STAR-CULTS (CONTINUED)--AMEN-T AND KHONS.
When I had the privilege of discussing at Thebes the orientation
hypothesis with M. Bouriant, the distinguished head of the French
School of Archæology in Egypt, he suggested that I should accompany
him one day to Medînet-Habû, at which place he was then superintending
excavations, and where there are three temples dedicated to Amen.
M. Bouriant, from the first, saw that if there were anything in the new
views, the cult must follow the star; and it was natural, therefore,
that the three temples dedicated to the same divinity at the same place
should be directed to the same star. The three temples to which I
refer are the two well-known temples the lack of parallelism of which
has been so often remarked, and a third much smaller one, built more
recently, lying to the south-west. The amplitudes I found to be as
follows:--
Amplitude S. of E.
Ethiopian or Ptolemaic Temple 45°
Great Temple 46½°
Ancient Temple 51½°
On the orientation hypothesis we were dealing with a star the S.E.
amplitude of which was decreasing like that of Sirius; _it was
therefore in the same quarter of the heavens_.
But which star? To investigate this it was best to deal in the first
instance with the orientation of the great temple, since its building
date was supposed to be that most accurately known; and there is not
much danger in doing this in the present case, because the king
obviously had not expanded an old temple, for there it still is
alongside.
The king was Rameses III., the date, according to Brugsch, 1200 B.C.,
and the hills to which the temples are directed may be taken as 1°
high. With these data we get the declination appropriate to the
amplitude of the temple 40° S. Now, this was nearly the declination
of the star Phact or α Columbæ in the time of Rameses III.; the
orientation date is 1250 B.C.
Taking this star, then, and correcting for heights of hills and
refraction, we get approximately the following dates:--
B.C.
Modern Temple 900
Great Temple 1250
Ancient Temple 2525
If the hills are taken as 1½° high, these dates will stand 750,
1150, and 2400.
The date 700 B.C. we have already found as the probable date of the
undertaking of the restoration at Denderah. It is the time of the
victorious march of the Theban priests northwards from their exile at
Gebel Barkal.
The date 2400 B.C. lands us in the times of the great solstitial king,
Usertsen I., about whom more in a subsequent chapter. Although the more
ancient temple is generally ascribed to Thothmes III., traces of the
work of Amen-hetep I. have been discovered. I think we have a case here
where the eighteenth dynasty enlarged and embellished a shrine erected
by the twelfth dynasty, precisely as the temple of Amen-Rā at Karnak
has been traced back to the twelfth dynasty.
If I am right, then, it follows that temples erected to stars
associated in any way with the chief cult, such as that of Amen-Rā, may
either be dedicated to the god or goddess personified by the star or
to the associated solar deity. Thus at Thebes we have the temple of
Mut, so-called, though Mut was the wife of Amen-Rā; and the temples now
under consideration, called temples of Amen, though they are dedicated
to the goddess Amen-t, the wife of Amen. This may or may not be
connected with the fact that the first of them was dedicated possibly
before the cult of Amen alone had been intensified and expanded by the
Theban priests--probably in the eighteenth dynasty--into the cult of
the solstitial sun-god Amen-Rā.
There is evidence, indeed, that Amen-t replaced Mut in the Theban
triad. With regard to these triads, a few words may be said here
from the astronomical point of view, though the subject, I am told,
is one on which a great diversity of opinion exists on the part of
Egyptologists.
I have collected all the most definite statements I can find on this
head, and it is certainly interesting to see that in many cases, though
not in all, the triad seems to consist of a form of the sun-god,
together with two stellar divinities, one of them certainly associated
with the heliacal rising of the sun at some time of the year, and
therefore a recognised form of Isis or Hathor. Thus we have:--
Place. Triad.
Thebes Amen-Rā
(Greater Triad) Mut
χonsu
(Lesser Triad) χem-Rā
Tamen (? Amen-t)
Harka
Denderah Atmu
Isis
Hathor
Memphis Atmu
Sekhet
Ptah
Hermonthis Menθu-Rā
Ra-Ta (= Hathor)
Hor-Para
Not only may this table enable us to see how Amen-t was sunk at
Medînet-Habû in the term Amen, but it enables us to consider a similar
case presented by those temples at Thebes, some of them associated with
Khons and another with Amen, referred to in Chapter XVII.
The temple of _Khons_ is among the best known at Karnak; the visitor
passes it before the great temple of Amen-Rā is reached. M. Bouriant
was able to prove, while we were together at Karnak, that the temple of
Seti II., nearly parallel to it, was also dedicated to _Khons_; but the
temple B of Lepsius, nearly parallel to both, is sacred to _Amen_. It
is seen at once that the main cult is the same, although the amount of
detail shown in the reference is different--we have the generic name of
the triad in one case, the specific name of the member of the triad in
the other.
As this is the first time a setting star has been in question, it is
well to point out that in this case the ancient Egyptians no longer
typified the star as a goddess but as a god--and, more than this, as
a dying god; for Khons is always represented as a _mummy_--the Osiris
form. Egyptologists state that both Thoth and Khons were moon-gods.
Perhaps the lunar attributes were assigned prior to the establishment
of sun-worship.
I shall show, subsequently, that the temples now being considered find
their place in continuous series stretching back in the case of Amen-t
to 3750 B.C., and in the case of Khons to possibly a long anterior date.
In the case of Amen-t and Khons, therefore, where we are free from the
difficulties connected with the interchange of the titles of Isis and
Hathor at Denderah, the star-cults stand out much more clearly, and we
get a step further into the domain of mythology.
But what did the cults mean? What was the utility of them? What their
probable origin? The cult of Sirius we already understand.
I will deal with Amen-t first. No doubt it will have been already asked
how it came that such an unfamiliar star as Phact had been selected.
Here the answer is overwhelming. This star, although so little familiar
to us northerners, is one of the most conspicuous of the stars in the
southern portion of the heavens, _and its heliacal rising heralded the
solstice and the rise of the Nile before the heliacal rising of Sirius
was useful for that purpose_!
In Phact we have the star symbolised by the ancient Egyptians under the
name of the goddess Amen-t or Teχi, whose figure in the month table at
the Ramesseum leads the procession of the months.
Amen-t, the wife of the solstitial sun-god Rā, symbolised the star the
rising of which heralded the solstice; and the complex title Amen-Rā
signified in ancient times, to _those who knew_, that the solstitial
sun-god Rā, so heralded, was meant.
The answer is clear, though not so simple in the case of Khons. The
setting of Canopus marked the autumnal equinox about 5000 B.C. We have
found that the first Khons temple at Karnak was possibly built as late
as 2000 B.C., when the utility of the observations of Canopus from
this point of view had therefore ceased; but it is also known that
Khons was a late addition to the Theban triad, and I shall subsequently
give evidence that the worship was introduced from the south, where
it had been conducted when the condition of utility held. The time of
introduction to Thebes was the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty,
when the priests wished to increase their power by conciliating all
worships; and we now see that with their local sun-god Amen-Rā and the
goddess Amen-t, with the Northern Mut (Isis) and the Southern Khons,
the Theban triad represented the worship of Central, Northern and
Southern Egypt.
It is an important fact to bear in mind that in the North of Egypt
in early times the stellar temples were more particularly directed
to the north, while south of Thebes, so far as I know, there is only
one temple so directed. It is suggested, therefore, that the Theban
priests amalgamated the northern and southern cults, probably for
political purposes. There is evidence that the priests were at heart
more sympathetic with the southern cults, and a further investigation
of this matter may eventually help us in several points of Egyptian
history.
It will have been noticed also that so far as we have gone, whether
discussing solar or stellar temples, we have had to associate the cults
carried on in most of them with some particular season of the year. If
I am right, in the worships at Denderah, Medînet-Habû, and Karnak, we
have a strict reference to the year, and in Egypt the year was always,
as it is now, associated with the rise of the river.
The sacred river must now occupy our attention for a while; we must
become familiar with its phenomena, and the divisions of time and the
calendar systems which were associated with them.