Of the nations which have contributed to the direct stream of
civilization, Egypt and Mesopotamia are at present believed to be
the oldest. The chronological dispute as to the relative
antiquity of the two countries is of minor importance; for while
in Babylonia the historical material is almost entirely
inscriptional, in Egypt we know the handicrafts, the weapons, the
arts, and, to a certain extent, the religious beliefs of the race
up to a period when it was just emerging from the Stone Age. In a
word, Egypt presents the most ancient race whose manner of life
is known to man. From the beginning of its history--that is,
from about 4500 B.C.--we can trace the development of a
religion one of whose most prominent elements was a promise of a
life after death. It was still a great religion when the
Christian doctrine of immortality was enunciated. In the early
centuries of the Christian era, it seemed almost possible that
the worship of Osiris and Isis might become the religion of the
classical world; and the last stand made by civilized paganism
against Christianity was in the temple of Isis at Philae in the
sixth century after Christ.
It is clear that a religion of such duration must have offered
some of those consolations to man that have marked all great
religions, chief of which is the faith in a spirit, in something
that preserves the personality of the man and does not perish
with the body. This faith was, in fact, one of the chief elements
in the Egyptian religion--the element best known to us through
the endless cemeteries which fill the desert from one end of
Egypt to the other, and through the funerary inscriptions.
It is necessary, however, to correct the prevailing impression
that religion played the greatest part in Egyptian life or even a
greater part than it does in Moslem Egypt. The mistaken belief
that death and the well-being of the dead overshadowed the
existence of the living, is due to the fact that the physical
character of the country has preserved for us the cemeteries and
the funerary temples better than all the other monuments. The
narrow strip of fat black land along the Nile produces generally
its three crops a year. It is much too valuable to use as a
cemetery. But more than that, it is subject to periodic
saturation with water during the inundation, and is, therefore,
unsuitable for the burials of a nation which wished to preserve
the contents of the graves. On the other hand, the desert, which
bounds this fertile strip so closely that a dozen steps will
usually carry one from the black land to the gray,--the desert
offers a dry preserving soil with absolutely no value to the
living. Thus all the funerary monuments were erected on the
desert, and except where intentionally destroyed they are
preserved to the present day. The palaces, the towns, the farms,
and many of the great temples which were erected on the black
soil, have been pulled down for building material or buried deep
under the steadily rising deposits of the Nile. The tombs of six
thousand years of dead have accumulated on the desert edge.
Moreover, our impression of these tombs has been formed from the
monuments erected by kings, princes, priests, and the great and
wealthy men of the kingdom. The multitude of plain unadorned
burial-places which the scientific excavator records by the
thousands have escaped the attention of scholars interested in
Egypt from the point of view of a comparison of religions. It has
also been overlooked that the strikingly colored mummies and the
glaring burial apparatus of the late period cost very little to
prepare. The manufacture of mummies was a regular trade in the
Ptolemaic period at least. Mummy cases were prepared in advance
with blank spaces for the names. I do not think that any more
expense was incurred in Egyptian funerals in the dynastic period
than is the case among the modern Egyptians. The importance of
the funerary rites to the living must, therefore, not be
exaggerated.