“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.

“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—

“O 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.”(87)

Lecture VI. The Gods Of Egypt.

In the language of ancient Egypt the word _neter_ signified “a god.” Sir

P. le Page Renouf endeavoured to show that the word originally meant

“strong,” and that the first Egyptians accordingly pictured their gods as

embodiments of strength.(88) But it has been pointed out(89) 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 pantheistic 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

the divinity which the multitude saw in the bull Apis and the formless and

ever-living Creator of the priesthood 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 centuries 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

connotation 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 only.

The hieroglyphic writing which preserved memories of a 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.(90) 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,(91)

and both in the old world and in the new the fetish 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 population 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 gods, 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 _rpâ_, 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 became the mother of the egg out of which the universe was born.

Nut 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,

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.(92) 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 unformed

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.

But Nu survived only in the theological schools, more especially in that

of Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên. The god of Hermopolis was Thoth, the

Egyptian Deḥuti. 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,(93) 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 astronomy, architecture and letters. He knew the magic

formulæ which could bind the gods themselves, and as minister of the

Pharaoh Thamos 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 due.

It is curious that we do not know his true name, for Deḥuti means merely

the god “who is attached to the ibis.” Was it really Nu? and is Thoth

really a compound 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.(94)

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 generation. 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 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.(95) But in accordance with the more

abstract character of the cosmogony of which it was a part, the divinities

of which it is composed 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

Ḥeḥui and Ḥeḥet, Kek and Keket, Nini and Ninit, “eternity,” “darkness,”

and “inertia.”(96) The whole scheme is Asiatic rather than Egyptian, but

the gods composing it are already mentioned in the Pyramid texts.

The four pairs of abstract deities constituted “the eight” gods after whom

Hermopolis received one of its names (Khmunu, now Ashmunên), and who were

often addressed as “the god eight,” like “the god seven” in Babylonia.

Professor Maspero sees in them a philosophical 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 Sudân; 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 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 Eshmunên. Its temple was called “the Abode

of the Five,” and its high priest “the great one of the House of the

Five.”(97)

How the half-human apes of Central Africa came to be 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 Suâkim 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

suppose 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 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;(98) 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 he knew the dance that would be pleasing to the gods.(99)

I believe, therefore, that the apes of Thoth were at the outset the

dwarf-like apes or ape-like dwarfs who danced in 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 Ra. 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-Menic age of Egypt; we can

hardly any longer call it prehistoric. So, too, does the influence of

Nekhen, once 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 Red 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 Sehêl received its

name, and there her sanctuary stood before Isis of Philæ 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 Sutê had

precisely the same meaning among the Babylonians. The fact cannot be

accidental; and as Sutê 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, Ânuqet by name, is her companion. Now Ânuqet is the feminine of

Ânuq, the Ânaq of the Old Testament. The foreign nature of Ânuqet 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 Red Sea. A similar cap is worn by the Zakkal on the coast of

Palestine, in the near neighbourhood of “the sons of Ânaq,” as well as by

the Babylonian king Merodach-nadin-akhi, on a monument now in the British

Museum.(100) Everything, therefore, points to its having been an Asiatic

characteristic; 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 Ânuqet with Hestia, and Sati with Hêra. 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 inundation of the Nile. It

thus became a symbol of the resurrection, and was consequently adopted by

the Christians of Egypt. Hence the frequency with which it is represented

on lamps of the late Roman 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 Philæ it is

said of him that he was “the moulder (_khnum_) of men, the modeller of the

gods.”(101) 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.(102) 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.(103)

But was there also a connection between the Babylonian god who was

worshipped in the ancient seaport of Chaldæa 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 Ânuqet was also from Asia, and that her traditional head-dress

preserved a memory of the fact. There is a road from the Red 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 Semitic kinsfolk did in later days into

the tablelands of Abyssinia.

The creator who was worshipped at Memphis, at the other end of the Nile

valley, was a potter also.(104) This was Ptaḥ, 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 ceremony 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.(105) Ptaḥ 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.(106) At any rate, Ptaḥ and Khnum are alike forms of the same

primitive deity, and the names they bear are epithets merely. At Philæ,

Ptaḥ 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.(107)

The Khnumu are the Patæki of Herodotos (iii. 37), whose figures, the Greek

writer tells us, were carved by the Phœnicians 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 Patæki we might infer that they had been

borrowed by the Phœnicians from Egypt. But it is also possible that both

Egypt and Phœnicia 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.(108) 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

Ptaḥ 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 syncretism which

accompanied it, the individuality of the old god of Memphis became still

further lost. He was merged into Tanen or Tatunen, a local god of the

earth, as well as into Ra. He had already been made into the chief of an

Ennead, and now the Ennead was resolved into a trinity. Nofer-Tum,

“beautified by Tum,” was brought from Heliopolis, and was made into a son

of Ptaḥ, afterwards to be superseded, however, by another abstraction,

Im-hotep, “he who comes in peace.”(109) Im-hotep was reputed the first

_kher-heb_ or hierophant; he it was who recited and interpreted the

liturgy of the dead and the magic formulæ which restored health to the

sick and raised the dead to life. The Greeks consequently identified him

with Asklêpios.(110) 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 Ptaḥ 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 Ptaḥ. He was even identified with

Ḥâpi, the Nile, though perhaps the similarity in sound between the sacred

name of the river and that of the bull Apis (Ḥapi) may have assisted in

the identification.(111)

That 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

displaced.(112)

But the backwardness of the 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 III., breathe a spirit of

gratitude and devotion which can hardly be exceeded—

“Hail to thee, O Nile!

who manifestest thyself over this land,

and comest to give life to Egypt!

Mysterious is thy issuing forth from darkness,

on 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 createst 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....

Establisher 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 country falls exhausted ...

O Nile, come (and) prosper!

O thou that makest men to live through his flocks,

and his flocks through his orchards!”(113)

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 his

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 Ptaḥ 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

take the place of Tum as the creators of heaven and earth.(114)

Nit rose to eminence with the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Her city of Sais had

previously played no part in history, but both its goddess and its

sanctuary were of old date.(115) 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 their Athêna on account of a slight similarity

in the names.

Sekhet, or Bast of Bubastis, is better known. Sometimes she has the head

of a lion, sometimes of a cat. At Philæ it is said of her that “she is

savage as Sekhet and mild as Bast.”(116) 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.(117) The lion of Sekhet

was transformed into a cat; and as the centuries passed, the petted and

domesticated animal was the object of a worship that became fanatical.

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 honoured

above all other animals on the banks of the Nile. The 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.(118)

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. Pepi I., even at Bubastis, still calls himself the son

of Hathor.

Hathor played much the same part among the goddesses that Ra 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 Ra. The kings of the Sixth Dynasty called themselves her sons, just as

they also called themselves sons of the sun-god. She presided over the

underworld; 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,(119) when compelled to form with her a trinity, remained

lay figures and nothing more.

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 addressed as the

daughter of Ra;(120) sometimes the sun-god is her son. At Dendera the

solar orb is represented as rising from her lap, while its rays encircle

her head, which rests upon Bâkhu, 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 Hathor.(121)

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 Ra, 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.” In 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.(122) 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. 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 Hât.

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 (_shi_) 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 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.(123) Even

her animal form connects her with Chaldæa. Dr. Scheil has published a

Babylonian seal of the age of Abraham, on which the cow, giving milk to a

calf, appears as the symbol of Istar, and a hymn of the time of

Assur-bani-pal identifies the goddess with a cow.(124)

I have left myself but little time in which to speak of the gods who

interpenetrated and transfigured Egyptian theology in the period of which

we know most. These are the gods of Thebes. For centuries Thebes was the

dominant centre of a powerful and united Egypt, and its chief god Amon

followed the fortunes of his city.

As 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

pantheistic. What Amon really signified the priests did not know, nor are

we any wiser.

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 of Hermonthis, who also probably represented the sun.

At any rate, Mentu had the head of a hawk, and therefore must have been a

local form of Horus—of that Horus, namely, of whom the Pharaonic Egyptians

were the followers.(125) Like Horus, too, he was a fighting god, and was

accordingly identified in the texts of the Nineteenth 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.(126)

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 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 of Amon with Ra. The

spread of the solar cult of Heliopolis had introduced the name and worship

of Ra into all the temples of Egypt; the local gods had, as it were, been

incorporated into him, and even the goddesses 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 Ra were one and the same.

In the Theban period, accordingly, Amon is no longer a simple god. He is

Amon-Ra, to whom all the attributes of Ra have been transferred. The solar

element is 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 or is 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 acquiring

this relationship Khonsu lost his original nature.(127) 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-Ra.

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 the creator is separate from his creation. With all its

spirituality, the Egyptian conception of the divine remained 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.

Lecture 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 story; had they been Greek or Roman historiographers,

they would have solved the problem 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 Nebhât, but her

son Anubis, the jackal, claimed Osiris as his father.

Osiris 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 become a

province of the Egyptian empire, and there were close relations between

the Phœnician 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.

Wherever 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.

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, until at last

Thoth was appointed arbiter, and divided Egypt between the two foes.

Southern Egypt was given to Horus, Northern Egypt to Set.

It is somewhat difficult to disentangle the threads out of which 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 between 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 Ra, 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 inhabitants

of Egypt dismembered their dead; and the preservation 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 paint, which was practised by the neolithic population of

Egypt.

There 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 human god; he was the first mummy; and he became the god of

the dead. And the paradise over which he ruled, and to which the faithful

souls who believed in him were admitted, was the field of Alu, a land of

light and happiness.

_Sekhet Alu_, “the field of Alu,” seems to have been the cemetery of

Busiris among the marshes of the Delta.(128) 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 Delta. 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.

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 Ânz, “the

king,” and it bordered on Hermopolis, which was dedicated to the ibis-god

Thoth, who is so closely connected with the story of Osiris.(129) To the

north stood the temple of Isis-Rennet,(130) to the south-west was

Pharbæthos (Horbêt), 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 Delta.

The name Busiris means simply “the place of Osiris.” Primitively it had

been called Daddu, “the two colonnades,”(131) 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 body. 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.”(132)

Nebhât and Anubis had originally nothing to do with the god of Busiris.

Nebhât, 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 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.

Nebhât 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 Siût, 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 him.

The acceptance of Osiris as the god of the underworld meant the

displacement of Anubis. He had to make 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 dead.

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 Ptaḥ 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 mummies

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 Abydos of its claim to veneration. Its sanctity was too firmly

established; hundreds of Egyptians still continued to be buried there,

rather than in the spacious necropolis of the Memphite Pharaohs.(133)

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

of Abydos” that he was now with preference addressed.

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

remained: the separate limbs would not suffice for the number of the

tombs, and the same member was sometimes 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 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.(134)

The double relation 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 Busiris, was transferred also to Southern Egypt.

Whom or what did Osiris originally represent? To this many answers have

been given. Of late Egyptologists have seen in him sometimes a

personification of mankind, sometimes the river Nile, sometimes the

cultivated 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.(135)

We have, however, one or two facts to guide us in determining the

primitive character of the god. He was a mummified man like Ptaḥ 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 with

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

engraved. 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 III. 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 wars of the two kingdoms the two gods would be hostile

to one another, and yet brethren.

It was the armies of Set that were driven by Horus and his metal-bearing

followers from one end of Egypt to the other, and finally overcome.(136)

Set therefore represents 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 Bedâwi 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 himself 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 faith.(137)

The 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 Pharaonic Egyptians, but a sun-god who was connected for

some special reason with the dead.(138)

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.(139) 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 who 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 Babylonia. 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.”(140)

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 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 formulas

which could ward off sickness or evil, and, as it is often expressed, to

“raise the dead to life.”

In this last expression we have the key to the part played 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 entombment, 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 that of 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, and

the old struggle between Horus and Set was transferred to the Osirian

cult.

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 Horus-hawk and

the animal of Set above his name.

Set, as I have already said, is the Sutu or Bedâwi. 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-rabê (“Nebo the great”) are described as twins.(141) 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 Bedâwin 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.

It has been thought that the struggle between Horus and Set typified the

struggle that is ever going on 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 II. 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

corruption, that the growth of the seed which has been buried in the

ground is invoked to explain and confirm their creed.

How 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 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. Ptaḥ of Memphis was also a

mummy; so too was the mummified 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.

It 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 restored 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.

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 in perpetual happiness under the

rule of Osiris, working, feasting, reading, even fighting, as they would

below, only without pain and eternally.(142)

But, in order to share in this state of bliss, it was necessary 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 developed form is

inconsistent with the idea of the _ka_. 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 individuality 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 _ka_ 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.

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 forward 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

counterpart? and what the god had done those who had become even as he was

could also do.

In this way the doctrine of the resurrection of the body 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, 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 corvée 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 hardship to the poor

fellah who had spent his life in agricultural 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

vicariously.

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 prevail here

were no longer possible. The old conception of the ka came to the help of

the believer. The place of the human servant was taken by the _ushebti_,

that little 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

_ushebti_-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.

The same belief which had substituted the _ushebti_ for the 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 in them,

were considered quite sufficient. One of the most touching results of this

thorough-going realism has been noticed by Professor Wiedemann.(143) “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

resurrection, and meantime make use of their _ka_.

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 Ritual with its divine lore and incantations 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.

This moral test of righteousness is the most remarkable fact connected

with the Osirian system of doctrine. The Egyptian who accepted it was

called on to acknowledge 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 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 on 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

Ritual which prescribed the prayers and incantations 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 Mât, 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 (O 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.(144)...

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 murdered.

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 cerecloths.

I have not been unchaste.

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!”(145)

The 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, O chiefs! in this hour of supreme judgment; grant

that the deceased may come unto you, he who hath not sinned, who hath

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!”(146)

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 following words: “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 impurity 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 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.”(147)

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 to prove that he has performed his duty towards the gods.

And 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 remembered 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 honoured my mother.... When a

famine arose, lasting 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.(148)

Of 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, in the form of a hideous hippopotamus, stood behind Thoth in 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 in 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

Osirian, 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 return to the

God who gave them, when the human individuality to which they had been

joined was punished for its offences in the flesh. The soul could remain

united only to that individuality which had been purified from all its

earthly stains, and had become as the god Osiris himself. The

individuality which was condemned in the judgment of Osiris perished

eternally, and in the mind of the Egyptian the individuality and the

individual were one and the same.

Lecture VIII. The Sacred Books.

Like all other organised religions, that of ancient Egypt had its sacred

books. According to St. Clement of Alexandria, 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 “Hermetic”

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.(149)

The Hermetic books were written in Greek, and were a compilation of the

Greek age. Such a systematic epitome of the learning of ancient Egypt

belonged to the period when Egyptian religion had ceased to be creative,

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.

Foremost amongst the latter is the Ritual 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 _ushebtis_ 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 sepulchral furniture, where their ghostly doubles could

be read by his ka and soul.

The 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 accompanied 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.(150)

But the Book of the Dead is a composite work. Not only are the religious

conceptions embodied in it composite 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 commentary and

explanation. Chapters have been inserted, paragraphs interpolated, and the

later commentary combined with the original text. The Book of the Dead as

it appears in the age of the Theban dynasties had already passed through

long centuries of growth and modification.(151)

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.(152)

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 day.

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 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

admitted 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 theological formulæ, 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, however 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 needful 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 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 belong. Professor Maspero has shown that

the 64th chapter, once considered one of the oldest, is in reality one of

the latest in date. It sums up the different formulæ 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-Ra of the

Fourth Dynasty, under the feet of Thoth in the temple of Eshmunên, written

in letters of lapis-lazuli on a tablet of alabaster. The details 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.(153)

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 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_.”(154) They describe how the soul can leave its mummy, can

escape forced labour in the other world through the help of the _ushebti_,

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

beyond the grave. The 15th chapter is a hymn to the Sun.

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 individuality. 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 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 _kheper_ happened to coincide in sound with the word that signified

“to become.”(155)

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 world. 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 during the Osirian wars,—a chapter, however, in which, it

may be observed, the elder Horus is already confounded with the son of

Osiris.(156)

Chapters xliv. to liii. are occupied in describing how the dead man 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 contrasted with the joys that await him in the

paradise of the 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 day.” 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. 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 formulæ relating to the severance of soul and body

which were current in the priestly schools.(157)