The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 4

It is impossible not to be reminded of similar supreme G.o.ds in the Semitic kingdoms of Asia. a.s.shur of a.s.syria was wifeless;(56) so also was Chemosh of Moab. Nor does the a.n.a.logy end here. Creation by generation was a peculiarly Semitic or rather Babylonian doctrine. The Babylonian Epic of the Creation begins by describing the generation of the world out of Mummu or Chaos. And the generation is by pairs as in the Ennead of Heliopolis.

First, Mummu, the one primeval source of all things; then Lakhmu and Lakhamu, who correspond with Shu and Tefnut; next, Ansar and Kisar, the firmament and the earth; and lastly, the three great G.o.ds who rule the present world. Of one of these, Ea, the ruler of the deep, Bel-Merodach the sun-G.o.d was born.

Between the Babylonian and the Egyptian schemes the differences are slight. In the Ennead of Heliopolis, Tum, the offspring of Nu, takes the place of Mummu, the watery chaos; but this was because he was the G.o.d of the State, and had therefore to be made the creator and placed at the head of the G.o.ds. It merely interposes another link in the chain of generation, separating Nu from the two elemental deities which in the Babylonian scheme proceeded immediately from it. For Nu was the exact equivalent of the Babylonian Mummu. Both denote that watery chaos out of which, it was believed, all things have come. And what makes the fact the more remarkable is, that though the conception of a primeval watery chaos was natural in Babylonia, it was not so in Egypt. Babylonia was washed by the waters of the Persian Gulf, out of which Ea, the G.o.d of the deep, had arisen, bringing with him the elements of culture, and the waves of which at times raged angrily and submerged the sh.o.r.e. But the Egyptians of history lived on the banks of a river and not by the sea; it was a river, too, whose movements were regular and calculable, and which bestowed on them all the blessings they enjoyed. So far from being an emblem of chaos and confusion, the Nile was to them the author of all good. I do not see how we can avoid the conclusion that between the Ennead of Heliopolis with its theory of cosmology, and the cosmological doctrines of Babylonia, a connection of some sort must have existed.(57)

Indeed, the native name of Heliopolis is suggestive of Asiatic relations.

It is the On of the Old Testament, and was called On of the north to distinguish it from another On, the modern Erment, in the south. It was symbolised by a fluted and painted column of wood,(58) in which some have seen an emblem of the sun-G.o.d, like the sun-pillars of Semitic faith. But the name of On was not confined to Egypt. There was another Heliopolis in Syria, called On of the Beka'a by Amos (i. 5), where the sun-G.o.d was worshipped under the form of a stone. And in Palestine itself Beth-el, "the house of G.o.d," was known in earlier ages as Beth-On. It is true that the name of On may have been carried into Asia in the days when the Hyksos dynasties ruled over Egypt, but it is more probable that both Beth-On and the On near Damascus go back to an older date. In any case they testify to some kind of contact between the sun-worship of Heliopolis in Egypt and that of Syria and Palestine.(59)

Between Tum, the sun-G.o.d of Northern Egypt, and Horus, the sun-G.o.d of the South, there was one notable difference. While Horus was a hawk, Tum was a man. In this respect, again, he resembled the G.o.ds of Babylonia, who are always depicted in human form. It is difficult to find any other Egyptian deity who was similarly fortunate. Osiris, indeed, was originally a man, but at an early date he became confounded with his symbol, the ram, in his t.i.tle of "lord of Daddu." Professor Maspero thinks that Khnum at the Cataract may also have been originally a man; but if so, he too became a ram before the beginning of history. Pta? of Memphis and Anher of This are the only other G.o.ds who appear consistently in human shape, and Pta? is a mummy, while Anher, like Tum, was the sun.(60)

With the adoption of the Ennead and the cosmological ideas it embodied, a new element entered into the theology of the Egyptian temples. This was the identification of one G.o.d with another, or, to speak more exactly, the loss of their individuality on the part of the G.o.ds. The process was begun when the priests of Heliopolis took such of the divinities as were recognised throughout Egypt, and trans.m.u.ted them into successive phases in the creative action of their local G.o.d. It was completed when other religious centres followed the example of Heliopolis, and formed Enneads of their own. In each case the local G.o.d stood of necessity at the head of the Ennead, and in each case also he was a.s.similated to Tum. Whatever may have previously been his attributes, he thus became a form of the sun-G.o.d.

A dual personality was created, which soon melted into one.

But it was not as Tum that the sun-G.o.d of Heliopolis thus made his way victoriously through the land of Egypt. It was under the more general and undefined name of Ra that he was accepted in the Egyptian sanctuaries. Tum remained the local G.o.d of Heliopolis, or else formed part of a solar trinity in which he represented the setting sun. But Ra became a divine Pharaoh, in whom the world of the G.o.ds was unified.

The kings of the Fifth Dynasty called themselves his sons. Hitherto the Pharaohs had been incarnations of the sun-G.o.d, like the earlier monarchs of Babylonia; henceforward the t.i.tle of Horus was restricted to their doubles in the other world, while that of "Son of the Sun" was prefixed to the birth-name which they bore on earth. The same change took place also in Babylonia. There it was due to the invasion of foreign barbarians, and the establishment of a foreign dynasty at Babylon, where the priests refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of a king who had not been adopted as son by the sun-G.o.d Bel-Merodach. Perhaps a similar cause was at work in Egypt. The Fifth Dynasty came from Elephantine, an island which was not only on the extreme frontier of Egypt, but was inhabited then as now by a non-Egyptian race; it may be that the price of their acknowledgment by the priests and princes of Memphis was their acceptance of the t.i.tle of "Son of Ra." It narrowed their pretensions to divinity, and at the same time implied their submission to the G.o.d of the great sanctuary which stood in such close relations with Memphis. As we have seen, the first monument on which the winged solar disc is found is that of a king of the Fifth Dynasty; it there overshadows his figure and his two names; but though the hawk of Horus stands above the name of his double, his birth-name is without the t.i.tle of "Son of Ra."

When once the principle had been adopted that the leading G.o.ds of Egypt were but varying forms of the sun-G.o.d, it was easy to construct Enneads, whatever might be the number of the deities it was wished to bring into them. Thus at Heliopolis itself Horus the son of Isis was introduced, his confusion with the sun-G.o.d Horus facilitating the process. At This, Anher was identified with Shu; at Thebes, Amon was made one with Tum and Ra, with Mentu and Mut. Where a G.o.ddess was at the head of the local Pantheon the process was the same; she interchanged with the other G.o.ddesses of the country, and even with Tum himself. At all events, Horapollo (i. 12) states that Nit of Sais was at once male and female.

One result of all this kaleidoscopic interchange was the growth of trinities in which the same G.o.d appears under three separate forms. At Heliopolis, for example, Harmakhis became identified with Tum, and the trinity of Tum, Ra, and Harmakhis grew up, in which Harmakhis was the sun of the morning and Tum of the evening, while Ra embodied them both. From one point of view, in fact, Harmakhis and Tum were but different aspects under which Ra could be envisaged; from another point, Ra, Tum, and Harmakhis were three persons in one G.o.d.

I believe that Professor Maspero is right in holding that the Egyptian trinity is of comparatively late origin and of artificial character.(61) He points out that it presupposes the Ennead, and in some cases, at least, can be shown to have been formed by the union of foreign elements. Thus at Memphis the triad was created by borrowing Nefer-Tum from Heliopolis and Sekhet from Latopolis, and making the one the son of the local G.o.d Pta?, and the other his wife. The famous trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, which became a pattern for the rest of Egypt, was formed by transferring Nebhat and Anubis, the allies of Osiris, to his enemy Set, and so throwing the whole of the Osirian legend into confusion. The trinity of Thebes is confessedly modern; it owed its origin to the rise of the Theban dynasties, when Thebes became the capital of Egypt, and its G.o.d Amon necessarily followed the fortunes of the local prince. Mut, "the mother,"

a mere t.i.tle of the G.o.ddess of Southern Egypt, was a.s.sociated with him, and the triad was completed by embodying in it Pta? of Memphis, who had been the chief G.o.d of Egypt when Thebes was still a small provincial town.

At a subsequent date, Khonsu, the moon-G.o.d, took the place of Pta?.(62)

We can thus trace the growth of the Egyptian trinity and the ideas and tendencies which lay behind it. It was the culminating stage in the evolution of the religious system which took its first start among the priests of Heliopolis. First creation by means of generation, then the Ennead, and lastly the triad and the trinity-such were the stages in the gradual process of development. And the doctrine of the trinity itself reached its highest point of perfection in that worship of Osiris of which I shall speak in a future lecture.

But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine of the trinity. Generation in the case of a G.o.d could not be the same as in the case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless proved this. It was inevitable, therefore, that it should come to be conceived of as symbolical like the generation of thought, all the more since the deities who had proceeded from Tum were all of them symbols representing the phenomena of the visible world. Hence the idea of generation pa.s.sed naturally into that of emanation, one divine being emanating from another as thought emanates from thought. And to the Egyptian, with his love of symbolism and disinclination for abstract thought, the expression of an idea meant a concrete form. Seb and Nut were the divine ideas which underlay the earth and the firmament and kept them in existence, but they were at the same time the earth and the firmament themselves. They represented thought in a concrete form, if we may borrow a phrase from the Hegelian philosophy.

The principle of emanation was eagerly seized upon by Greek thinkers in the days when Alexandria was the meeting-place of the old world and the new. It afforded an explanation not only of creation, but also of the origin of evil, and had, moreover, behind it the venerable shadow of Egyptian antiquity. It became the basis and sheet-anchor of most of the Gnostic systems, and through them made its way into Christian thought.

From another point of view it may be regarded as an antic.i.p.ation of the doctrine of evolution.

The work of the priestly college of Heliopolis was accomplished long before the Pyramid texts were written under the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties. The Ennead appears in them as a long established doctrine, with all its consequences. The solar faith had laid firm hold of Egyptian religion, and gained a position from which it was never to be dislodged. Henceforward Egyptian religion was permeated by the ideas and beliefs which flowed from it, and the G.o.ds and G.o.ddesses of the land a.s.sumed a solar dress. Under the Nineteenth Dynasty, if not before, a new view of the future life obtained official sanction, which subst.i.tuted the sun-G.o.d for Osiris and the solar bark for the Osirian paradise. But I must leave an account of it to another occasion, and confine myself at present to the last and most noteworthy development of solar worship in Egypt.

It is perhaps hardly correct to apply to it the term development. It was rather a break in the religious tradition of Egypt, an interruption in the normal evolution of the Egyptian creed, which accordingly made but little permanent impression on the religious history of the nation. But in the religious history of mankind it is one of the most interesting of episodes. Like Mosaism in Israel, it preached the doctrine of monotheism in Egypt; but unlike Mosaism, its success was only temporary. Unlike Mosaism, moreover, it was a pantheistic monotheism, and it failed accordingly in its struggle with the nebulous polytheism of Egypt.

One of the last Pharaohs of the Eighteenth Dynasty was Amon-hotep IV.

Since the conquest of Syria by his ancestor Thothmes III., and the establishment of an empire which extended to the banks of the Euphrates, Asiatic manners and customs had poured into Egypt in an ever-increasing flood, and with them the ideas and religious beliefs of the Semitic East.

Amon-hotep III., the father of Amon-hotep IV., had maintained the older traditions of the Egyptian court, so far at least as religion was concerned, though his mother and wife had alike been foreigners. But his son appears to have been young at the time of his father's death. He was accordingly brought up under the eye and influence of his mother Teie, and his temperament seems to have seconded the teaching he received from her.

His features are those of a philosophic visionary rather than of a man of action, of a religious reformer rather than of a king. He flung himself eagerly into a religious movement of which he was the mainspring and centre, and for the first time in history there was persecution for religion's sake.

For numberless centuries the Egyptian had applied the t.i.tle of "the one G.o.d" to the divinity he was adoring at the moment, or who presided over the fortunes of his city or nome. But he did not mean to exclude by it the existence of other deities. The "one G.o.d" was unique only to the worshipper, and to the worshipper only in so far as his worship for the moment was addressed to this "one G.o.d" alone. When with the growth of the solar theory the deities of Egypt began to be resolved into one another, the t.i.tle came to signify that attribute of divinity which unified all the rest. But to the Egyptian, it must be remembered, the attribute was a concrete thing; and though in one sense Amon and Khnum and Horus denoted the attributes of Ra, in another sense they were distinct personalities with a distinct history behind them. The result was what I have called a nebulous polytheism, in which the individual deities of the Egyptian Pantheon had melted like clouds into one another; they had lost their several individualities, but had not gained a new individuality in return.

The conservative spirit, which forbade the Egyptian to break with the traditions of the past and throw aside any part of his heritage, prevented him from taking the final step, and pa.s.sing out of polytheism into monotheism.

It was just this step, however, that was taken by Amon-hotep IV. and his followers, and which at once stamps the non-Egyptian character of his religious reformation. Henceforward there was to be but one G.o.d in Egypt, a G.o.d who was omnipresent and omniscient, existing everywhere and in everything, and who would brook no rival at his side. He was not, indeed, a new G.o.d, for he had already revealed himself to the generations of the past under the form of Ra, and his visible symbol was the solar disc. But Ra had been ignorantly worshipped; unworthy language had been used of him, and he had been confounded with G.o.ds who were no G.o.ds at all. The new and purified conception of the supreme divinity needed a new name under which it could be expressed, and this was found in Aten, "the solar disc," or Aten-Ra, "the disc of the sun."

It was not probable that Amon of Thebes and his worshippers would bow their heads to the new faith without a struggle. It was Amon who had led the fathers of Amon-hotep IV. to victory, who had given them their empire over the world, and upon whose city of Thebes the spoils of Asia had been lavished. A fierce contest broke out between the Theban priesthood and the heretical king. The worship of Amon was proscribed, his very name was erased from the monuments on which it was engraved, and a shrine of the rival deity was erected at the very gates of his ancient temple. The Pharaoh changed his own name to that of Khu-n-Aten, "the glory of the solar disc," and thereby publicly proclaimed his renunciation of the religion of which he was the official head.

But in the end the priests of Amon prevailed. Khu-n-Aten was forced to leave the capital of his fathers, and, carrying with him the State archives and the adherents of the new faith, he built a new city for himself midway between Minia and Siut, where the mounds of Tel el-Amarna now mark its site. Here, surrounded by a court which was more than half Asiatic in blood and belief, he raised a temple to the new G.o.d of Egypt, and hard by it a palace for himself. The new creed was accompanied by a new style of art; the old traditions of Egyptian art were thrown aside, and a naturalistic realism, sometimes of an exaggerated character, took their place. The palace and temple were alike made glorious with brilliant painting and carved stone, with frescoed floors and walls, with columns and friezes inlaid with gold and precious stones, with panels of pictured porcelain, and with statuary which reminds us of that of later Greece.(63) Gardens were planted by the edge of the Nile, and carriage roads constructed in the desert, along which the king and his court took their morning drives. Then, returning to his palace, the Pharaoh would preach or lecture on the principles and doctrines of the new faith.

It was officially called "the doctrine," which, as Professor Erman remarks, shows that it possessed a dogmatically-formulated creed. Its teachings are embodied in the hymns inscribed on the walls of the tombs of Tel el-Amarna. The G.o.d, whose visible symbol is the solar disc, is He, as we learn from them, who has created all things, "the far-off heavens, mankind, the animals and the birds; our eyes are strengthened by his beams, and when he reveals himself all flowers grow and live; at his rising the pastures bring forth, they are intoxicated before his face; all the cattle skip on their feet, and the birds in the marshes flutter with joy." It is he "who brings in the years, creates the months, makes the days, reckons the hours; he is lord of time, according to whom men reckon."(64) Beside Him, "there is no other" G.o.d.

"Beautiful is thy setting," begins another hymn, "O living Aten, thou lord of lords and king of the two worlds! When thou unitest thyself with the heaven at thy setting, mortals rejoice before thy countenance, and give honour to him who has created them, and pray to him who has formed them in the presence of Khu-n-Aten, thy son, whom thou lovest, the king of Egypt who liveth in truth. All Egypt and all lands within the circle that thou treadest in thy glory, praise thee at thy rising and at thy setting. O G.o.d, who in truth art the living one, who standest before our eyes, thou createst that which was not, thou formest it all; we also have come into being through the word of thy mouth."(65)

The solar disc was thus, as it were, the mask through which the supreme Creator revealed himself. And this Creator was the one true living G.o.d, living eternally, brooking the worship of no other G.o.d at his side, and, in fact, the only G.o.d who existed in truth. All other G.o.ds were false, and the followers of Aten-Ra were accordingly called upon to overthrow their worship and convert their worshippers. At the same time, Aten was the father of all things; he had called all things into existence by the word of his mouth, men equally with the beasts and birds, the flowers and the far-off heaven itself. If, therefore, men refused to worship him, it was because they had been led astray by falsehood and ignorance, or else were wilfully blind.

Whatever measure of success the reforms of Khu-n-Aten attained among the natives of Egypt, they must have possessed in so far as they represented a reformation, and not the introduction of a new and foreign cult. There must have been a section of the people, more especially among the educated cla.s.ses, whose religious ideas were already tending in that direction, and who were therefore prepared to accept the new "doctrine." The language often used of the G.o.ds, if strictly interpreted, implied a more or less modified form of monotheism; the Egyptian deities, as we have seen, had come to be resolved into manifestations of the sun-G.o.d, and the symbol of the new faith enabled it to be connected with the ancient worship of Ra.

The old sun-worship of Heliopolis formed a bridge which spanned the gulf between Amon and Aten. Indeed, the worship of the solar disc itself was not absolutely strange. An Egyptian, for instance, who was buried at Kom el-A?mar, opposite El-Kab, in the reign of Thothmes III., speaks of being "beloved by the beams of the solar disc" (_Aten-Ra_); and though no determinative of divinity is attached to the words, it was but a step forward to make the disc the equivalent of the sun-G.o.d.

Nevertheless, between the "doctrine" of Khu-n-Aten and the older Egyptian ideas of the sun-G.o.d there was a vast, if not impa.s.sable, distance. The "doctrine" was no result of a normal religious evolution. That is proved not only by the opposition with which it met and the violent measures that were taken to enforce it, but still more by its rapid and utter disappearance or extermination after the death of its royal patron. It came from Asia, and, like the Asiatic officials, was banished from Egypt in the national reaction which ended in the rise of the Nineteenth Dynasty.

The G.o.d of Khu-n-Aten, in fact, has much in common with the Semitic Baal.

Like Baal, he is the "lord of lords," whose visible symbol is the solar orb. Like Baal, too, he is a jealous G.o.d, and the father of mankind. It is true that Baal was accompanied by the shadowy Baalat; but Baalat, after all, was but his pale reflection, necessitated by the genders of Semitic grammar; and in some parts of the Semitic world even this pale reflection was wanting. Chemosh of Moab, for instance, and a.s.shur of a.s.syria were alike wifeless.

On the other hand, between Aten and the Semitic Baal there was a wide and essential difference. The monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was pantheistic, and as a result of this the G.o.d he worshipped was the G.o.d of the whole universe.

The character and attributes of the Semitic Baal were clearly and sharply defined. He stood outside the creatures he had made or the children of whom he was the father. His kingdom was strictly limited, his power itself was circ.u.mscribed. He was the "lord of heaven," separate from the world and from the matter of which it was composed.

But Aten was in the things which he had created; he was the living one in whom all life is contained, and at whose command they spring into existence. There was no chaos of matter outside and before him; he had created "that which was not," and had formed it all. He was not, therefore, a national or tribal G.o.d, whose power and protection did not extend beyond the locality in which he was acknowleged and the territory on which his high places stood; on the contrary, he was the G.o.d of the whole universe; not only Egypt, but "all lands" and all peoples are called upon to adore him, and even the birds and the flowers grow and live through him. For the first time in history, so far as we know, the doctrine was proclaimed that the Supreme Being was the G.o.d of all mankind.

The fact is remarkable from whatever point of view it may be regarded. The date of Khu-n-Aten is about 1400 B.C., a century before the Exodus and the rise of Mosaism. More than once it has been suggested that between Mosaism and the "doctrine" of Aten there may have been a connection. But in Mosaism we look in vain for any traces of pantheism. The Yahveh of the Commandments stands as much outside His creation as the man whom He had made in His own image; His outlines are sharply defined, and He is the G.o.d of the Hebrews rather than of the rest of the world. The first Commandment bears the fact on its forefront: other nations have their G.o.ds whose existence is admitted, but Yahveh is the G.o.d of Israel, and therefore Him only may Israel serve.

Lecture V. Animal Worship.

St. Clement of Alexandria thus describes the religion of his Egyptian neighbours (_Paedag._ iii. 2): "Among (the Egyptians) the temples are surrounded with groves and consecrated pastures; they are provided with propylaea, and their courts are encircled with an infinite number of columns; their walls glitter with foreign marbles and paintings of the highest art; the sanctuary is resplendent with gold and silver and electrum, and many-coloured stones from India and Ethiopia; the shrine within it is veiled by a curtain wrought with gold. But if you pa.s.s beyond into the remotest part of the enclosure in the expectation of beholding something yet more excellent, and look for the image which dwells in the temple, a _pastophorus_ or some other minister, singing a paean in the Egyptian language with a pompous air, draws aside a small portion of the curtain, as if about to show us the G.o.d; and makes us burst into a loud laugh. For no G.o.d is found therein, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent sprung from the soil, or some such brute animal ... and the Egyptian deity is revealed as a beast that rolls itself on a purple coverlet."

St. Clement was a Christian philosopher and apologist, but the animal worship of the Egyptians was quite as much an object of ridicule to the pagan writers of Greece and Rome. "Who has not heard," says Juvenal (_Sat._ xv.),-"who has not heard, where Egypt's realms are named-

"What monster G.o.ds her frantic sons have framed?

Here Ibis gorged with well-grown serpents, there The crocodile commands religious fear;...

And should you leeks or onions eat, no time Would expiate the sacrilegious crime; Religious nations sure, and blest abodes, Where every orchard is o'errun with G.o.ds!"

A Roman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was torn to pieces by the mob before the eyes of Diodorus, although the Romans were at the time masters of the country, and the reigning Ptolemy did his utmost to save the offender.(66) For the majority of the people the cat was an incarnate G.o.d.

This worship of animals was a grievous puzzle to the philosophers of the cla.s.sical age. The venerable antiquity of Egypt, the high level of its moral code, and, above all, the spiritual and exalted character of so much of its religion, had deeply impressed the thinking world of the Roman Empire. That world had found, in a blending of Egyptian religious ideas with Greek metaphysics, a key to the mysteries of life and death; in the so-called Hermetic books the old beliefs and religious conceptions of Egypt were reduced to a system and interpreted from a Greek point of view, while the Neo-Platonic philosophy was an avowed attempt to combine the symbolism of Egypt with the subtleties of Greek thought. But the animal worship was hard to reconcile with philosophy; even symbolism failed to explain it away, or to satisfy the mind of the inquirer. Plutarch had boldly denied that the worship of an animal was in any way more absurd than that of an image; the deity, if so he chose, could manifest himself in either equally well. Porphyry had recourse to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If the soul migrated after death into the body of some lower animal, he urged, it would communicate to the latter a portion of the divine essence. But after all this was no explanation of the worship paid to the animal; the soul had not been worshipped while it was still in the body of its original possessor, and there was therefore no reason why it should be worshipped when it was embodied in another form.

Moreover, metempsychosis in the Greek sense was never an Egyptian doctrine. All the Egyptian held was that the soul, after it had been justified and admitted to a state of blessedness, could enter for a time whatever material form it chose; could fly to heaven, for instance, in the body of a swallow, or return to the mummified body in which it had once dwelt. But such embodiments were merely temporary, and matters of free choice; they were like a garment, which the soul could put on and take off at will.

Modern writers have found it as difficult to explain the animal worship of ancient Egypt as the philosophers and theologians of Greece and Rome.

Creuzer declared that it was the result of a poverty of imagination, and that the beasts were worshipped because they embodied certain natural phenomena. Lenormant argued, on the other hand, that it was due to a high spiritual conception of religion, which prevented the Egyptians from adoring lifeless rocks and stones like the other nations of antiquity. Of late the tendency has been to see in it a sort of totemism which prevailed among the aboriginal population of the country, and was tolerated by the higher religion of the Pharaonic immigrants. In this case it would represent the religion of the prehistoric race or races, and its admittance into the official religion would be paralleled by the history of Bra?manism, which has similarly tolerated the cults and superst.i.tions of the aboriginal tribes of India. Indeed, it is possible to discover an a.n.a.logous procedure in the history of Christianity itself. The lower beliefs and forms of worship can be explained away wherever needful with the help of symbolism and allegory, while the ma.s.s of the people are left in the undisturbed enjoyment of the religious ideas and rites of their forefathers.

Recent discoveries, however, have cast a new light on the matter. The early monuments of Egyptian history, found in the neolithic graves and among the remains of the first dynasties, have shown that the animal worship of Egypt was only part of a larger system. Slate plaques, on which are represented the actions of Pharaohs who preceded Menes or were his immediate successors, prove that the prevailing system of religion must have been one closely akin to African fetishism. The G.o.ds appear frequently, but they always appear under the form of what in later times were regarded as their symbols. Sometimes the symbol is an animal or bird, but sometimes also it is a lifeless object. The human forms, to which we are accustomed in later Egyptian art, are absent;(67) there is nothing to tell us that the religion of the time was in any way distinguished from the fetishism of Dahomey or the Congo.

Thus on a slate plaque from Kom el-A?mar (opposite El-Kab(68)) we see the Pharaoh entering the hall in which lie the bodies of his decapitated foes, while four standards are borne before him. On the first two are the hawks of Horus, on the third the jackal of Anubis, on the last an object which may be intended for a lock of hair.(69) On the reverse of the plaque the G.o.d is bringing before him the prisoners of the north. But the G.o.d is a hawk, whose human hand grasps the rope by which the conquered enemy is dragged along. On a plaque of equally early date, found at Abydos, five standards are depicted, the foot of each of which is shaped like a hand holding a rope. Above the first two standards are the jackals of Anubis, on the next the ibis of Thoth, then the hawk of Horus, and, finally, the curious object which is the emblem of Min. On a still older plaque from the same locality the names of the cities ruled (or conquered) by the Pharaoh are inscribed, each within its battlemented wall, while above is the animal G.o.d by which it is said to be "beloved" or perhaps "destroyed."

The last of the cities is "the royal" capital, above which stand the two hawks of Horus, who are perched on the standards of the king; behind it are the names of the other towns under the protection of the scorpion of Selk, the lion of Sekhet, and the hawk of Horus.(70)