The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 7

Thou createst the wheat, thou bringest forth the barley, a.s.suring perpetuity to the temples.

If thou ceasest thy toil and thy work, then all that exists is in anguish.

If the G.o.ds suffer in heaven, then the faces of men waste away....

No dwelling (is there) which may contain thee!

None penetrates within thy heart!

Thy young men, thy children, applaud thee and render unto thee royal homage.

Stable are thy decrees for Egypt before thy servants of the north.

He dries the tears from all eyes, and guards the increase of his good things....

Establisher of justice, mankind desires thee, supplicating thee to answer their prayers; thou answerest them by the inundation!

Men offer thee the first-fruits of corn; all the G.o.ds adore thee!...

A festal song is raised for thee on the harp, with the accompaniment of the hand.

Thy young men and thy children acclaim thee, and prepare their exercises.

Thou art the august ornament of the earth, letting thy bark advance before men, lifting up the heart of women in labour, and loving the mult.i.tude of the flocks.

When thou shinest in the royal city, the rich man is sated with good things, even the poor man disdains the lotus; all that is produced is of the choicest; all plants exist for thy children.

If thou refusest nourishment, the dwelling is silent, devoid of all that is good, the country falls exhausted ...

O Nile, come (and) prosper!

O thou that makest men to live through his flocks, and his flocks through his orchards!"(113)

The supremacy of Memphis was replaced by that of Thebes, and under the Theban dynasties, accordingly, Amon, the G.o.d of Thebes, became paramount in the State religion of Egypt. But before we trace the history of his rise to supremacy, it is necessary to say a few words regarding the Egyptian G.o.ddesses. The woman occupied an important position in the Egyptian household; purity of blood was traced through her, and she even sat on the throne of the Pharaohs. The divine family naturally corresponded to the family on earth. The Egyptian G.o.ddess was not always a pale reflection of the G.o.d, like the Semitic consort of Baal; on the contrary, there were G.o.ddesses of nomes as well as G.o.ds of nomes, and the nome-G.o.ddess was on precisely the same footing as the nome-G.o.d. Nit of Sais or Hathor of Dendera differed in no way, so far as their divine powers were concerned, from Pta? of Memphis or Khnum of the Cataract. Like the G.o.ds, too, they became the heads of Enneads, or were embodied in Trinities, when first the doctrine of the Ennead, and then that of the Trinity, made its way through the theological schools. They are each even called "the father of fathers" as well as "the mother of mothers," and take the place of Tum as the creators of heaven and earth.(114)

Nit rose to eminence with the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Her city of Sais had previously played no part in history, but both its G.o.ddess and its sanctuary were of old date.(115) Of the nature of the G.o.ddess, however, we know little. She is represented as a woman with a shuttle as her emblem, and in her hands she carries a bow and arrow, like Istar of a.s.syria or Artemis of Greece. But the twin arrow was also a symbol of the nome, which was a border district, exposed to the attacks of the Libyan tribes. The Greeks identified her with their Athena on account of a slight similarity in the names.

Sekhet, or Bast of Bubastis, is better known. Sometimes she has the head of a lion, sometimes of a cat. At Philae it is said of her that "she is savage as Sekhet and mild as Bast."(116) But the lion must have preceded the cat. The earlier inhabitants of the valley of the Nile were acquainted with the lion; the cat seems to have been introduced from Nubia in the age of the Eleventh Dynasty. In the time of the Old Empire there was no cat-headed deity, for there were no cats. But the cat, when once introduced, was from the outset a sacred animal.(117) The lion of Sekhet was transformed into a cat; and as the centuries pa.s.sed, the petted and domesticated animal was the object of a worship that became fanatical.

Herodotos maintains that when a house took fire the Egyptians of his time thought only of preserving the cats; and to this day the cat is honoured above all other animals on the banks of the Nile. The chief sanctuary of Bast was at Bubastis, where, however, the excavations of Dr. Naville have shown that she did not become the chief divinity before the rise of the Twenty-second Dynasty.(118)

The G.o.ddesses pa.s.sed one into the other even more readily than the G.o.ds.

Sekhet developed by turns into Uazit and Mut, Selk the scorpion, and Hathor of Dendera. Pepi I., even at Bubastis, still calls himself the son of Hathor.

Hathor played much the same part among the G.o.ddesses that Ra played among the G.o.ds. She gradually absorbed the other female divinities of Egypt.

They were resolved into forms of her, as the G.o.ds were resolved into forms of Ra. The kings of the Sixth Dynasty called themselves her sons, just as they also called themselves sons of the sun-G.o.d. She presided over the underworld; she presided also over love and pleasure. The seven G.o.ddesses, who, like fairy G.o.dmothers, bestowed all good things on the newborn child, were called by her name, and she was even identified with Mut, the starry sky. Her chief sanctuary was at Dendera, founded in the first days of the Pharaonic conquest of Egypt. Here she was supreme; even Horus the elder and the younger,(119) when compelled to form with her a trinity, remained lay figures and nothing more.

She was pictured sometimes as a cow, sometimes as a woman with the head of a cow bearing the solar disc between her horns: for from the earliest days she was a.s.sociated with the sun. Sometimes she is addressed as the daughter of Ra;(120) sometimes the sun-G.o.d is her son. At Dendera the solar orb is represented as rising from her lap, while its rays encircle her head, which rests upon Bakhu, the mountain of the sun. In another chamber of the same temple we see her united with her son Horus as a hawk with a woman's head in the very middle of the solar disc, which slowly rises from the eastern hills. When Isis is figured as a cow, it is because she is regarded as a form of Hathor.(121)

The original character of Hathor has been a matter of dispute. Some scholars have made her originally the sky or s.p.a.ce generally, others have called her the G.o.ddess of light, while she has even been identified with the moon. In the legend of the destruction of mankind by Ra, she appears as the eye of the sun-G.o.d who plies her work at night; and a text at Dendera speaks of her as "resting on her throne in the place for beholding the sun's disc, when the bright one unites with the bright one." In any case she is closely connected with the rising sun, whose first rays surround her head.

Egyptian tradition maintained that she had come from the land of Punt, from those sh.o.r.es of Arabia and the opposite African coast from which the Pharaonic immigrants had made their way to the valley of the Nile. She was, moreover, the G.o.ddess of the Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula; in other words, she was here identified with the Ashtoreth or Istar of the Semitic world.(122) Now the name of Hathor does not seem to be Egyptian. It is written with the help of a sort of rebus, so common in ideographic forms of writing. The p.r.o.nunciation of the name is given by means of ideographs, the significations of which have nothing in common with it, though the sounds of the words they express approximate to its p.r.o.nunciation. The name of Hathor, accordingly, is denoted by writing the hawk of Horus inside the picture of a "house," the name of which was Hat.

A similar method of representing names is frequent in the ideographic script of ancient Babylonia; thus the name of Asari, the Egyptian Osiris, is expressed by placing the picture of an eye (_shi_) inside that of a place (_eri_).

The name of Hathor, therefore, had primitively nothing to do with either Horus or the house of Horus, whatever may have been the speculations which the priests of a later day founded upon the written form of the name. It was only an attempt, similar to those common in the early script of Babylonia, to represent the p.r.o.nunciation of a name which had no meaning in the Egyptian language. But it is a name which we meet with in the ancient inscriptions of Southern Arabia. There it appears as the name of the G.o.d Atthar. But Atthar itself was borrowed from Babylonia. It is the name of the Babylonian G.o.ddess Istar, originally the morning and evening stars, who, an astronomical text tells us, was at once male and female. As a male G.o.d she was adored in South Arabia and Moab; as the G.o.ddess of love and war she was the chief G.o.ddess of Babylonia, the patron of the a.s.syrian kings, and the Ashtoreth of Canaan. When, with the progress of astronomical knowledge, the morning and evening stars were distinguished from one another, in one part of Western Asia she remained identified with the one, in another part with the other.

Hathor is then, I believe, the Istar of the Babylonians. She agrees with Istar both in name and in attributes. The form of the name can be traced back to that of Istar through the Atthar of South Arabia, that very land of Punt from which Hathor was said to have come. In Egypt as in Babylonia she was the G.o.ddess of love and joy, and her relation to the sun can be explained naturally if she were at the outset the morning star.(123) Even her animal form connects her with Chaldaea. Dr. Scheil has published a Babylonian seal of the age of Abraham, on which the cow, giving milk to a calf, appears as the symbol of Istar, and a hymn of the time of a.s.sur-bani-pal identifies the G.o.ddess with a cow.(124)

I have left myself but little time in which to speak of the G.o.ds who interpenetrated and transfigured Egyptian theology in the period of which we know most. These are the G.o.ds of Thebes. For centuries Thebes was the dominant centre of a powerful and united Egypt, and its chief G.o.d Amon followed the fortunes of his city.

As the word _amon_ meant "to conceal," the priests discovered in the G.o.d an embodiment of a mysterious and hidden force which pervades and controls the universe, and of which the sun is as it were the material organ. But such discoveries were the product of a later day, when the true meaning of the name had been long since forgotten, and Theban theology had become pantheistic. What Amon really signified the priests did not know, nor are we any wiser.

Amon was, however, the local G.o.d of Thebes, or rather of Karnak, and he seems from the first to have been a sun-G.o.d. But he had a rival in the warrior deity Mentu of Hermonthis, who also probably represented the sun.

At any rate, Mentu had the head of a hawk, and therefore must have been a local form of Horus-of that Horus, namely, of whom the Pharaonic Egyptians were the followers.(125) Like Horus, too, he was a fighting G.o.d, and was accordingly identified in the texts of the Nineteenth Dynasty with the Canaanitish Baal, "the Lord of hosts." But he was also incarnated in the sacred bull which was worshipped at Erment, and of which I have spoken in an earlier lecture. He thus differed from Amon, who was identified with the ram, the sacred animal of the aboriginal population, not at Karnak only, but in the whole of the surrounding district.(126)

But Amon was usually of human form, with two lofty feathers rising above his crown. Under the Theban dynasties he became the supreme G.o.d, first of Egypt, then of the Egyptian empire. All other G.o.ds had to give way before him, and to lose their individuality in his. His supremacy began with the rise of the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties; it was checked for a moment by the Hyksos conquest of Egypt, but in the end the check proved only a fresh impulse. It was the princes of Thebes, the servants of Amon, who raised the standard of revolt against the Asiatic intruder, and finally drove him back to Asia. Amon had been their helper in the war of independence, and it was he who afterwards gained their victories for them in Syria and Ethiopia. The glory and wealth of Egypt were all due to him, and upon his temple and city accordingly the spoils of Asia were lavished, and trains of captives worked under the lash. The Hyksos invasion, moreover, and the long war of independence which followed, destroyed the power of the old feudal princes, while it strengthened and developed that of the Pharaoh.

The influence of the provincial G.o.ds pa.s.sed away with the feudal princes whose patrons they had been; the supremacy of the Pharaoh implied also the supremacy of the Pharaoh's G.o.d. There was none left in Egypt to dispute the proud boast of the Theban, that Amon was "the one G.o.d."

But he became the one G.o.d not by destroying, but by absorbing the other G.o.ds of the country. The doctrines of the Ennead and the Trinity had prepared the way. They had taught how easily the G.o.ds of the State religion could be merged one into the other; that their attributes were convertible, and yet, at the same time, were all that gave them a distinct personality. The attributes were to the Egyptian little more than the concrete symbols by which they were expressed in the picture writing; the personality was little more than a name. And both symbols and name could be changed or interchanged at will.

The process of fusion was aided by the identification of Amon with Ra. The spread of the solar cult of Heliopolis had introduced the name and worship of Ra into all the temples of Egypt; the local G.o.ds had, as it were, been incorporated into him, and even the G.o.ddesses forced to become his wives or his daughters. The Pharaoh, even the Theban Pharaoh, was still "the son of the sun-G.o.d"; as Amon was also his "father," it was a necessary conclusion that Amon and Ra were one and the same.

In the Theban period, accordingly, Amon is no longer a simple G.o.d. He is Amon-Ra, to whom all the attributes of Ra have been transferred. The solar element is predominant in his character; and, since the other G.o.ds of the country are but subordinate forms of Amon, in their characters also. Most of the religious literature of Egypt which we possess belongs to the Theban period or is derived from it; it is not astonishing, therefore, if Egyptologists have been inclined to see the sun-G.o.d everywhere in Egyptian theology.

The Theban trinity was modelled on the orthodox lines. Mut, "the mother,"

a local epithet of the G.o.ddess of Southern Egypt, was made the wife of Amon, while Khonsu, a local moon-G.o.d, became his son. But in acquiring this relationship Khonsu lost his original nature.(127) Since the divine son was one with his divine father, he too became a sun-G.o.d, with the solar disc and the hawk's head. As the designer of architectural plans, however, he still preserved a reminiscence of his primal character. But he was eventually superseded by Mentu, a result of the decadence of Thebes and the rise of Erment to the headship of the nome. It is needless to say that Mentu had long before become Mentu-Ra.

We can trace the evolution of Amon, thanks to the multiplicity of the texts which belong to the period when his city was supreme. We can watch him as he rises slowly from the position of an obscure provincial deity to that of the supreme G.o.d of all Egypt, and can follow the causes which brought it about. We can see him uniting himself with the sun-G.o.d, and then absorbing the rest of the Egyptian G.o.ds into himself. The theological thought, of which he was the subject and centre, gradually but inexorably pa.s.ses from a narrow form of polytheism into a materialistic pantheism.

There, however, it ends. It never advances further into a monotheism in which the creator is separate from his creation. With all its spirituality, the Egyptian conception of the divine remained concrete; the theologians of Egypt never escaped the influence of the symbol or recognised the G.o.d behind and apart from matter. It was through matter that they came to know G.o.d, and to the last it was by matter that their conception of the G.o.dhead was bounded.

Lecture VII. Osiris And The Osirian Faith.

The legend of Osiris as it existed at the end of the first century is recorded by Plutarch. It has been pieced together from the myths and folk-tales of various ages and various localities that were current about the G.o.d. The Egyptian priests had considerable difficulty in fitting them into a consistent story; had they been Greek or Roman historiographers, they would have solved the problem by declaring that there had been more than one Osiris; as it was, they were contented with setting the different accounts of his death and fortunes side by side, and harmonising them afterwards as best they might.

As to the general outlines of the legend, there was no dispute. Osiris had been an Egyptian Pharaoh who had devoted his life to doing good, to introducing the elements of art and culture among his subjects, and transforming them from savages into civilised men. He was the son of the sun-G.o.d, born on the first of the intercalatory days, the brother and husband of Isis, and the brother also of Set or Sut, whom the Greeks called Typhon. Typhon had as wife his sister Nephthys or Nebhat, but her son Anubis, the jackal, claimed Osiris as his father.

Osiris set forth from his Egyptian kingdom to subdue the world by the arts of peace, leaving Isis to govern in his absence. On his return, Set and his seventy-two fellow conspirators imprisoned him by craft in a chest, which was thrown into the Nile. In the days when Canaan had become a province of the Egyptian empire, and there were close relations between the Phnician cities and the Delta, it was said that the chest had floated across the sea to Gebal, where it became embedded in the core of a tree, which was afterwards cut down and shaped into one of the columns of the royal palace. Isis wandered from place to place seeking her lost husband, and mourning for him; at last she arrived at Gebal, and succeeded in extracting the chest from its hiding-place, and in carrying it back to Egypt. But the older version of the legend knew nothing of the voyage to Gebal. The chest was indeed found by Isis, but it was near the mouths of the Nile. Here it was buried for awhile; but Set, while hunting by night, discovered it, and, tearing open its lid, cut the body inside into fourteen pieces, which he scattered to the winds. Then Isis took boat and searched for the pieces, until she had recovered them all save one.

Wherever a piece was found, a tomb of Osiris arose in later days.

Carefully were the pieces put together by Isis and Nephthys, and Anubis then embalmed the whole body. It was the first mummy that was made in the world.

Meanwhile Horus the younger had been born to Isis, and brought up secretly at Buto, in the marshes of the Delta, out of reach of Set. As soon as he was grown to man's estate he gathered his followers around him, and prepared himself to avenge his father's death. Long and fierce was the struggle. Once Set was taken prisoner, but released by Isis; whereupon Horus, in a fit of anger, struck off his mother's head, which was replaced by Thoth with the head of a cow. According to one account, the contest ended with the victory of Horus. The enemy were driven from one nome to another, and Horus sat on the throne of his father. But there were others who said that the struggle went on with alternating success, until at last Thoth was appointed arbiter, and divided Egypt between the two foes.

Southern Egypt was given to Horus, Northern Egypt to Set.

It is somewhat difficult to disentangle the threads out of which this story has been woven. Elements of various sorts are mixed up in it together. Horus the younger, the posthumous son of Osiris, has been identified with Horus the elder, the ancient sun-G.o.d of Upper Egypt, and the legends connected with the latter have been transferred to the son of Isis. The everlasting war between good and evil has been inextricably confounded with the war between the Pharaonic Egyptians and the older population. The solar theology has invaded the myth of Osiris, making him the son of Ra, and investing him with solar attributes. Anubis the jackal, who watched over the cemeteries of Upper Egypt, has been foisted into it, and has become the servant and minister of the G.o.d of the dead who superseded him. The doctrine of the Trinity has been applied to it, and Anubis and Nephthys, who originally were the allies of Osiris, have been forced to combine with Set. Here and there old forgotten customs or fragments of folk-lore have been embodied in the legend: the dismemberment of Osiris, for example, points to the time when the neolithic inhabitants of Egypt dismembered their dead; and the preservation of the body of Osiris in the heart of a tree has its echo in the Tale of the Two Brothers, in which the individuality of the hero was similarly preserved.

The green face with which Osiris was represented was in the same way a traditional reminiscence of the custom of painting the face of the dead with green paint, which was practised by the neolithic population of Egypt.

There are three main facts in the personality of Osiris which stand out clearly amid the myths and theological inventions which gathered round his name. He was a human G.o.d; he was the first mummy; and he became the G.o.d of the dead. And the paradise over which he ruled, and to which the faithful souls who believed in him were admitted, was the field of Alu, a land of light and happiness.

_Sekhet Alu_, "the field of Alu," seems to have been the cemetery of Busiris among the marshes of the Delta.(128) The name meant "the field of marsh-mallows,"-the "asphodel meadows" of the _Odyssey_,-and was applied to one of the islands which were so numerous in the north-eastern part of the Delta. Here, then, in the nome of which Osiris was the feudal G.o.d, the paradise of his followers originally lay, though a time came when it was translated from the earth to the sky. But when Osiris first became lord of the dead, the land to which they followed him was still within the confines of Egypt.

It would seem, therefore, that Professor Maspero is right in holding that Osiris was primarily the G.o.d of Busiris in the Delta. It is the only nome of which he was formally the presiding deity, under the t.i.tle of anz, "the king," and it bordered on Hermopolis, which was dedicated to the ibis-G.o.d Thoth, who is so closely connected with the story of Osiris.(129) To the north stood the temple of Isis-Rennet,(130) to the south-west was Pharbaethos (Horbet), which worshipped Set, while Horus was the G.o.d of many of the neighbouring nomes. The whole cycle of Osirian deities is thus to be found within the confines of a small tract of the Delta.

The name Busiris means simply "the place of Osiris." Primitively it had been called Daddu, "the two colonnades,"(131) and Osiris became known as its lord. It was under this t.i.tle that he was incarnated in the ram of the neighbouring town of Mendes on the eastern boundary of Hermopolis. The ram became his soul; all the more easily since the Egyptian words for "ram"

and "soul" had the same or a similar p.r.o.nunciation. At Dendera it is said that in the ram of Mendes Osiris grew young again; and in the later days of solar syncretism the four souls of Ra and Osiris, of Shu and Khepera, were united in its body. How far back this identification of the G.o.d and the sacred animal may reach we do not know. But it is significant that it was not at Daddu itself, but at a neighbouring city, that the animal was worshipped, though a seal-cylinder which belongs to the oldest period of Egyptian history already declares that Daddu was "the city of the ram."(132)

Nebhat and Anubis had originally nothing to do with the G.o.d of Busiris.

Nebhat, in fact, is merely a t.i.tle which has been fossilised into the name of a deity. It is merely the ordinary t.i.tle of the Egyptian lady as "the mistress of the house," who thus stands on the same footing as "the lord of the house," her husband. The t.i.tle could have been given to any G.o.ddess who was conceived of in human form, and was doubtless applied to Isis the wife of Osiris. He was "the lord" of the city; she, "the lady of the house." It reminds us of the way in which the deities of Babylonia were addressed. There, too, the G.o.d was "the lord," the G.o.ddess "the lady." The old t.i.tles of Osiris and Isis which have thus survived in the Osirian myth are essentially Babylonian.

Nebhat or Nephthys was individualised in order to complete the trinity of Set, of which Set was the central figure. We can tell, accordingly, when she thus developed into a separate G.o.ddess. It was when the doctrine of the Trinity first became dominant in the Egyptian schools of theology, and all the chief deities of the country were forced to conform to it. Anubis, the second person in the trinity of Set, must have already been attached to the cult of Osiris. How this came about is not difficult to discover.

Anubis the jackal was the G.o.d of the underworld. Like his symbol, the jackal, he watched over the tombs, more especially in "the mountain" far away from the cultivated land. His sacred animal already appears mounted on its standard on the early slate plaques of Nekhen and Abydos by the side of the Horus-hawk. He was, in fact, worshipped in many of the nomes, above all at Siut, where he was adored as "the opener of the paths" to the world below. He was the inventor of the art of embalming; he must therefore have been the G.o.d of the dead when the Pharaonic Egyptians first settled themselves in Upper Egypt. In one sense, indeed, he was younger than Horus, since "the followers of Horus" had not brought the art with them from their earlier home; but he was already G.o.d of the dead, and the discovery of the art was accordingly ascribed to him.