EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.
Talking, if you will carefully think of it, you will find to be just
sending messages to one another by means of sounds. You learned to
talk--that is to say, to send messages in this way--when you were a
child, before you learned to write. So did the early Egyptians and
all early peoples. But the difference between you and them is that
you had some one to teach you to write, and they had not. They had
to invent a way of doing this for themselves.
When you were a child you saw the sun rising, winter and summer
following each other, and all the rest of the events in Nature, and
you had some one to tell you how they all happened. The early
Egyptians and the others saw all these things, but they had no one to
tell them how they happened. They had to puzzle them out, or try to
do so, for themselves.
They saw that such things were entirely beyond the power of any mere
man to make to happen; therefore they attributed the happenings to
some invisible power or powers immensely stronger and more gifted
than themselves. And of course they were perfectly right in so
doing. Only the mistake, or one of the mistakes, they made was this:
they imagined each of the greatest marvels that they saw to be caused
by a power which was busied with that particular marvel. {28} Thus
they thought that it was one power which made the corn to grow in the
spring-time, for instance; another power that caused the sun to rise
in the morning, and so on. They would see the flowing of a river,
with its appearance of being a live thing as it went along, now
smooth, now rippling, and they would go so far as to imagine that
each stream had its own particular power or god looking after it.
Or they might actually look on the marvellous thing as itself a god.
The sun, for instance, which they saw to give them light and warmth
and to be a very splendid object--many races thought, and not
unnaturally, that the sun itself was a god, and a very great god.
They saw the moon, and to some of them it seemed that the moon was a
power not unlike the sun, but less strong, and so it occurred to them
that perhaps the moon was a goddess and the wife of the great god the
sun. But the Egyptians, unlike others, looked on the moon as a male
deity. When they had gone thus far in guesses about the heavenly
bodies, they did not have to go any great way farther in order to
ascribe all sorts of power--less than the power of the sun or of the
moon--to the other planets and stars.
[Sidenote: Sacrifices]
And, once more, these early, unlearned men, who had no one to teach
them, but had to find out everything for themselves, saw indeed that
they received great good from, let us say, the warmth of the sun and
the overflowing of the river, and the growing of their crops, to give
them food. They could worship the power that they thought had given
them all this. But then, again, they would sometimes find themselves
visited by some dreadful disaster, perhaps an earthquake, or terrible
pestilence, or famine when the river did not overflow in its usual
way. And these evil {29} things they had to ascribe to some power
very much more strong than themselves. Thence they got the idea of
evil gods, or devils, as well as of the good and kind gods. The idea
arose that they must do something to avert these calamities, by
giving to the powers or gods who caused the calamities something that
the gods would like. And since men had to think that the gods would
like the things that they themselves liked, they sacrificed to them,
as it was called--that is to say, gave them gifts of such things as
they themselves liked best. It was rather a puzzle, perhaps, to know
how to give a gift to a being who was invisible, and who would not
come and take the gift away; but they solved that puzzle as best they
could. They burned some of the gifts, or sacrifices, so that the
solid flesh of the sacrificed creature was turned into smoke and went
up into the air and disappeared. Or they poured libation of wine or
of blood upon the earth, where it soaked in. So in both instances it
became invisible, and therefore it might be supposed that it had been
accepted by the invisible god.
And then, finally, there is this other point that I want you to
notice about the speculations, or guesses, of man in his earliest
ages, about the powers by which he was surrounded and which he was
trying to understand--early man did not distinguish so clearly as we
do between himself and the other animals. He regarded them as
closely related to himself. Many of the Red Indians and other tribes
even to-day believe themselves to be descended from some animal who
was the founder, the first ancestor, of their tribe. Men of that
tribe will on no account kill an animal of the species to which they
believe that their first ancestor belonged. Thus a tribe which
believes its ancestor to {30} have been a beaver, let us say, would
hold all beavers sacred, would never kill one, and very likely would
use the figure of a beaver as a kind of family crest. The beaver
would become a kind of god to them, and when it was looked on in this
way it was called the "totem" of the tribe.
I mention this idea of "totem" worship because it may have been
somewhat in this way that the Egyptians came to consider as sacred
such curious, and so many, animals as they did--cats, hawks, bulls,
crocodiles, even beetles. I do not say that it was thus that the
worship of these creatures came to prevail among the Egyptians. I do
not think that there is any at all clear evidence that it came about
in this way; but it may have been so, and it is rather difficult to
see how else it grew.
You may have noticed that I wrote, for the heading of this chapter,
"religions" in the plural, with an "s," not "religion." And this I
did because the religion of the ancient Egyptians was not one. There
are at least three different lines of religious thought and
speculation to be traced, so tangled up together that the whole
subject becomes very difficult to understand, but beyond all doubt
there are these three. There is this animal worship; there is the
worship of the sun and moon; and there is the worship of the two
opposed and yet connected powers that bring good and evil.
[Sidenote: Legends of the Gods]
The invention, the imagination, of the mind of early man was disposed
to making up stories about these gods. If the stories explained the
events that people saw happening, so much the better. Now there was
a god, by name Osiris, who was first worshipped, as it seems, only in
a town called Busiris. Near by {31} was a town called Buto, where it
is thought that a goddess, to whom they gave the name of Tsis, was
worshipped. For some reason which we do not know, the worship of
Osiris extended until it spread over the whole of Egypt, and with it
the worship of Isis, who was supposed to be the wife of Osiris. The
story of Osiris and Isis was told very differently at different times
and in different places. According to the Greek writer, Plutarch,
the legend which he heard about them went thus: that Osiris a very
long time ago reigned as a great king over all Egypt. He civilised
the people and taught them arts and science. He had a wicked brother
Seth, who made a conspiracy against him and killed him, and put his
body into a coffin and threw it into the Nile. The wife of Osiris,
Isis, after long search, found the body and brought it back. Then
she went on a visit to her son, Horus, who lived at Buto; and while
she was away the wicked Seth came back, found the body (mummified, as
we may suppose) of Osiris, took it away and cut it up into fourteen
pieces, so that Isis might never again have it as a whole body.
[Illustration: HORUS, ISIS (WITH HORUS)]
From that point there seem to be two versions of the story. One is
that Isis, having found the fourteen pieces, buried each piece where
she found it. Another is that she collected the pieces, put them all
together again, and that Osiris, thus made whole again, ruled in the
under-world as king of the dead.
Horus, according to one story, later attacked and slew his uncle, the
wicked Seth, to avenge his father; and in this contest between the
good Osiris and the bad Seth we perhaps see an attempt to account for
the good and evil in the world. If that is so, the good finally
triumphed in that story, because Horus, {32} the good son of the good
father, killed the bad Seth.
Another story, however, says that the struggle between Horus and Seth
was so equal that Egypt was divided between them, Lower Egypt going
to Horus and Upper Egypt to Seth.
On the inscriptions, in the hieroglyphic, or sacred graving, to which
we will come directly, Horus is represented by the figure of a
falcon, Seth by that of some animal which has been variously guessed
to be a jerboa or an okapi, but which looks very much as if it might
be some kind of dog. It has been conjectured that the contest
recorded between Horus and Seth may be a growth from wars waged
between tribes represented the one by the falcon and the other by
this four-footed animal of Seth's, whatever it may be.
The story, and the different shapes it takes, and the way in which
the incidents get transformed so as to fit in with the incidents of
quite a different story, may help you to understand something of the
way in which the legends grew. They not only grew, separately, into
very strange shapes, but they grew into one another, like
neighbouring trees with their branches inter-tangled, so that it is
very hard to distinguish them.
One thing you may have noticed in the story--that Osiris, according
to one version at least, becomes king of the dead in the nether
world. That means, of course, that these people so very long ago
believed in the life of a man's soul after his body was dead. That
is curious, is it not, seeing that they had had no revelation, so far
as we know, to tell them that it was so? We may speak of that a
little more, in a minute or two.
Probably you may have seen pictures of some of the {33} hieroglyphics
or sacred inscriptions, and if you have you may have noticed that
some of the figures have human bodies and beasts' heads.
Thus Horus is often shown with a man's body and a falcon's head.
Anubis has a man's body and a jackal's head, and the like happens
with many of the other animal gods. We may take it all as sign of
the confusion in the minds of these early people with regard to the
difference between gods and man and other animals.
[Sidenote: Various religions]
The confusion of religions in Egypt is particularly great, very
likely because different tribes brought in different beliefs and
gods, and they grew confused with the beliefs and gods already there.
Where they believed that there was such a great number of gods, it
was almost necessary that the power of each god must be supposed to
be restricted to a certain place. Otherwise the fighting between
them for mastery would be endless. We have seen, however, how, as
time went on, the idea grew of Osiris as a god universal throughout
Egypt. That was a long step forward in the direction of belief in a
single god, ruler and maker of all the universe. And yet then a
further confusion arose, which led a step farther again in the same
right direction, when Osiris began to be identified with--that is to
say, to be considered the same as--the Sun-god, whom they called Re
or Ra.
They had very many and various stories and fancies about this great
god Re, the Sun--that at dawn he began to sail across the sky in a
boat called the boat of the dawn, and again, at night, that he got
into another boat, the boat of the dark, and sailed along underneath
the earth all night to catch his morning boat again. Another story
was that he was born a baby in the dawn, {34} grew to his full manly
strength at midday, and then declined again into an old man, dying at
night. Stories of the same sort were invented to account for the
apparent movements of the moon and stars and other planets. Of
course they had no knowledge of the earth turning on its own axis, or
travelling round the sun.
It seems curious enough that Osiris should be at one time identified
with the sun, the god of the heavens, and yet be the ruler of the
under-world, where the souls of dead men and women went after death.
Perhaps it seems less curious when we remember that the sun himself
was supposed to sail nightly underneath the earth. But it is quite
impossible for us to have any clear idea of how they reasoned about
these things, partly because the accounts we have of it are all very
vague and given to us only by the records of the inscriptions which
survive, and by travellers, like the Greek Herodotus, to whom the
priests would not tell a great deal, and partly because the ideas of
the people even who held those beliefs must have been very far from
clear.
We know that they worshipped a great number of gods, and different
gods in different places. The bull, Apis, was a sacred animal which
was worshipped especially at Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt.
Bast was the cat goddess, worshipped principally at Bubastis, where
thousands of mummied bodies of cats have been found. Horus, the
falcon; Seth, an animal not quite clearly identified; and Anubis, the
jackal, I have mentioned already. And they worshipped the crocodile,
the serpent, the ram, and many other creatures, but especially the
sacred beetle, the scarabæus, in whose likeness those "scarabs" which
we have in great numbers from Egypt, were made. {35} Very often the
"scarabs," in stone or glazed pottery, were engraved with the crests
of the kings and used as seals.
[Sidenote: The priests]
There were a very great many priests. Every town seems to have had
its temple to one or other of the many gods, and there were priests
attached to every temple. But all the priests were not only priests
and nothing else. I mean, that they might do other business as well;
rather as if a clergyman here were to be a tradesman or a lawyer as
well as doing his work in the Church. Sometimes the principal priest
would be the great man of the district, the chief land-owner. But
where religions were so many and so different, the customs must have
differed very much too.
During the course of the eighteenth dynasty, with which the new
empire and the great power of Egypt began, one of the kings tried to
do away with all these different religions and to extend the worship
of Osiris, identified with Ra, the Sun-god, over the whole of Egypt.
And he succeeded; but his success was only for a time, and after a
short period the Egyptians went back to the worship of their many
gods again.
It was very important, in the opinion of the Egyptians, that the gods
at each place, and of each kind, should be worshipped with the
exactly right ceremonies. If the ceremonies were not rightly
performed the god might be angry and bring all kinds of calamities
upon you. It seemed to them far more important that these rites
should be properly performed than that those who performed them
should lead very good lives. They had their laws and their customs
which regulated their conduct, but they do not seem to have feared
that the gods would visit them with punishment in {36} this life for
any wrong-doing. They did, however, consider that any acts of
injustice, such as robbery or dishonesty, would affect the state of
their soul after death. That would be the business of Osiris, the
ruler of the dead, to look after. We will speak of that in a minute.
The priests were the people who knew exactly how the worship of the
gods at each place should be performed. They could read the
religious instructions which were written in what is called the
hieroglyphic--the sacred engravings. The hieroglyphic was probably
the beginning of all writing.
If you can imagine a time when writing was unknown, and when there
was need to send communications from one to another, and that these
communications must not be known to the bearer of the message, how
would you set about doing it?
Well, one way, at least, of doing it would be by sending signs marked
on papyrus or parchment or on a slate, or whatever you might have
convenient for making marks on, and to hope that the man you were
sending them to would be clever enough to understand what you meant,
and that the man by whom you were sending them would not. And if you
wanted to send a message about any particular thing, the most easy
and obvious way to begin would be by making a simple drawing of that
thing. So, if you wanted to send a message about a bird, you would
draw the figure, or outline, of a bird. If you wanted to send a
message about an eye, a human eye, you might draw the figure of an
eye. I suggest these two things because they are two of the most
simple figures that actually do appear in the picture-writing which
is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic.
{37}
Now we can go a step farther. The eye is the thing that we see with.
Therefore, if we want to send a message to our friend and tell him
that we "see a bird," if we put the picture of an eye, which is the
organ of sight, and a bird next to it, our friend, if he is at all
intelligent, may understand the message to mean "I see a bird."
[Sidenote: Three kinds of writing]
That, or something like that, may have been--I do not say that it
was, but I think it most likely--the way in which this
picture-writing began. I ought not to call it picture-writing,
really, for it was not that. _Hieros_ is Greek for sacred, or for a
priest; _glyphein_ is Greek for to grave, or engrave. So
hieroglyphic meant sacred characters engraved; that is, cut in on
stone. The word for the sacred writing was hieratic, meaning simply
sacred, without the meaning of engraving. The hieratic was written
on papyrus. It was derived from the hieroglyphic, the hieroglyphic
being the older, but it was not quite the same because the pictures,
so to call them, had become a good deal simplified so that they could
be drawn much more quickly. The figures were not so carefully made,
and certain signs, sometimes not very like the original figures, came
to be understood as representing these figures.
That was one alteration from the hieroglyphic that was made, as time
went on; and then there came another, further change, still in the
direction of making simpler and simpler signs in place of the
original figures; and when this third kind of writing had established
itself it seems to have been found the easiest of the three and best
suited for everyday use. It was called "Demotic," from "demos,"
meaning the populace, whence we get our "democracy" and {38} the like
words. "Demotic," then, meant that it was the writing of the common
people, of the nation at large, as contrasted with the "hieratic,"
which was the writing used and known by the priests.
All the old religious writings and the instructions about the
ceremonies to be performed at the worship of the various gods were,
of course, in the sacred writing. And when the priests added to them
they were careful to do it in their own sacred script. And so, by
knowing this script, or writing, which the others did not, they grew
to have a knowledge of their own, which they kept rather jealously to
themselves. It gave them all the greater importance. And their
importance and power were very great.
[Sidenote: Egyptian dress]
They were distinguished from the rest of the people, probably on all
occasions, and certainly on the occasions of performing the religious
rites, by a peculiar costume. The costume in which we see the common
people figured in the earliest engravings is extremely simple. The
climate was warm and they did not require much covering. The dress
consists simply in a cloth wound around the loins and passing between
the legs, just as the most savage peoples in the world to-day wear
the loin-cloth.
A little later we find the engravings showing us the cloth
lengthening downward, perhaps as far as the knees, or even a little
lower in the female costume, but the upper part of the body was
generally bare in both sexes. Linen woven from the flax, for the art
of weaving was very early known, was the light material of which this
costume was made.
And then we find them wearing something not unlike a night-gown
to-day, rather open at the neck, and without sleeves. Another
variety of the linen {39} dress was as if it were a night-gown with
the front closed up to the neck, but all the right shoulder and
sleeve taken out of it, so that the left shoulder was covered, but
the right arm and shoulder were left all free.
That was the kind of dress of the common people. At first we see
them bare-foot. Gradually they took more and more to sandals, and
there are pictures of great men going along bare-foot, but followed
by a servant carrying their sandals--perhaps to put on when they came
to rough ground. But it is also likely that the wearing of the
sandals had a meaning in a religious rite which they might be going
to perform.
The head was at first always uncovered; but we see at one time a
fillet, or simple band for the hair, beginning to be worn; then we
come to a curious low cap, and next to a high, almost mitre-like cap,
and finally to a variety of headgear. The hair and the beard are
sometimes elaborately curled; but as a rule the Egyptians were
clean-shaven. The beard, however, was recognised as so important in
some of the religious ceremonies that it is said that a false beard
was sometimes worn on these sacred occasions. It is rather like the
wearing of wigs by our judges and barristers in Court.
At the beginning of the great eighteenth dynasty, we find the longer
gowns, which are like our night-gowns, worn more and more, and the
priestly garments and those of the great men becoming more and more
rich and long. Likely enough this change was due to the closer
intercourse which the Egyptians now began to have with the Eastern
Empire, where the longer and richer garments were commonly worn.
{40}
But, after all, when you hear or read the words Ancient Egypt, what,
at first, do you begin to think of? I know what ideas the words
first suggest to me--pyramids and mummies. They are both so
extraordinary and unlike what we find in other countries. And they
both have rather the same meaning at the back of them, namely, that
the Egyptians paid a very great respect to the bodies of the dead.
For the mummifying was, of course, to preserve the body, and the
pyramids were only one form of the immense and immensely expensive
tombs which they built for the mummies to be laid in.
And I do not want you to be misled by something that I wrote a few
pages back about the Egyptians not supposing that the favour of the
gods was to be won by good behaviour, but rather by very exact ritual
and ceremonies. That is true, but I also said then that they did
think that the behaviour of a person while alive made a great
difference to his future after death.
That is a fact that we may be quite certain of. There is a very
famous old Egyptian book, called _The Book of the Dead_, illustrated
with pictures showing all that happened, after his death, to a
certain illustrious Egyptian; how he passed through several gates,
each guarded by its own horrible demons, how he arrived at the great
judgment-seat at last, and how there his good deeds in this life were
weighed against his bad, and the good were found to be more than the
bad, so that he was allowed to go on to a place in which it hardly
seems as if he was likely to be very, very happy, but at least it was
far better fortune for him than if he had been found guilty and been
given to the tormentor. The tormentor is shown in many of {41} the
pictures waiting for him. He is a terrible creature, with teeth and
claws.
[Sidenote: Slaves]
The inner walls of some of the pyramids are covered with texts
describing events of this kind in the after-death life of kings.
Some are of such antiquity that they go back before the uniting into
one of the two kingdoms by Menes; and even in those far-away times
the instructions were lengthy and very precise about the kind of food
and drink, and means of protection from evil things, that should be
buried with the king for his use in the after-life. They had much
the same thoughts as we have about the difference between good
conduct and bad. One of the evil acts which would most certainly
condemn the doer to punishment after death was oppression of the
poor. Even as long ago as that it was accounted a virtue to be
kindly and generous to those who had been less fortunate than
yourself. It seems probable they were a kindly, rather gentle
people, inclined to peace and arts rather than to war, but compelled
to be in a constant state of defence against the incursions of
enemies who lived in less fertile lands. In the course of such
defence and resistance many prisoners would be taken. The prisoners
would be retained alive, as valuable slaves. It does not follow that
because they were slaves they would be ill-treated. A kind master
would treat a slave well out of kindness; and a sensible master, even
if he were not kind of heart, would treat a slave well because the
better a slave, like a horse, was fed and cared for, the more work
could be got out of him.
And that brings us again to the pyramids and the other great tombs of
the kings and temples of the gods; for it is very certain that but
for "slave labour," as it is called, the building of the pyramids
would have {42} been an impossibility. As it is, with all allowance
made for the multitude of the labourers and the cheapness of their
food and of the material for the building, the pyramids remain
perhaps the greatest wonder of man's making in all the world,
especially when we consider their age and the small engineering
appliances that the builders had for their making. How they dealt
with the huge blocks of stone is a marvel.
You probably know, roughly, the shape of a pyramid. The largest now
standing is the Great Pyramid, or the Pyramid of Cheops, near Gizeh.
Its base, or lowest and largest part, covers 13 acres, and its top is
150 feet higher than the top of St. Paul's Cathedral. A space of 13
acres measures about 250 yards each way and well over half a mile
round. Ask somebody to show you a piece of ground, near where you
live, that is about the size of 13 acres. Then remember that 150
feet is 50 yards, or more than the length of two cricket pitches, and
imagine St. Paul's dome all that higher. With that idea for the
height, and with an idea of the size of the piece of ground for the
size of the base, you may perhaps form some kind of idea of the
immense appearance of this pyramid rising out of the desert in the
clear Egyptian air. And the purpose of all this vast construction is
to make a covering over two little burial chambers in the middle of
it all, in which were laid, thousands of years ago, the mummied
bodies of King Cheops and of the queen who was his wife.
This is certainly the biggest pyramid now standing, and probably the
largest ever built; but there are many pyramids to which reference is
made in the inscriptions or writings which have entirely disappeared.
Probably their materials have been used for other {43} buildings, and
sand-storms from the desert have helped to cover their foundations.
[Sidenote: Temples]
A temple, in which the pious people might worship, was often
connected with the pyramid. When this was so, the temple always
seems to have been placed to the east of the burial pyramid, so that
the worshippers should look towards the body and to the west. It was
towards the west of the burial chamber that a passage was made, with
a door of exit for the soul to go out into the under-world. We have
to remember that even in life the Egyptian king was regarded as a
kind of god. It is difficult for us to find our way back into the
thoughts of these ancient people, who saw far less difference than we
know that we are obliged to see between the human nature and the
divine; but we must try to get back into their thoughts, if we want
to understand them.
And this, and a great deal more that I have written in this chapter
and in the one before, is true not of the early Egyptians only, but
of early man all the world over. I shall not keep you nearly so long
in my description of what went on in the old days along the Euphrates
and Tigris and elsewhere, because a good deal of what I am telling
you now about these old Egyptians applies to dwellers in those other
places.
Some of the inscriptions speak of the important part which a priest
accompanying the spirit in the under-world played in getting the
spirit through the various demon-guarded doors and arguing his case,
as a barrister might, before the judge. I say spirit, but in the
pictures the body is shown, very substantially. Of course it was all
the more to the priests' advantage to prove how useful they could be
in the after-life, as well as in this.
{44}
The mummies, as you must know, were dead bodies preserved by putting
chemicals into them and over them, and wrapping them round, and often
by painting their faces, and giving them altogether an appearance
which to us, discovering them after all these years, seems rather
dreadful, but no doubt was much admired. We have no record of the
time when the Egyptians began thus to "mummy" their dead; we may
almost say that we have no record of a time when they did not do so.
There were mummies long before Menes, whose date, you may remember,
has been guessed so early as 5500 years B.C. and so late as 3300 B.C.
At first it seems as if only kings were mummied. The kings were
always looked on as semi-divine, and later the people began to regard
the king as being almost identical with--almost the same as--Osiris.
It is as if they thought that the god came down in spirit to live in
the body of the reigning king.
[Illustration: BANDAGING A MUMMY.]
[Sidenote: Mummies]
Later on in the story, many great people, as well as the kings, were
mummied, and yet later again it became quite common with all classes.
Sacred animals, such as the cats in Bubastis, hawks in the temples of
Horus, and even crocodiles and quite large creatures, have been
found, mummied, in great numbers. The art and trade {45} of making
mummies was a very important one, and grew to greater perfection as
the artists began to learn more of the preserving power of chemicals.
Generally, they are the mummies of royal personages that have come
down to us in the best preservation, no doubt because the greatest
care and expense were given to their embalming. One of the best is
of that famous king Tethmosis III. who was the greatest hero of that
greatest eighteenth dynasty up, or down, to which we have now brought
our story.
I have said, and you will be ready to agree with it, that all this
care for the dead body shows what high value the Egyptians placed on
the corpse, although life and the soul had left it. But they had the
idea that the soul could be brought back again, by incantations, to
go into the body again through the mouth, and so make the mouth and
the legs and other parts move, almost as they did before death. That
idea explains perhaps why they took so much pains about keeping the
body perfect. It may explain why the wicked Seth, in his malice, cut
up the body of Osiris, whom he had murdered, and scattered the pieces
in fourteen different places, and also why the faithful Isis
collected them and put them all together again.
The Egyptians, like other ancient people and like many savage races
to-day, believed that a man possessed and had in his body, but
capable of separation from it, two souls, or spirits, and perhaps
more, and though that is an idea so very different from ours it is
not very difficult for us to understand a way in which it might have
come into their minds.
It has been thought likely by many who have given much learned and
deep attention to the subject, that the idea arose from what people
saw in dreams. {46} They would know, perhaps, that a friend of
theirs had gone away on a journey, yet they might go to sleep, and
see, in a dream, the friend beside them. What were they likely to
think? They had not our knowledge about dreams, and did not know
that all that they saw in them came from their own fancy. They would
be very likely to think, then, that their friend, in his soul or
spirit with something that looked like his body, really had come and
had stood beside them, although what we should call his real self was
far away. They would say, then, that he had a second self, or
spirit, which could be in one place and doing one thing while his
other self was in another place and doing quite a different thing.
Thus they might get the idea of one kind of soul and body which would
be different from the man whom they actually saw and spoke to when
they were awake.
And then, when a friend had died, had gone through that great change
which we call death, they would often, still in dreams, see him
again, as he had been in life, though they knew that his body had not
moved from the place where it had been buried. Other friends might
be able to assure them as to this. Therefore they might say, "Here
is another self or spirit of my friend, who is dead, which I saw come
and do this or that. It is the soul not of a living man, but of a
dead man." Thus the idea might arise of a second soul different from
that which was seen while the friend was alive.
You must understand that I am not saying that it certainly was thus
that the idea of more than one soul arose; but it may have been in
this way. It is a way in which we can easily see that it might have
come into their minds.
{47}
Many of the old writings and inscriptions give instructions about the
prayers and ceremonies and forms of words to be used for bringing
back the soul into the dead body, and these, of course, were best
understood by the priests. This, again, helped to make the priests
very important persons. The greatest people in the land performed
the priests' duties; and some of what we may call professed priests,
those whose whole business was the performance of these rites and
ceremonies, became the greatest people. Also some of these very same
people acted as judges and decided points of law, and gave
punishments for the breaking of the laws. You may realise, then, how
extensive their power was.
[Sidenote: Laws]
We do not know a great deal about their laws, but it is singular that
all we do know shows that they had very much the same ideas as to
what was right or wrong as we have. The king issued decrees. We
find decrees against the oppression of the poor by the large
landowners. Crime was punished by death, by fines, by mutilation,
such as by cutting off the nose or by the infliction of other wounds,
and by banishment out of the kingdom. They had their codes of laws,
for they are referred to in inscriptions, but the codes themselves
have not been found.
I do not know whether this short account will help you to get a
picture into your minds of the life of the ancient Egyptians. A
large part of the picture should be filled by the religious
ceremonies, by the worship of the gods and by the offerings which had
to be made, at stated times, to the souls of dead relations. The
power and the number of the priesthood became so great as to rival
that of the king, and actually one of the ruling dynasties was set up
by the priest class itself.
{48}
So now, with that picture, such as I have been able to set it before
your minds, of the people living along the Nile, let us go eastward
and see what was being done all that while along the courses of the
Tigris and Euphrates.
{49}