Pausing at the entrance to a much explored domain with a fitting
realization of being a novice and an intruder therein, I find myself
encouraged to advance by the frank admission recently made by one of the
leading authorities in Egyptology. In his “Notes for travellers in Egypt,”
Dr. Wallis Budge, the Assistant in the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian
antiquities, of the British Museum, openly states that “the religion of
the ancient Egyptians is one of the most difficult problems of Egyptology
and though a great deal has been written about it during the last few
years and many difficulties have been satisfactorily explained, there
still remain unanswered a large number of questions connected with it. In
all religious texts the reader is always assumed to have a knowledge of
the subject treated of by the writer, and no definite statement is made on
the subject concerning which very little, comparatively, is known by
students of to-day” (The Nile, London, 1890, p. 71).
After having traced, as I have done, throughout ancient America, China,
India and Babylonia-Assyria, one and the same fundamental, artificial
scheme of state organization, it was with keenest interest and a new sense
of comprehension of the ancient Egyptian civilization that I noted certain
facts which I shall now proceed to present.
They will be found to show that ancient Egypt supplies us with the
instance of a civilization in which the fundamental set of ideas,
developed from primitive pole-star worship, prevailed during thousands of
years and had reached a high stage of evolution at a period anterior to
about B.C. 4000.