia fell naturally into two
halves, Akkad in the north and Sumer in the south.
The recollection of the fact was preserved in the imperial
title of " king of Akkad and Sumer," which thus corre
sponds with the Egyptian title of " king of Upper and
Lower Egypt." But whereas in Egypt the conquering
race moved from south to north, causing the name of
Upper Egypt to come first in the royal title, in
Babylonia it was the Semites of the northern half who
imposed their yoke upon the south. Akkad accordingly
takes precedence of Sumer.
1 It is significant that although the antediluvian kings enumerated by
Berossos must have belonged to Eridu, as is shown by their connection
with the Oannes-gods who rose from the Persian Gulf, they are not kings
of Eridu, but of Pantibibla and Larankha (which seems to have been the
Surippak of the cuneiform texts).
INTRODUCTORY 265
I have said that the veil which has so long covered
the early history of the country is beginning at last to
be lifted. Eays of light are beginning to struggle
through the darkness, and we can at last form some idea
of the process which made Babylonia what it was in
later historical times. When the light first breaks upon
it, the leading kingdom, at all events in the north, is
Kis. Here a Semitic dynasty seems to have established
itself at an early period, and we hear of wars carried on
by it with its southern neighbours. Towards the south,
Lagas, the modern Tello, became the chief State under
its high priests, who made themselves kings. But Lagas,
like all the other petty kingdoms of the country, had at
length to submit to a Semitic power which grew up in
the north, and, after unifying Babylonia, created an
empire that extended to the shores of the Mediterranean.
This was the empire of Sargon of Akkad, and his son
Naram-Sin, whose date is fixed by the native annalists
at B.C. 3800, and whose importance for the history of
religion and culture throughout Western Asia can hardly
be overestimated.
Palestine and Syria the land of the Amorites, as the
Babylonians called them became a Babylonian province ;
and a portion of a cadastral survey for the purposes of
taxation has come down to us, from which we learn that
it had been placed under a governor who bears the
Canaanitish name of Uru-Malik (Urimelech). 1 Naram-
Sin carried his arms even into Magan, the Sinaitic
Peninsula, where he wrested from the Egyptians the
coveted mines of copper and malachite. Susa had long
been a Babylonian dependency; and as Mesopotamia,
including the later Assyria, also obeyed Babylonian rule,
the whole of Western Asia became Babylonian or, to use
the words of Sargon s Annals, " all countries were formed
1 Thureau-Dangin, in the jRevue Semitiquc.
266 THE RELIGION OF THE BABYLONIANS
together into one (empire)." Intercourse was kept up
between one part of the empire and the other by means
of high roads, along which the imperial post travelled
frequently. Some of the letters carried by it, with the
clay seals which served as stamps, are now in the museum
of the Louvre. 1
How long the empire of Sargon lasted is still uncertain.
But from that day onward the kings who claimed supreme
authority in Babylonia itself also claimed authority in
Syria ; and from time to time they succeeded in enforcing
their claim. Erech and Ur now appear upon the scene,
and more than one imperial dynasty had its capital at
Ur. When the last of these fell, Babylonia passed for a
while into a state of decay and anarchy, a dynasty of
South Arabian or Canaanitish origin established itself at
Babylon ; while Elamite princes seized Larsa, and com
pelled the southern half of the country to pay them
tribute. A deliverer finally arose, in the person of Kham-
murabi or Ammurapi, of the Arabian dynasty ; he drove
the Elamites out of Babylonia, defeated Arioch of Larsa,
captured his capital, and once more united Babylonia
under a single head, with its centre at Babylon. From
henceforth Babylon remained the capital of the monarchy,
and the sacred city of Western Asia. The national
revival was accompanied by a literary revival as well.
Poets and writers arose whose works became classical ;
new copies and editions were made of ancient books,
and the theology of Babylonia was finally systematised.
Under Khammurabi and his immediate successors we
may place the consummation of that gradual process of
development which had reduced the discordant elements
of Babylonian society and religion into a single harmonious
system.
1 Heuzey, " Sceaux inedits des rois d Agade," in the Revue d Assyria-
logic, iv. 1, pp. 1-12.
INTRODUCTORY 267
This theological system, however, cannot be understood,
unless we bear in mind that, as in Egypt so too in
Babylonia, there was originally a number of small inde
pendent principalities, each with its tutelary deity and
special sanctuary. The head of the State was the patesi,
or high priest of the god, his vicar and representative
upon earth, and the interpreter of the divine commands
to men. At the outset, therefore, Babylonian govern
ment was essentially theocratic ; and this theocratic char
acter clung to it to the last. It was this which made
Babylon a sacred city, whose priests had the power of
conferring the right to rule upon whom they would, like
the Pope in the Middle Ages. Though the high priest
became in time a king, he never divested himself of his
sacerdotal mantle, or forgot that he was the adopted son
of his god. 1
The tutelary gods followed the fortunes of the cities
over whose destinies they watched. The rise of a city
to power meant the supr 
