* The Purification Ritual for officiating priests is contained in a papyrus of the Berlin Museum, whose analysis and table of chapters has been published by Herr Oscar von Lemm, Das Bitualbuch des Ammonsdienstes, p. 4, et seq.

They were always recited with the same rhythm, according to a system of chaunting in which every tone had its virtue, combined with movements which confirmed the sense and worked with irresistible effect: one false note, a single discord between the succession of gestures and the utterance of the sacramental words, any hesitation, any awkwardness in the accomplishment of a rite, and the sacrifice was vain.

Worship as thus conceived became a legal transaction, in the course of which the god gave up his liberty in exchange for certain compensations whose kind and value were fixed by law. By a solemn deed of transfer the worshipper handed over to the legal representatives of the contracting divinity such personal or real property as seemed to him fitting payment for the favour which he asked, or suitable atonement for the wrong which he had done. If man scrupulously observed the innumerable conditions with which the transfer was surrounded, the god could not escape the obligation of fulfilling his petition;[*] but should he omit the least of them, the offering remained with the temple and went to increase the endowments in mortmain, while the god was pledged to nothing in exchange.

* This obligation is evident from texts where, as in the poem of Pentauirit, a king who is in danger demands from his favourite god the equivalent in protection of the sacrifices which he has offered to that divinity, and the gifts wherewith he has enriched him. "Have I not made unto thee many offerings?" says Ramses II. to Amon. "I have filled thy temple with my prisoners, I have built thee a mansion for millions of years.... Ah if evil is the lot of them who insult thee, good are thy purposes towards those who honour thee, O Amon!"

Hence the officiating priest assumed a formidable responsibility as regarded his fellows: a slip of memory, the slightest accidental impurity, made him a bad priest, injurious to himself and harmful to those worshippers who had entrusted him with their interests before the gods. Since it was vain to expect ritualistic perfections from a prince constantly troubled with affairs of state, the custom was established of associating professional priests with him, personages who devoted all their lives to the study and practice of the thousand formalities whose sum constituted the local religion. Each temple had its service of priests, independent of those belonging to neighbouring temples, whose members, bound to keep their hands always clean and their voices true, were ranked according to the degrees of a learned hierarchy. At their head was a sovereign pontiff to direct them in the exercise of their functions. In some places he was called the first prophet, or rather the first servant of the god—hon-nutir topi; at Thebes he was the first prophet of Amon, at Thinis he was the first prophet of Anhuri.[*]

* This title of first prophet belongs to priests of the less important towns, and to secondary divinities. If we find it employed in connection with the Theban worship, it is because Amon was originally a provincial god, and only rose into the first rank with the rise of Thebes and the great conquests of the XVIIIth and XIXth dynasties.

But generally he bore a title appropriate to the nature of the god whose servant he was. The chief priest of Ra at Heliopolis, and in all the cities which adopted the Heliopolitan form of worship, was called Oiru mau, the master of visions, and he alone besides the sovereign of the nome, or of Egypt, enjoyed the privilege of penetrating into the sanctuary, of "entering into heaven and there beholding the god" face to face. In the same way, the high priest of Anhuri at Sebennytos was entitled the wise and pure warrior—ahuiti sau uibu—because his god went armed with a pike, and a soldier god required for his service a pontiff who should be a soldier like himself.

These great personages did not always strictly seclude themselves within the limits of the religious domain. The gods accepted, and even sometimes solicited, from their worshippers, houses, fields, vineyards, orchards, slaves, and fishponds, the produce of which assured their livelihood and the support of their temples. There was no Egyptian who did not cherish the ambition of leaving some such legacy to the patron god of his city, "for a monument to himself," and as an endowment for the priests to institute prayers and perpetual sacrifices on his behalf.[*] In course of time these accumulated gifts at length formed real sacred fiefs—hotpu-nutir—analogous to the wakfs of Mussulman Egypt.[**] They were administered by the high priest, who, if necessary, defended them by force against the greed of princes or kings. Two, three, or even four classes of prophets or heiroduli under his orders assisted him in performing the offices of worship, in giving religious instruction, and in the conduct of affairs. Women did not hold equal rank with men in the temples of male deities; they there formed a kind of harem whence the god took his mystic spouses, his concubines, his maidservants, the female musicians and dancing women whose duty it was to divert him and to enliven his feasts. But in temples of goddesses they held the chief rank, and were called hierodules, or priestesses, hierodules of Nit, hierodules of Hathor, hierodules of Pakhit.[***]

* As regards the Saite period, we are beginning to accumulate many stelae recording gifts to a god of land or houses, made either by the king or by private individuals.

** We know from the Great Harris Papyrus to what the fortune of Amon amounted at the end of the reign of Ramses III.; its details may be found in Brugsch, Die AEgyptologie, pp. 271-274. Cf. in Naville, Bubastis, Eighth Memoir of the Egyptian Exploration Fund, p. 61, a calculation as to the quantities of precious metals belonging to one of the least of the temples of Bubastis; its gold and silver were counted by thousands of pounds.

*** Mariette remarks that priests play but a subordinate part in the temple of Hathor. This fact, which surprised him, is adequately explained by remembering that Hathor being a goddess, women take precedence over men in a temple dedicated to her. At Sais, the chief priest was a man, the Tcharp-haitu; but the persistence with which women of the highest rank, and even queens themselves, took the title of prophetess of Nit from the times of the Ancient Empire shows that in this city the priestess of the goddess was of equal, if not superior, rank to the priest.

The lower offices in the households of the gods, as in princely households, were held by a troop of servants and artisans: butchers to cut the throats of the victims, cooks and pastrycooks, confectioners, weavers, shoemakers, florists, cellarers, water-carriers and milk-carriers. In fact, it was a state within a state, and the prince took care to keep its government in his own hands, either by investing one of his children with the titles and functions of chief pontiff', or by arrogating them to himself. In that case, he provided against mistakes which would have annulled the sacrifice by associating with himself several masters of the ceremonies, who directed him in the orthodox evolutions before the god and about the victim, indicated the due order of gestures and the necessary changes of costume, and prompted him with the words of each invocation from a book or tablet which they held in their hands.[*]

* The title of such a personage was khri-habi, the man with the roll or tablet, because of the papyrus roll, or wooden tablet containing the ritual, which he held in his hand.

In addition to its rites and special hierarchy, each of the sacerdotal colleges thus constituted had a theology in accordance with the nature and attributes of its god. Its fundamental dogma affirmed the unity of the nome god, his greatness, his supremacy over all the gods of Egypt and of foreign lands[*]—whose existence was nevertheless admitted, and none dreamed of denying their reality or contesting their power.

* In the inscriptions all local gods bear the titles of Nutir ua, only god; Suton nutiru, Suntiru, [ Greek word], king of the gods; of Nutir aa nib pit, the great god, lord of heaven, which show their pretensions to the sovereignty and to the position of creator of the universe.

The latter also boasted of their unity, their greatness, their supremacy; but whatever they were, the god of the nome was master of them all—their prince, their ruler, their king. It was he alone who governed the world, he alone kept it in good order, he alone had created it. Not that he had evoked it out of nothing; there was as yet no concept of nothingness, and even to the most subtle and refined of primitive theologians creation was only a bringing of pre-existent elements into play.



2 Drawing by Faucher-Gudin of a green enamelled statuette in my possession. It was from Shu that the Greeks derived their representations, and perhaps their myth of Atlas.

The latent germs of things had always existed, but they had slept for ages and ages in the bosom of the Nu, of the dark waters. In fulness of time the god of each nome drew them forth, classified them, marshalled them according to the bent of his particular nature, and made his universe out of them by methods peculiarly his own. Nit of Sais, who was a weaver, had made the world of warp and woof, as the mother of a family weaves her children's linen.

Khnumu, the Nile-God of the cataracts, had gathered up the mud of his waters and therewith moulded his creatures upon a potter's table. In the eastern cities of the Delta these procedures were not so simple. There it was admitted that in the beginning earth and sky were two lovers lost in the Nu, fast locked in each other's embrace, the god lying beneath the goddess. On the day of creation a new god, Shu, came forth from the primaeval waters, slipped between the two, and seizing Nuit with both hands, lifted her above his head with outstretched arms.[*]

* This was what the Egyptians called the upliftings of Shu. The event first took place at Hermopolis, and certain legends added that in order to get high enough the god had been obliged to make use of a staircase or mound situate in this city, and which was famous throughout Egypt.

Though the starry body of the goddess extended in space—her head being to the west and her loins to the east—her feet and hands hung down to the earth. These were the four pillars of the firmament under another form, and four gods of four adjacent principalities were in charge of them. Osiris, or Horus the sparrow-hawk, presided over the southern, and Sit over the northern pillar; Thot over that of the west, and Sapdi, the author of the zodiacal light, over that of the east. They had divided the world among themselves into four regions, or rather into four "houses," bounded by those mountains which surround it, and by the diameters intersecting between the pillars. Each of these houses belonged to one, and to one only; none of the other three, nor even the sun himself, might enter it, dwell there, or even pass through it without having obtained its master's permission. Sibu had not been satisfied to meet the irruption of Shu by mere passive resistance. He had tried to struggle, and he is drawn in the posture of a man who has just awakened out of sleep, and is half turning on his couch before getting up. One of his legs is stretched out, the other is bent and partly drawn up as in the act of rising. The lower part of the body is still unmoved, but he is raising himself with difficulty on his left elbow, while his head droops and his right arm is lifted towards the sky. His effort was suddenly arrested. Rendered powerless by a stroke of the creator, Sibu remained as if petrified in this position, the obvious irregularities of the earth's surface being due to the painful attitude in which he was stricken. His sides have since been clothed with verdure, generations of men and animals have succeeded each other upon his back, but without bringing any relief to his pain; he suffers evermore from the violent separation of which he was the victim when Nuit was torn from him, and his complaint continues to rise to heaven night and day.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painting on the mummy-case of Butehamon in the Turin Museum. "Shu, the great god, lord of heaven," receives the adoration of two ram-headed souls placed upon his right and left.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a specimen in blue enamelled pottery, now in my possession.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a figure frequently found in Theban mummy-cases of XXIst and XXIInd dynasties (Wilkinson, Manners and Customs. 2nd edit., vol. iii. pl. xxv., No 5).

The aspect of the inundated plains of the Delta, of the river by which they are furrowed and fertilized, and of the desert sands by which they are threatened, had suggested to the theologians of Mendes and Buto an explanation of the mystery of creation, in which the feudal divinities of these cities and of several others in their neighbourhood, Osiris, Sit, and Isis, played the principal parts. Osiris first represented the wild and fickle Nile of primitive times; afterwards, as those who dwelt upon his banks learned to regulate his course, they emphasized the kindlier side of his character and soon transformed him into a benefactor of humanity, the supremely good being, Unnofriu, Onnophris.[*] He was lord of the principality of Didu, which lay along the Sebennytic branch of the river between the coast marshes and the entrance to the Wady Tumilat, but his domain had been divided; and the two nomes thus formed, namely, the ninth and sixteenth nomes of the Delta in the Pharaonic lists, remained faithful to him, and here he reigned without rival, at Busiris as at Mendes. His most famous idol-form was the Didu, whether naked or clothed, the fetish, formed of four superimposed columns, which had given its name to the principality.[**]

* It has long been a dogma with Egyptologists that Osiris came from Abydos. Maspero has shown that from his very titles he is obviously a native of the Delta, and more especially of Busiris and Mendes.

** The Didu has been very variously interpreted. It has been taken for a kind of nilometer, for a sculptor's or modeller's stand, or a painter's easel for an altar with four superimposed tables, or a sort of pedestal bearing four door-lintels, for a series of four columns placed one behind another, of which the capitals only are visible, one above the other, etc. The explanation given in the text is that of Reuvens, who recognized the Didu as a symbolic representation of the four regions of the world; and of Maspero, Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. ii. p. 359, note 3. According to Egyptian theologians, it represented the spine of Osiris, preserved as a relic in the town bearing the name of Didu, Bidit.



1 Drawn by Boudier from a statue in green basalt found at Sakkarah, and now in the Gizeh Museum.

They ascribed life to this Didu, and represented it with a somewhat grotesque face, big cheeks, thick lips, a necklace round its throat, a long flowing dress which hid the base of the columns beneath its folds, and two arms bent across the breast, the hands grasping one a whip and the other a crook, symbols of sovereign authority. This, perhaps, was the most ancient form of Osiris; but they also represented him as a man, and supposed him to assume the shapes of rams and bulls,[*] or even those of water-birds, such as lapwings, herons, and cranes, which disported themselves about the lakes of that district.[**]

* The ram of Mendes is sometimes Osiris, and sometimes the soul of Osiris. The ancients took it for a he-goat, and to them we are indebted for the record of its exploits. According to Manetho, the worship of the sacred ram is not older than the time of King Kaiekhos of the second dynasty. A Ptolemaic necropolis of sacred rams was discovered by Mariette at Tmai el-Amdid, in the ruins of Thmuis, and some of their sarcophagi are now in the Gizeh Museum.

** The Bonu, the chief among these birds, is not the phoenix, as has so often been asserted. It is a kind of heron, either the Ardea cinerea, which is common in Egypt, or else some similar species.

The goddess whom we are accustomed to regard as inseparable from him, Isis the cow, or woman with cow's horns, had not always belonged to him. Originally she was an independent deity, dwelling at Buto in the midst of the ponds of Adhu. She had neither husband nor lover, but had spontaneously conceived and given birth to a son, whom she suckled among the reeds—a lesser Horus who was called Harsiisit, Horus the son of Isis, to distinguish him from Haroeris. At an early period she was married to her neighbour Osiris, and no marriage could have been better suited to her nature. For she personified the earth—not the earth in general, like Sibu, with its unequal distribution of seas and mountains, deserts and cultivated land; but the black and luxuriant plain of the Delta, where races of men, plants, and animals increase and multiply in ever-succeeding generations. To whom did she owe this inexhaustible productive energy if not to her neighbour Osiris, to the Nile? The Nile rises, overflows, lingers upon the soil; every year it is wedded to the earth, and the earth comes forth green and fruitful from its embraces.



1 Drawn by Boudier from a green basalt statue in the Gizeh Museum. Prom a photograph by Emil Brugsch-Bey.

The marriage of the two elements suggested that of the two divinities; Osiris wedded Isis and adopted the young Horus. But this prolific and gentle pair were not representative of all the phenomena of nature. The eastern part of the Delta borders upon the solitudes of Arabia, and although it contains several rich and fertile provinces, yet most of these owe their existence to the arduous labour of the inhabitants, their fertility being dependent on the daily care of man, and on his regular distribution of the water. The moment he suspends the straggle or relaxes his watchfulness, the desert reclaims them and overwhelms them with sterility. Sit was the spirit of the mountain, stone and sand, the red and arid ground as distinguished from the moist black soil of the valley. On the body of a lion or of a dog he bore a fantastic head with a slender curved snout, upright and square-cut ears; his cloven tail rose stiffly behind him, springing from his loins like a fork. He also assumed a human form, or retained the animal head only upon a man's shoulders. He was felt to be cruel and treacherous, always ready to shrivel up the harvest with his burning breath, and to smother Egypt beneath a shroud of shifting sand. The contrast between this evil being and the beneficent couple, Osiris and Isis, was striking. Nevertheless, the theologians of the Delta soon assigned a common origin to these rival divinities of Nile and desert, red land and black. Sibu had begotten them, Nuit had given birth to them one after another when the demiurge had separated her from her husband; and the days of their birth were the days of creation.[*]

* According to one legend which is comparatively old in origin, the fous* children of Nuit, and Horus her grandson, were born one after another, each on one of the intercalary days of the year. This legend was still current in the Greek period.

At first each of them had kept to his own half of the world. Moreover Sit, who had begun by living alone, had married, in order that he might be inferior to Osiris in nothing.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a painted wooden statuette in my possession, from a funeral couch found at Akhmim. On her head the goddess bears the hieroglyph for her name; she is kneeling at the foot of the funeral couch of Osiris and weeps for the dead god.

2 Bronze statuette of the XXth dynasty, encrusted with gold, from the Hoffmann collection: drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a photograph taken by Legrain in 1891. About the time when the worship of Sit was proscribed, one of the Egyptian owners of this little monument had endeavoured to alter its character, and to transform it into a statuette of the god Khnumu. He took out the upright ears, replacing them with ram's horns, but made no other change. In the drawing I have had the later addition of the curved horns removed, and restored the upright ears, whose marks may still be seen upon the sides of the head-dress.

As a matter of fact, his companion, Nephthys, did not manifest any great activity, and was scarcely more than an artificial counterpart of the wife of Osiris, a second Isis who bore no children to her husband;[*] for the sterile desert brought barrenness to her as to all that it touched.

* The impersonal character of Nephthys, her artificial origin, and her derivation from Isis, have been pointed out by Maspero (Etudes de Mythologie et d'Archeologie Egyptiennes, vol. ii. pp. 362-364). The very name of the goddess, which means the lady (nibit) of the mansion (hait), confirms this view.



2 Drawn by Thuillier, from the Description de l'Egypte (Atlas, Ant., vol. v. pl. 26, 1).

Yet she had lost neither the wish nor the power to bring forth, and sought fertilization from another source. Tradition had it that she had made Osiris drunken, drawn him to her arms without his knowledge, and borne him a son; the child of this furtive union was the jackal Anubis. Thus when a higher Nile overflows lands not usually covered by the inundation, and lying unproductive for lack of moisture, the soil eagerly absorbs the water, and the germs which lay concealed in the ground burst forth into life. The gradual invasion of the domain of Sit by Osiris marks the beginning of the strife. Sit rebels against the wrong of which he is the victim, involuntary though it was; he surprises and treacherously slays his brother, drives Isis into temporary banishment among her marshes, and reigns over the kingdom of Osiris as well as over his own. But his triumph is short-lived. Horus, having grown up, takes arms against him, defeats him in many encounters, and banishes him in his turn. The creation of the world had brought the destroying and the life-sustaining gods face to face: the history of the world is but the story of their rivalries and warfare.

None of these conceptions alone sufficed to explain the whole mechanism of creation, nor the part which the various gods took in it. The priests of Heliopolis appropriated them all, modified some of their details and eliminated others, added several new personages, and thus finally constructed a complete cosmogony, the elements of which were learnedly combined so as to correspond severally with the different operations by which the world had been evoked out of chaos and gradually brought to its present state. Heliopolis was never directly involved in the great revolutions of political history; but no city ever originated so many mystic ideas and consequently exercised so great an influence upon the development of civilization.[*]

* By its inhabitants it was accounted older than any other city of Egypt.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Beato of a bas-relief in the temple of Seti I. at Abydos. The two gods are conducting King Ramses II., here identified with Osiris, towards the goddess Hathor.

It was a small town built on the plain not far from the Nile at the apex of the Delta, and surrounded by a high wall of mud bricks whose remains could still be seen at the beginning of the century, but which have now almost completely disappeared.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin. The open lotus-flower, with a bud on either side, stands upon the usual sign for any water- basin. Here the sign represents the Nu, that dark watery abyss from which the lotus sprang on the morning of creation, and whereon it is still supposed to bloom.

One obelisk standing in the midst of the open plain, a few waste mounds of debris, scattered blocks, and two or three lengths of crumbling wall, alone mark the place where once the city stood. Ka was worshipped there, and the Greek name of Heliopolis is but the translation of that which was given to it by the priests—Pi-ra, City of the Sun. Its principal temple, the "Mansion of the Prince," rose from about the middle of the enclosure, and sheltered, together with the god himself, those animals in which he became incarnate: the bull Mnevis, and sometimes the Phoenix. According to an old legend, this wondrous bird appeared in Egypt only once in five hundred years. It is born and lives in the depths of Arabia, but when its father dies it covers the body with a layer of myrrh, and flies at utmost speed to the temple of Helio-polis, there to bury it.[*]

* The Phoenix is not the Bonu (cf. p. 186, note 2), but a fabulous bird derived from the golden sparrow-hawk, which was primarily a form of Haroeris, and of the sun-gods in second place only. On the authority of his Heliopolitan guides, Herodotus tells us (ii. 83) that in shape and size the phoenix resembled the eagle, and this statement alone should have sufficed to prevent any attempt at identifying it with the Bonu, which is either a heron or a lapwing.



2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a water-colour published by Lepsius, Denkm., i. 56. The view is taken from the midst of the ruins at the foot of the obelisk of Usirtasen. A little stream runs in the foreground, and passes through a muddy pool; to right and left are mounds of ruins, which were then considerable, but have since been partially razed. In the distance Cairo rises against the south-west.

In the beginning, Ra was the sun itself, whose fires appear to be lighted every morning in the east and to be extinguished at evening in the west; and to the people such he always remained. Among the theologians there was considerable difference of opinion on the point. Some held the disk of the sun to be the body which the god assumes when presenting himself for the adoration of his worshippers. Others affirmed that it rather represented his active and radiant soul. Finally, there were many who defined it as one of his forms of being—khopriu—one of his self-manifestations, without presuming to decide whether it was his body or his soul which he deigned to reveal to human eyes; but whether soul or body, all agreed that the sun's disk had existed in the Nu before creation. But how could it have lain beneath the primordial ocean without either drying up the waters or being extinguished by them? At this stage the identification of Ra with Horus and his right eye served the purpose of the theologians admirably: the god needed only to have closed his eyelid in order to prevent his fires from coming in contact with the water.[*]

* This is clearly implied in the expression so often used by the sacred writers of Ancient Egypt in reference to the appearance of the sun and his first act at the time of creation: "Thou openest the two eyes, and earth is flooded with rays of light."

He was also said to have shut up his disk within a lotus-bud, whose folded petals had safely protected it. The flower had opened on the morning of the first day, and from it the god had sprung suddenly as a child wearing the solar disk upon his head. But all theories led the theologians to distinguish two periods, and as it were two beings in the existence of supreme deity: a pre-mundane sun lying inert within the bosom of the dark waters, and our living and life-giving sun.



1 Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Insinger of an outer wall of the Hypostyle Hall at Karnak. Harmakhis grants years and festivals to the Pharaoh Seti I., who kneels before him, and is presented by the lioness-headed goddess Sokhit, here described as a magician—Oirit hilcau.

One division of the Heliopolitan school retained the use of traditional terms and images in reference to these Sun-gods. To the first it left the human form, and the title of Ra, with the abstract sense of creator, deriving the name from the verb ra, which means to give. For the second it kept the form of the sparrow-hawk and the name of Harma-khuiti—Horus in the two horizons—which clearly denoted his function;[*] and it summed up the idea of the sun as a whole in the single name of Ra-Harmakhuiti, and in a single image in which the hawk-head of Horus was grafted upon the human body of Ra. The other divisions of the school invented new names for new conceptions. The sun existing before the world they called Creator—Tumu, Atumu [**]—and our earthly sun they called Khopri—He who is.

* Harmakhuiti is Horus, the sky of the two horizons; i.e. the sky of the daytime, and the night sky. When the celestial Horus was confounded with Ra, and became the sun (cf. p. 133), he naturally also became the sun of the two horizons, the sun by day, and the sun by night.

** E. de Rouge, Etudes sur le Rituel funeraire, p. 76: "His name may be connected with two radicals. Tem is a negation; it may be taken to mean the Inapproachable One, the Unknown (as in Thebes, where Aman means mystery). Atum is, in fact, described as 'existing alone in the abyss,' before the appearance of light. It was in this time of darkness that Atum performed the first act of creation, and this allows of our also connecting his name with the Coptic tamio, creare. Atum was also the prototype of man (in Coptic tme, homo), and becomes a perfect 'tum' after his resurrection." Rugsch would rather explain Tumu as meaning the Perfect One, the Complete. E. de Rouge's philological derivations are no longer admissible; but his explanation of the name corresponds so well with the part played by the god that I fail to see how that can be challenged.

Tumu was a man crowned and clothed with the insignia of supreme power, a true king of gods, majestic and impassive as the Pharaohs who succeeded each other upon the throne of Egypt. The conception of Khopri as a disk enclosing a scarabaeus, or a man with a scarabous upon his head, or a scarabus-headed mummy, was suggested by the accidental alliteration of his name and that of Khopirru, the scarabaeus. The difference between the possible forms of the god was so slight as to be eventually lost altogether. His names were grouped by twos and threes in every conceivable way, and the scarabaeus of Khopri took its place upon the head of Ra, while the hawk headpiece was transferred from the shoulders of Harmakhuiti to those of Tumu. The complex beings resulting from these combinations, Ra-Tumu, Atumu-Ra, Ra-Tumu-Khopri, Ra-Harmakhuiti-Tumu, Tum-Harmakhuiti-Khopri, never attained to any pronounced individuality.



They were as a rule simple duplicates of the feudal god, names rather than persons, and though hardly taken for one another indiscriminately, the distinctions between them had reference to mere details of their functions and attributes. Hence arose the idea of making these gods into embodiments of the main phases in the life of the sun during the day and throughout the year. Ra symbolized the sun of springtime and before sunrise, Harmakhuiti the summer and the morning sun, Atumu the sun of autumn and of afternoon, Khopri that of winter and of night. The people of Heliopolis accepted the new names and the new forms presented for their worship, but always subordinated them to their beloved Ra. For them Ra never ceased to be the god of the nome; while Atumu remained the god of the theologians, and was invoked by them, the people preferred Ra. At Thinis and at Sebennytos Anhuri incurred the same fate as befell Ra at Heliopolis. After he had been identified with the sun, the similar identification of Shu inevitably followed. Of old, Anhuri and Shu were twin gods, incarnations of sky and earth. They were soon but one god in two persons—the god Anhuri-Shu, of which the one half under the title of Auhuri represented, like Atumu, the primordial being; and Shu, the other half, became, as his name indicates, the creative sun-god who upholds (shu) the sky.

Turnu then, rather than Ra, was placed by the Heliopolitan priests at the head of their cosmogony as supreme creator and governor. Several versions were current as to how he had passed from inertia into action, from the personage of Tumu into that of Ra. According to the version most widely received, he had suddenly cried across the waters, "Come unto me!"[*] and immediately the mysterious lotus had unfolded its petals, and Ra had appeared at the edge of its open cup as a disk, a newborn child, or a disk-crowned sparrow-hawk; this was probably a refined form of a ruder and earlier tradition, according to which it was upon Ra himself that the office had devolved of separating Sibu from Nuit, for the purpose of constructing the heavens and the earth.

* It was on this account that the Egyptians named the first day of the year the Day of Come-unto-me!

But it was doubtless felt that so unseemly an act of intervention was beneath the dignity even of an inferior form of the suzerain god; Shu was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhuri, and at Heliopolis, as at Sebennytos, the office was entrusted to him of seizing the sky-goddess and raising her with outstretched arms. The violence suffered by Nuit at the hands of Shu led to a connexion of the Osirian dogma of Mendes with the solar dogma of Sebennytos, and thus the tradition describing the creation of the world was completed by another, explaining its division into deserts and fertile lands. Sibu, hitherto concealed beneath the body of his wife, was now exposed to the sun; Osiris and Sit, Isis and Nephthys, were born, and, falling from the sky, their mother, on to the earth, their father, they shared the surface of the latter among themselves. Thus the Heliopolitan doctrine recognized three principal events in the creation of the universe: the dualization of the supreme god and the breaking forth of light, the raising of the sky and the laying bare of the earth, the birth of the Nile and the allotment of the soil of Egypt, all expressed as the manifestations of successive deities. Of these deities, the latter ones already constituted a family of father, mother, and children, like human families. Learned theologians availed themselves of this example to effect analogous relationships between the rest of the gods, combining them all into one line of descent. As Atumu-Ra could have no fellow, he stood apart in the first rank, and it was decided that Shu should be his son, whom he had formed out of himself alone, on the first day of creation, by the simple intensity of his own virile energy. Shu, reduced to the position of divine son, had in his turn begotten Sibu and Nuit, the two deities which he separated. Until then he had not been supposed to have any wife, and he also might have himself brought his own progeny into being; but lest a power of spontaneous generation equal to that of the demiurge should be ascribed to him, he was married, and the wife found for him was Tafnuit, his twin sister, born in the same way as he was born. This goddess, invented for the occasion, was never fully alive, and remained, like Nephthys, a theological entity rather than a real person. The texts describe her as the pale reflex of her husband.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a vignette in the papyrus of Ani in the British Museum, published by Lepage-Renouf in the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology, vol. xi., 1889-90, pp. 26-28. The inscription above the lion on the right reads safu, "yesterday;" the other, duau, "this morning."

Together with him she upholds the sky, and every morning receives the newborn sun as it emerges from the mountain of the east; she is a lioness when Shu is a lion, a woman when he is a man, a lioness-headed woman if he is a lion-headed man; she is angry when he is angry, appeased when he is appeased; she has no sanctuary wherein he is not worshipped. In short, the pair made one being in two bodies, or, to use the Egyptian expression, "one soul in its two twin bodies."

Hence we see that the Heliopolitans proclaimed the creation to be the work of the sun-god, Atumu-Ra, and of the four pairs of deities who were descended from him. It was really a learned variant of the old doctrine that the universe was composed of a sky-god, Horus, supported by his four children and their four pillars: in fact, the four sons of the Heliopolitan cosmogony, Shu and Sibu, Osiris and Sit, were occasionally substituted for the four older gods of the "houses" of the world. This being premised, attention must be given to the important differences between the two systems. At the outset, instead of appearing contemporaneously upon the scene, like the four children of Horus, the four Heliopolitan gods were deduced one from another, and succeeded each other in the order of their birth. They had not that uniform attribute of supporter, associating them always with one definite function, but each of them felt himself endowed with faculties and armed with special powers required by his condition. Ultimately they took to themselves goddesses, and thus the total number of beings working in different ways at the organization of the universe was brought up to nine. Hence they were called by the collective name of the Ennead, the Nine gods—pauit nutiru,[*]—and the god at their head was entitled Pauiti, the god of the Ennead.

* The first Egyptologists confounded the sign used in writing pauit with the sign kh, and the word khet, other. E. de Rouge was the first to determine its phonetic value: "it should be read Pau, and designates a body of gods." Shortly afterwards Beugsch proved that "the group of gods invoked by E. de Rouge must have consisted of nine "— of an Ennead. This explanation was not at first admitted either by Lepsius or by Mariette, who had proposed a mystic interpretation of the word in his Memoire sur la mere d'Apis, or by E. de Rouge, or by Chabas. The interpretation a Nine, an Ennead, was not frankly adopted until later, and more especially after the discovery of the Pyramid texts; to-day, it is the only meaning admitted. Of course the Egyptian Ennead has no other connection than that of name with the Enneads of the Neo-Platonists.

When creation was completed, its continued existence was ensured by countless agencies with whose operation the persons of the Ennead were not at leisure to concern themselves, but had ordained auxiliaries to preside over each of the functions essential to the regular and continued working of all things. The theologians of Heliopolis selected eighteen from among the innumerable divinities of the feudal cults of Egypt, and of these they formed two secondary Enneads, who were regarded as the offspring of the Ennead of the creation. The first of the two secondary Enneads, generally known as the Minor Ennead, recognized as chief Harsiesis, the son of Osiris. Harsiesis was originally an earth-god who had avenged the assassination of his father and the banishment of his mother by Sit; that is, he had restored fulness to the Nile and fertility to the Delta. When Harsiesis was incorporated into the solar religions of Heliopolis, his filiation was left undisturbed as being a natural link between the two Enneads, but his personality was brought into conformity with the new surroundings into which he was transplanted. He was identified with Ra through the intervention of the older Horus, Haroeris-Harmakhis, and the Minor Ennead, like the Great Ennead, began with a sun-god. This assimilation was not pushed so far as to invest the younger Horus with the same powers as his fictitious ancestor: he was the sun of earth, the everyday sun, while Atumu-Ra was still the sun pre-mundane and eternal. Our knowledge of the eight other deities of the Minor Ennead is very imperfect.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Wilkinson's Manners and Customs, 2nd edit., vol. iii. p. 221, pl. xlviii.

We see only that these were the gods who chiefly protected the sun-god against its enemies and helped it to follow its regular course. Thus Harhuditi, the Horus of Edfu, spear in hand, pursues the hippopotami or serpents which haunt the celestial waters and menace the god. The progress of the Sun-bark is controlled by the incantations of Thot, while Uapuaitu, the dual jackal-god of Siufc, guides, and occasionally tows it along the sky from south to north. The third Ennead would seem to have included among its members Anubis the jackal, and the four funerary genii, the children of Horus—Hapi, Amsit, Tiumautf, Kabhsonuf; it further appears as though its office was the care and defence of the dead sun, the sun by night, as the second Ennead had charge of the living sun. Its functions were so obscure and apparently so insignificant as compared with those exercised by the other Enneads, that the theologians did not take the trouble either to represent it or to enumerate its persons. They invoked it as a whole, after the two others, in those formulas in which they called into play all the creative and preservative forces of the universe; but this was rather as a matter of conscience and from love of precision than out of any true deference. At the initial impulse of the lord of Heliopolis, the three combined Enneads started the world and kept it going, and gods whom they had not incorporated were either enemies to be fought with, or mere attendants.

The doctrine of the Heliopolitan Ennead acquired an immediate and a lasting popularity. It presented such a clear scheme of creation, and one whose organization was so thoroughly in accordance with the spirit of tradition, that the various sacerdotal colleges adopted it one after another, accommodating it to the exigencies of local patriotism. Each placed its own nome-god at the head of the Ennead as "god of the Nine," "god of the first time," creator of heaven and earth, sovereign ruler of men, and lord of all action. As there was the Ennead of Atumu at Heliopolis, so there was that of Anhuri at Thinis and at Sebennytos; that of Minu at Coptos and at Panopolis; that of Haroeris at Edfu; that of Sobkhu at Ombos; and, later, that of Phtah at Memphis and of Amon at Thebes. Nomes which worshipped a goddess had no scruples whatever in ascribing to her the part played by Atumu, and in crediting her with the spontaneous maternity of Shu and Tafnuit.

Illustration: 206.jpg [PLAN OF THE RUINS OP HERMOPOLIS MAGNA. 1]

1 Plan drawn by Thuillier, from the Description de l' Egypte, Ant., vol. iv. pl. 50.

Nit was the source and ruler of the Ennead of Sais, Isis of that of Buto, and Hathor of that of Denderah.[**] Few of the sacerdotal colleges went beyond the substitution of their own feudal gods for Atumu. Provided that the god of each nome held the rank of supreme lord, the rest mattered little, and the local theologians made no change in the order of the other agents of creation, their vanity being unhurt even by the lower offices assigned by the Heliopolitan tradition to such powers as Osiris, Sibu, and Sit, who were known and worshipped throughout the whole country.

** On the Ennead of Hathor at Denderah, see Mariette, Denderah, p. 80., et seq., of the text. The fact that Nit, Isis, and, generally speaking, all the feudal goddesses, were the chiefs of their local Enneads, is proved by the epithets applied to them, which represent them as having independent creative power by virtue of their own unaided force and energy, like the god at the head of the Heliopolitan Ennead.

The theologians of Hermopolis alone declined to borrow the new system just as it stood, and in all its parts. Hermopolis had always been one of the ruling cities of Middle Egypt. Standing alone in the midst of the land lying between the Eastern and Western Mies, it had established upon each of the two great arms of the river a port and a custom-house, where all boats travelling either up or down stream paid toll on passing. Not only the corn and natural products of the valley and of the Delta, but also goods from distant parts of Africa brought to Siufc by Soudanese caravans, helped to fill the treasury of Hermopolis. Thot, the god of the city, represented as ibis or baboon, was essentially a moon-god, who measured time, counted the days, numbered the months, and recorded the years. Lunar divinities, as we know, are everywhere supposed to exercise the most varied powers: they command the mysterious forces of the universe; they know the sounds, words, and gestures by which those forces are put in motion, and not content with using them for their own benefit, they also teach to their worshippers the art of employing them.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from an enamelled pottery figure from Coptos, now in my possession. Neck, feet, and tail are in blue enamel, the rest is in green. The little personage represented as squatting beneath the beak is Mait, the goddess of truth, and the ally of Thot. The ibis was furnished with a ring for suspending it; this has been broken off, but traces of it may still be seen at the back of the head.

2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a green enamelled pottery figure in my possession (Saite period).

Thot formed no exception to this rule. He was lord of the voice, master of words and of books, possessor or inventor of those magic writings which nothing in heaven, on earth, or in Hades can withstand.[***]

*** Cf. in the tale of Satni (Maspero, Contes populaires de l'Ancienne Egypte, 2nd edit., p. 175) the description of the book which Thot has himself written with his own hand, and which makes its possessor the equal of the gods. "The two formulas which are written therein, if thou recitest the first thou shalt charm heaven, earth, Hades, the mountains, the waters; thou shalt know the birds of the sky and the reptiles, how many soever they be; thou shalt see the fish of the deep, for a divine power will cause them to rise to the surface of the water. If thou readest the second formula, even although thou shouldest be in the tomb, thou shalt again take the form which was thine upon earth; thou shalt even see the sun rising in heaven, and his cycle of gods, and the moon in the form wherein it appeareth."

He had discovered the incantations which evoke and control the gods; he had transcribed the texts and noted the melodies of these incantations; he recited them with that true intonation—ma khrou—which renders them all-powerful, and every one, whether god or man, to whom he imparted them, and whose voice he made true—sma khrou—became like himself master of the universe. He had accomplished the creation not by muscular effort to which the rest of the cosmogonical gods primarily owed their birth, but by means of formulas, or even of the voice alone, "the first time" when he awoke in the Nu. In fact, the articulate word and the voice were believed to be the most potent of creative forces, not remaining immaterial on issuing from the lips, but condensing, so to speak, into tangible substances; into bodies which were themselves animated by creative life and energy; into gods and goddesses who lived or who created in their turn. By a very short phrase Tumu had called forth the gods who order all things; for his "Come unto me!" uttered with a loud voice upon the day of creation, had evoked the sun from within the lotus. Thot had opened his lips, and the voice which proceeded from him had become an entity; sound had solidified into matter, and by a simple emission of voice the four gods who preside over the four houses of the world had come forth alive from his mouth without bodily effort on his part, and without spoken evocation. Creation by the voice is almost as great a refinement of thought as the substitution of creation by the word for creation by muscular effort. In fact, sound bears the same relation to words that the whistle of a quartermaster bears to orders for the navigation of a ship transmitted by a speaking trumpet; it simplifies speech, reducing it as it were to a pure abstraction. At first it was believed that the creator had made the world with a word, then that he had made it by sound; but the further conception of his having made it by thought does not seem to have occurred to the theologians. It was narrated at Hermopolis, and the legend was ultimately universally accepted, even by the Heliopolitans, that the separation of Nuit and Sibu had taken place at a certain spot on the site of the city where Sibu had ascended the mound on which the feudal temple was afterwards built, in order that he might better sustain the goddess and uphold the sky at the proper height. The conception of a Creative Council of five gods had so far prevailed at Hermopolis that from this fact the city had received in remote antiquity the name of the "House of the Five;" its temple was called the "Abode of the Five" down to a late period in Egyptian history, and its prince, who was the hereditary high priest of Thot, reckoned as the first of his official titles that of "Great One of the House of the Five."

The four couples who had helped Atumu were identified with the four auxiliary gods of Thot, and changed the council of Five into a Great Hermopolitan Ennead, but at the cost of strange metamorphoses. However artificially they had been grouped about Atumu, they had all preserved such distinctive characteristics as prevented their being confounded one with another. When the universe which they had helped to build up was finally seen to be the result of various operations demanding a considerable manifestation of physical energy, each god was required to preserve the individuality necessary for the production of such effects as were expected of him. They could not have existed and carried on their work without conforming to the ordinary conditions of humanity; being born one of another, they were bound to have paired with living goddesses as capable of bringing forth their children as they were of begetting them. On the other hand, the four auxiliary gods of Hermopolis exercised but one means of action—the voice. Having themselves come forth from the master's mouth, it was by voice that they created and perpetuated the world. Apparently they could have done without goddesses had marriage not been imposed upon them by their identification with the corresponding gods of the Heliopolitan Ennead; at any rate, their wives had but a show of life, almost destitute of reality. As these four gods worked after the manner of their master, Thot, so they also bore his form and reigned along with him as so many baboons. When associated with the lord of Hermopolis, the eight divinities of Heliopolis assumed the character and the appearance of the four Hermopolitan gods in whom they were merged. They were often represented as eight baboons surrounding the supreme baboon, or as four pairs of gods and goddesses without either characteristic attributes or features; or, finally, as four pairs of gods and goddesses, the gods being, as far as we are able to judge, the couple Nu-Nuit answers to Shu-Tafnuit; Hahu-Hehit to Sibu and Nuifc; Kaku-Kakit to Osiris and Isis; Ninu-Ninit to Sit and Nephthys. There was seldom any occasion to invoke them separately; they were addressed collectively as the Eight—Khmunu—and it was on their account that Hermopolis was named Khmunu, the City of the Eight. Ultimately they were deprived of the little individual life still left to them, and were fused into a single being to whom the texts refer as Khomninu, the god Eight.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a photograph by Beato. Cf. Lepsius, Denkm., iv. pl. 66 c. In this illustration I have combined! the two extremities of a great scene at Philae, in which the Eight, divided into two groups of four, frog- headed men, and the goddesses serpent-headed women. Morning and evening do they sing; and the mysterious hymns wherewith they salute the rising and the setting sun ensure the continuity of his course. Their names did not survive their metamorphoses; each pair had no longer more than a single name, the termination of each name varying according as a god or a goddess was intended:—Nu and Nuit, Hehu and Hehit, Kaku and Kakit, Ninu and Ninit, the god One and the god Eight, the Monad and the Ogdoad. The latter had scarcely more than a theoretical existence, and was generally absorbed into the person of the former. Thus the theologians of Hermopolis gradually disengaged the unity of their feudal god from the multiplicity of the cosmogonie deities.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a bronze statuette found at Thebes, and now in my possession.

By degrees the Ennead of Thot was thus reduced to two terms: take part in the adoration of the king. According to a custom common towards the Graeco-Roman period, the sculptor has made the feet of his gods like jackals' heads; it is a way of realizing the well-known metaphor which compares a rapid runner to the jackal roaming around Egypt.

As the sacerdotal colleges had adopted the Heliopolitan doctrine, so they now generally adopted that of Hermopolis: Amon, for instance, being made to preside indifferently over the eight baboons and over the four independent couples of the primitive Ennead. In both cases the process of adaptation was absolutely identical, and would have been attended by no difficulty whatever, had the divinities to whom it was applied only been without family; in that case, the one needful change for each city would have been that of a single name in the Heliopolitan list, thus leaving the number of the Ennead unaltered. But since these deities had been turned into triads they could no longer be primarily regarded as simple units, to be combined with the elements of some one or other of the Enneads without preliminary arrangement. The two companions whom each had chosen had to be adopted also, and the single Thot, or single Atumu, replaced by the three patrons of the nome, thus changing the traditional nine into eleven. Happily, the constitution of the triad lent itself to all these adaptations. We have seen that the father and the son became one and the same personage, whenever it was thought desirable. We also know that one of the two parents always so far predominated as almost to efface the other. Sometimes it was the goddess who disappeared behind her husband; sometimes it was the god whose existence merely served to account for the offspring of the goddess, and whose only title to his position consisted in the fact that he was her husband. Two personages thus closely connected were not long in blending into one, and were soon defined as being two faces, the masculine and feminine aspects of a single being. On the one hand, the father was one with the son, and on the other he was one with the mother. Hence the mother was one with the son as with the father, and the three gods of the triad were resolved into one god in three persons.



1 This Ennead consists of fourteen members—Montu, duplicating Atumu; the four usual couples; then Horus, the son of Isis and Osiris, together with his associate deities, Hathor, Tanu, and Anit.

Thanks to this subterfuge, to put a triad at the head of an Ennead was nothing more than a roundabout way of placing a single god there: the three persons only counted as one, and the eleven names only amounted to the nine canonical divinities. Thus, the Theban Ennead of Amon-Maut-Khonsu, Shu, Tafnuit, Sibu, Nuit, Osiris, Isis, Sit, and Nephthys, is, in spite of its apparent irregularity, as correct as the typical Ennead itself. In such Enneads Isis is duplicated by goddesses of like nature, such as Hathor, Selkit, Taninit, and yet remains but one, while Osiris brings in his son Horus, who gathers about himself all such gods as play the part of divine son in other triads. The theologians had various methods of procedure for keeping the number of persons in an Ennead at nine, no matter how many they might choose to embrace in it. Supernumeraries were thrown in like the "shadows" at Roman suppers, whom guests would bring without warning to their host, and whose presence made not the slightest difference either in the provision for the feast, or in the arrangements for those who had been formally invited.

Thus remodelled at all points, the Ennead of Heliopolis was readily adjustable to sacerdotal caprices, and even profited by the facilities which, the triad afforded for its natural expansion. In time the Heliopolitan version of the origin of Shu-Tafnuit must have appeared too primitively barbarous. Allowing for the licence of the Egyptians during Pharaonic times, the concept of the spontaneous emission whereby Aturnu had produced his twin children was characterized by a superfluity of coarseness which it was at least unnecessary to employ, since by placing the god in a triad, this double birth could be duly explained in conformity with the ordinary laws of life. The solitary Aturnu of the more ancient dogma gave place to Aturnu the husband and father. He had, indeed, two wives, Iusasit and Nebthotpit, but their individualities were so feebly marked that no one took the trouble to choose between them; each passed as the mother of Shu and Tafnuifc. This system of combination, so puerile in its ingenuity, was fraught with the gravest consequences to the history of Egyptian religions. Shu having been transformed into the divine son of the Heliopolitan triad, could henceforth be assimilated with the divine sons of all those triads which took the place of Tumu at the heads of provincial Enneads. Thus we find that Horus the son of Isis at Buto, Arihosnofir the son of Nit at Sais, Khnumu the son of Hathor at Esneh, were each in turn identified with Shu the son of Aturnu, and lost their individualities in his. Sooner or later this was bound to result in bringing all the triads closer together, and in their absorption into one another. Through constant reiteration of the statement that the divine sons of the triads were identical with Shu, as being in the second rank of the Ennead, the idea arose that this was also the case in triads unconnected with Enneads; in other terms, that the third person in any family of gods was everywhere and always Shu under a different name. It having been finally admitted in the sacerdotal colleges that Tumu and Shu, father and son, were one, all the divine sons were, therefore, identical with Tumu, the father of Shu, and as each divine son was one with his parents, it inevitably followed that these parents themselves were identical with Tumu. Reasoning in this way, the Egyptians naturally tended towards that conception of the divine oneness to which the theory of the Hermopolitan Ogdoad was already leading them. In fact, they reached it, and the monuments show us that in comparatively early times the theologians were busy uniting in a single person the prerogatives which their ancestors had ascribed to many different beings. But this conception of deity towards which their ideas were converging has nothing in common with the conception of the God of our modern religions and philosophies. No god of the Egyptians was ever spoken of simply as God. Tumu was the "one and only god"—nutir uau uaiti—at Heliopolis; Anhuri-Shu was also the "one and only god" at Sebennytos and at Thinis. The unity of Atumu did not interfere with that of Anhuri-Shu, but each of these gods, although the "sole" deity in his own domain, ceased to be so in the domain of the other. The feudal spirit, always alert and jealous, prevented the higher dogma which was dimly apprehended in the temples from triumphing over local religions and extending over the whole land. Egypt had as many "sole" deities as she had large cities, or even important temples; she never accepted the idea of the sole God, "beside whom there is none other."



CHAPTER III.—-THE LEGENDARY HISTORY OF EGYPT

THE DIVINE DYNASTIES: RA, SHU, OSIEIS, SIT, HOEUS—THOT, AND THE INVENTION OF SCIENCES AND WRITING—MENES, AND THE THREE FIRST HUMAN DYNASTIES.

_The Egyptians claim to Be the most ancient of peoples: traditions concerning the creation of man and of animals—The Heliopolitan Enneads the framework of the divine dynasties—Ra, the first King of Egypt, and his fabulous history: he allows himself to be duped and robbed by Isis, destroys rebellious men, and ascends into heaven.

The legend of Shu and Sibil—The reign of Osiris Onnophris and of Isis: they civilize Egypt and the world—Osiris, slain by Sit, is entombed by Isis and avenged by Horus—The wars of Typhon and of Horus: peace, and the division of Egypt between the two gods.

The Osirian embalmment; the kingdom of Osiris opened to the followers of Horus—The Book of the Dead—The journeying of the soul in search of the fields of Ialu—The judgment of the soul, the negative confession—The privileges and duties of Osirian souls—Confusion between Osirian and Solar ideas as to the state of the dead: the dead in the hark of the Sun—The going forth by day—The campaigns of Harmakhis against Sit.

Thot, the inventor: he reveals all sciences to men—Astronomy, stellar tables; the year, its subdivisions, its defects, influence of the heavenly bodies and the days upon human destiny—Magic arts; incantations, amulets—-Medicine: the vitalizing spirits, diagnosis, treatment—Writing: ideographic, syllabic, alphabetic.

The history of Egypt as handed down by tradition: Manetho, the royal lists, main divisions of Egyptian history—The beginnings of its early history vague and uncertain: Menes, and the legend of Memphis—The first three human dynasties, the two Thimie and the Memphite—Character and, origin of the legends concerning them—The famine stela—The earliest monuments: the step pyramid of Saqgdrah._



THE LEGENDARY HISTORY OF EGYPT

The divine dynasties: Ra, Shu, Osiris, Sit, Horus—Thot, and the invention of sciences and writing—Menes, and the three first human dynasties.

The building up and diffusion of the doctrine of the Ennead, like the formation of the land of Egypt, demanded centuries of sustained effort, centuries of which the inhabitants themselves knew neither the number nor the authentic history. When questioned as to the remote past of their race, they proclaimed themselves the most ancient of mankind, in comparison with whom all other races were but a mob of young children; and they looked upon nations which denied their pretensions with such indulgence and pity as we feel for those who doubt a well-known truth. Their forefathers had appeared upon the banks of the Nile even before the creator had completed his work, so eager were the gods to behold their birth. No Egyptian disputed the reality of this right of the firstborn, which ennobled the whole race; but if they were asked the name of their divine father, then the harmony was broken, and each advanced the claims of a different personage.[*] Phtah had modelled man with his own hands;[**] Khnumu had formed him on a potter's table.[***]

* We know the words which Plato puts into the mouth of an Egyptian priest: "O Solon, Solon, you Greeks are always children, and there is no old man who is a Greek! You are all young in mind; there is no opinion or tradition of knowledge among you which is white with age." Other nations disputed their priority—the Phrygians, the Medes, or rather the tribe of the Magi among the Medes, the Ethiopians, the Scythians. A cycle of legends had gathered about this subject, giving an account of the experiments instituted, by Psamtik, or other sovereigns, to find out which were right, Egyptians or foreigners.

** At Philae and at Denderah, Phtah is represented as piling upon his potter's table the plastic clay from which he is about to make a human body, and which is somewhat wrongly called the egg of the world. It is really the lump of earth from which man came forth at his creation.

*** At Philas, Khnumu calls himself "the potter who fashions men, the modeller of the gods." He there moulds the members of Osiris, the husband of the local Isis, as at Erment he forms the body of Harsamtaui, or rather that of Ptolemy Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and the celebrated Cleopatra, identified with Harsamtaui.

Ra at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare, had flooded it with his rays as with a flood of tears; all living things, vegetable and animal, and man himself, had sprung pell-mell from his eyes, and were scattered abroad with the light over the surface of the world.[*] Sometimes the facts were presented under a less poetic aspect. The mud of the Nile, heated to excess by the burning sun, fermented and brought forth the various races of men and animals by spontaneous generation, having moulded itself into a thousand living forms. Then its procreative power became weakened to the verge of exhaustion. Yet on the banks of the river, in the height of summer, smaller animals might still be found whose condition showed what had once taken place in the case of the larger kinds. Some appeared as already fully formed, and struggling to free themselves from the oppressive mud; others, as yet imperfect, feebly stirred their heads and fore feet, while their hind quarters were completing their articulation and taking shape within the matrix of earth.[**]

* With reference to the substances which proceeded from the eye of Ra, see the remarks of Birch, Sur un papyrus magique du Musee Britannique. By his tears (romitu) Horus, or his eye as identified with the sun, had given birth to all men, Egyptians (romitu, rotu), Libyans, and Asiatics, excepting only the negroes. The latter were born from another part of his body by the same means as those employed by Atumu in the creation of Shu and Tafnuit.

** The same story is told, but with reference to rats only, by Pliny, by Diodorus, by AElianus, by Macrobius, and by other Greek or Latin writers. Even in later times, and in Europe, this pretended phenomenon met with a certain degree of belief, as may be seen from the curious work of Marcus Fredericus Wendelinus, Archipalatinus, Admiranda Nili, Franco-furti, mdcxxiii., cap. xxi. pp. 157-183. In Egypt all the fellahin believe in the spontaneous generation of rats as in an article of their creed. They have spoken to me of it at Thebes, at Denderah, and on the plain of Abydos; and Major Brown has lately noted the same thing in the Fayum. The variant which he heard from the lips of the notables is curious, for it professes to explain why the rats who infest the fields in countless bands during the dry season, suddenly disappear at the return of the inundation; born of the mud and putrid water of the preceding year, to mud they return, and as it were dissolve at the touch of the new waters.

It was not Ra alone whose tears were endowed with vitalizing power. All divinities whether beneficent or malevolent, Sit as well as Osiris or Isis, could give life by weeping; and the work of their eyes, when once it had fallen upon earth, flourished and multiplied as vigorously as that which came from the eyes of Ra.



1 Drawn by Boudier, from a photograph by Gayet. The scene is taken from bas-reliefs in the temple of Luxor, where the god Khnumu is seen completing his modelling of the future King Amenothes III. and his double, represented as two children wearing the side-lock and large necklace. The first holds his finger to his lips, while the arms of the second swing at his sides.

The individual character of the creator was not without bearing upon the nature of his creatures; good was the necessary outcome of the good gods, evil of the evil ones; and herein lay the explanation of the mingling of things excellent and things execrable, which is found everywhere throughout the world. Voluntarily or involuntarily, Sit and his partisans were the cause and origin of all that is harmful. Daily their eyes shed upon the world those juices by which plants are made poisonous, as well as malign influences, crime, and madness. Their saliva, the foam which fell from their mouths during their attacks of rage, their sweat, their blood itself, were all no less to be feared. When any drop of it touched the earth, straightway it germinated, and produced something strange and baleful—a serpent, a scorpion, a plant of deadly nightshade or of henbane. But, on the other hand, the sun was all goodness, and persons or things which it cast forth into life infallibly partook of its benignity. Wine that maketh man glad, the bee who works for him in the flowers secreting wax and honey, the meat and herbs which are his food, the stuffs that clothe him, all useful things which he makes for himself, not only emanated from the Solar Eye of Horus, but were indeed nothing more than the Eye of Horus under different aspects, and in his name they were presented in sacrifice. The devout generally were of opinion that the first Egyptians, the sons and flock of Ra, came into the world happy and perfect;[*] by degrees their descendants had fallen from that native felicity into their present state.

* In the tomb of Seti I, the words flock of the Sun, flock of Ra, are those by which the god Horus refers to men. Certain expressions used by Egyptian writers are in themselves sufficient to show that the first generations of men were supposed to have lived in a state of happiness and perfection. To the Egyptians the times of Ra, the times of the god—that is to say, the centuries immediately following on the creation—-were the ideal age, and no good thing had appeared upon earth since then.

Some, on the contrary, affirmed that their ancestors were born as so many brutes, unprovided with the most essential arts of gentle life. They knew nothing of articulate speech, and expressed themselves by cries only, like other animals, until the day when Thot taught them both speech and writing.

These tales sufficed for popular edification; they provided but meagre fare for the intelligence of the learned. The latter did not confine their ambition to the possession of a few incomplete and contradictory details concerning the beginnings of humanity. They wished to know the history of its consecutive development from the very first; what manner of life had been led by their fathers; what chiefs they had obeyed and the names or adventures of those chiefs; why part of the nations had left the blessed banks of the Nile and gone to settle in foreign lands; by what stages and in what length of time those who had not emigrated rose out of native barbarism into that degree of culture to which the most ancient monuments bore testimony. No efforts of imagination were needful for the satisfaction of their curiosity: the old substratum of indigenous traditions was rich enough, did they but take the trouble to work it out systematically, and to eliminate its most incongruous elements. The priests of Heliopolis took this work in hand, as they had already taken in hand the same task with regard to the myths referring to the creation; and the Enneads provided them with a ready-made framework. They changed the gods of the Ennead into so many kings, determined with minute accuracy the lengths of their reigns, and compiled their biographies from popular tales. The duality of the feudal god supplied an admirable expedient for connecting the history of the world with that of chaos. Tumu was identified with Nu, and relegated to the primordial Ocean: Ra was retained, and proclaimed the first king of the world. He had not established his rule without difficulty. The "Children of Defeat," beings hostile to order and light, engaged him in fierce battles; nor did he succeed in organizing his kingdom until he had conquered them in nocturnal combat at Hermopolis, and even at Heliopolis itself.[*]

* The Children of Defeat, in Egyptian Mosu batashu, or Mosu batashit, are often confounded with the followers of Sit, the enemies of Osiris. From the first they were distinct, and represented beings and forces hostile to the sun, with the dragon Apopi at their head. Their defeat at Hermopolis corresponded to the moment when Shu, raising the sky above the sacred mound in that city, substituted order and light for chaos and darkness. This defeat is mentioned in chap xvii. of the Book of the Dead (Naville's edition, vol. i. pl. xxiii. 1. 3, et seq.), in which connexion E. de Rouge first explained its meaning. In the same chapter of the Book of the Dead (Naville's edition, vol. i. pis. xxiv., xxv., 11. 54-58), reference is also made to the battle by night, in Heliopolis, at the close of which Ra appeared in the form of a cat or lion, and beheaded the great serpent.

Pierced with wounds, Apopi the serpent sank into the depths of Ocean at the very moment when the new year began. The secondary members of the Great Ennead, together with the Sun, formed the first dynasty, which began with the dawn of the first day, and ended at the coming of Horus, the son of Isis. The local schools of theology welcomed this method of writing history as readily as they had welcomed the principle of the Ennead itself. Some of them retained the Heliopolitan demiurge, and hastened to associate him with their own; others completely eliminated him in favour of the feudal divinity,—Amon at Thebes, Thot at Hermopolis, Phtah at Memphis,—keeping the rest of the dynasty absolutely unchanged.[*] The gods in no way compromised their prestige by becoming incarnate and descending to earth. Since they were men of finer nature, and their qualities, including that of miracle-working, were human qualities raised to the highest pitch of intensity, it was not considered derogatory to them personally to have watched over the infancy and childhood of primeval man. The raillery in which the Egyptians occasionally indulged with regard to them, the good-humoured and even ridiculous roles ascribed to them in certain legends, do not prove that they were despised, or that zeal for them had cooled. The greater the respect of believers for the objects of their worship, the more easily do they tolerate the taking of such liberties, and the condescension of the members of the Ennead, far from lowering them in the eyes of generations who came too late to live with them upon familiar terms, only enhanced the love and reverence in which they were held. Nothing shows this better than the history of Ra. His world was ours in the rough; for since Shu was yet nonexistent, and Nuit still reposed in the arms of Sibu, earth and sky were but one.[**]

* Thot is the chief of the Hermopolitan Ennead, and the titles ascribed to him by inscriptions maintaining his supremacy show that he also was considered to have been the first king. One of the Ptolemies said of himself that he came "as the Majesty of Thot, because he was the equal of Atumu, hence the equal of Khopri, hence the equal of Ra." Atumu-Khopri-Ra being the first earthly king, it follows that the Majesty of Thot, with whom Ptolemy identifies himself, comparing himself to the three forms of the God Ra, is also the first earthly king.

** This conception of the primitive Egyptian world is clearly implied in the very terms employed by the author of The Destruction of Men. Nuit does not rise to form the sky until such time as Ra thinks of bringing his reign to an end; that is to say, after Egypt had already been in existence for many centuries. In chap. xvii. of the Book of the Dead (Naville's edition, vol. i. pl. xxiii. 11. 3-5) it is stated that the reign of Ra began in the times when the upliftings had not yet taken place; that is to say, before Shu had separated Nuit from Sibu, and forcibly uplifted her above the body of her husband.

Nevertheless in this first attempt at a world there was vegetable, animal, and human life. Egypt was there, all complete, with her two chains of mountains, her Nile, her cities, the people of her nomes, and the nomes themselves. Then the soil was more generous; the harvests, without the labourer's toil, were higher and more abundant;[*] and when the Egyptians of Pharaonic times wished to mark their admiration of any person or thing, they said that the like had never been known since the time of Ra.

* This is an ideal in accordance with the picture drawn of the fields of Ialu in chap. ex. of the Book of the Dead (Naville's edition, vol. i. pis. cxxi.~ cxxiii.). As with the Paradise of most races, so the place of the Osirian dead still possessed privileges which the earth had enjoyed during the first years succeeding the creation; that is to say, under the direct rule of Ra.

It is an illusion common to all peoples; as their insatiable thirst for happiness is never assuaged by the present, they fall back upon the remotest past in search of an age when that supreme felicity which is only known to them as an ideal was actually enjoyed by their ancestors. Ra dwelt in Heliopolis, and the most ancient portion of the temple of the city, that known as the "Mansion of the Prince"—Hait Saru,—passed for having been his palace. His court was mainly composed of gods and goddesses, and they as well as he were visible to men. It contained also men who filled minor offices about his person, prepared his food, received the offerings of his subjects, attended to his linen and household affairs. It was said that the oiru mau—the high priest of Ra, the hankistit—his high priestess, and generally speaking all the servants of the temple of Heliopolis, were either directly descended from members of this first household establishment of the god, or had succeeded to their offices in unbroken succession.



1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from one of the scenes represented upon the architraves of the pronaos at Edfu (Rosellini, Monumenti del Culto, pl. xxxviii. No. 1).

In the morning he went forth with his divine train, and, amid the acclamations of the crowd, entered the bark in which he made his accustomed circuit of the world, returning to his home at the end of twelve hours after the accomplishment of his journey. He visited each province in turn, and in each he tarried for an hour, to settle all disputed matters, as the final judge of appeal. He gave audience to both small and great, he decided their quarrels and adjudged their lawsuits, he granted investiture of fiefs from the royal domains to those who had deserved them, and allotted or confirmed to every family the income needful for their maintenance. He pitied the sufferings of his people, and did his utmost to alleviate them; he taught to all comers potent formulas against reptiles and beasts of prey, charms to cast out evil spirits, and the best recipes for preventing illness. His incessant bounties left him at length with only one of his talismans: the name given to him by his father and mother at his birth, which they had revealed to him alone, and which he kept concealed within his bosom lest some sorcerer should get possession of it to use for the furtherance of his evil spells.

But old age came on, and infirmities followed; the body of Ra grew bent, "his mouth trembled, his slaver trickled down to earth and his saliva dropped upon the ground." Isis, who had hitherto been a mere woman-servant in the household of the Pharaoh, conceived the project of stealing his secret from him, "that she might possess the world and make herself a goddess by the name of the august god." Force would have been unavailing; all enfeebled as he was by reason of his years, none was strong enough to contend successfully against him. But 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 Ra nothing was unknown either in heaven or upon earth." She contrived a most ingenious stratagem. When man or god was struck down by illness, the only chance of curing him lay in knowing his real name, and thereby adjuring the evil being that tormented him. Isis determined to cast a terrible malady upon Ra, concealing its cause from him; then to offer her services as his nurse, and by means of his sufferings to extract from him the mysterious word indispensable to the success of the exorcism. She gathered up mud impregnated with the divine saliva, and moulded of it a sacred serpent which she hid in the dust of the road. Suddenly bitten as he was setting out upon his daily round, the god cried out aloud, "his voice ascended into heaven and his Nine called: 'What is it? what is it?' and his gods: 'What is the matter? what is the matter?' but he could make them no answer so much did his lips tremble, his limbs shake, and the venom take hold upon his flesh as the Nile seizeth upon the land which it invadeth." Presently he came to himself, and succeeded in describing his sensations. "Something painful hath stung me; my heart perceiveth it, yet my two eyes see it not; my hand hath not wrought it, nothing that I have made knoweth it what it is, yet have I never tasted suffering like unto it, and there is no pain that may overpass it.... Fire it is not, water it is not, yet is my heart in flames, my flesh trembleth, all my members are full of shiverings born of breaths of magic. Behold! let there be brought unto me children of the gods of beneficent words, who know the power of their mouths, and whose science reacheth unto heaven." They came, these children of the gods, all with their books of magic. There came Isis with her sorcery, her mouth full of life-giving breaths, her recipe for the destruction of pain, her words which pour life into breathless throats, and she said: "What is it? what is it, O father of the gods? May it not be that a serpent hath wrought this suffering in thee; that one of thy children hath lifted up his head against thee? Surely he shall be overthrown by beneficent incantations, and I will make him to retreat at the sight of thy rays." On learning the cause of his torment, the Sun-god is terrified, and begins to lament anew: "I, then, as I went along the ways, travelling through my double land of Egypt and over my mountains, that I might look upon that which I have made, I was bitten by a serpent that I saw not. Fire it is not, water it is not, yet am I colder than water, I burn more than fire, all my members stream with sweat, I tremble, mine eye is not steady, no longer can I discern the sky, drops roll from my face as in the season of summer." Isis proposes her remedy, and cautiously asks him his ineffable name. But he divines her trick, and tries to evade it by an enumeration of his titles. He takes the universe to witness that he is called "Khopri in the morning, Ra at noon, Tumu in the evening." The poison did not recede, but steadily advanced, and the great god was not eased. Then Isis said to Ra: "Thy name was not spoken in that which thou hast said. Tell it to me and the poison will depart; for he liveth upon whom a charm is pronounced in his own name." The poison glowed like fire, it was strong as the burning of flame, and the Majesty of Ra said, "I grant thee leave that thou shouldest search within me, O mother Isis! and that my name pass from my bosom into thy bosom." In truth, the all-powerful name was hidden within the body of the god, and could only be extracted thence by means of a surgical operation similar to that practised upon a corpse which is about to be mummified. Isis undertook it, carried it through successfully, drove out the poison, and made herself a goddess by virtue of the name. The cunning of a mere woman had deprived Ra of his last talisman.

In course of time men perceived his decrepitude. They took counsel against him: "Lo! his Majesty waxeth old, his bones are of silver, his flesh is of gold, his hair of lapis-lazuli." As soon as his Majesty perceived that which they were saying to each other, his Majesty said to those who were of his train, "Call together for me my Divine Eye, Shu, Tafnuit, Sibu, and Nuit, the father and the mother gods who were with me when I was in the Nu, with the god Nu. Let each bring his cycle along with him; then, when thou shalt have brought them in secret, thou shalt take them to the great mansion that they may lend me their counsel and their consent, coming hither from the Nu into this place where I have manifested myself." So the family council comes together: the ancestors of Ra, and his posterity still awaiting amid the primordial waters the time of their manifestation—his children Shu and Tafnuit, his grandchildren Sibu and Nuit. They place themselves, according to etiquette, on either side his throne, prostrate, with their foreheads to the ground, and thus their conference begins: "O Nu, thou the eldest of the gods, from whom I took my being, and ye the ancestor-gods, behold! men who are the emanation of mine eye have taken counsel together against me! Tell me what ye would do, for I have bidden you here before I slay them, that I may hear what ye would say thereto." Nu, as the eldest, has the right to speak first, and demands that the guilty shall be brought to judgment and formally condemned. "My son Ra, god greater than the god who made him, older than the gods who created him, sit thou upon thy throne, and great shall be the terror when thine eye shall rest upon those who plot together against thee!" But Ra not unreasonably fears that when men see the solemn pomp of royal justice, they may suspect the fate that awaits them, and "flee into the desert, their hearts terrified at that which I have to say to them." The desert was even then hostile to the tutelary gods of Egypt, and offered an almost inviolable asylum to their enemies. The conclave admits that the apprehensions of Ra are well founded, and pronounces in favour of summary execution; the Divine Eye is to be the executioner. "Let it go forth that it may smite those who have devised evil against thee, for there is no Eye more to be feared than thine when it attacketh in the form of Hathor." So the Eye takes the form of Hathor, suddenly falls upon men, and slays them right and left with great strokes of the knife. After some hours, Ra, who would chasten but not destroy his children, commands her to cease from her carnage; but the goddess has tasted blood, and refuses to obey him. "By thy life," she replies, "when I slaughter men then is my heart right joyful!"