The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 3

and the nature of this Zi is in no way distinguishable from that of the Egyptian Ka. As in Egypt, moreover, the G.o.ds had each his Zi as well as men and things, and, as in Egypt, it was the Zi of the G.o.d rather than the G.o.d himself which was primarily worshipped. So marked is the resemblance between the two conceptions, that in working it out on the Babylonian side, I could not resist the conviction that there must have been some connection between them. That was sixteen years ago. Since then discoveries have been made and facts brought to light which indicate that a connection really did exist between the Babylonia and the Egypt of the so-called prehistoric age, and have led me to believe, with Hommel, de Morgan, and others, that Babylonia was the home and cradle of the Pharaonic Egyptians. In Sumerian the word Zi signified "life," and was denoted by the picture of a flowering reed. It was the life on which was imprinted the form of the body that was for a time its home, and its separation from the body meant the death of the latter. The Sumerians never advanced to the further stage of making the vital principle itself a separable quality; perhaps the original signification of the word which it never lost would have prevented this. But they did go on to transform the Zi into a spirit or demon, who, in place of being the counterpart of some individual person or thing, could enter at will into any object he chose.

Even in Egypt, traces of the same logical progress in ideas may perhaps be found. If Professor Maspero is right in his interpretation of certain pa.s.sages in the Pyramid texts and Ptolemaic papyri, "The double did not allow its family to forget it, but used all the means at its disposal to remind them of its existence. It entered their houses and their bodies, terrified them, waking and sleeping, by its sudden apparitions, struck them down with disease or madness, and would even suck their blood like the modern vampire(25)." Such a conception of the Ka, however, if ever it existed, must have soon pa.s.sed away, leaving behind it but few vestiges of itself.

I have dwelt thus long on the doctrine of the Ka or double on account both of its importance and of the difficulties it presents to the modern scholar. Its discovery by Professor Maspero and Sir P. Le Page Renouf cleared away a host of misconceptions, and introduced light into one of the darkest corners of Egyptian religion(26). And however strange it may seem to us, it was in thorough accordance with the simple logic of primitive man. Given the premisses, the conclusion followed. It was only when the Egyptian came to progress in knowledge and culture, and new ideas about his own nature were adopted, that difficulties began to multiply and the theory of the Ka to become complicated.

Among these new ideas was that of the Khu or "luminous" part of man. On the recently discovered monuments of the early period, the Khu holds a place which it lost after the rise of Memphite influence with the Third Dynasty. We find it depicted on the tombstones of Abydos embraced by the down-bent arms of the Ka. The Khu, therefore, was conceived of as comprehended in the human Ka, as forming part of it, though at the same time as a separate ent.i.ty. It was, in fact, the soul of the human Ka, and was accordingly symbolised by the crested ibis(27). It may be that it was in the beginning nothing more than the phosph.o.r.escent light emitted by decaying vegetation which the belated wayfarer took for a ghost; the _ginn_ (_jinn_) of the modern Egyptian fellah are similar lights which flash up suddenly from the ground. But the earliest examples of its use on the monuments are against such an ign.o.ble origin, and suggest rather that it was the glorified spirit which mounted up like a bird in the arms of its Ka towards the brilliant vault of heaven. It is not until we come to the decadent days of the Greek and Roman periods that the Khu appears in a degraded form as a malignant ghost which enters the bodies of the living in order to torment them. No traces of such a belief are to be found in older days. The Pyramid texts speak of "the four Khu of Horus," "who live in Heliopolis," and were at once male and female, and of the Khu who brandish their arms and form a sort of bodyguard around the G.o.d of the dead. They are identified with the fixed stars, and more especially with those of the Great Bear, and in the euhemeristic chronicles of Egyptian history they become the "Manes" of Manetho, the semi-divine dynasty which intervened between the dynasties of the G.o.ds and of men.(28)

The Khu thus forms a link between men and the G.o.ds, and partic.i.p.ates in the divine nature. It is the soul regarded as a G.o.dlike essence, as coming down from heaven rather than as mounting up towards it. It is not only disembodied, but needs the body no longer; it belongs to the Ka, which still lives and moves, and not to the mummified corpse from which the vital spark has fled. It waits on the G.o.d of the dead, not on the dead themselves.

It seems probable, therefore, that in the part of Egypt in which the doctrine of the Khu grew up, mummification was not practised; and the probability is strengthened by the fact that, before the rise of the Third Dynasty, embalming was apparently not frequent in Upper Egypt, even in the case of the kings. But, however this may be, one thing is certain. The conception of the Khu cannot have originated in the same part of the country, or perhaps among the same element in the population, as a parallel but wholly inconsistent conception which eventually gained the predominance. According to this conception, the imperishable part of man which, like the Ka, pa.s.sed after death into the other world, was the Ba or "soul." Like the Khu, the Ba was pictured as a bird; but the bird is usually given a human head and sometimes human hands.(29) But, while the Khu was essentially divine, the Ba was essentially human. It is true that the Ba, as well as the Khu, was a.s.signed to the G.o.ds-Ra of Heliopolis was even credited with seven; but whereas man possessed a Khu or luminous soul because he was likened to the G.o.ds, the G.o.ds possessed a Ba because they were likened to men.

The relation between the two is brought out very clearly in the philosophy of the so-called Hermetic books, which endeavoured to translate the theology of Egypt into Greek thought. There we are told that the Khu is the intelligence (????), of which the Ba or soul (????) is as it were the envelope. As long as the soul is imprisoned in the earthly tabernacle of the body, the intelligence is deprived of the robe of fire in which it should be clothed, its brightness is dimmed, and its purity is sullied.

The death of the body releases it from its prison-house; it once more soars to heaven and becomes a spirit (da???), while the soul is carried to the hall of judgment, there to be awarded punishment or happiness in accordance with its deserts.(30) The Khu, in other words, is a spark of that divine intelligence which pervades the world and to which it must return; the Ba is the individual soul which has to answer after death for the deeds committed in the body.

The plover was the bird usually chosen to represent the Ba, but at times the place of the plover is taken by the hawk, the symbol of Horus and the solar G.o.ds. That the soul should have been likened to a bird is natural, and we meet with the same or similar symbolism among other peoples. Like the bird, it flew between earth and heaven, untrammelled by the body to which it had once been joined. From time to time it visited its mummy; at other times it dwelt with the G.o.ds above. Now and again, so the inscriptions tell us, it alighted on the boughs of the garden it had made for itself in life, cooling itself under the sycamores and eating their fruits. For the Ba was no more immaterial than the Ka; it, too, needed meat and drink for its sustenance, and looked to its relatives and descendants to furnish them.

But, as Professor Maspero(31) has pointed out, there was a very real and fundamental difference between the idea of the Ka or double, and that of the Ba or soul. The Ka was originally nourished on the actual offerings that were placed in the tomb of the dead man; it pa.s.sed into it through the false door and consumed the food that it found there. But the soul had ascended to the G.o.ds in heaven; it lived in the light of day, not in the darkness of the tomb; and it is doubtful if it was ever supposed to return there. To the G.o.ds accordingly was committed the care of the Ba, and of seeing that it was properly provided for. By the power of prayer and magical incantation, the various articles of food, or, more strictly speaking, their doubles, were identified with the G.o.ds, and communicated by the G.o.ds to the soul. Long before the days when the Pyramid texts had been compiled, this theory of the nourishment of the soul was applied also to the nourishment of the Ka, and the older belief in the material eating and drinking of the Ka had pa.s.sed away. All that remained of it was the habitual offering of the food to the dead, a custom which still lingers among the fellahin of Egypt, both Moslem and Copt.

Besides the double and the two souls, there was yet another immortal element in the human frame. This was the heart, the seat both of the feelings and of the mind. But it was not the material heart, but its immaterial double, which pa.s.sed after death into the other world. The material heart was carefully removed from the mummy, and with the rest of the intestines was usually cast into the Nile. Porphyry(32) tells us that in his time, when the bodies of the wealthier cla.s.ses were embalmed, the Egyptians "take out the stomach and put it into a coffer, and, holding the coffer to the sun, protest, one of the embalmers making a speech on behalf of the dead. This speech, which Euphantos translated from his native language, is as follows: 'O Lord the Sun, and all ye G.o.ds who give life to man, receive me and make me a companion of the eternal G.o.ds. For the G.o.ds, whom my parents made known to me, as long as I have lived in this world I have continued to reverence, and those who gave birth to my body I have ever honoured. And as for other men, I have neither slain any, nor defrauded any of anything entrusted to me, nor committed any other wicked act; but if by chance I have committed any sin in my life, by either eating or drinking what was forbidden, not of myself did I sin, but owing to these members,'-at the same time showing the coffer in which the stomach was. And having said this, he throws it into the river, and embalms the rest of the body as being pure. Thus they thought that they needed to excuse themselves to G.o.d for what they had eaten and drunken, and therefore so reproach the stomach."(33)

Now and then, however, the heart and intestines were replaced in the mummy, but under the protection of wax images of the four genii of the dead-the four Khu of the Book of the Dead. More often they were put into four vases of alabaster or some other material, which were buried with the dead.(34) Though the latter practice was not very common, probably on account of its expense, it must go back to the very beginnings of Egyptian history. The hieroglyphic symbol of the heart is just one of these vases, and one of the two names applied to the heart was _?ati_, "that which belongs to the vase." After ages even endeavoured to draw a distinction between _ab_ "the heart" proper, and _?ati_ "the heart-sack."(35)

From the time of the Twelfth Dynasty(36) onwards, the place of the material heart in the mummy was taken by an amulet, through the influence of which, it was supposed, the corpse would be secured against all the dangers and inconveniences attending the loss of its heart until the day of resurrection. The amulet was in the form of a beetle or scarab, the emblem of "becoming" or transformation, and on the under side of it there was often inscribed the 30th chapter of the Book of the Dead, to the words of which were ascribed a magical effect. The chapter reads as follows: "O heart (_ab_) of my mother, O heart (_?ati_) of my transformations! Let there be no stoppage to me as regards evidence (before the judges of the dead), no hindrance to me on the part of the Powers, no repulse of me in the presence of the guardian of the scales! Thou art my Ka in my body, the G.o.d Khnum who makes strong my limbs. Come thou to the good place to which we are going. Let not our name be overthrown by the lords of Hades who cause men to stand upright! Good unto us, yea good is it to hear that the heart is large (and heavy) when the words (of life) are weighed!(37) Let no lies be uttered against me before G.o.d. How great art thou!"

Meanwhile the immaterial heart, the "Ka" of it, which is addressed in the words just quoted, had made its way through the region of the other world, until it finally reached the place known as "the Abode of Hearts." Here in the judgment-hall of Osiris it met the dead man to whom it had formerly belonged, and here, too, it accused him of all the evil words and thoughts he had harboured in his lifetime, or testified to the good thoughts and words of which he had been the author. For the heart, though the organ through which his thoughts and words had acted, was not the cause of them; in its nature it was essentially pure and divine, and it had been an unwilling witness of the sins it had been forced to know. Eventually it was weighed in the balance against the image of Truth, and only if the scales turned in favour of the dead man could it rejoin its former body and live with it for ever in the islands of the Blest.

The scales and judgment-hall, however, belong to the religious conceptions which gathered round the name of Osiris, like the Paradise which the risen mummy looked forward to enjoy. It was only after the worship of Osiris had become universal throughout Egypt, and the older or local ideas of the future life had been accommodated to them, that it was possible for an Egyptian to speak of meeting his disembodied heart, or of the testimony it could give for or against him before the judges of the dead. The fact that the use of the scarab does not seem to extend further back than the age of the Memphite or Theban dynasties, may imply that it was only then that the Osirian beliefs were officially fitted on to earlier forms of faith.

However this may be, the worship of Osiris and the beliefs attaching to it must be left to another lecture, and for the present we must pa.s.s on to the mummy itself, the last part of man which it was hoped would be immortal.

The mummy or Sa?u has to be carefully distinguished from the Khat or natural body. The latter was a mere dead sh.e.l.l, seen by the soul but not affording a resting-place for it. The mummy, on the other hand, contained within itself the seeds of growth and resurrection. It could be visited by the soul and inspired by it for a few moments with life, and the Egyptian looked forward to a time when it would once more be reunited with both its heart and its soul, and so rise again from the dead.

It is impossible to say how far back in the history of the Egyptian religion this belief in the immortality of the mummy may go. It can hardly have originated in the same circle of ideas as the doctrine of the Ka, though the doctrine of the Ka could easily be reconciled with it. On the one hand, it seems connected, as we shall see, with the cult of Osiris; but, on the other hand, there are no traces of mummification in the prehistoric graves, and it is doubtful whether there are any in the royal tombs of Negada and Abydos which belong to the age of the First and Second Dynasties. At all events, the scarab, which accompanied embalmment, first appears at a much later date, and perhaps had a Memphite origin. There are, however, indications that the process of embalming first arose among the pre-Menic rulers of Nekhen, in the neighbourhood of El-Kab. The soil of El-Kab literally effloresces with the natron, which, it was discovered, preserved the bodies buried in it; and even as late as the time of the Pyramid texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the northern sources of natron were known, it was still necessary for ceremonial purposes that the materials used by the embalmer should contain some of the natron of El-Kab.(38)

What was difficult to harmonise with the belief in the resurrection of the mummy was the belief which made the risen man an "Osiris," identified, that is to say, in substance with the G.o.d Osiris, and not his old material self. In the days, therefore, when Greek philosophy took it in hand to systematise and interpret the theology of Egypt, the risen mummy drops out of sight. The Khu, as we have seen, becomes the divine intelligence, which for a time is enshrouded in the human soul; and this again needs the envelope of the spirit, which sends the breath of life through the veins before it can tabernacle in the body of man. The Hermetic books tell us that while body, spirit, and soul are common to man and the beasts, the divine intelligence is his alone to possess, stripped, indeed, of its native covering of ethereal fire, but still the veritable spirit of G.o.d.

Ever is it seeking to raise the human soul to itself, and so purify it from the pa.s.sions and desires with which it is inspired by the body. But the flesh wages continual war against it, and endeavours to drag the soul down to its own level. If the soul yields, after death the intelligence returns to its original state, while the soul is arraigned before the judgment-seat of heaven, and there being accused by its conscience, the heart, is condemned to the punishment of the lost. First it is scourged for its sins, and then handed over to the buffetings of the tempests, suspended between earth and sky. At times in the form of an evil demon it seeks alleviation of its torments by entering the body of a man or animal, whom it drives to murder and madness. But at last, after ages of suffering, the end comes; it dies the second death, and is annihilated for ever.

The good soul, on the other hand, which has listened in life to the voice of the divine intelligence, and struggled to overcome the l.u.s.ts and pa.s.sions of the flesh, obtains after death its reward. Guided by the intelligence, it traverses s.p.a.ce, learning the secrets of the universe, and coming to understand the things that are dark and mysterious to us here. At length its education in the other world is completed, and it is permitted to see G.o.d face to face and to lose itself in His ineffable glory.

I need not point out to you how deeply this h.e.l.lenised philosophy of Egypt has affected the religious thought of Christian Alexandria, and through Alexandria of Christian Europe. It may be that traces of it may be detected even in the New Testament. At any rate, much of the psychology of Christian theologians is clearly derived from it. We are still under the influence of ideas whose first home was in Egypt, and whose development has been the work of long ages of time. True or false, they are part of the heritage bequeathed to us by the past.

Lecture IV. The Sun-G.o.d And The Ennead.

In my last lecture, when speaking of the form under which the soul of man was pictured by the Egyptians, I mentioned that it was often represented by a hawk, the symbol of the sun-G.o.d. Why the hawk should have thus symbolised the sun is a question that has often been asked. The Egyptians did not know themselves; and Porphyry, in the dying days of the old Egyptian faith, gravely declares that it was because the hawk was a compound of blood and breath! One explanation has been that it was because the hawk pounces down from the sky like the rays of the sun, which, like the eagle, he can gaze at without blinking; and a pa.s.sage in the _Odyssey_ of Homer (xv. 525) has been invoked in favour of this view, where the hawk is called "the swift messenger of Apollo." But if there is any connection between the Homeric pa.s.sage and the Egyptian symbol, it would show only that the symbol had been borrowed by the Greek poet. Originally, moreover, it was only the sun-G.o.d of Upper Egypt who was represented even by the Egyptians under the form of a hawk.

This was Horus, often called in the later texts "Horus the elder" (Hor-ur, the Greek Aroeris), in order to distinguish him from a wholly different G.o.d, Horus the younger, the son of Isis. His symbol, the hawk, is found on the early Pharaonic monuments which recent excavations have brought to light. Sometimes the hawk stands on the so-called standard, which is really a perch, sometimes on the crenelated circle, which denoted a city in those primitive days. The standard is borne before the Pharaoh, representing at once his own t.i.tle and the nome or princ.i.p.ality over which he held rule; and its resemblance to the stone birds perched on similar supports, which Mr. Bent found in the ruins of Zimbabwe, suggests a connection between the prehistoric gold miners of Central Africa and the early inhabitants of Southern Egypt. On one of the early Egyptian monuments discovered at Abydos, two hawks stand above the wall of a city which seems to bear the name of "the city of the kings,"(39) and a slate plaque found by Mr. Quibell at Kom el-A?mar shows us on one side the Pharaoh of Nekhen inspecting the decapitated bodies of his enemies with two hawks on standards carried before him, while, on the other side, a hawk leads the bridled "North" to him under the guise of a prisoner, through whose lips a ring has been pa.s.sed.(40) In the first case, the hawks may represent the districts of which the G.o.d they symbolised was the protecting deity;(41) in the second case, the G.o.d and the king must be identified together. It was as Horus, the hawk, that the Pharaoh had conquered the Egyptians of the north, and it was Horus, therefore, who had given them into his hand.

If Dr. Naville is right, Horus the hawk-G.o.d is again represented on the same plaque, with the symbol of "follower," above a boat which is engraved over the bodies of the decapitated slain.(42) Countenance is given to this view by a drawing on the rocks near El-Kab, in which the cartouches of two kings of the Fourth Dynasty, Sharu and Khufu, are carried in boats on the prows of which a hawk is perched, while above each name are two other hawks, standing on the hieroglyph of "gold," and with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt on their heads. The t.i.tle "follower of Horus" would take us back to the earliest traditions of Egyptian history. The "followers of Horus," according to the later texts, were the predecessors of Menes and the First Dynasty of united Egypt, the Pharaohs and princes of the southern kingdom whose very names were forgotten in after days.

Nevertheless, it was remembered that they had founded the great sanctuaries of the country; thus an inscription at Dendera declares that in the reign of king Pepi of the Sixth Dynasty there was found in the wall of the palace a parchment on which was a plan of the temple drawn upon it in the time of "the followers of Horus." The legends of Edfu told how these followers of Horus had been smiths, armed with weapons of iron, and how they had driven the enemies of their leader before them until they had possessed themselves of the whole of Egypt.(43) But many hard-fought battles were needed before this could be accomplished. Again and again had the foe been crushed-at Zadmit near Thebes, at Neter-Khadu near Dendera, at Minia, at Behnesa and Ahnas on the frontier of the Fayyum, and finally at Zaru on the Asiatic borders of the Delta. Even here, however, the struggle was not over. Horus and his followers had to take ship and pursue the enemy down the Red Sea, inflicting a final blow upon them near Berenice, from whence he returned across the desert in triumph to Edfu.

In this legend, which in its present form is not older than the Ptolemaic period, echoes of the gradual conquest of Egypt by the first followers of the Pharaohs have probably been preserved, though they have been combined with a wholly different cycle of myths relating to the eternal struggle between Horus the son of Isis and his twin brother Set. But the confusion between the two Horuses must have arisen at an early time. Already a king of the Third Dynasty, whose remains have been found in the ruins of Nekhen, and who bore the t.i.tle of him "who is glorified with the two sceptres, in whom the two Horus G.o.ds are united," has above his name the crowned emblems of Horus and Set.(44) The t.i.tles of the queens of the Memphite dynasties make it clear that by the two Horuses are meant the two kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and we must therefore see in Horus and Set the symbols of the South and North.(45)

In the rock drawing, south of El-Kab, to which I have alluded a few minutes ago, the two Horus hawks stand on the symbol of "gold," the one wearing the crown of Southern Egypt, the other that of the North. The "Golden Horus" was, in fact, one of the t.i.tles a.s.sumed by the Pharaoh at an early date. Whether the epithet applied to the G.o.d represented originally the golden colour of the wings of the sparrow-hawk, or whether, as is more probable, it denoted the Horus-hawk of gold who watched over the destinies of the kings of Upper Egypt in their ancient capital of Nekhen, it is now impossible to say.(46) Later ages explained it as referring to the golden rays of the morning sun.

In the time of the Fourth Dynasty the t.i.tle was attached indifferently to the Ka or death name given to the Pharaoh after his death, and to the living name given to him at his birth into this world. The Horus-hawk, without the symbol of "gold," surmounted, so far as we know, only the Ka name. It was the double of the Pharaoh, rather than the Pharaoh himself, in whom the G.o.d had been incarnated. Horus brings the captive northerner to the king, and presides over his kingdom; but it is only over the royal Ka that he actually watches.

At Nekhen, the Horus-hawk, to whom the city was dedicated, was represented under the form of a mummy. It was here, perhaps, that the natron of El-Kab was first employed to preserve the dead body from decay, and that Horus was supposed to be entombed, like Osiris at Abydos. At any rate, there is clearly a connection between the dead and mummified Horus and the Horus who stands above the name of the Pharaoh's double. It is probable, therefore, that the identification of Horus with the kings of Upper Egypt originated at Nekhen. The Horus-hawk was the token under which they fought and ruled; it was Horus who had led them to victory, and in whose name the Pharaonic Egyptians, with their weapons of metal, overcame the neolithic population of the Nile.

That Horus, accordingly, in one shape or another, should have become the patron G.o.d of so many princ.i.p.alities in Southern Egypt, is in no way astonishing.(47) He represented the Pharaonic Egyptians; and as they moved northward, subduing the older inhabitants of the country, they carried his worship with them. At Heliopolis he was adored as Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis, "Horus issuing from the two horizons," and identified with Ra, the sun-G.o.d, the patron of the city. His image may still be seen in the sphinx of Giza, with its human head and lion's body. At Edfu, where the Pharaonic invaders appear to have first established themselves, he was worshipped as Hor-be?udet under the form of a winged solar disc, a combination of the orb of the sun with the wings of the hawk.(48) A legend inscribed on the walls of the temple, which is a curious mixture of folklore and false etymologising, worked up after the fashion of Lempriere by the priests of the Ptolemaic period, knows exactly when it was that this emblem of the G.o.d came into existence. It was in the three hundred and sixty-third year of the reign of Ra-Harmakhis on earth, when he fled from the rebels who had risen against him in Nubia and had landed at Edfu.

Here Hor-be?udet, the local deity, paid homage to his suzerain and undertook to destroy his enemies. But first, he flew up to the sun "as a great winged disc," in order that he might discover where they were. Then in his new form he returned to the boat of Harmakhis, and there Thoth addressed Ra, saying: "O lord of the G.o.ds, the G.o.d of Edfu (_Be?udet_) came in the shape of a great winged disc: from henceforth he shall be called Hor-be?udet." It was after this that Horus of Edfu and his followers, "the smiths," smote the foe from the southern to the northern border of Egypt.

The legend, or rather the prosaic fiction in which it has been embodied, has been composed when the original character of Horus had long been forgotten, and when the sun-G.o.d of Heliopolis had become the dominant G.o.d of Egypt. It belongs to the age of theological syncretism, when the G.o.ds of Egypt were resolved one into the other like the colours in a kaleidoscope, and made intangible and ever-shifting forms of Ra. But it bears witness to one fact,-the antiquity of the worship of Horus of Edfu and of the emblem which was a.s.sociated with him. The winged solar disc forms part of his earliest history.

The fact is difficult to reconcile with the view of Professor Maspero, that Horus was originally the sky, and is in favour of the general belief of Egyptologists, that he was from the outset the sun-G.o.d. Such, at all events, was the opinion of the Egyptians themselves in the later period of their history. In the Pyramid texts Horus already appears as a solar deity, and it is only as the sun-G.o.d that his identification with the Pharaohs can be explained. It was not the sky but the sun who watched over the names of their doubles. It is true that the two eyes of Horus were said to be the sun and the moon, and that a punning etymology, which connected his name with the word _her_ or "face," caused him to be depicted as the face of the sky, the four locks of hair of which were the four cardinal points. But the etymology is late, and there is no more difficulty in understanding how the solar and lunar discs can be called the eyes of the sun-G.o.d, than there is in understanding how the winged disc was distinguished from him, or how even in modern phrase the "eye"

may be used as a synonym of the whole man. When we speak of "the eye of G.o.d," we mean G.o.d Himself.(49)

There is, however, one newly-discovered monument which may be claimed in support of Professor Maspero's theory. Above the Horus-hawk which surmounts the name of the Third Dynasty king found at Nekhen, is the hieroglyph of the sky. But the explanation of this is not difficult to find. On the one hand, the hieroglyph embraces the hawk as the sky does the sun; on the other hand, it gives the p.r.o.nunciation of the name of Horus, the sky in Egyptian being _her_ or _hor_, "the high" and uplifted.

And the name of Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis, "the Horus who issues from the two horizons," must be quite as old as the monument of Nekhen. What the two horizons were is shown us by the hieroglyph which depicts them. They were the twin mountains between which the sun came forth at dawn, and between which he again pa.s.ses at sunset.

The hieroglyph belongs to the very beginning of Pharaonic Egyptian history. It may have been brought by the Pharaonic immigrants from their old home in the East. It is at least noticeable that in the Sumerian language of primitive Babylonia the horizon was called _kharra_ or _khurra_, a word which corresponds letter for letter with the name of Horus. The fact may, of course, be accidental, and the name of the Egyptian G.o.d may really be derived from the same root as that from which the word for "heaven" has come, and which means "to be high." But the conception of the twin-mountains between which the sun-G.o.d comes forth every morning, and between which he pa.s.ses again at nightfall, is of Babylonian origin. On early Babylonian seal-cylinders we see him stepping through the door, the two leaves of which have been flung back by its warders on either side of the mountains, while rays of glory shoot upward from his shoulders. The mountains were called Mas, "the twins," in Sumerian; and the great Epic of Chaldaea narrated how the hero Gilgames made his way to them across the desert, to a land of darkness, where scorpion-men, whose heads rise to heaven while their b.r.e.a.s.t.s descend to h.e.l.l, watched over the rising and the setting of the sun. It is difficult to believe that such a conception of the horizon could ever have arisen in Egypt. There the Delta is a flat plain with no hills even in sight, while in the valley of Upper Egypt there are neither high mountains nor twin peaks.

Horus himself is, I believe, to be found in the Babylonian inscriptions.

Mention is occasionally made in them of a G.o.d Khar or Khur, and in contracts of the time of Khammurabi (B.C. 2200) we find the name of Abi-Khar, "my father is Khar." But the age of Khammurabi was one of intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt, and the G.o.d Khar or Horus is therefore probably borrowed from Egypt, just as a seal-cylinder informs us was the case with Anupu or Anubis.(50)

But though the name of Khar or Khur is and must remain Egyptian, Horus has much in common with the Babylonian sun-G.o.d Nin-ip. They are both warrior-G.o.ds; and just as the followers of Horus were workers in iron, so Nin-ip also was the G.o.d of iron. One of his t.i.tles, moreover, is that of "the southern sun"; and on a boundary-stone the eagle standing on a perch is stated to be "the symbol of the southern sun."(51)

The G.o.ddess with whom Horus of Nekhen was a.s.sociated was Nekheb with the vulture's head. Her temple stood opposite Nekhen at El-Kab on the eastern bank of the Nile, and at the end of the long road which led across the desert from the Red Sea. It was at once a sanctuary and a fortress defending Nekhen on the east. But Nekheb was the G.o.ddess not only of Nekhen, but of all Southern Egypt. We find her in the earliest inscriptions on the sacred island of Sehel in the Cataract, where she is identified with the local G.o.ddess Sati. We find her again at Thebes under the name of Mut, "the mother." Her supremacy, in fact, went back to the days when Nekhen was the capital of the south, and its G.o.ddess accordingly shared with it the privileges of domination. When Nekhen fell back into the position of a small provincial town, Nekheb also partic.i.p.ated in its decline. Under the Theban dynasties, it is true, the name of Mut of Karnak became honoured throughout Egypt, but her origin by that time had been forgotten. The Egyptian who brought his offering to Mut never realised that behind the mask of Mut lay the features of Nekheb of Nekhen.

Mut, however, continued to wear the vulture form, and the t.i.tles a.s.sumed by the king still preserved a recollection of the time when Nekheb was the presiding G.o.ddess of the kingdom of the south. From the days of Menes onward, in the t.i.tle of "king of Upper and Lower Egypt," while the serpent of Uazit symbolised the north, the vulture of Nekheb symbolised the south.

At times, indeed, the uraeus of Uazit is transferred to Nekheb; but that was at an epoch when it had come to signify "G.o.ddess," as the Horus-hawk signified "G.o.d." From the earliest ages, however, the plant which denoted the south, and formed part of the royal t.i.tle, was used in writing her name. She was emphatically "the southerner," the mistress of the south, just as her consort, the mummified Horus, was its lord.

The euhemerising legends of Edfu made Horus the faithful va.s.sal of his liege lord Ra Harmakhis of Heliopolis. But from a historical point of view the relations between the two G.o.ds ought to have been reversed, and the legends themselves contained a reminiscence that such was the case. In describing the victorious march of Horus and his followers towards the north, they tell us how he made his way past Heliopolis into the Delta, and even established one of his "forges" on its easternmost borders. The Horus kings of Upper Egypt made themselves masters of the northern kingdom, introducing into it the divine hawk they worshipped and the Horus t.i.tle over their names.

The sun-G.o.d of Heliopolis was represented, like the G.o.ds of Babylonia, as a man and not as a hawk. He was known as Tum or Atmu, who, in the later days of religious syncretism, was distinguished from the other forms of the sun-G.o.d as representing the setting sun. But Tum was the personal name of the sun-G.o.d; the sun itself was called Ra. As time went on, the attributes of the G.o.d were transferred to the sun; Ra, too, became divine, and, after being first a synonym of Tum, ended by becoming an independent deity. While Tum was peculiarly the setting sun, Ra denoted the sun-G.o.d in all his forms and under all his manifestations. He was thus fitted to be the common G.o.d of all Egypt, with whom the various local sun-G.o.ds could be identified, and lose in him their individuality. Ra was a word which meant "the sun" in all the dialects of the country, and its very want of theological a.s.sociations made it the starting-point of a new phase of religious thought.

It was not until the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty that a special temple was built to Ra in Heliopolis.(52) Up to that time Ra had been content to share with Tum the ancient temple of the city, or rather had absorbed Tum into himself and thus become its virtual possessor. But his religious importance goes back to prehistoric times. The temple of Heliopolis became the centre of a theological school which exercised a great influence on the official religion of Egypt. It was here that the sun-worship was organised, and the doctrine of creation by generation or emanation first developed; it was here, too, that the chief G.o.ds of the State religion were formed into groups of nine.(53)

The doctrine of these Enneads or groups of nine was destined to play an important part in the official creed. From Heliopolis it spread to other parts of Egypt, and eventually each of the great sanctuaries had its own Ennead, formed on the model of that of Heliopolis. At Heliopolis the cycle of the nine supreme G.o.ds contained Shu and Tefnut, Seb and Mut, Osiris and Isis, Set and Nebhat, the four pairs who had descended by successive acts of generation from Tum, the original G.o.d of the nome. We owe the explanation and a.n.a.lysis of the Ennead to Professor Maspero, who has for the first time made the origin of it clear.(54)

Tum, who is always represented in human form, was the ancient sun-G.o.d and tutelary deity of Heliopolis. To him was ascribed the creation of the world, just as it was ascribed by each of the other nomes to their chief G.o.d. But whereas at the Cataract the creator was a potter who had made things from clay, or at Memphis an artist who had carved them out of stone, so it was as a father and generator that Tum had called the universe into being. In the Book of the Dead it is said of him that he is "the creator of the heavens, the maker of (all) existences, who has begotten all that there is, who gave birth to the G.o.ds, who created himself, the lord of life who bestows upon the G.o.ds the strength of youth." An origin, however, was found for him in Nu, the primeval abyss of waters, though it is possible that Professor Maspero may be right in thinking that Nu really owes his existence to the G.o.ddess Nut, and that he was introduced into the cosmogony of Heliopolis under the influence of Asiatic ideas. However this may be, Shu and Tefnut, who immediately emanated from him, apparently represented the air. Later art pictured them in Asiatic style as twin lions sitting back to back and supporting between them the rising or setting sun.(55) But an old legend described Shu as having raised the heavens above the earth, where he still keeps them suspended above him like the Greek Atlas. A text at Esna, which identifies him with Khnum, describes him as sustaining "the floor of the sky upon its four supports" or cardinal points; "he raised Nut, and put himself under her like a great column of air." Tefnut, his twin sister, was the north wind, which gives freshness and vigour to the world.

The next pair in the Ennead of Heliopolis were Seb and Nut, the earth and the firmament, who issued from Shu and Tefnut. Then came Osiris and Isis, the children of the earth and sky, and lastly Set and Nebhat, the one the representative of the desert land in which the Asiatic nomads pitched their tents, the other of the civilised Egyptian family at whose head stood _Neb-hat_, "the lady of the house." Upon the model of this Ennead two other minor Enneads were afterwards formed.

But it was only its first father and generator who was the G.o.d of the nome in which the temple of Heliopolis stood. The deities who were derived from him in the priestly cosmogony were fetched from elsewhere. They were either elementary deities like Shu and Seb, or else deities whose worship had already extended all over Egypt, like Osiris and Isis. The G.o.ddess Nebhat seems to have been invented for the purpose of providing Set with a sister and a consort; perhaps Tefnut, too, had originally come into existence for the same reason.

The Ennead, once created, was readily adopted by the other nomes of Egypt.

It provided an easy answer to that first question of primitive humanity: what is the origin of the world into which we are born? The answer was derived from the experience of man himself; as he had been born into the world, so, too, it was natural to suppose that the world itself had been born. The creator must have been a father, and, in a land where the woman held a high place in the family, a mother as well. Though Tum continued to be pictured as a man, no wife was a.s.signed him; father and mother in him were one.