the same time, the worship of Egypt and the myths of Egypt were early directed to, and were peopled by, a wilderness of monkeys, jackals, bulls, geese, rams, and beasts in general. Now it may be, and probably is, impossible for us to say whether the conception of an invisible being who punishes wickedness and answers. prayers (a conception held even by the forlorn Fuegians and Bushmen) is earlier or later than totemism and the myths of animals. In the same way, it is impossible to say whether the Egyptian belief in an all-creating and surveying power-Osiris, or Ra, or Horus-is, in some form or other, prior to, or posterior to, the cult of bulls and rams and crocodiles. But it is not impossible for us to discern and divide those portions of myth and cult which the Egyptians had in common with Australian and American and Polynesian and African tribes, from those litanies of a purer and nobler style which are only found among civilised and reflective peoples. Having once made this division, it will be natural and plausible to hold that the animal gods and wild myths are survivals of the fancies of savagery, to which they exactly correspond, rather than priestly symbolisms and modes of worshipping pure attributes of the divine nature, though it was in this light that they were regarded by the schools of esoteric theology in Egypt.

The peculiarity of Egypt, in religion and myth as in every other institution, is the retention of the very rudest and most barbarous things, side by side with the last refinements of civilisation. The existence of this conservatism (by which we profess to explain the Egyptian myths and worship) is illustrated, in another field, by the arts of everyday life, and by the testimony of the sepulchres of Thebes. M. Passalacqua, in some excavations at Quoarnah, struck on the common cemetery of the ancient city of Thebes. Here he found 'the mummy of a hunter, with a wooden bow and twelve arrows, the shaft made of reed, the points of hardened wood tipped with edged flints. Hard by lay jewels belonging to the mummy of a young woman, pins with ornamental heads, necklaces of gold and lapis lazuli, gold earrings, scarabs of gold, bracelets of gold,' and so forth.7 The refined art of the gold-worker was contemporary, and this at a late period, with the use of flint-headed arrows, the weapons commonly found all over the world in places where the metals have never penetrated. Again, a razor-shaped knife of flint has been unearthed; it is inscribed in hieroglyphics with the words, 'The great Sam, son of Ptah, chief of artists.' The Sams' were members of the priestly class, who fulfilled certain mystic duties at funerals. It is reported, by Herodotus, that the embalmers opened the bodies of the dead with a knife of stone; and the discovery of such a knife, though it had not

• See a collection of lofty and beautiful Egyptian monotheistic texts in Brugsch (Rel. und Myth. pp. 96, 99).

Chabas, Etudes sur l'Antiquité Historique, p. 390.

belonged to an embalmer, proves that in Egypt the stone age did not disappear, but coexisted throughout with the arts of metalworking. It is certain that flint chisels and stone hammers were used by the workers of the mines in Sinai, even under Dynasties XII., XIX. The soil of Egypt, when excavated, constantly shows that the Egyptians, who in the remote age of the pyramid builders were already acquainted with bronze, and even with iron, did not therefore relinquish the use of flint knives and arrow-heads, when such implements became cheaper than tools of metal, or when they were associated with religion. Precisely in the same way did the Egyptians, who, in the remotest known times, had imposing religious ideas, decline to relinquish the totems, and beast-gods, and absurd or blasphemous myths which (like flint axes and arrow-heads) are everywhere characteristic of savages.

Our business, then, is to discern and exhibit apart, so to speak, the metal age and the stone age, the savage and the cultivated practices and ideas, which make up the pell-mell of Egyptian mythology. As a preliminary to this task, we must rapidly survey the history of Egypt, as far as it affected the religious development.

8

The ancient Egyptians appear to be connected, by race, with the peoples of Western Asia, and are styled, correctly or not, 'ProtoSemitic.' When they first invaded Egypt, at some period quite dim and inconceivably distant, they are said to have driven an earlier stock into the interior. The new comers, the ancestors of the Egyptians, were in the tribal state of society, and the various tribes established themselves in local and independent settlements, which (as the original villages of Greece were collected into city states) were finally gathered together (under Menes, a real or mythical hero) as portions, styled 'nomes,' of an empire. Each tribal state retained its peculiar religion, a point of great importance in this discussion. In the empire thus formed, different towns, at different times, reached the rank of secular, and, to some extent, of spiritual capitals. Thebes, for example, was so ancient that it was regarded as the native land of Osiris, the great mythical figure of Egypt. More ancient as a capital was This, or Abydos, the Holy City par excellence. Memphis, again, was, in religion, the metropolis of the god Ptah, as Thebes was of the god Ammon. Each sacred metropolis, as it came to power, united in a kind of pantheon the gods of the various nomes (that is, the old tribal deities), while the god of the metropolis itself was a sort of Bretwalda among them, and even absorbed into himself their powers and peculiarities. Similar examples of aggregates of

8 Maspero, Hist. de l'Orient, p. 17. Other authorities regard the Egyptians as a successful race, sprung from the same African stock as the extremely unsuccessful Bushmen.

• XI.-XX. Dynasties.

village or tribal religions in a State religion are familiar in Peru, and meet us in Greece.10

Of what nature, then, were the gods of the nomes, the old tribal gods? On this question we have evidence of two sorts: first, we have the evidence of monuments and inscriptions from many of the periods; next we have the evidence, in much more minute detail, of foreign observers, from Herodotus to Plutarch and Porphyry. Let us first see what the monuments have to say about the tribal gods, and the divine groups of the various towns and of each metropolis. Summaries may be borrowed from M. Maspero, head of the Egyptian Museums, and from Mr. Flinders Petrie, the discoverer of Naucratis. According to these authorities, the early shapes of gods among the Egyptians, as among Bushmen and Australians and Algonkins, are bestial. M. Maspero writes," The essential fact in the religion of Egypt is the existence of a considerable number of divine personages of different shapes and different names. M. Pierret may call this "an apparent polytheism." 12 I call it a polytheism extremely well marked. . . . The bestial shapes in which the gods were clad had no allegorical character, they denote that straightforward worship of the lower animals which is found in many religions, ancient and modern. . . . It is possible, nay it is certain, that during the second Theban Empire (1700-1300 B.C.) the learned priests may have thought it well to attribute a symbolical sense to certain bestial deities. But, whatever they may have worshipped in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, and not a hieroglyph, that the first worshippers of the ibis adored.13 The bull Hapi was a god-bull long before he became a bull which was the symbol of a god, and it would not surprise me if the onion-god that the Roman satirists mocked at really existed.'14 M. Maspero

10 Maspero, Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel. i. 126. The unity of political power which, despite the original feudal organisation of the country, had existed since Menes, brought with it the unity of religion. The schools of theology in Sais, Heliopolis, Memphis, Abydos, Thebes, produced, perhaps unconsciously, a kind of syncretism into which they fused or forced all the scattered beliefs.'

11 Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel. i. 120.

12 Pierret, Essai sur la Mythologie Egyptienne, p. 6. Polythéiste en apparence, la religion Egyptienne était essentiellement monothéiste.' M. Pierret explains the divine animals thus: these creatures, employed as symbols, became sacred for no other reason than because they had the honour to be used as vestments of religious thought (Le Panthéon Egyptien, p. vi).

13 Mr. Le Page Renouf, on the other hand (Hib. Lect. p. 116), clings to the belief that the ibis-god sprang from a misunderstanding of words, a kind of calembour or pun.

...

14 When we hear of the one god he is only the god of the town, or nome, and does not exclude the one god of the neighbours. The conception of his unity is, therefore, at least as much geographical and political as religious. Ra, the one god at Heliopolis, is not the same as Ammon, the one god at Thebes. The unity of each of these one gods, absolute as it might be in his own country, did not exclude the reality of the other gods. Each one god, therefore, imagined in this way, or nome, noutir noutti, and not a national god, (Hist. de l'Orient, p. 27.)

...

is only the one god of his town,

ecognised by the whole country.'

goes on to remark that so far as it is possible to speak of one god in ancient Egypt, that god was, in each case, 'nothing but the god of each nome or town.' M. Meyer is resolute in the same opinion. These sentiments (of reverence for beasts) are naturally no expression of a dim feeling of the unity of godhead, of a "primitive henotheism," as has so often been asserted, but of the exact opposite.' 15 The same view is taken by MM. Chipiez and Perrot. Later theology has succeeded in giving more or less plausible explanations of the animal gods. Each of them has been assigned as a symbol or attribute to one of the greater deities. As for ourselves, we have no doubt that these objects of popular devotion were no more than ancient fetishes.' 16 Meanwhile it is universally acknowledged, it is asserted by Mr. Le Page Renouf, as well as by M. Maspero, that 'the Egyptian religion comprehends a quantity of local worships.' 17

6

M. Maspero next describes the earliest religious texts and testimonies. During the Ancient Empire I only find monuments at four points-at Memphis, at Abydos, and in some parts of Middle Egypt, at Sinai, and in the valley of Hammamat. The divine names appear but occasionally, in certain unvaried fornulæ. Under Dynasties XI. and XII. Lower Egypt comes on the scene; the formulæ are more explicit, but the religious monuments rare. From the eighteenth century onwards, we have representations of all the deities' (previously only named, not pictured), accompanied by legends, more or less developed, and we begin to discover books of ritual, hymns, amulets, and other materials' 18

6

What, then, are the earliest gods of the monuments, the gods which were local, and had once probably been tribal gods? Mr. Flinders Petrie 19 observes that Egyptian art is first native, then Semitic, then renascence or revival. In the earliest period, till Dynasty XII. native art prevails, and in this earliest art the gods are invariably portrayed as beasts. The gods, when mentioned, are always represented by their animals' (M. Maspero says that the animals were the gods) or with the name spelt out in hieroglyphs, often beside the beast or bird. The jackal stands for Anup' (M. Maspero would apparently say that Anup is the jackal), 'the frog for Hekt, the baboon for Tahuti; it is not till after Semitic influence had begun to work in the country that any figures of gods are found.' Under Dynasty XII. the gods that had previously been represented in art as beasts appear in their later shapes, often half anthropomorphic, half zoomorphic, dog-headed, cat-headed, hawkheaded, bull-headed men and women. These figures are probably derived from those of the priests, half draped in the hides of the animals to which they ministered. Compare the Aztec pictures.

.

15 Geschichte des Alterthums, p. 72.

16 Egyptian Art, English translation, i. 54. The word 'fetish' is here very loosely employed. 17 Hib. Lect. p. 90.

18 Rev. de l'Hist. des Rel. i. 124.

13 The Arts of Ancient Egypt, p. 8.

It is now set forth, first, that the earliest gods capable of being represented in art were local (that is originally tribal), and, second, that these gods were beasts. 20 How, then, is this phenomenon to be explained? MM. Pierret and Le Page Renouf, as we have seen, take the old view of the Egyptian priests that the beast-gods are mere symbols of the attributes of divinity. MM. Chipiez and Perrot regard the beast-gods as 'fetishes,' and suppose that the domestic animals were originally worshipped out of gratitude. 21 But who could be grateful to a frog or a jackal? As to the fact, their opinion is explicit: the worship of the hawk, the vulture, and the ibis had preceded by many centuries that of the gods who correspond to the personages of the Hellenic pantheon,' such as Dionysus and Apollo. The doctrines of emanation and incarnation permitted theology to explain and accept these things.' Our own explanation will have been anticipated. The totems, or ancestral sacred plants and animals of groups of the original savage kindreds, have survived in religion as the sacred plants (garlic, for example) and animals of Egyptian towns and nomes.22

Here we are fortunate enough to have the support of Professor Sayce.23 He remarks:-

These animal forms, in which a later myth saw the shapes assumed by the affrighted gods during the great war between Horus and Typhon, take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt was still totemism. They are survivals from a long-forgotten past, and prove that Egyptian civilisation was of slow and independent growth, the latest stage only of which is revealed to us by the monuments. Apis of Memphis, Mnevis of Heliopolis, and Pacis of Hermonthis, are all links that bind together the Egypt of the Pharaohs and the Egypt of the stone age. They were the sacred animals of the clans which first settled in these localities, and their identification with the deities of the official religion must have been a slow process, never fully carried out, in fact, in the minds of the lower classes.24

Thus it appears that, after all, even on philological showing, the religions and myths of a civilised people may be illustrated by the religions and myths of savages. It is purely through study of savage totemism that an explanation has been found of the singular Egyptian practices which puzzled the Greeks and Romans, and the Egyptians themselves.25 The inhabitants of each district worshipped a particular sacred animal, and abstained from its flesh (except on rare occasions of ritual solemnity), while each set of people ate with

20 Beasts also appear in the chronological roll of the earliest kings. Turin papyrus (Brugsch, Hist. of Egypt, Engl. transl. p. 32).

21 Chipiez and Perrot, i. 64.

22 Eusebius quotes from Alexander Polyhistor an absurd story that Moses founded a town, and selected the ibis for its protecting animal (Præp. Ev. ix. 432).

23 Herodotus, p. 344.

24 Ibid. p. 344.

25 Mr. Le Page Renouf ridicules, in the Hiblert Lectures, this discovery of Mr. M'Lennan's, whose original sketch of his ideas was certainly hasty, and not well documenté.