C. Proportions of pyramids and other monuments with sloping sides.

III. _Miscellaneous problems_ (and tables) such as are met with in

bread-making, beer-making, food of live-stock, &c. &c.

The method of estimating the area of irregular fields and the cubic

contents of granaries, &c., is very faulty. It would be interesting to

find material of later date, such as Pythagoras is reported to have

studied.

See A. Eisenlohr, _Ein mathematisches Handbuch der alten Agypter_

(Leipzig, 1877); F. Ll. Griffith, "The Rhind Mathematical Papyrus" in

_Proceedings of the Soc. of Biblical Archaeology_, Nov. 1891, March,

May and June 1894.

_Astronomy._--The brilliant skies of day and night in Egypt favoured the

development of astronomy. A papyrus of the Roman period in the British

Museum attributes the invention of horoscopes to the Egyptians, but no

early instance is known. Professor Petrie has indeed suggested, chiefly

on chronological grounds, that a table of stars on the ceiling of the

Ramesseum temple and another in the tomb of Rameses VI. (repeated in

that of Rameses IX. without alteration) were horoscopes of Rameses II.

and VI.; but Mahler's interpretation of the tables on which this would

rest appears to be false. Astronomy played a considerable part in

religious matters for fixing the dates of festivals and determining the

hours of the night. The titles of several temple books are preserved

recording the movements and phases of the sun, moon and stars. The

rising of Sothis (Sirius) at the beginning of the inundation was a

particularly important point to fix in the yearly calendar (see below, S

"Chronology"). The primitive clock[10] of the temple time-keeper

(horoscopus), consisting of a [Greek: horologion kai phoinika] (Clemens

Alex. _Strom._, vi. 4. 35), has been identified with two inscribed

objects in the Berlin Museum; these are a palm branch with a sight-slit

in the broader end, and a short handle from which a plummet line was

hung. The former was held close to the eye, the latter in the other

hand, perhaps at arm's length. From the above-mentioned tables of

culmination in the tombs of Rameses VI. and IX. it seems that for fixing

the hours of the night a man seated on the ground faced the horoscopus

in such a position that the line of observation of the Pole-star passed

over the middle of his head. On the different days of the year each hour

was determined by a fixed star culminating or nearly culminating in it,

and the position of these stars at the time is given in the tables as

"in the centre," "on the left eye," "on the right shoulder," &c.

According to the texts, in founding or rebuilding temples the north axis

was determined by the same apparatus, and we may conclude that it was

the usual one for astronomical observations. It is conceivable that in

ingenious and careful hands it might give results of a high degree of

accuracy.

See L. Borchardt, "Ein altagyptisches astronomisches Instrument" in

_Zeitschrift fur agyptische Sprache_, xxxvii. (1899), p. 10; Ed.

Meyer, _Agyptische Chronologie_, p. 36. Besides the sun and moon, five

planets, thirty-six dekans, and constellations to which animal and

other forms are given, appear in the early astronomical texts and

paintings. The zodiacal signs were not introduced till the Ptolemaic

period. See H. Brugsch, _Die Agyptologie_ (Leipzig, 1891), pp. 315 et

seqq., for a full account of all these.

_Medicine._--Except, that splints are sometimes found on the limbs of

bodies of all periods, at present nothing is known, from texts or

otherwise, of the existence of Egyptian surgery or dentistry. For

historical pathology the examination of mummies and skeletons is

yielding good results. There is little sign of the existence of gout or

of syphilitic diseases until late times (see MUMMY). A number of papyri

have been discovered containing medical prescriptions. The earliest are

of the XIIth Dynasty from Kahun, one being veterinary, the other

gynaecological. The finest non-religious papyrus known, the Ebers

Papyrus, is a vast collection of receipts. One section, giving us some

of "the mysteries of the physician," shows how lamentably crude were his

notions of the constitution of the body. It teaches little more than

that the pulse is felt in every part of the body, that there are vessels

leading from the heart to the eyes, ears, nose and all the other

members, and that "the breath entering the nose goes to the heart and

the lungs." The prescriptions are for a great variety of ailments and

afflictions--diseases of the eye and the stomach, sores and broken

bones, to make the hair grow, to keep away snakes, fleas, &c. Purgatives

and diuretics are particularly numerous, and the medicines take the form

of pillules, draughts, liniments, fumigations, &c. The prescriptions are

often fanciful and may thus bear some absurd relation to the disease to

be cured, but generally they would be to some extent effective. Their

action was assisted by spells, for general use in the preparation or

application, or for special diseases. In most cases several ingredients

are prescribed together: when the amounts are indicated it is by measure

not by weight, and evidently no very potent drugs were employed, for the

smallest measure specified is equal to about half of a cubic inch.

Little has yet been accomplished in identifying the diseases and the

substances named in the medical papyri.

See G. A. Reisner, _The Hearst Medical Papyrus_ (Leipzig, 1905),

(XVIIIth Dynasty), and for a great magical text of the Roman period

(3rd century A.D.) with some prescriptions, F. Ll. Griffith and H.

Thompson, _The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden_ (London,

1904).

_Literature_.--The vast mass of writing which has come down to us from

the ancient Egyptians comprises documents of almost every conceivable

kind, business documents and correspondence, legal documents, memorial

inscriptions, historical, scientific, didactic, magical and religious

literature; also tales and lyrics and other compositions in poetical

language. Most of these classes are dealt with in this article under

special headings. In addition there should be mentioned the abundant

explanatory inscriptions attached to wall-scenes as a secondary element

in those compositions. As early as the Middle Kingdom, papyri are found

containing classified lists of words, titles, names of cities, &c., and

of nomes with their capitals, festivals, deities and sacred things,

calendars, &c.

To a great extent the standard works in all classes date from an early

age, not later than the Middle Kingdom, and subsequent works of religion

and learning like the later additions were largely written in the same

style. Several books of proverbs or "instructions" were put in

circulation during the Middle Kingdom. Kagemni and Ptahhotp of the Old

Kingdom were nominally or really the instructors in manners: King

Amenemhe I. laid down the principles of conduct in government for his

son Senwosri I., preaching on the text of beneficence rewarded by

treachery; Kheti points out in detail to his schoolboy son Pepi the

advantages enjoyed by scribes and the miseries of all other careers.

Some of these books are known only in copies of the New Kingdom. The

instructions of Ani to his son Khenshotp are of later date. In demotic

the most notable of such works is a papyrus of the first century A.D. at

Leiden.

A number of Egyptian tales are known, dating from the Middle Kingdom and

later. Some are so sober and realistic as to make it doubtful whether

they are not true biographies and narratives of actual events. Such are

the story of Sinuhi, a fugitive to Syria in the reign of Sesostris

[Senwosri] I., and perhaps the narrative of Unamun of his expedition in

quest of cedar wood for the bark of the Theban Ammon in the XXIst

Dynasty. Others are highly imaginative or with miraculous incidents,

like the story of the Predestined Prince and the story of the Two

Brothers, which begins with a pleasing picture of the industrious

farmer, and, in demotic of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, two stories

of the learned Sethon Khamois, son of Rameses II. and high priest of

Ptah, with his rather tragical experiences at the hands of magicians.

The stories of the Middle Kingdom were in choice diction, large portions

of them being rhetorical or poetical compositions attributed to the

principal characters. The story of Sinuhi is of this description and was

much read during the New Kingdom. Another, of the Eloquent Peasant whose

ass had been stolen, was only a framework to the rhetoric of endless

petitions. The tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor in the Red Sea was a piece

of simpler writing, not unpicturesque, of the marvellous type of a

Sindbad story. If all these are deficient in literary merit, they are

deeply interesting as revelations of primitive mind and manners. Of New

Kingdom tales, the story of the Two Brothers is frankly in the simplest

speech of everyday life, while others are more stilted. The demotic

stories of Khamois are simple, but the "Rape of Inaros' Cuirass" (at

Vienna) is told in a stiff and high-flown style.

In general it may be said of Egyptian literary compositions that apart

from their interest as anthropological documents they possess no merit

which would entitle them to survive. They are more or less touched by

artificiality, but so far as we are able to appreciate them at present

they very seldom attain to any degree of literary beauty. Most of the

compositions in the literary language, whether old or archaistic, are in

a stilted style and often with parallelisms of phrase like those of

Hebrew poetry. Simple prose narrative is here quite exceptional. Some

few hymns contain stanzas of ten lines, each line with a break in the

middle. There is no sign of rhyming in Egyptian poetry, and the rhythm

is not yet recognizable owing to our ignorance of the ancient

vocalization. In old Egyptian tales the narrative portions are

frequently in prose; New Egyptian and demotic contain as a rule little

else. Hymns exist in both of these later forms of the language, and a

few love songs in Late Egyptian.

See W. M. F. Petrie, _Egyptian Tales_ (2 vols., London, 1895); G.

Maspero, _Les Contes populaires de l'Egypte ancienne_ (3rd edition,

Paris, 1906); W. Max Muller, _Die Liebespoesie der alten Agypter_

(Leipzig, 1899). (F. LL. G.)

C. _Religion._--1. _Introductory._--Copious as are the sources of

information from which our knowledge of the Egyptian religion is drawn,

there is nevertheless no aspect of the ancient civilization of Egypt

that we really so little understand. While the youth of Egyptological

research is in part responsible for this, the reason lies still more in

the nature of the religion itself and the character of the testimony

bearing upon it. For a true appreciation of the chaotic polytheism that

reveals itself even in the earliest texts it would be necessary to be

able to trace its development, stage by stage, out of a number of naive

primitive cults; but the period of growth lies behind recorded history,

and we are here reduced to hypotheses and _a posteriori_

reconstructions. The same criticism applies, no doubt, to other

religions, like those of Greece and Rome. In Egypt, however, the

difficulty is much aggravated by the poor quality of the evidence. The

religious books are textually very corrupt, one-sided in their

subject-matter, and distributed over a period of more than two thousand

years. The greatest defect of all is their relative silence with regard

to the myths. For the story of Isis and Osiris we have indeed the late

treatise ascribed to Plutarch, and a few fragments of other myths may be

culled from earlier native sources. But in general the tales that passed

current about the gods are referred to only in mysterious and recondite

allusions; as Herodotus for his own times explicitly testifies, a

reticence in such matters seems to have been encouraged by the priests.

Thus with regard to Egyptian theology we are very imperfectly informed,

and the account that is here given of it must be looked upon as merely

provisional. The actual practices of the cult, both funerary and divine,

are better known, and we are tolerably familiar with the doctrines as to

the future state of the dead. There is good material, too, for the study

of Egyptian magic, though this branch has been somewhat neglected

hitherto.

2. _Main Sources._--(a) _The Pyramid texts,_ a vast collection of

incantations inscribed on the inner walls of five royal tombs of the Vth

and VIth Dynasties at Sakkara, discovered and first published by

Maspero. Much of these texts is of extreme antiquity; one incantation at

least has been proved to belong to an age anterior to the unification of

the Northern and Southern kingdoms. Later copies also exist, but possess

little independent critical value. The subject-matter is funerary, i.e.

it deals with the fate of the dead king in the next life. Some chapters

describe the manner in which he passes from earth to heaven and becomes

a star in the firmament, others deal with the food and drink necessary

for his continued existence after death, and others again with the royal

prerogatives which he hopes still to enjoy; many are directed against

the bites of snakes and stings of scorpions. It is possible that these

incantations were recited as part of the funerary ritual, but there is

no doubt that their mere presence in the tombs was supposed to be

magically effective for the welfare of the dead. Originally these texts

had an application to the king alone, but before the beginning of the

XIIth Dynasty private individuals had begun to employ them on their own

behalf. They seem to be relatively free from textual corruption, but the

vocabulary still occasions much difficulty to the translator.

(b) _The Book of the Dead_ is the somewhat inappropriate name applied to

a large similar collection of texts of various dates, certain chapters

of which show a tendency to become welded together into a book of fixed

content and uniform order. A number of chapters contained in the later

recensions are already found on the sarcophagi of the Middle Kingdom,

together with a host of funereal texts not usually reckoned as belonging

to the Book of the Dead; these have been published by Lepsius and Lacau.

The above-mentioned nucleus, combined with other chapters of more recent

origin, is found in the papyri of the XVIIIth-XXth Dynasties, and forms

the so-called Theban recension, which has been edited by Naville in an

important work. Here already more or less rigid groups of chapters may

be noted, but individual manuscripts differ greatly in what they include

and exclude. In the Saite period a sort of standard edition was drawn

up, consisting of 165 chapters in a fixed order and with a common title

"the book of going forth in the day"; this recension was published by

Lepsius in 1842 from a Turin papyrus. Like the Pyramid texts, the Book

of the Dead served a funerary purpose, but its contents are far more

heterogeneous; besides chapters enabling the dead man to assume what

shape he will, or to issue triumphant from the last judgment, there are

lists of gates to be passed and demons to be encountered in the nether

world, formulae such as are inscribed on sepulchral figures and amulets,

and even hymns to the sun-god. These texts are for the most part

excessively corrupt, and despite the translations of Pierret, Renouf and

Budge, much labour must yet be expended upon them before they can rank

as a first-rate source.

(c) The texts of the _Tombs of the Kings at Thebes_ (XVIIIth-XXth Dyn.)

consist of a series of theological books compiled at an uncertain date;

they have been edited by Naville and Lefebure. The chief of these,

extant in a longer and a shorter version, is called _The book of that

which is in the Nether World_ (familiarly known as the _Am Duat_) and

deals with the journey of the sun during the twelve hours of the night.

_The Book of Gates_ treats of the same topic from a more theological

standpoint. _The Litanies of the Sun_ contain the acclamations with

which the sun-god Re was greeted, when at eventide his bark reached the

entrance of the nether world. Another treatise relates the destruction

of mankind, and the circumstances that led to the creation of the

heavens in the form of a cow.

(d) Among the _later religious books_ one or two deserve a special

mention, such as _The Overthrowing of Apophis_, the serpent enemy of the

sun-god; _The Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys_ over their murdered

brother Osiris; _The Book of Breathings_, a favourite book among the

later Theban priests. Several of these books were used in the ritual of

feast days, but all have received a secondary funerary employment, and

are therefore found buried with the dead in their tombs.

(e) The _Ritual texts_ have survived only in copies not earlier than the

New Kingdom. The temple ritual employed in the daily cult is illustrated

by the scenes depicted on the inner walls of the great temples: the

formulae recited during the performance of the ceremonies are recorded

at length in the temple of Seti I. (XIXth Dyn.) at Abydos, as well as in

some later papyri in Berlin. The whole material has been collected and

studied by Moret. The funerary ritual is known from texts in the Theban

tombs (XVIIIth-XXth Dyn.) and papyri and sarcophagi of later date; older

versions are contained in the Pyramid texts and _The Book of the Dead_.

Schiaparelli has done much towards gathering together this scattered

material. The ritual observed during the process of embalmment is

preserved in late papyri in Paris and Cairo published by Maspero.

(f) The _magical_ documents have been comparatively little studied, in

spite of their great interest. They deal for the most part with the

hearing of diseases, the bites of snakes and scorpions, &c., but

incidentally cast many sidelights on the mythology and superstitious

beliefs. The best-known of these books is the _Papyrus Harris_ published

by F. J. Chabas, but other papyri of as great or greater importance are

to be found in the Leiden, Turin and other collections. A curious book

published by A. Erman contains spells to be used by mothers for the

protection of their children. A papyrus in London contains a calendar of

lucky and unlucky days. A late class of stelae, of which the best

specimen has been published by Golenischeff, consists of spells of

various kinds originally intended for the use of the living, but later

employed for funerary purposes.

(g) Under the heading _Miscellaneous_ we must mention a number of

sources of great value: the grave-stones, or stelae, especially those

from Abydos, which throw much light on funerary beliefs; the great

_Papyrus Harris_, the longest of all papyri, which enumerates the gifts

of Rameses III. (XXth Dyn.) to the various temples of Egypt; the hymns

to the gods preserved in Cairo and Leiden papyri; and the inscriptions

of the Ptolemaic temples (Dendera, Edfu, &c.), which teem with good

religious material. Nor can any attempt here be made to summarize the

remaining native Egyptian sources, literary and archaeological, that

deserve notice.

(h) Among the classical writers, Plutarch in his treatise _Concerning

Isis and Osiris_ is the most important. Diodorus also is useful.

Herodotus, owing to his religious awe and dread of divulging sacred

mysteries, is only a second-rate source.

3. _The Gods._--The end of the pre-dynastic period, in which we dimly

descry a number of independent tribes in constant warfare with one

another, was marked by the rise of a united Egyptian state with a single

Pharaonic ruler at its head. The era of peace thus inaugurated brought

with it a rapid progress in all branches of civilization; and there soon

emerged not only a national art and a condition of material prosperity

shared by the entire land in common, but also a state religion, which

gathered up the ancient tribal cults and floating cosmical conceptions,

and combining them as best it could, imposed them on the people as a

whole. By the time that the Pyramid texts were put into writing,

doubtless long before the Vth Dynasty, this religion had assumed a

stereotyped appearance that clung to it for ever afterwards. But the

multitude of the deities and the variety of the myths that it strove to

incorporate prevented the development of a uniform theological system,

and the heterogeneous origin of the religion remained irretrievably

stamped upon its face. Written records were few at the time when the

pantheon was built up, so that the process of construction cannot be

followed historically from stage to stage; but it is possible by arguing

backwards from the later facts to discern the main tendencies at work,

and the principal elementary cults that served as the materials.

Classification of pre-dynastic gods.

The gods of the pre-dynastic period may be divided into two chief

groups, the tribal or local divinities and the cosmic or explanatory

deities. At the beginning each tribe had its own particular god, who in

essence was nothing but the articulate expression of the inner cohesion

and of the outward independence of the tribe itself, but who outwardly

manifested himself in the form of some animal or took up his abode in

some fetish of wood or stone. In times of peace this visible emblem of

the god's presence was housed in a rude shrine, but in war-time it was

taken thence and carried into the battlefield on a standard. We find

such divine standards [HRG: R12] often depicted on the earliest

monuments, and among the symbols placed upon them may be detected the

images of many deities destined to play an important part in the later

national pantheon, such as the falcon Horus [HRG: G5:R12], the wolf

Wepwawet (Ophois) [HRG: zAb:R12], the goddess Neith [HRG: R25:R12],

symbolized by a shield transfixed with arrows, and the god Min [HRG:

R23:R12], the nature of whose fetish is obscure. In course of time the

tribes became localized in particular districts, under the influence of

a growing central authority, and their gods then passed from tribal into

local deities. Hence it came about that the provincial districts or

nomes, as they were called, often derived their names from the gods of

tribes that settled in them, these names being hieroglyphically written

with the sign for "district" surmounted by standards of the type above

described, e.g. [HRG: E15:R12], "the nome of the dog Anubis," the 17th

or Cynopolite nome of Upper Egypt. In this way a large number of deities

came to enjoy special reverence in restricted territories, e.g. the ram

[HRG:] Khnum in Elephantine, the jerboa or okapi (?) [HRG: E20] Seth in

Ombos, the ibis [HRG: G26] Thoth in Hermopolis Magna, and of the gods

named above, Horus in Hieraconpolis, Wepwawet in Assiut, Neith in Sais,

and Min in Coptos. As towns and villages gradually sprang up, they too

adopted as their patron some one or other of the original tribal gods,

so that these came to have different seats of worship all over Egypt.

For this reason it is often hard to tell where the primitive cult-centre

of a particular deity is to be sought; thus Horus seems equally at home

both at Buto in the Delta and at Hieraconpolis in Upper Egypt, and the

earliest worship of Seth appears to have been claimed no less by Tanis

in the north than by Ombos in the south. The effect of the localization

of gods in many different places was to give them a double aspect; so,

for instance, Khnum the god of Elephantine could in one minute be

regarded as identical with Khnum the god of Esna, while in the next

minute and without any conscious sense of contradiction the two might be

looked upon as entirely separate beings. In order that there might be no

ambiguity as to what divinity was meant, it became usual, in speaking of

any local deity, to specify the place of which he was "lord." The

tendency to create new forms of a god by instituting his worship in new

local centres persisted throughout the whole course of Egyptian history,

unhindered by the opposite tendency which made national out of local

gods. Some of the cosmic gods, like the sun-god Re of Heliopolis and of

Hermonthis, early acquired a local in addition to their cosmic aspect.

In the innermost principle of their existence, as patrons and protectors

of restricted communities, the primitive tribal gods did not differ from

one another. But externally they were distinguishable by the various

shapes that their worshippers ascribed to them; and there can be little

doubt that even in the beginning each had his own special attributes and

particular mythical traits. These, however, may have borne little

resemblance to the later conceptions of the same gods with which we are

made familiar by the Pyramid texts. Thus we have no means of

ascertaining what the earliest people of Sais thought about their

goddess Neith, though her fetish would seem to point to her warlike

nature. Nor are we much wiser in respect of those primitive tribal gods

that are represented on the oldest monuments in animal form. For though

we may be sure that the shape of an animal was that in which these gods

were literally visible to their worshippers, yet it is impossible to

tell whether some one living animal was chosen to be the earthly

tenement of the deity, or whether he revealed himself in every

individual of a species, or whether merely the cult-image was roughly

hewn into the shape of an animal. Not too much weight must be attached

to later evidence on this point; for the New Kingdom and still more the

Graeco-Roman period witnessed a strange recrudescence of supposed

primitive cults, to which they gave a form that may or may not have been

historically exact. In some places whole classes of animals came to be

deemed sacred. Thus at Bubastis, where the cat-headed Bast (Ubasti) was

worshipped, vast cemeteries of mummified cats have been found; and

elsewhere similar funerary cults were accorded to crocodiles, lizards,

ibises and many other animals. In Elephantine Khnum was supposed to

become incarnate in a ram, at whose death the divinity left him and took

up his abode in another. So too the bull of Apis (a black animal with

white spots) was during its lifetime regarded as a reincarnation of

Ptah, the local god of Memphis, and similarly the Mnevis and Bacis bulls

were accounted to be "the living souls" of Etom of Heliopolis and of Re

of Hermonthis respectively; these latter cults are certainly secondary,

for Ptah himself was never, either early or late, depicted otherwise

than in human form, as a mummy or as a dwarf; and Etom and Re are but

different names of the sun-god. The form of a snake, attributed to many

local goddesses, especially in later times (e.g. Meresger of the Theban

necropolis), was borrowed from the very ancient deity Outo (Buto); the

semblance of a snake became so characteristic of female divinities that

even the word "goddess" was written with the hieroglyph of a snake.

Other animal shapes particularly affected by goddesses were those of a

lioness (Sakhmi, Pakhe) or a cow (Hathor, Isis). The primitive animal

gods are not to be confused with the animal forms ascribed to many

cosmic deities; thus when the sun-god Re was pictured as a scarabaeus,

or dung-beetle, rolling its ball of dung behind it, this was certainly

mere poetical imagery. Or else a cosmic god might assume an animal shape

through assimilation with some tribal god, as when Re was identified

with Horus and therefore depicted as a falcon.

With the advance of civilization and the transformation of the tribal

gods into national divinities, the beliefs held about them must have

become less crude. At a very early date the anthropomorphizing tendency

caused the animal deities to be represented with human bodies, though as

a rule they retained their animal heads; so in the case of Seth as early

as the IInd Dynasty. The other gods carry their primitive fetishes in

their hands (like Neith, who is depicted holding arrows) or on their

heads (so Nefertem [Iphthimis] with his lotus-flower). At the same time

the gods began to acquire human personalities. In a few instances this

may have come about by the emphasizing of a really primitive trait; as

when the wolf Ophois, in consonance with the predatory nature of that

animal, developed into a god of war. In other cases the transitional

steps are shrouded in mystery; we do not know, for example, why the ibis

Thoth subsequently became the patron of the fine arts, the inventor of

writing, and the scribe of the gods. But the main factor in this

evolutionary process was undoubtedly the formation of myths, which

brought gods of independent origin into relation with one another, and

thus imbued them with human passions and virtues. Here dim historic

recollections often determined the features of the story, and in one

famous legend that knits together a group of gods all seemingly local in

origin we can still faintly trace how the tale arose, was added to, and

finally crystallized in a coherent form.

Osiris was a wise and beneficent king, who reclaimed the Egyptians from

savagery, gave them laws and taught them handicrafts. The prosperous

reign of Osiris was brought to a premature close by the machinations of

his wicked brother Seth, who with seventy-two fellow-conspirators

invited him to a banquet, induced him to enter a cunningly-wrought

coffin made exactly to his measure, then shut down the lid and cast the

chest into the Nile. Isis, the faithful wife of Osiris, set forth in

search of her dead husband's body, and after long and adventure-fraught

wanderings, succeeded in recovering it and bringing it back to Egypt.

Then while she was absent visiting her son Horus in the city of Buto,

Seth once more gained possession of the corpse, cut it into fourteen

pieces, and scattered them all over Egypt. But Isis collected the

fragments, and wherever one was found, buried it with due honour; or,

according to a different account, she joined the limbs together by

virtue of her magical powers, and the slain Osiris, thus resurrected,

henceforth reigned as king of the dead in the nether world. When Horus

grew up he set out to avenge his father's murder, and after terrible

struggles finally conquered and dispossessed his wicked uncle; or, as

another version relates, the combatants were separated by Thoth, and

Egypt divided between them, the northern part falling to Horus and the

southern to Seth. Such is the story as told by Plutarch, with certain

additions and modifications from older native sources. There existed,

however, a very ancient tradition according to which Horus and Seth were

hostile brothers, not nephew and uncle; and many considerations may be

urged in support of the thesis which regards their struggles as

reminiscences of wars between two prominent tribes or confederations of

tribes, one of which worshipped the falcon Horus while the other had the

okapi (?) Seth as its patron and champion. The Horus-tribes were the

victors, and it was from them that the dynastic line sprang; hence the

Pharaoh always bore the name of Horus, and represented in his own

hallowed person the ancient tribal deity. Of Osiris we can only state

that he was originally the local god of Busiris, whatever further

characteristics he primitively possessed being quite obscure. Isis was

perhaps the local goddess of Buto, a town not far distant from Busiris;

this geographical proximity would suffice to explain her connexion with

Osiris in the tale. A legend now arose, we know not how or why, which

made Seth the brother and murderer of Osiris; and this led to a fusion

of the Horus-Seth and the Seth-Isis-Osiris _motifs_. The relationships

had now to be readjusted, and the most popular view recognized Horus as

the son and avenger of Osiris. The more ancient account survived,

however, in the myth that Osiris, Horus, Seth, Isis and Nephthys (a

goddess who plays but a minor part in the Osiris cycle) were all

children of the earth-god Keb and the sky-goddess Nut, born on the five

consecutive days added on at the end of the year (the so-called

epagomenal days). Later generations reconciled these contradictions by

assuming the existence of two Horuses, one, the brother of Osiris, Seth

and Isis, being named Haroeris, i.e. Horus the elder, while the other,

the child of Isis and Osiris, was called Harpocrates, i.e. Horus the

child.

Cosmic deities.

The second main class of divinities that entered into the composition of

the Egyptian pantheon was due to that innate and universal speculative

bent which seeks, and never fails to find, an explanation of the facts

of the external world. Behind the great natural phenomena that they

perceived all around them, the Egyptians, like other primitive folk,

postulated the existence of divine wills not dissimilar in kind to their

own, though vastly superior in power. Chief among these cosmic deities

was the sun-god Re, whose supremacy seemed predestined under the

cloudless sky of Egypt. The oldest conceptions represented Re as sailing

across the heavens in a ship called "Manzet," "the bark of the dawn"; at

sunset he stepped aboard another vessel named "Mesenktet," "the bark of

the dusk," which bore him back from west to east during the night. Later

theories symbolized Re in many different ways. For some he was identical

with Horus, and then he was falcon-headed and was called Hor-akhti, the

Horus of the horizons. Others pictured him to themselves as a tiny

infant in the early dawn, as full-grown at noon, and as an infirm old

man in the evening. When the sky was imagined as a cow, he was a calf

born anew every morning. The moon was a male deity, who likewise fared

across the heavens in a boat; hence he was often named Chons, "the

sailor." The ibis-god Thoth was early identified with the moon. The

stars and planets were likewise gods. Among them the bright star Sirius

was held in special esteem; it was a goddess Sothis (Sopde), often

identified by the Egyptians with Isis. The constellations that seemed

unceasingly to speed across the sky were named "the never-resting ones,"

and the circumpolar stars, which never sink beneath the horizon, were

known as "the imperishables." Concerning earth and sky there were many

different opinions. Some thought that the sky was a goddess Nut, whom

the god Show held aloof from her husband Keb the earth, on whose back

the plants and trees grew. Others believed in a celestial ocean,

personified under the name of Nun, over which the heavenly bodies sailed

in boats. At a later date the sky was held to be a cow (Hathor) whose

four feet stood firm upon the soil; or else a vast face, in which the

right eye was the sun and the left eye the moon. Alongside these

fanciful conceptions there existed a more sober view, according to which

the earth was a long oval plain, and the sky an iron roof supported by

the tops of mountains or by four pillars [HRG] at the cardinal points.

Beneath the ground lay a dark and mysterious region, now conceived as an

inverse heaven (Nenet), now as a vast series of caverns whose gates were

guarded by demons. This nether world was known as the Duat (Dat, Tei),

and through it passed the sun on his journey during the hours of night;

here too, as many thought, dwelt the dead and their king Osiris. That

great natural feature of Egypt, the Nile, was of course one of the gods;

his name was Hapi, and as a sign of his fecundity he had long pendulous

breasts like a woman. In contradistinction to the tribal gods, it rarely

happened that the cosmic deities enjoyed a cult. But there are a few

important exceptions: Re in Heliopolis (here identified with a local god

Etom) and in Hermonthis; Hathor at Dendera and elsewhere. Certain of the

tribal gods early became identified with cosmic divinities, and the

latter thus became the objects of a cult; so, for instance, the Horus of

Edfu was a sun-god, and Thoth in Hermopolis Magna was held to be the

moon.

Minor deities and demons.

An extension of the principle that created the cosmic gods gave rise to

a large number of minor deities and demons. Day and night, the year, the

seasons, eternity, and many similar conceptions were each represented by

a god or goddess of their own, who nevertheless possessed but a shadowy

and doubtful existence. Human attributes like Taste, Knowledge, Joy and

so forth were likewise personified, no less than abstract ideas such as

Fate, Destiny and others; rather more clearly defined than the rest was

Maat, the goddess of Truth and Right, who was fabled to be the daughter

of Re and may even have had a cult. Certain gods were purely functional,

that is to say, they appeared at special times to perform some

appointed task, at the completion of which they vanished. Such were

Nepri, the god of the corn-harvest; Meskhonit, the goddess who attended

every child-bed; Tait, the goddess of weaving. Numberless semi-divine

beings had no other purpose than to fill out the myths, as, for

instance, the chattering apes that greeted the sun-god Re as he rose

above the eastern horizon, and the demons who opened the gates of the

nether world at the approach of the setting sun.

Foreign deities.

We take this opportunity of mentioning sundry other divinities who were

later introduced to swell the already overcrowded ranks of the pantheon.

Contact with foreign lands brought with it several new deities, Baal,

Anat and Resheph from Syria, and the misshapen dwarf Bes from the south;

earlier than these, the Astarte of Byblus, whom the Egyptians identified

with Hathor. In Thebes Amenophis I. and his spouse Nefertari were

worshipped as patron gods of the necropolis many centuries after their

death. Two men of exceptional wisdom received divine honours, and had

temples of their own in the Ptolemaic period; these were Imouthes, who

had lived under Zoser of the IIIrd Dynasty, and Amenophis son of Hapu, a

contemporary of the third king of the same name (XVIIIth Dyn.). The hill

of Sheikh Abd-el-gurna at Thebes was looked upon as a particularly holy

place, and was revered as a goddess. Almost anything that was regarded

with awe, any object used in the divine ritual could at a given moment

be envisaged as a deity. Thus the boat of Osiris (Neshemet) and those of

the sun-god were goddesses; and various wands and sceptres belonging to

certain gods were imagined as harbouring the divine being. Truly it

might have been said in ancient Egypt: of the making of gods there is no

end!

Theological combinations.

For such order as can be discerned in the mythological conceptions of

the Egyptians the priesthood was largely responsible. At a very early

date the theological school of Heliopolis undertook the task of

systematizing the gods and the myths, and it is mainly to them that is

due the Egyptian religion as we find it in the Pyramid texts. Their

influence is particularly conspicuous in the prominent place accorded to

the sun-god Re, and in the creation-legend that made him the father of

gods and men. First of all living things was Re; legend told how he

arose as a naked babe from a lotus-flower that floated on the primeval

ocean Nun. Others held the view that he crept from an egg that lay on a

hill in the midst of a lake called Desdes; and a third, more barbarous,

tale related his obscene act of self-procreation. Re became the father

of the pair of gods Show and Tefnut (Tphenis), who emanated from his

spittle. They again gave birth to Keb and Nut, from whom in their turn

sprang Osiris and Seth, Isis and Nephthys. These nine gods were together

known as the great Ennead or cycle of nine. A second series of nine

deities, with Horus as its first member, was invented at the same time

or not long afterwards, and was called the Lesser Ennead. In later times

the theory of the Ennead became very popular and was adopted by most of

the local priesthoods, who substituted their own favourite god for Re,

sometimes retaining and sometimes changing the names of the other eight

deities. Thus locally many different gods came to be viewed as the

creators of the world. Only in two instances, however, did a local god

ever obtain wide acceptance in the capacity of demiurge: Ptah of

Memphis, who was famed as an artist and master-builder, and Khnum of

Elephantine, who was said to have moulded mankind on the potter's wheel.

Already in the Pyramid texts the importance of Osiris almost rivals that

of Re. His worship does not seem to have been due to Heliopolitan

influence, and may possibly have been propagated by active missionary

effort. It is apparently through the funeral cult that Osiris so early

took a firm hold on the imagination of the people; for at a very ancient

date he was identified with every dead king, and it needed but a slight

extension of this idea to make him into a king of the dead. In later

times the moral aspect of his tale was doubtless the main cause of its

continued popularity; Osiris was named Onnophris, "the good Being" _par

excellence_, and Seth was contrasted with him as the author and the root

of all evil. Still the Egyptians themselves seem to have been somewhat

at a loss to account for the great veneration that they paid to Osiris.

Successive theories interpreted him as the god of the earth, as the god

of the Nile, as a god of vegetation, as a moon-god and as a sun-god; and

nearly every one of these theories has been claimed to be the primitive

truth by some scholar or another.

Nowhere is the conservatism of the Egyptians more clearly displayed than

in the tenacity with which they clung to the old forms of the theology,

such as we have essayed to describe. Neither the influx of new deities

nor the diligence of the priestly authors and commentators availed to

break down the cast-iron traditions with which the compilers of the

Pyramid texts were already familiar. It is true that with the

displacement of the capital town certain local deities attained a degree

of power that, superficially regarded, seems to alter the entire

perspective of the religion. Thus Ammon, originally the obscure local

god of Thebes, was raised by the Theban monarchs of the XIIth and of the

XVIIIth to XXIst Dynasties to a predominant position never equalled by

any other divinity; and, by similar means, Suchos of the Fayum, Ubasti

of Bubastis, and Neith of Sais, each enjoyed for a short space of time a

consideration that no other cause would have secured to them. But

precisely the example of Ammon proves the hopelessness of any attempt to

change the time-honoured religious creed; his priests identified him

with the sun-god Re, whose cult-centre was thus merely transferred a few

hundred miles to the South. Nor could even the violent religious

revolution of Akhenaton (Amenophis IV.), of which we shall later have

occasion to speak, sweep away for ever beliefs that had persisted for so

many generations.

But if the facts of the religion, broadly viewed, never underwent a

change, the interpretation of those facts did so in no small degree. The

religious books were for the most part written in archaic language,

which was only imperfectly understood by the priests of later times; and

hence great scope was given to them to exercise their ingenuity as

commentators. By the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty some early chapters of

the Book of the Dead had been provided with a triple commentary.

Unfortunately the methods pursued were as little reasonable as those

adopted by the medieval Jewish Rabbis; instead of the context being

studied as a whole, with a view to the recovery of its literal sense,

each single verse was considered separately, and explained as an

allusion to some obscure myth or as embodying some mystical meaning.

Thus so far from simplifying or really elucidating the religion, these

priestly labours tended rather to confuse one legend with another and to

efface the personality of individual gods. The ease with which one god

could be identified with another is perhaps the most striking

characteristic of later Egyptian theology. There are but few of the

greater deities who were not at some time or another identified with the

solar god Re. His fusion with Horus and Etom has already been noted;

further we find an Ammon-Re, a Sobk-Re, a Khnum-Re; and Month, Onouris,

Show and Osiris are all described as possessing the attributes of the

sun. Ptah was early assimilated to the sepulchral gods Sokaris and

Osiris. Pairs of deities whose personalities are often blended or

interchanged are Hathor and Nut, Sakhmi and Pakhe, Seth and Apophis. So

too in Abydos, his later home, Osiris was identified with Khante-Amentiu

(Khentamenti, Khentamenthes), "the chief of those who are in the West,"

a name that was given to a vaguely-conceived but widely-venerated

divinity ruler of the dead. Many factors helped in the process of

assimilation. The unity of the state was largely influential in bringing

about the suppression of local differences of belief. The less important

priesthoods were glad to enhance the reputation of the deity they served

by identifying him with some more important god. And the mystical bent

of the Egyptians found satisfaction in the multiplicity of forms that

their gods could assume; among the favourite epithets which the hymns

apply to divinities are such as "mysterious of shapes," "multiple of

faces."

Monotheistic tendency.

The goal towards which these tendencies verged was monotheism; and

though this goal was only once, and then quite ephemerally, reached,

still the monotheistic idea was at most periods, so to speak, in the

air. Sometimes the qualities common to all the gods were abstracted, and

the resultant notion spoken of as "the god." At other times, and

especially in the hymns addressed to some divinity, all other gods were

momentarily forgotten, and he was eulogized as "the only one," "the

supreme," and so forth. Or else several of the chief deities were

consciously combined and regarded as different emanations or aspects of

a Sole Being; thus a Ramesside hymn begins with the words "Three are all

the gods, Ammon, Re and Ptah," and then it is shown how these three

gods, each in his own particular way, gave expression and effect to a

single divine purpose.

Akhenaton.

For a brief period at the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty a real monotheism,

as exclusive as that of Judaism or of Islam, was adopted as the state

religion of Egypt. The young Pharaoh Amenophis IV. seems to have been

fired by genuine fanatical enthusiasm, though political motives, as well

as doctrinal considerations, may have prompted him in the planning of

his religious revolution (see also S History). The Theban god Ammon-Re

was then supreme, and the ever-growing power of his priesthood may well

have inflamed the jealousy of their Heliopolitan rivals. Amenophis began

his reign in Thebes as an adherent of the traditional faith, but after a

few years he abandoned that town and built a new capital for his god

Aton 200 m. farther north, at a place now called El Amarna. The new

deity was a personification of the sun's disk. The name Re was

suppressed, as too intimately associated with that of Ammon; and Ammon,

together with all the other gods, was put to the ban. Amenophis even

changed his own name, of which the name of Ammon formed an element, to

Akhenaton, "the brilliancy of the Aton," and the capital was called

Khitaton, "The Horizon of the Aton." The new dogmas were known as "the

Teaching," and their tenets, as revealed in the poems composed in honour

of the Aton, breathe the purest and most exalted monotheistic spirit.

The movement had, no doubt, met with serious opposition from the very

start, and the reaction soon set in. The immediate successors of

Akhenaton strove to follow in his footsteps, but the conservative nature

of Egypt quickly asserted itself. Not sixty years after the accession of

Akhenaton, his city was abandoned, its rulers branded as heretics, and

the old religion restored in Thebes as completely as if the Aton had

never existed.

Having thus failed to become rational, Egyptian theology took refuge in

learning. The need for a more spiritual and intellectual interpretation

of the pantheon still remained, and gave rise to a number of theological

sciences. The names of the gods and the places of their worship were

catalogued and classified, and manuals were devoted to the topography of

mythological regions. Much ingenuity was expended on the development of

a history of the gods, the groundwork of which had been laid in much

earlier times. Re was not only the creator of the world, but he was also

the first king of Egypt. He was followed on the throne by the other

eight members of his Ennead, then by the lesser Ennead and by other

gods, and finally by the so-called "worshippers of Horus." The latter

were not wholly mythical personages, though they were regarded as

demigods (Manetho calls them "the dead," [Greek: nekues]); they have

been shown to be none other than the dim rulers of the predynastic age.

The Pharaohs of the historic period were thus divine, not only by virtue

of their connexion with Horus (see above), but also as descendants of

Re; and the king of Egypt was called "the good god" during his lifetime,

and "the great god" after his death. The later religious literature is

much taken up with the mythical and semi-mythical dynasties of kings,

and the priests compiled, with many newly-invented details, the

chronicles of the wars they were supposed to have waged.

Later developments.

In a similar manner, the ethical and allegorical methods of

interpretation came into much greater prominence towards the end of the

New Kingdom. The Osirian legend, as we have already seen, was early

accepted as symbolizing the conflict between good and evil. So too the

victories of Re over the serpent named Apophis were more or less clearly

understood as a simile of the antithetical nature of light and darkness.

In one text at least as ancient as the XVIIIth Dynasty (the copy that we

have dates only from the Ethiopian period) an ingenious attempt is made

to represent Ptah as the source of all life: from him, it is said,

emanated Horus as "heart" or "mind" and Thoth as "tongue," and through

the conjoint action of these two, the mind conceiving the design and the

tongue uttering the creative command, all gods and men and beasts

obtained their being. Of this kind of speculation much more must have

existed than has reached us. It is doubtless such explanations as these

that the Greeks had in view when they praised the wisdom of the ancient

Egyptians; and in the classical period similar semi-philosophical

interpretations altogether supplanted, among the learned at least, the

naive literal beliefs of earlier times. Plutarch in his treatise on Isis

and Osiris well exemplifies this standpoint: for him every god and every

rite is symbolic of some natural or moral truth.

The final stages of the Egyptian religion are marked by a renewed

popularity of all its more barbarous elements. Despairing, as it would

seem, of discovering the higher wisdom that the more philosophic of the

priests supposed that religion to conceal, the simpler-minded sought to

work out their own salvation by restoring the worship of the gods to its

most primitive forms. Hence came the fanatical revival of animal-worship

which led to feud and bloodshed between neighbouring towns--a feature of

Egyptian religion that at once amused and scandalized contemporary Greek

and Latin authors (Plut. De Iside, 72; Juv. xv. 33). Nevertheless

Egyptian cults, and particularly those of Serapis and Isis, found

welcome acceptance on European soil; and the shrines of Egyptian deities

were established in all the great cities of the Roman Empire. Serapis

was a god imported by the first Ptolemy from Sinope on the Black Sea,

who soon lost his own identity by assimilation with Osiris-Apis, the

bull revered in Memphis. Far down into the Roman age the worship of

Serapis persisted and flourished, and it was only when the Serapeum of

Alexandria was razed to the ground by order of Theodosius the Great

(A.D. 391) that the death-blow of the old Egyptian religion was struck.

Notes are here added on some divinities who have received inadequate

or no attention in the preceding pages. For information as to Ammon,

Anubis, Apis, Bes, Bubastis, Buto, Isis and Thoth, reference must be

made to the special articles on these gods.

ARSAPHES, in Egyptian _Harshafe_, "he who is upon his lake," the

ram-headed god of Heracleopolis Magna, gained an ephemeral importance

during the IXth Dynasty, which arose from his town. Outwardly, he

resembles Khnum. Little is known about him, and he is seldom

mentioned. The burial-place of his priests in later times was in 1904

discovered at Abusir el Meleq.

CHONS, "he who travels by boat," perhaps originally a mere epithet of

the moon-god Ioh or Thoth, is chiefly familiar as the third member of

the Theban triad. As such he is represented as a youthful god, wearing

a skull-cap surmounted by the moon. His cult was revived and became

popular in Ptolemaic times. A curious story about the sending of his

statue to Mesopotamia to heal a daughter of the king of Bakhtan is

related upon a stele that purports to date from the Ramesside period:

it has been proved to be a pious fraud invented by the priests not

earlier than the Greek period.

HATHOR, whose name means "house of Horus," was at all times a very

important deity. She is depicted as a cow, or with a broad human

countenance, the cow's ears just showing from under a massive wig.

Probably at first a goddess of the sky, she is early mentioned in

connexion with Re. Later she was often identified with Isis, and her

name was used to designate foreign goddesses like those of Puoni and

Byblus. Unlike most cosmic deities, she was worshipped in many

localities, chief among which was Dendera, where her magnificent

temple, of Ptolemaic date, still stands. "The seven Hathors" is a name

given to certain fairies, who appeared shortly after the birth of an

infant, and predicted his future.

KHNUM or KHNOUM, a ram-headed god, whose principal place of worship

was the island of Elephantine (there associated with Satis and

Anukis), but also revered elsewhere, e.g. together with Nebtu in Esna.

He enjoyed great repute as a creator, and was supposed to use the

potter's wheel for the purpose. In this capacity he is sometimes

accompanied by the frog-headed goddess Heket.

MONTH, a hawk-headed god of the Thebaid: in Thebes itself his cult was

superseded by that of Ammon, but it persisted in Hermonthis. He was

often given the solar attributes, and was credited as a great warrior.

MIN, the god of Coptos and Panopolis (Akhmim), seems to have been

early looked upon as a deity of the harvest and crops. His cult dates

from the earliest times. Represented as ithyphallic, with two tall

plumes on his head, the right arm upraised and bearing a scourge. In

old times he is identified with Horus: later Ammon was confused with

him, and depicted in his image.

NECHBET (Nekhbi, Nekhebi), the vulture-goddess of El Kab, called

Eileithyia by the Greeks. She gained an ascendancy as patroness of the

south at the time when the two kingdoms were striving for the mastery.

It is as such, in opposition to Buto the goddess of the north, that

she is most often named on the monuments.

NEITH, the very ancient and important goddess of Sais, the Greek

Athene. On the earliest monuments she is represented by a shield

transfixed by arrows. Later she wears the crown of Lower Egypt, and

carries in her hands a bow and arrows, a sign of her warlike

character. In the XXVIth Dynasty, when a line of Pharaohs sprang from

Sais, she regained a prominent position, and was given many cosmogonic

attributes, including the title of mother of Re.

NEPHTHYS, the sister of Osiris and wife of Seth, daughter of Keb and

Nut, plays a considerable role in the Osiris story. She sided with

Isis and aided her to bring Osiris back to life. Isis and Nephthys are

often mentioned together as protectresses of the dead.

ONOURIS, Egyptian _En-huri_, "sky-bearer," the god of Thinis. Later

identified with Shu (Show), who holds heaven and earth apart.

PTAH, the Hephaestus of the Greeks, a demiurgic and creative god,

special patron of hand-workers and artisans. Worshipped in Memphis, he

perhaps owed his importance more to the political prominence of that

town than to anything else. He was early identified with an ancient

but obscure god Tenen, and further with the sepulchral deity Sokaris.

He is represented either as a closely enshrouded figure whose

protruding hands grasp a composite sceptre, the whole standing on a

pedestal within a shrine; or else as a misshapen dwarf.

SAKHMI, a lion-headed goddess of war and strife, whose name signifies

the mighty. She was worshipped at Latopolis (Esna), but also at a late

date as a member of the Memphite triad, with Ptah as husband and

Nefertem (Iphthimis) as son: often, too, confounded with Ubasti.

SETH (Egyptian Set, Sth or Sts), by the Greeks called Typhon, was

depicted as an animal [HRG] that has been compared with the jerboa by

some, and with the okapi by others, but which the Egyptians themselves

occasionally conceived to be nothing but a badly drawn ass. In

historic times his cult was celebrated at Tanis and Ombos. He regained

a certain prestige as god of the Hyksos rulers, and two Pharaohs of

the XIXth Dynasty derived their name Sethos (Seti) from him. But,

generally speaking, he was abominated as a power of evil, and his

figure was often obliterated on the monuments. He is named in similes

as a great warrior, and as such and "son of Nut" he is identified with

the Syrian Baal.

4. _The Divine Cult._--In the midst of every town rose the temple of the

local god, a stately building of stone, strongly contrasting with the

mud and plaster houses in which even the wealthiest Egyptians dwelt. It

was called the "house of the god" [HRGs], and in it the deity was

supposed to reside, attended by his "servants" [HRGs] the priests. There

was indeed a certain justification for this contention, even when a

contrary theory assigned to the divinity a place in the sky, as in the

case of the lunar divinity Thoth; for in the inmost sanctuary stood a

statue of the god, which served as his representative for the purposes

of the cult. Originally each temple was dedicated to one god only; but

it early became usual to associate with him a mate of the opposite sex,

besides a third deity who might be represented either as a second wife

or as a child. As examples of such triads, as they are called, may be

mentioned that of Thebes, consisting of Ammon, Mut and Chons, father,

mother and child; and as typical of the other kind, where a god was

accompanied by two goddesses, that of Elephantine, consisting of Khnum,

Satis and Anukis. The needs of the god were much the same as those of

mortals; no more than they could he dispense with food and drink,

clothes for his apparel, ointment for his limbs, and music and dancing

to rejoice his heart. The only difference was that the divine statue was

half-consciously recognized as a lifeless thing that required carefully

regulated rites and ceremonies to enable it to enjoy the good things

offered to it. Early every morning the officiating priest proceeded to

the holy of holies, after the preliminaries of purification had cleansed

him from any miasma that might interfere with the efficacy of the rites.

Then with the prescribed gestures, and reciting appropriate formulae all

the while, he broke the seal upon the door of the shrine, loosed the

bolts, and at last stood face to face with the god. There followed a

series of prostrations and adorations, culminating in the offering of a

small image of Maat, the goddess of Truth. This seems to have been the

psychological moment of the entire service: hitherto the statue had been

at best a god in _posse_; now the symbolical act placed him in

possession of all his faculties, he was a god in truth, and could

participate like any mortal in the food and luxuries that his servants

put before him. The daily ceremony closed with ablutions, anointings and

a bountiful feast of bread, geese, beer and oxen; having taken his fill

of these, the god returned to his shrine until the next morning, when

the ritual was renewed. The words that accompanied the manual gestures

are, in the rituals that have come down to us, wholly dominated by the

myth of Osiris: it is often hard to discern much connexion between the

acts and the formulae recited, but the main thought is clearly that the

priest represents Horus, the pious son of the dead divinity Osiris. That

this conception is very old is proved by the fact that even in the

Pyramid texts "the eye of Horus" is a synonym for all offerings: an

ancient tale of which only shreds have reached us related how Seth had

torn the eye of Horus from him, though not before he himself had

suffered a still more serious mutilation; and by some means, we know not

how, the restoration of the eye was instrumental in bringing about the

vindication of Osiris. As to the manual rites of the daily cult, all

that can here be said is that incense, purifications and anointings with

various oils played a large part; the sacrifices consisted chiefly of

slaughtered oxen and geese; burnt offerings were a very late innovation.

At an early date the rites practised in the various temples were

conformed to a common pattern. This holds good not only for the daily

ritual, but also for many festivals that were celebrated on the same day

throughout the whole length of the land. Such were the calendrical

feasts, called "the beginnings of the seasons," and including, for

example, the monthly and half-monthly festivals, that of the New Year

and that of the rising of Sirius (Sothis). But there were also local

feast days like that of Neith in Sais (Hdt. ii. 62) or that of Ammon in

southern Opi (Luxor). These doubtless had a more individual character,

and often celebrated some incident supposed to have occurred in the

lifetime of the god. Sometimes, as in the case of the feast of Osiris in

Abydos, a veritable drama would be enacted, in which the whole history

of the god, his sufferings and final triumph were represented in mimic

form. At other times the ceremonial was more mysterious and symbolical,

as in the feast of the raising of the Ded-column [HRG] when a column of

the kind was drawn by cords into an upright position. But the most

common feature of these holy days was the procession of the god, when he

was carried on the shoulders of the priests in his divine boat far

beyond the precincts of his temple; sometimes, indeed, even to another

town, where he paid a visit to the god of the place. These occasions

were public holidays, and passed amid great rejoicings. The climax was

reached when at a given moment the curtains of the shrine placed on the

boat were withdrawn, and the god was revealed to the eyes of the

awe-struck multitude. Music and dancing formed part of the festival

rites.

Temples.

As with the rites and ceremonies, so also the temples were early

modelled upon a common type. Lofty enclosure walls, adorned with scenes

from the victorious campaigns of the Pharaoh, shut off the sacred

buildings from the surrounding streets. A small gateway between two

massive towers or pylons gave admittance to a spacious forecourt open to

the sky, into which the people were allowed to enter at least on feast

days. Farther on, separated from the forecourt by smaller though still

massive pylons, lay a hypostyle hall, so called from its covered

colonnades; this hall was used for all kinds of processions. Behind the

hypostyle hall, to which a second similar one might or might not be

added, came the holy of holies, a dark narrow chamber where the god

dwelt; none but the priests were admitted to it. All around lay the

storehouses that contained the treasures of the god and the

appurtenances of the divine ritual. The temples of the earliest times

were of course far more primitive than this: from the pictures that are

all that is now left to indicate their nature, they seem to have been

little more than huts or sheds in which the image of the god was kept.

One temple of a type different from that above described has survived at

Abusir, where it has been excavated by German explorers. It was a

splendid edifice dedicated to the sun-god Re by a king of the Vth

Dynasty, and was probably a close copy of the famous temple of

Heliopolis. The most conspicuous feature was a huge obelisk on a broad

superstructure [HRG]: the obelisk always remained closely connected with

the solar worship, and probably took the place of the innermost shrine

and statue of other temples. The greater part of the sanctuary was left

uncovered, as best befitted a dwelling-place of the sun. Outside its

walls there was a huge brick model of the solar bark in which the god

daily traversed the heavens.

Power of the priests.

As the power of the Pharaohs increased, the maintenance of the cult

became one of the most important affairs of state. The most illustrious

monarchs prided themselves no less on the buildings they raised in

honour of the gods than on the successful wars they waged: indeed the

wars won a religious significance through the gradual elevation of the

god of the capital to god of the nation, and a large part of the spoils

was considered the rightful perquisite of the latter. Countless were the

riches that the kings heaped upon the gods in the hope of being requited

with long life and prosperity on the throne of the living. It became the

theory that the temples were the gifts of the Pharaoh to his fathers the

gods, and therefore in the scenes of the cult that adorn the inner walls

it is always he who is depicted as performing the ceremonies. As a

matter of fact the priesthoods were much more independent than was

allowed to appear. Successive grants of land placed no small portion of

the entire country in their hands, and the administration of the temple

estates gave employment to a large number of officials and serfs. In the

New Kingdom the might of the Theban god Ammon gradually became a serious

menace to the throne: in the reign of Rameses III. he could boast of

more than 80,000 dependants, and more than 400,000 cattle. It is not

surprising that a few generations later the high priests of Ammon

supplanted the Pharaohs altogether and founded a dynasty of their own.

At no period did the priests form a caste that was quite distinctly

separated from the laity. In early times the feudal lords were

themselves the chief priests of the local temples. Under them stood a

number of subordinate priests, both professional and lay. Among the

former were the _kher-heb_, a learned man entrusted with the conduct of

the ceremonies, and the "divine fathers," whose functions are obscure.

The lay priests were divided into four classes that undertook the

management of the temple in alternate months; their collective name was

the "hour-priesthood." Perhaps it was to them that the often recurring

title _oueb_, "the pure," should properly be restricted, though strict

rules as to personal purity, dress and diet were demanded of all

priests. The personnel of the temple was completed by various

subordinate officials, doorkeepers, attendants and slaves. In the New

Kingdom the leading priests were more frequently mere clerics than

theretofore, though for instance the high priest of Ammon was often at

the same time the vizier of southern Egypt. In some places the highest

priests bore special names, such as the _Ouer maa_, "the Great Seer," of

Re in Heliopolis, or the _Khorp himet_, "chief artificer," of the

Memphite Ptah. Women could also hold priestly rank, though apparently in

early times only in the service of goddesses; "priestess of Hathor" is a

frequent title of well-born ladies in the Old Kingdom. At a later date

many wealthy dames held the office of "musicians" (_shemat_) in the

various temples. In the service of the Theban Ammon two priestesses

called "the Adorer of the God" and the "Wife of the God" occupied very

influential positions, and towards the Saite period it was by no means

unusual for the king to secure these offices for his daughters and so to

strengthen his own royal title.

5. _The Dead and their Cult._--While the worship of the gods tended

more and more to become a monopoly of the state and the priests, and

provided no adequate outlet for the religious cravings of the people

themselves, this deficiency was amply supplied by the care which they

bestowed upon their dead: the Egyptians stand alone among the nations of

the world in the elaborate precautions which they took to secure their

own welfare beyond the tomb. The belief in immortality, or perhaps

rather the incapacity to grasp the notion of complete annihilation, is

traceable from the very earliest times: the simplest graves of the

prehistoric period, when the corpses were committed to the earth in

sheepskins and reed mats, seldom lack at least a few poor vases or

articles of toilet for use in the hereafter. In proportion as the

prosperity of the land increased, and the advance of civilization

afforded the technical means, so did these primitive burials give place

to a more lavish funereal equipment. Tombs of brick with a single

chamber were succeeded by tombs of stone with several chambers, until

they really merited the name of "houses of eternity" that the Egyptians

gave to them. The conception of the tomb as the residence of the dead is

the fundamental notion that underlies all the ritual observances in

connexion with the dead, just as the idea of the temple as the

dwelling-place of the god is the basis of the divine cult. The

parallelism between the attitude of the Egyptians towards the dead and

their attitude towards the gods is so striking that it ought never to be

lost sight of: nothing can illustrate it better than the manner in which

the Osirian doctrines came to permeate both kinds of cult.

Tombs.

The general scheme of Egyptian tombs remained the same throughout the

whole of the dynastic period, though there were many variations of

detail. By preference they were built in the Western desert, the Amente,

near the place where the sun was seen to go to rest, and which seemed

the natural entrance to the nether world. A deep pit led down to the

sepulchral chamber where the dead man was deposited amid the funereal

furniture destined for his use; and no device was neglected that might

enable him to rest here undisturbed. This aim is particularly

conspicuous in the pyramids, the gigantic tombs which the Pharaohs of

the Old Kingdom constructed for themselves: the passages that lead to

the burial chamber were barred at intervals by vast granite blocks, and

the narrow opening that gave access to them was hidden from view beneath

the stone casing of the pyramid sides. Quite separate from this part of

the tomb lay the rooms employed for the cult of the dead: their walls

were often adorned with pictures from the earthly life of the deceased,

which it was hoped he might still continue to enjoy after death. The

innermost chamber was the chapel proper: on its western side was

sculptured an imitation door for the dead man to pass through, when he

wished to participate in the offerings brought by pious relatives. It

was of course only the few who could afford elaborate tombs of the kind:

the poor had to make shift with an unpretentious grave, in which the

corpse was placed enveloped only by a few rags or enclosed in a rough

wooden coffin.

Embalming and burial.

The utmost care was taken to preserve the body itself from decay. Before

the time of the Middle Kingdom it became usual for the rich to have

their bodies embalmed. The intestines were removed and placed in four

vases (the so-called Canopic jars) in which they were supposed to enjoy

the protection of the four sons of Horus, the man-headed Mesti, the

ape-headed Hapi, the jackal Duamutef and the falcon Kebhsenuf. The

corpse was treated with natron and asphalt, and wound in a copious

swathing of linen bandage, with a mask of linen and stucco on the face.

The "mummy" thus prepared was then laid on its side like a sleeper, the

head supported by a head-rest, in a sarcophagus of wood or stone. The

operations in connexion with the mummy grow more and more elaborate

towards the end of the Pharaonic period: already in the New Kingdom the

wealthiest persons had their mummies laid in several coffins, each of

which was gaudily painted with mythological scenes and inscriptions. The

costliest process of embalmment lasted no less than seventy days. Many

superstitious rites had to be observed in the course of the process: a

late book has preserved to us the magical formulae that were repeated by

the wise _kher-heb_ priest (who in the necropolis performed the

functions of taricheutes, "embalmer"), as each bandage was applied.

A large number of utensils, articles of furniture and the like were

placed in the burial-chamber for the use of the dead--jars, weapons,

mirrors, and even chairs, musical instruments and wigs. In the early

times statuettes of servants, representing them as engaged in their

various functions (brewers, bakers, &c.), were included for the same

purpose; they were supposed to perform their menial functions for their

deceased lord in the future life. In the Middle Kingdom these are

gradually replaced by small models of the mummy itself, and the belief

arose that when their owner was called upon to perform any distasteful

work in the nether world, they would answer to his name and do the task

for him. The later _ushebti_-figures, little statuettes of wood, stone

or faience, of which several hundreds are often found in a single tomb,

are confused survivals of both of the earlier classes of statuettes.

Still more important than all such funereal objects are the books that

were placed in the grave for the use of the dead: in the pyramids they

are written on the walls of the sepulchral chamber and the passages

leading to it; in the Middle Kingdom usually inscribed on the inner

sides of the sarcophagus; in later times contained in rolls of papyrus.

The Pyramid texts and the _Book of the Dead_ are the most important of

these, and teach us much about the dangers and needs that attended the

dead man beyond the tomb, and about the manner in which it was thought

they could be counteracted.

The burial ceremony itself must have been an imposing spectacle. In many

cases the mummy had to be conveyed across the Nile, and boats were gaily

decked out for this purpose. On the western bank a stately procession

conducted the deceased to his last resting-place. At the door of the

tomb the final ceremonies were performed; they demanded a considerable

number of actors, chief among whom were the _sem_-priest and the

_kher-heb_ priest. It was a veritable drama that was here enacted, and

recalled in its incidents the story of Osiris, the divine prototype of

all successive generations of the Egyptian dead.

The soul.

However carefully the preliminary rites of embalmment and burial might

have been performed, however sumptuous the tomb wherein the dead man

reposed, he was nevertheless almost entirely at the mercy of the

living for his welfare in the other world: he was as dependent on a

continued cult on the part of the surviving members of his family as

the gods were dependent on the constant attendance of their priests.

That portion of a man's individuality which required, even after

death, food and drink, and the satisfaction of sensuous needs, was

called by the Egyptians the _ka_, and represented in hieroglyphs by

the uplifted hands [HRG]. This _ka_ was supposed to be born together

with the person to whom it belonged, and on the very rare occasions

when it is depicted, wears his exact semblance. The conception of this

psychical entity is too vaguely formulated by the Egyptians and too

foreign to modern thought to admit of exact translation: of the many

renderings that have been proposed, perhaps "double" is the most

suitable. At all events the _ka_ has to be distinguished from the

soul, the _bai_ (in hieroglyphs [HRG] or [HRG]), which was of more

tangible nature, and might be descried hovering around the tomb in the

form of a bird or in some other shape; for it was thought that the

soul might assume what shape it would, if the funerary rites had been

duly attended to. The gods had their _ka_ and _bai_, and the forms

attributed to the latter are surprising; thus we read that the soul of

the sky Nun is Re, that of Osiris the Goat of Mendes, the souls of

Sobk are crocodiles, and those "of all the gods are snakes"; similarly

the soul of Ptah was thought to dwell in the Apis bull, so that each

successive Apis was during its lifetime the reincarnation of the god.

Other parts of a man's being to which at given moments and in

particular contexts the Egyptians assigned a certain degree of

separate existence are the "name" [HRG] _ran_, the "shadow" [HRG],

_khaibet_, and the "corpse" [HRG], _khat_.

It was, however, the _ka_ alone to which the cult of the dead was

directly addressed. This cult was a positive duty binding on the

children of a dead man, and doubtless as a rule discharged by them with

some regularity and conscientiousness; at least, on feast-days offerings

would be brought to the tomb, and the ceremonies of purification and

opening the mouth of the deceased would be enacted. But there could be

little guarantee that later generations would perpetuate the cult. It

therefore became usual under the Old Kingdom for the wealthiest persons

to make testamentary dispositions by which certain other persons agreed

for a consideration to observe the required rites at stated periods:

they received the name of "servants of the _ka_," and stood in the same

relation to the deceased as the priests to the gods. Or again, contracts

might be made with a neighbouring temple, the priesthood of which bound

itself to reserve for the contracting party some portion of the

offerings that had already been used for the divine cult. There is

probably a superstitious reason for the preference shown by the dead for

offerings of this kind; no wish is commoner than that one may receive

"bread and beer that had gone up on to the altar of the local god," or

"with which the god had been sated"; something of the divine sanctity

still clung about such offerings and made them particularly desirable.

In spite of all the precautions they took and the contracts they made,

the Egyptians could never quite rid themselves of the dread that their

tombs might decay and their cult be neglected; and they sought therefore

to obtain by prayers and threats what they feared they might lose

altogether. The occasional visitor to the tomb is reminded by its

inscriptions of the many virtues of the dead man while he yet lived, and

is charged, if he be come with empty hands, at least to pronounce the

funerary formula; it will indeed cost him nothing but "the breath of his

mouth"! Against the would-be desecrator the wrath of the gods is

invoked: "with him shall the great god reckon there where a reckoning is

made."

The funerary customs that have been described are meaningless except on

the supposition that the tomb was the regular dwelling-place of the

dead. But just as the Egyptians found no contradiction between the view

of the temple as the residence of the god and the conception of him as a

cosmic deity, so too they often attributed to the dead a continued

existence quite apart from the tomb. According to a widely-spread

doctrine of great age the deceased Egyptian was translated to the

heavens, where he lived on in the form of a star. This theme is

elaborated with great detail in the Pyramid texts, where it is the dead

king to whom this destiny is promised. It was perhaps only a restricted

aristocracy who could aspire to such high honour: the [HRG] _ikh_, or

"glorified being," who has his place in the sky seems often to hold an

intermediate position between the gods and the rank and file of the

dead. But in a few early passages the required qualification appears to

be rather moral integrity than exalted station. The life of the dead man

in the sky is variously envisaged in different texts: at one moment he

is spoken of as accompanying the sun-god in his celestial bark, at

another as a mighty king more powerful than Re himself; the crudest

fancy of all pictures him as a hunter who catches the stars and gods,

and cooks and eats them. According to another conception that persisted

in the imagination of the Egyptians longer than any of the ideas just

mentioned, the home of the dead in the heavens was a fertile region not

very different from Egypt itself, intersected by canals and abounding in

corn and fruit; this place was called the Sokhet Earu or "field of

Reeds."

Even in the oldest texts these beliefs are blended inextricably with the

Osirian doctrines. It is not so much as king of the dead that Osiris

here appears, but every deceased Egyptian was regarded as himself an

Osiris, as having undergone all the indignities inflicted upon the god,

but finally triumphant over the powers of death and evil impersonated by

Seth. This notion became so popular, that beside it all other views of

the dead sink into insignificance; it permeates the funerary cult in all

its stages, and from the Middle Kingdom onwards the dead man is

regularly called "the Osiris so-and-so," just as though he were

completely identical with the god. One incident of the tale of Osiris

acquired a deep ethical meaning in connexion with the dead. It was

related how Seth had brought an accusation against Osiris in the great

judgment hall of Heliopolis, and how the latter, helped by the skilful

speaker Thoth, had emerged from the ordeal acquitted and triumphant. The

belief gradually grew up that every dead man would have to face a

similar trial before he could be admitted to a life of bliss in the

other world. A well-known vignette in the _Book of the Dead_ depicts the

scene. In a shrine sits Osiris, the ruler and judge of the dead,

accompanied by forty-two assessors; and before him stands the balance on

which the heart of the deceased man is to be weighed against Truth;

Thoth stands behind and registers the result. The words that accompany

this picture are still more remarkable: they form a long negative

confession, in which the dead man declares that he has sinned neither

against man nor against the gods. Not all the sins named are equally

heinous according to modern conceptions; many of them deal with petty

offences against religious usages that seem to us but trifling. But it

is clear that by the time this chapter was penned it was believed that

no man could attain to happiness in the hereafter if he had not been

upright, just and charitable in his earthly existence. The date at which

these conceptions became general is not quite certain, but it can hardly

be later than the Middle Kingdom, when the dead man has the epithet

"justified" appended to his name in the inscriptions of his tomb.

It was but a natural wish on the part of the Egyptians that they should

desire to place their tombs near the traditional burying-place of

Osiris. By the time of the XIIth Dynasty it was thought that this lay in

Abydos, the town where the kings of the earliest times had been

interred. But it was only in a few cases that such a wish could be

literally fulfilled. It therefore became customary for those who

possessed the means to dedicate at least a tombstone in the

neighbourhood of "the staircase of the great god," as the sacred spot

was called. And those who had found occasion to visit Abydos in their

lifetime took pleasure in recalling the part that they had there taken

in the ceremonies of Osiris. Such pilgrims doubtless believed that the

pious act would stand to their credit when the day of death arrived.

6. _Magic._--Among the rites that were celebrated in the temples or

before the statues of the dead were many the mystical meaning of which

was but imperfectly understood, though their efficacy was never doubted.

Symbolical or imitative acts, accompanied by spoken formulae of set form

and obscure content, accomplished, by some peculiar virtues of their

own, results that were beyond the power of human hands and brain. The

priests and certain wise men were the depositaries of this mysterious

but highly useful art, that was called _hik_ or "magic"; and one of the

chief differences between gods and men was the superior degree in which

the former were endowed with magical powers. It was but natural that the

Egyptians should wish to employ magic for their own benefit or

self-gratification, and since religion put no veto on the practice so

long as it was exercised within legal bounds, it was put to a widespread

use among them. When magicians made figures of wax representing men whom

they desired to injure, this was of course an illegal act like any

other, and the law stepped in to prevent it: one papyrus that has been

preserved records the judicial proceedings taken in such a case in

connexion with the harem conspiracy against Rameses III.

One of the chief purposes for which magic was employed was to avert

diseases. Among the Egyptians, as in other lands, illnesses were

supposed to be due to evil spirits or the ghosts of dead men who had

taken up their abode in the body of the sufferer, and they could only be

driven thence by charms and spells. But out of these primitive notions

arose a real medical science: when the ailment could be located and its

nature roughly determined, a more materialistic view was taken of it;

and many herbs and drugs that were originally used for some

superstitious reason, when once they had been found to be actually

effective, easily lost their magical significance and were looked upon

as natural specifics. It is extremely hard to draw any fixed line in

Egypt between magic and medicine; but it is curious to note that simple

diagnoses and prescriptions were employed for the more curable diseases,

while magical formulae and amulets are reserved for those that are

harder to cope with, such as the bites of snakes and the stings of

scorpions.

The formulae recited for such purposes are not purely cabalistic, though

inasmuch as mystery is of the very essence of magic, foreign words and

outlandish names occur in them by preference. Often the magician relates

some mythical case where a god had been afflicted with a disease similar

to that of the patient, but had finally recovered: a number of such

tales were told of Horus, who was usually healed by some device of his

mother Isis, she being accounted as a great enchantress. The mere

recitation of such similar cases with their happy issue was supposed to

be magically effective; for almost unlimited power was supposed to be

inherent in mere words. Often the demon is directly invoked, and

commanded to come forth. At other times the gods are threatened with

privations or even destruction if they refuse to aid the magician: the

Egyptians seem to have found little impiety in such a use of the divine

name, though to us it would seem the utmost degree of profanity when,

for instance, a magician declares that if his spell prove ineffective,

he "will cast fire into Mendes and burn up Osiris."

The verbal spells were always accompanied by some manual performance,

the tying of magical knots or the preparation of an amulet. In these

acts particular significance was attached to certain numbers: a

sevenfold knot, for example, was more efficacious than others. Often the

formula was written on a strip of rag or a scrap of papyrus and tied

round the neck of the person for whom it was intended. Beads and all

kinds of amulets could be infused with magical power so as to be potent

phylacteries to those who wore them.

In conclusion, it must be emphasized that in Egypt magic stands in no

contrast or opposition to religion, at least as long as it was

legitimately used. The religious rites and ceremonies are full of it.

When a pretence was made of opening, with an iron instrument, the mouth

of the divine statue, to the accompaniment of recited formulae, this can

hardly be termed anything but magic. Similarly, the potency attributed

to _ushebti_-figures and the copies of the _Book of the Dead_ deposited

in the tombs is magical in quality. What has been considered under this

heading, however, is the use that the same principles of magic were put

to by men in their own practical life and for their own advantage.

AUTHORITIES.--An excellent list of books and articles on the various

topics connected with Egyptian Religion will be found in H. O. Lange's

article on the subject in P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaye, _Lehrbuch

der Religionsgeschichte_ (Tubingen, 1905), vol. i. pp. 172-245. Among

general works may be especially recommended A. Erman, _Die agyptische

Religion_ (Berlin, 1905); and chapters 2 and 3 in G. Maspero,

_Histoire ancienne des peuples de l'Orient, les origines_, vol. i.

(Paris, 1895). (A. H. G.)

D. _Egyptian Language and Writing.--Decipherment._--Although attempts

were made to read Egyptian hieroglyphs so far back as the 17th century,

no promise of success appeared until the discovery of the Rosetta stone

in 1799 by the French engineers attached to Napoleon's expedition to

Egypt. This tablet was inscribed with three versions, in hieroglyphic,

demotic and Greek, of a long decree of the Egyptian priests in honour of

Ptolemy V., Epiphanes and his wife Cleopatra. The Greek and demotic

versions were still almost perfect, but most of the hieroglyphic text

had been broken away with the top of the tablet; portions of about half

of the lines remained, but no single line was complete. In 1802 J. D.

Akerblad, a Swedish orientalist attached to the embassy in Paris,

identified the proper names of persons which occurred in the demotic

text, being guided to them by the position of their equivalents in the

Greek. These names, all of them foreign, were written in an alphabet of

a limited number of characters, and were therefore analysed with

comparative ease.

The hieroglyphic text upon the Rosetta stone was too fragmentary to

furnish of itself the key to the decipherment. But the study of this

with the other scanty monuments and imperfect copies of inscriptions

that were available enabled the celebrated physicist Thomas Young

(1773-1829) to make a beginning. In an article completed in 1819 and

printed (over the initials I. J.) in the supplement to the 4th, 5th and

6th editions of the _Encyclopaedia Britannica_ (vol. iv., 1824), he

published a brief account of Egyptian research, with five plates

containing the "rudiments of an Egyptian vocabulary." It appears that

Young could place the hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek texts of the

Rosetta stone very correctly parallel; but he could not accurately break

up the Egyptian sentences into words, much less could he attribute to

the words their proper sounds. Yet he recognized correctly the names of

Apis and Re, with many groups for words such as "assembly," "good,"

"name," and important signs such as those which distinguish feminine

words. In a bad copy of another monument he rightly guessed the royal

name of Berenice in its cartouche by the side of that of Ptolemy, which

was already known from its occurrence on the Rosetta stone. He

considered that these names must be written in phonetic characters in

the hieroglyphic as in demotic, but he failed to analyse them correctly.

It was clear, however, that with more materials and perseverance such

efforts after decipherment must eventually succeed.

Meanwhile J. F. Champollion "le Jeune" (see CHAMPOLLION; and Hartleben,

_Champollion, sein Leben und sein Werk_, Berlin, 1906) had devoted his

energies whole-heartedly since 1802, when he was only eleven years old,

to preparing himself for the solution of the Egyptian problem, by wide

linguistic and historical studies, and above all by familiarizing

himself with every scrap of Egyptian writing which he could find. By

1818 he made many equations between the demotic and the hieroglyphic

characters, and was able to transcribe the demotic names of Ptolemy and

Cleopatra into hieroglyphics. At length, in January 1822, a copy of the

hieroglyphic inscription on the Bankes obelisk, which had long been

fruitlessly in the hands of Young, reached the French savant. On the

base of this obelisk was engraved a Greek inscription in honour of

Ptolemy Euergetes II. and Cleopatra; of the two cartouches on the

obelisk one was of Ptolemy, the other was easily recognized as that of

Cleopatra, spelt nearly as in Champollion's experimental transcript of

the demotic name, only more fully. This discovery, and the recognition

of the name Alexander, gave fourteen alphabetic signs, including

homophones, with ascertained values. Starting from these, by the

beginning of September Champollion had analysed a long series of

Ptolemaic and Roman cartouches. His next triumph was on the 14th of

September, when he read the names of the ancient Pharaohs Rameses and

Tethmosis in some drawings just arrived from Egypt, proving that his

alphabetic characters were employed, in conjunction with syllabic signs,

for spelling native names; this gave him the assurance that his

discovery touched the essential nature of the Egyptian writing and not

merely, as had been contended, a special cipher for the foreign words

which might be quite inapplicable to the rest of the inscriptions. His

progress continued unchecked, and before the end of the year the

connexion of ancient Egyptian and Coptic was clearly established.

Subsequently visits to the museums of Italy and an expedition to Egypt

in 1828-1829 furnished Champollion with ample materials. The _Precis du

systeme hieroglyphique_ (1st ed. 1823, 2nd ed. 1828) contained the

philological results of his decipherments down to a certain point. But

his MS. collections were vast, and his illness after the strenuous

labours of the expedition and his early death in 1832 left all in

confusion. The _Grammaire egyptienne_ and _Dictionnaire egyptien_,

edited from these MSS. by his brother, precious as they were, must be a

very imperfect register of the height of his attainments. In his last

years he was able to translate long texts in hieroglyphic and in

hieratic of the New Kingdom and of the later periods with some

accuracy, and his comprehension of demotic was considerable. Champollion

outdistanced all his competitors from the first, and had practically

nothing to thank them for except material to work on, and too often that

had been intentionally withheld from him. In eleven years he broke

ground in all directions; if the ordinary span of life had been allowed

him, with twenty or thirty more years of labour he might have brought

order into the chaos of different ages and styles of language and

writing; but, as it was, the task of co-ordination remained to be done

by others. For one year, before his illness incapacitated him,

Champollion held a professorship in Paris; but of his pupils and

fellow-workers, F. P. Salvolini, insincere and self-seeking, died young,

and Ippolito Rosellini (1800-1843) showed little original power. From

1832 to 1837 there was a pause in the march of Egyptology, and it seemed

as if the young science might be overwhelmed by the storm of doubts and

detraction that was poured upon it by the enemies of Champollion. Then,

however, Lepsius in Germany and Samuel Birch in England took up the

thread where the master had dropped it, and E. de Rouge, H. Brugsch,

Francois Joseph Chabas and a number of lesser lights quickly followed.

Brugsch (q.v.) was the author of a hieroglyphic and demotic dictionary

which still holds the field, and from time to time carried forward the

study of demotic by a giant's stride. De Rouge (d. 1872) in France was a

brilliant translator of hieroglyphic texts and the author of an

important grammatical work. Chabas (1817-1882) especially addressed

himself to the reading of the hieratic texts of the New Kingdom. By such

labours after forty years the results attained by Champollion in

decipherment were entirely superseded. Yet, while the values of the

signs were for the most part well ascertained, and the meanings of most

works fixed with some degree of accuracy, few grammatical rules had as

yet been established, the varieties of the language at different periods

had not been defined, and the origins of the hieroglyphs and of their

values had not been investigated beyond the most obvious points. At this

time a rare translator of Egyptian texts in all branches was arising in

G. Maspero (q.v.), while E. Revillout addressed himself with success to

the task of interpreting the legal documents of demotic which had been

almost entirely neglected for thirty years. But the honour of

inaugurating an epoch marked by greater precision belongs to Germany.

The study of Coptic had begun in Europe early in the 17th century, and

reached a high level in the work of the Dane Georg Zoega (1755-1809) at

the end of the 18th century. In 1835, too late for Champollion to use

it, Amadeo Peyron (1785-1870) of Turin published a Coptic lexicon of

great merit which is still standard, though far from satisfying the

needs of scholars of the present day. In 1880 Ludwig Stern (_Koptische

Grammatik_) admirably classified the grammatical forms of Coptic. The

much more difficult task of recovering the grammar of Egyptian has

occupied thirty years of special study by Adolf Erman and his school at

Berlin, and has now reached an advanced stage. The greater part of

Egyptian texts after the Middle Kingdom having been written in what was

even then practically a dead language, as dead as Latin was to the

medieval monks in Italy who wrote and spoke it, Erman selected for

special investigation those texts which really represented the growth of

the language at different periods, and, as he passed from one epoch to

another, compared and consolidated his results.

The _Neuagyptische Grammatik_ (1880) dealt with texts written in the

vulgar dialect of the New Kingdom (Dyns. XVIII. to XX.). Next

followed, in the _Zeitschrift fur agyptische Sprache und

Alterthumskunde_, studies on the Old Kingdom inscription of Una, and

the Middle Kingdom contracts of Assiut, as well as on an "Old Coptic"

text of the 3rd century A.D. At this point a papyrus of stories

written in the popular language of the Middle Kingdom provided Erman

with a stepping-stone from Old Egyptian to the Late Egyptian of the

_Neuagyptische Grammatik_, and gave the connexions that would bind

solidly together the whole structure of Egyptian grammar (see _Sprache

des Papyrus Westcar_, 1889). The very archaic pyramid texts enabled

him to sketch the grammar of the earliest known form of Egyptian

(_Zeitschrift d. Deutsch. Morgenl. Gesellschaft_, 1892), and in 1894

he was able to write a little manual of Egyptian for beginners

(_Agyptische Grammatik_, 2nd ed., 1902), centring on the language of

the standard inscriptions of the Middle and New Kingdoms, but

accompanying the main sketch with references to earlier and later

forms. Of the work of Erman's pupils we may mention G. Steindorff's

little _Koptische Grammatik_ (1894, ed. 1904), improving greatly on

Stern's standard work in regard to phonology and the relationship of

Coptic forms to Egyptian, and K. Sethe's _Das Agyptische Verbum_

(1899). The latter is an extensive monograph on the verb in Egyptian

and Coptic by a brilliant and laborious philologist. Owing to the very

imperfect notation of sound in the writing, the highly important

subject of the verbal roots and verbal forms was perhaps the obscurest

branch of Egyptian grammar when Sethe first attacked it in 1895. The

subject has been reviewed by Erman, _Die Flexion des agyptischen

Verbums_ in the _Sitzungsberichte_ of the Berlin Academy, 1900. The

Berlin school, having settled the main lines of the grammar, next

turned its attention to lexicography. It has devised a scheme, founded

on that for the Latin Thesaurus of the Berlin Academy, which almost

mechanically sorts the whole number of occurrences of every word in

any text examined. Scholars in England, America and Denmark, as well

as in Germany, have taken part in this great enterprise, and though

the completion of it may be far off, the collections of classified

material already made are very valuable for consultation.[11] At

present Egyptologists depend on Heinrich Brugsch's admirable but

somewhat antiquated _Worterbuch_ and on Levi's useful but entirely

uncritical _Vocabolario_. Though demotic has not yet received serious

attention at Berlin, the influence of that great school has made

itself felt amongst demotists, especially in Switzerland, Germany,

America and England. The death of Heinrich Brugsch in 1895 was a very

severe blow to demotic studies; but it must be admitted that his

brilliant gifts lay in other directions than exact grammatical

analysis. Apart from their philological interest, as giving the

history of a remarkable language during a period of several thousand

years, the grammatical studies of the last quarter of the 19th century

and afterwards are beginning to bear fruit in regard to the exact

interpretation of historical documents on Egyptian monuments and

papyri. Not long ago the supposed meaning of these was extracted

chiefly by brilliant guessing, and the published translations of even

the best scholars could carry no guarantee of more than approximate

exactitude, where the sense depended at all on correct recognition of

the syntax. Now the translator proceeds in Egyptian with some of the

sureness with which he would deal with Latin or Greek. The meaning of

many words may be still unknown, and many constructions are still

obscure; but at least he can distinguish fairly between a correct text

and a corrupt text. Egyptian writing lent itself only too easily to

misunderstanding, and the writings of one period were but half

intelligible to the learned scribes of another. The mistaken readings

of the old inscriptions by the priests at Abydos (Table of Abydos),

when attempting to record the names of the kings of the 1st Dynasty on

the walls of the temple of Seti I., are now admitted on all sides; and

no palaeographer, whether his field be Greek, Latin, Arabic, Persian

or any other class of MSS., will be surprised to hear that the

Egyptian papyri and inscriptions abound in corruptions and mistakes.

The translator of to-day can, if he wishes, mark where certainty ends

and mere conjecture begins, and it is to be hoped that advantage will

be taken more widely of this new power. The Egyptologist who has long

lived in the realm of conjecture is too prone to consider any series

of guesses good enough to serve as a translation, and forgets to

insert the notes of interrogation which would warn workers in other

fields from implicit trust.

_Language and Writing._--The history of the Egyptian language is

evidenced by documents extending over a very long range of time. They

begin with the primitive inscriptions of the Ist Dynasty (not later than

3300 B.C.) and end with the latest Coptic compositions of about the 14th

century A.D. The bulk of the hieroglyphic inscriptions are written in a

more or less artificial literary language; but in business documents,

letters, popular tales, &c., the scribes often adhered closely to the

living form of the tongue, and thus reveal its progressive changes.