The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia Part 6

Vanished are the hearths and homes, What he does or thinks, who dies, None to tell us comes.

"Have thy heart's desire, be glad, Use the ointment while you live; Be in gold and linen clad, Take what G.o.ds may give.

"For the day shall come to each When earth's voices sound no more; Dead men hear no mourners' speech, Tears can not restore.

"Eat and drink in peace to-day, When you go, your goods remain; He who fares the last long way Comes not back again."

Still more hopeless are the words put into the mouth of the wife of the high priest of Memphis at the close of the first century before our era-

"O my brother, my spouse, and my friend, High priest of Memphis!

Cease not to drink and to eat, To fill thyself with wine, and to make sweet love; Enjoy each festive day and follow thy desire, Let not care enter thy heart All the years that on earth thou remainest.

The underworld is a land of thick darkness, A sorrowful place for the dead.

They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken And behold their comrades.

Their father and their mother they know not, No yearning for their wives and their children do they feel."(87)

Lecture VI. The G.o.ds Of Egypt.

In the language of ancient Egypt the word _neter_ signified "a G.o.d." Sir P. le Page Renouf endeavoured to show that the word originally meant "strong," and that the first Egyptians accordingly pictured their G.o.ds as embodiments of strength.(88) But it has been pointed out(89) that where _neter_ is used in the sense of "strong," it is rather the l.u.s.tiness of youth that is meant, and that a better rendering would be "fresh and vigorous." The verb _neter_ signifies "to flourish" and "grow up."

Moreover, it is a question whether between this verb and the word for "G.o.d" there is any connection at all. It is difficult to understand how the G.o.ds could be described as "growths" unless they were conceived of as plants; and of this there is no evidence in ancient Egypt. We must be content with the fact that as far back as we can trace the history of the word _neter_, it meant "G.o.d" and "G.o.d" only.

But we must also beware of supposing that the Egyptians attached the same ideas to it that we do, or that it had the same connotation at all periods of their history or among all cla.s.ses of the people. The pantheistic deity of Khu-n-Aten was a very different being from the sun-G.o.d of whom the Pharaohs of the Fifth Dynasty had called themselves the sons, and between the divinity which the mult.i.tude saw in the bull Apis and the formless and ever-living Creator of the priesthood there was a gulf which could hardly be bridged. But even the conception of the Creator formed by the priesthood is difficult for us to realise. Eighteen centuries of Christianity have left their impress upon us, and we start from a different background of ideas from that of the Egyptian, to whatever cla.s.s he may have belonged. It is impossible that we can enter exactly into what the Egyptian meant by such expressions as "living for ever" or "having no form"; even the words "life" and "form" would not have had the same connotation for him that they have for us. All that we can do is to approximate to the meaning that he gave to them, remembering that our translation of them into the language of to-day can be approximative only.

The hieroglyphic writing which preserved memories of a time that the Egyptians themselves had forgotten, represents the idea of a "G.o.d" by the picture of an axe. The axe seems originally to have consisted of a sharpened flint or blade of metal hafted in a wooden handle, which was occasionally wrapped in strips of red, white, and black cloth.(90) It takes us back to an age of fetis.h.i.+sm, when inanimate objects were looked upon as divine, and perhaps reflects the impression made upon the natives of the country by the Pharaonic Egyptians with their weapons of metal.

Horus of Edfu, it will be remembered, was served by smiths, and the shrines he founded to commemorate his conquest of Egypt were known as "the smithies." The double-headed axe was a divine symbol in Asia Minor,(91) and both in the old world and in the new the fetish was wrapped in cloths.

Even at Delphi a sacred stone was enveloped in wool on days of festival.

In the sacred axe, therefore, which denoted a G.o.d, we may see a parallel to the standards on the prow of the prehistoric boat or to the symbols of the nomes. It would have represented the G.o.ds of those invaders of the valley of the Nile who brought with them weapons of copper, and have been the symbol of the conquering race and the deities it wors.h.i.+pped. As the Pharaonic Egyptians appropriated the fetishes of the older population in their sculptures and their picture-writing, so too would they have appropriated what had become to the neolithic people the sign and emblem of superior power.

We have already dealt with an important cla.s.s of G.o.ds, those which had a solar origin. There were other G.o.ds of an elemental character, whose wors.h.i.+p does not seem to have been originally confined to one particular locality. Such were Seb, the earth, Nut, the sky, and Nu, the primeval deep. But they played only a small part in the religion of the country.

Seb was known in later days chiefly as the father of Osiris; at an earlier epoch he had been the _rpa_, or "hereditary prince, of the G.o.ds," a t.i.tle which takes us back to the feudal period of Egypt, when as yet there was no Pharaoh who ruled over the whole of the land. The animal sacred to him was the goose, perhaps on account of some similarity in its name; but he was never identified with it, and continued to the last to be depicted in human form. His symbol, however, gave rise to a cosmological myth. The goose became the mother of the egg out of which the universe was born.

Nut was the wife of Seb, wedded to him as the sky is wedded to the earth.

It seems reasonable to see in her the feminine form of Nu, the primeval chaos of waters; and so the Egyptians of the historical period believed, since they identified her with the wife of the Nile, and represented her as sitting in the sycamore and pouring the water of life on the hands of a soul at the foot of the tree. It has been suggested, however, that Nu was of later origin than Nut, who became a Nile G.o.ddess with the head of a snake only when Nu himself had been changed into the Nile.(92) But the idea of a watery chaos is not one which would have grown up on Egyptian soil. There it was rather the desert which represented the unformed beginning of things; the Nile spread itself over the already existing land at regular intervals, and was no dreary waste of waters, out of which the earth emerged for the first time. The geographical home of the idea was in Babylonia, on the sh.o.r.es of the ever-retreating Persian Gulf. And from Babylonia we find that the belief in a primeval deep spread itself over Western Asia. The Egyptian Nu is the counterpart of the Babylonian Mummu, the mother of G.o.ds, as Nu was their father. Professor Hommel may even be right in identifying the name with the Babylonian Nun or Nunu, the lord of the deep.

But Nu survived only in the theological schools, more especially in that of Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunen. The G.o.d of Hermopolis was Thoth, the Egyptian De?uti. Thoth seems to have been at the outset the moon, which was thus, as in Babylonia, of the male s.e.x. A legend, repeated by Plutarch,(93) relates how he gained the five intercalatory days of the Egyptian year by playing at dice with the moon; and he was at times identified with the moon-G.o.ds Aah and Khonsu. The first month of the year was his, and he was the measurer of time, who had invented arithmetic and geometry, music and astronomy, architecture and letters. He knew the magic formulae which could bind the G.o.ds themselves, and as minister of the Pharaoh Thamos had introduced writing and literature into Egypt.

Henceforward he remained the patron of books and education, on which the culture of Egypt so largely rested. He was, in fact, the culture-G.o.d of the Egyptians to whom the elements of civilisation were due.

It is curious that we do not know his true name, for De?uti means merely the G.o.d "who is attached to the ibis." Was it really Nu? and is Thoth really a compound of a moon-G.o.d and a sun-G.o.d? At all events the culture-G.o.d of Babylonia who corresponded to Thoth was Ea, the deep, and one of the earliest names of Ea was "the G.o.d Nun." Moreover, the son of Ea was Asari, the Osiris of Egypt; and just as Asari instructed mankind in the wisdom and laws of Ea, so Thoth acted as the minister of Osiris and adjudged his cause against Seb. Like Ea, too, Thoth wrote the first books from which men derived their laws.(94)

However this may be, Thoth was the creator of the world through the word of his mouth. In the cosmogony of Hermopolis the universe and the G.o.ds that direct it are the creation of his word, which later ages refined into the sound of his voice. From Hermopolis the doctrine pa.s.sed to other parts of Egypt, and under the Theban dynasties tended to displace or absorb the older Heliopolitan doctrine of creation by generation. But the doctrine was known also in Babylonia, where the G.o.d whose word is creative was Asari, the Merodach of the Semites. In the Babylonian Epic of the Creation the "word" of Merodach creates and destroys, like the "word" of Yahweh in the Old Testament. I must leave to another lecture the consideration as to how far the Logos of Alexandrine philosophy has been influenced by the theology of Hermopolis.

Whether Thoth were originally Nu or not, Nu at all events forms the second member of the Hermopolitan Ennead. Professor Maspero has shown that it was modelled on the Ennead of Heliopolis.(95) But in accordance with the more abstract character of the cosmogony of which it was a part, the divinities of which it is composed are abstractions that look strangely out of place in the Egyptian Pantheon.

Nu is provided with the feminine Nut, who is not to be confounded with the old G.o.ddess of the sky, and from them are derived the successive pairs ?e?ui and ?e?et, Kek and Keket, Nini and Ninit, "eternity," "darkness,"

and "inertia."(96) The whole scheme is Asiatic rather than Egyptian, but the G.o.ds composing it are already mentioned in the Pyramid texts.

The four pairs of abstract deities const.i.tuted "the eight" G.o.ds after whom Hermopolis received one of its names (Khmunu, now Ashmunen), and who were often addressed as "the G.o.d eight," like "the G.o.d seven" in Babylonia.

Professor Maspero sees in them a philosophical development of the four cynocephalous apes who accompanied Thoth and saluted the first streak of dawn. But the development is difficult to follow, and the apes who are the companions of the G.o.d probably had another origin. They certainly must have come from the Sudan; no apes were indigenous in Egypt in historical times. Moreover, it was only the Thoth of Hermopolis in Upper Egypt in whose train they were found; the Thoth of Hermopolis Parva in the Delta, properly speaking, knew them not. But from an early epoch "the five G.o.ds"-Thoth and his four ape-followers, whose likeness he sometimes adopted-had been wors.h.i.+pped at Eshmunen. Its temple was called "the Abode of the Five," and its high priest "the great one of the House of the Five."(97)

How the half-human apes of Central Africa came to be a.s.sociated with Thoth we do not know. Between the baboons who sing hymns to the rising and setting sun and the moon, or the culture-G.o.d, there is little or no connection. But a curious biography found in a tomb at a.s.suan throws light upon it. Herkhuf, the subject of the biography, was sent by Hor-em-saf of the Sixth Dynasty on an exploring expedition into the Libyan desert south of the First Cataract, and he brought back with him a Danga dwarf "who danced the dances of the G.o.d," like another Danga dwarf brought from Punt in the neighbourhood of Suakim or Ma.s.sawa in the time of the Fifth Dynasty. The dwarf was evidently regarded by Herkhuf as a species of baboon, if we may judge from the account he gives of the way in which he was treated; even to-day the ape in the zoological gardens of Giza is called by the lower cla.s.ses at Cairo "the savage man." Travellers have described the dancing and screaming of troops of apes at daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and it was natural for primitive man to suppose that the dancing was in honour of the return of the G.o.d of day.

Dances in honour of the G.o.ds have been common all over the world; indeed, among barbarous and savage peoples the dance is essentially of a religious character. Even David danced before the ark, and boys still dance before the high altar in the cathedral of Seville. That dances are represented on the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, has been pointed out by M. de Morgan;(98) and since the Danga dwarf came from the half-mythical country in the south which was known to the Egyptians as "the land of the G.o.ds,"

and where, too, the apes of Thoth had their home, it was reasonable to believe that he knew the dance that would be pleasing to the G.o.ds.(99)

I believe, therefore, that the apes of Thoth were at the outset the dwarf-like apes or ape-like dwarfs who danced in his honour in the temple of Hermopolis. Gradually they were taken hold of by that symbolism which was inseparable from a religion so intimately bound up with a pictorial system of writing; from dancers they became the followers of the G.o.d, who sang to the rising and setting sun the hymns which Thoth had composed. But this would have been when the wors.h.i.+p of the sun-G.o.d of Heliopolis had already spread to Hermopolis, and the cult of Thoth was mingling with that of Ra. The mutual influence of the theories of creation taught by the priests of the two cities shows at what a comparatively early date this would have happened.

It is possible that there was actually a connection between the four baboons and the four elemental G.o.ds of Hermopolitan theology. But it was not in the way of development. It was rather that as the G.o.ds were four in number, the dancers in their temple were four also. To each G.o.d, as it were, an ape was a.s.signed.

The influence of Hermopolis belongs to the pre-Menic age of Egypt; we can hardly any longer call it prehistoric. So, too, does the influence of Nekhen, once the capital of the kingdom of Upper Egypt. In a former lecture I have already spoken of its vulture-headed G.o.ddess Nekheb, the consort of the hawk Horus, whose temple at El-Kab guarded the outlet of the road from the Red Sea, and who was known as Mut, "the mother," at Thebes. She was, in fact, the G.o.ddess of all Upper Egypt, whose wors.h.i.+p had spread over it in the days when Nekhen was its ruling city. The G.o.ds of the Pharaoh followed the extension of his power.

In the early inscriptions of the First Cataract the vulture-headed G.o.ddess sitting on her basket is identified with the local divinity Sati (more correctly Suti), "the Asiatic." From her the island of Sehel received its name, and there her sanctuary stood before Isis of Philae ousted her from her supremacy. She was symbolised by the arrow, the name of which was the same as that of the G.o.ddess, and which was, moreover, a fitting emblem of the hostile tribes of the desert. It already appears on the prehistoric pottery as a sacred fetish on the "flagstaff" or standard at the prow of the boat.

The name of Sati, or rather Suti, is remarkable. It was not only the name of the G.o.ddess of the First Cataract, it was also the name given by the Egyptians to the nomadic tribes of Asia. But it was not the Egyptians only who used it in this sense. From time immemorial the name Sute had precisely the same meaning among the Babylonians. The fact cannot be accidental; and as Sute is of Babylonian origin, we have in it a fresh proof of the relations of the Pharaonic Egyptians with primeval Babylonia.

But the G.o.ddess Sati does not stand alone. There was also a G.o.d Set (or Sut), the twin-brother and enemy of Osiris, and, like Esau in Hebrew history, a representative of the desert; while at the Cataract another G.o.ddess, anuqet by name, is her companion. Now anuqet is the feminine of anuq, the anaq of the Old Testament. The foreign nature of anuqet has long been recognised, for she wears on her head the non-Egyptian head-dress of a cap fringed with feathers. It is the same head-dress as that worn by the G.o.d Bes, whom the Egyptians derived from the land of Punt on the sh.o.r.es of the Red Sea. A similar cap is worn by the Zakkal on the coast of Palestine, in the near neighbourhood of "the sons of anaq," as well as by the Babylonian king Merodach-nadin-akhi, on a monument now in the British Museum.(100) Everything, therefore, points to its having been an Asiatic characteristic; perhaps it was made of the ostrich feathers which are still collected in Arabia and even on the eastern side of the Jordan.

The Greeks identified anuqet with Hestia, and Sati with Hera. This was probably because Sati was the wife of Khnum (or Kneph), the G.o.d of the Cataract. As such Sati was also known as Heket, "the frog," which was supposed to be born from the mud left by the inundation of the Nile. It thus became a symbol of the resurrection, and was consequently adopted by the Christians of Egypt. Hence the frequency with which it is represented on lamps of the late Roman period.

Khnum, like the G.o.d of Thebes, was a ram, and is accordingly usually depicted with a ram's head. But he could not originally have been so. Once more the old fetish of the district, the sacred animal of the nome, must have been fused with the G.o.d whom the Pharaonic invaders brought with them. For Khnum was a potter, as his name signifies, and at Philae it is said of him that he was "the moulder (_khnum_) of men, the modeller of the G.o.ds."(101) Hence he is called "the creator of all this, the fas.h.i.+oner of that which exists, the father of fathers, the mother of mothers," "the creator of the heaven and the earth, the lower world, the water and the mountains," "who has formed the male and female of fowl and fish, wild beasts, cattle, and creeping things."

In Babylonia, Ea, the culture-G.o.d and creator, was also termed the "potter," and it was thus that he moulded the G.o.ds as well as men.(102) At the same time, like Khnum, he was a G.o.d of the waters. While the Cataract of the Nile was the home of Khnum, the Persian Gulf was the dwelling-place of Ea. The connection between the water and the modeller in clay is obvious. It is only where the water inundates the soil and leaves the moist clay behind it that the art of the potter can flourish.(103)

But was there also a connection between the Babylonian G.o.d who was wors.h.i.+pped in the ancient seaport of Chaldaea and the G.o.d of the Egyptian Cataract? We have seen that the wife of Khnum was ent.i.tled "the Asiatic,"

the very form of the name being Babylonian. We have further seen that her companion anuqet was also from Asia, and that her traditional head-dress preserved a memory of the fact. There is a road from the Red Sea to a.s.suan as well as to El-Kab; it may be that it goes back to those prehistoric times when the Pharaonic Egyptians made their way across the desert into the valley of the Nile, as their Semitic kinsfolk did in later days into the tablelands of Abyssinia.

The creator who was wors.h.i.+pped at Memphis, at the other end of the Nile valley, was a potter also.(104) This was Pta?, whose name is derived from a root which means to "open." According to Porphyry, he had sprung from an egg which had come from the mouth of Kneph. But the reference in the name is probably to the ceremony of "opening the mouth" of a mummy, or the statue of the dead man with a chisel, a finger, or some red pebbles, in order to confer upon it the capability of receiving the breath of life, and of harbouring the double or the soul.(105) Pta? was represented as a mummy; he was, in fact, one of the G.o.ds of the underworld, who, like Osiris or the mummified Horus of Nekhen, had their tombs as well as their temples. He must have been the creative potter, however, before he became a mummy. Perhaps his transformation dates from the period of his fusion with Sokaris, who seems to have been the G.o.d of the cemetery of Memphis.(106) At any rate, Pta? and Khnum are alike forms of the same primitive deity, and the names they bear are epithets merely. At Philae, Pta? is pictured as about to model man out of a lump of clay, and the Khnumu, or "creators" who helped him to fas.h.i.+on the world, were his children.(107)

The Khnumu are the Pataeki of Herodotos (iii. 37), whose figures, the Greek writer tells us, were carved by the Phnicians on the prows of their vessels, probably to ward off the evil eye. They were dwarfs, like the Danga dwarf of Herkhuf or the G.o.d Bes, with thick heads, bowed legs, long arms, and bushy beards; and their terra-cotta figures have often been met with in the tombs. From the name Pataeki we might infer that they had been borrowed by the Phnicians from Egypt. But it is also possible that both Egypt and Phnicia derived them from the same source. Dr. Scheil has pointed out that a similar figure occurs on early Babylonian seal-cylinders, where its Sumerian name is given as "the G.o.d Nugidda" or "the Dwarf," and it is sometimes represented as dancing before the G.o.ddess Istar.(108) Thus far, however, no text has been discovered which a.s.sociates the G.o.d Nugidda with the creator of the world.

When Memphis became the capital of Egypt and the seat of the Pharaoh, its G.o.d also became supreme in the Egyptian pantheon. But he was no longer Pta? the creator simply. He was already amalgamated with Sokaris, and probably with Osiris as well. It was not difficult to identify two mummified G.o.ds whose domain was among the dead. With the spread of the sun-wors.h.i.+p of Heliopolis and the spirit of pantheistic syncretism which accompanied it, the individuality of the old G.o.d of Memphis became still further lost. He was merged into Tanen or Tatunen, a local G.o.d of the earth, as well as into Ra. He had already been made into the chief of an Ennead, and now the Ennead was resolved into a trinity. Nofer-Tum, "beautified by Tum," was brought from Heliopolis, and was made into a son of Pta?, afterwards to be superseded, however, by another abstraction, Im-hotep, "he who comes in peace."(109) Im-hotep was reputed the first _kher-heb_ or hierophant; he it was who recited and interpreted the liturgy of the dead and the magic formulae which restored health to the sick and raised the dead to life. The Greeks consequently identified him with Asklepios.(110) Both Im-hotep and Nofer-Tum were the sons of Sekhet, the lion-headed G.o.ddess of Letopolis, from whence she must have been borrowed by the Memphite priests when the ancient potter G.o.d had become a generator, and a wife was needed for him.

With the decline of the Memphite dynasties and the fall of the Old Empire, the commanding part played by Pta? in the Egyptian pantheon was at an end.

The G.o.d of the imperial city had been identified with the G.o.ds of the provincial nomes; his temple at Memphis had taken precedence of all others, and the local priesthoods were content that their deities should have found a shelter in it as forms of Pta?. He was even identified with ?api, the Nile, though perhaps the similarity in sound between the sacred name of the river and that of the bull Apis (?api) may have a.s.sisted in the identification.(111)

That the Nile should have been wors.h.i.+pped throughout the land of Egypt is natural. The very land itself was his gift, the crops that grew upon it and the population it supported all depended upon his bounty. When the Nile failed, the people starved; when the Nile was full, Egypt was a land of contentment and plenty. It is only wonderful that the cult of the Nile should not have been more prominent than it was. The temples built in its honour were neither numerous nor important, nor were its priests endowed as the priests of other G.o.ds. But the cause of this is explained by history. The neolithic population of the country lived in the desert; the Nile was for them little more than the creator of pestilential swamps and dangerous jungles, where wild beasts and venomous serpents lurked for the intruder. The Pharaonic Egyptians brought their own G.o.ds with them, and these naturally became the divinities of the nomes. When the river had been embanked and its waters been made a blessing instead of a curse, the sacred animals and the G.o.ds of the nomes were too firmly established to be displaced.(112)

But the backwardness of the State religion was made up for by the piety of individuals. Hymns to the Nile, like those which were engraved on the rocks of Silsilis by Meneptah and Ramses III., breathe a spirit of grat.i.tude and devotion which can hardly be exceeded-

"Hail to thee, O Nile!

who manifestest thyself over this land, and comest to give life to Egypt!

Mysterious is thy issuing forth from darkness, on this day whereon it is celebrated!

Watering the orchards created by Ra to cause all cattle to drink, thou givest the earth to drink, inexhaustible one!...

Lord of the fish, during the inundation, no bird alights on the crops.