History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 22 - Vol. 01, Ch. 03: The Legendary History of Egypt, pt. 6

1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a very small photograph published in the Catalogue of the Minutoli Sale.

As soon as his bark appeared at the last bend of the celestial Nile, the cynocephali, who guarded the entrance into night, began to dance and gesticulate upon the banks as they intoned their accustomed hymn.

The gods of Abydos mingled their shouts of joy with the chant of the sacred baboons, the bark lingered for a moment upon the frontiers of day, and initiated souls seized the occasion to secure their recognition and their reception on board of it.

[*] Once admitted, they took their share in the management of the boat, and in the battles with hostile deities;

but they were not all endowed with the courage or equipment needful to withstand the perils and terrors of the voyage.

Many stopped short by the way in one of the regions which it traversed, either in the realm of Khontamentît, or in that of Sokaris, or in those islands where the good Osiris welcomed them as though they had duly arrived in the ferry-boat, or upon the wing of Thot.

There they dwelt in colonies under the suzerainty of local gods, rich, and in need of nothing, but condemned to live in darkness, excepting for the one brief hour in which the solar bark passed through their midst, irradiating them with beams of light.

[**] * This description of the embarkation and voyage of the soul is composed from indications given in one of the vignettes of chap.

xvi.

of the _Book of the Dead_ (Naville's edition, vol. i.

pl.

xxii.

), combined with the text of a formula which became common from the times of the XIth and XIIth dynasties (Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et l'Archéologie Égyptiennes_, vol. i.

pp. 14-18, and _Études Égyptiennes_, vol. i.

pp. 122, 123).

** Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie Égyptiennes_, vol. ii.

pp. 44, 45. The few persevered, feeling that they had courage to accompany the sun throughout, and these were indemnified for their sufferings by the most brilliant fate ever dreamed of by Egyptian souls.

, Born anew with the sun-god and appearing with him at the gates of the east, they were assimilated to him, and shared his privilege of growing old and dying, only to be ceaselessly rejuvenated and to live again with ever-renewed splendour.

They disembarked where they pleased, and returned at will into the world.

If now and then they felt a wish to revisit all that was left of their earthly bodies, the human-headed sparrow-hawk descended the shaft in full flight, alighted upon the funeral couch, and, with hands softly laid upon the spot where the heart had been wont to beat, gazed upwards at the impassive mask of the mummy.

[Illustration: 284. jpg THE SOUL DESCENDING THE SEPULCHRAL SHAFT ON ITS WAY TO REJOIN THE MUMMY.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from Dévèria.

This was but for a moment, since nothing compelled these perfect souls to be imprisoned within the tomb like the doubles of earlier times, because they feared the light.

They "went forth by day," and dwelt in those places where they had lived; they walked in their gardens by their ponds of running water; they perched like so many birds on the branches of the trees which they had planted, or enjoyed the fresh air under the shade of their sycamores; they ate and drank at pleasure; they travelled by hill and dale; they embarked in the boat of Râ, and disembarked without weariness, and without distaste for the same perpetual round.

This conception, which was developed somewhat late, brought the Egyptians back to the point from which they had started when first they began to speculate on the life to come.

[Illustration: 285. jpg THE SOUL ON THE EDGE OF THE FUNERAL COUCH, WITH ITS HANDS ON THE HEART OF THE MUMMY.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a photograph by Emil Brugsch- Bey, reproducing the miniature sarcophagus of the scribe Râ (Maspero, _Guide du Visiteur_, pp. 130, 131, No. 1621).

The soul, after having left the place of its incarnation to which in the beginning it clung, after having ascended into heaven and there sought congenial asylum in vain, forsook all havens which it had found above, and unhesitatingly fell back upon earth, there to lead a peaceful, free, and happy life in the full light of day, and with the whole valley of Egypt for a paradise.

The connection, always increasingly intimate between Osiris and Râ, gradually brought about a blending of the previously separate myths and beliefs concerning each.

The friends and enemies of the one became the friends and enemies of the other, and from a mixture of the original conceptions of the two deities, arose new personalities, in which contradictory elements were blent together, often without true fusion.

The celestial Horuses one by one were identified with Horus, son of Isis, and their attributes were given to him, as his in the same way became theirs.

Apopi and the monsters--the hippopotamus, the crocodile, the wild boar--who lay in wait for Râ as he sailed the heavenly ocean, became one with Sît and his accomplices.

Sit still possessed his half of Egypt, and his primitive brotherly relation to the celestial Horus remained unbroken, either 'on account of their sharing one temple, as at Nûbît, or because they were worshipped as one in two neighbouring nomes, as, for example, at Oxyrrhynchos and at Heracleopolis Magna.

The repulsion with which the slayer of Osiris was regarded did not everywhere dissociate these two cults: certain small districts persisted in this double worship down to the latest times of paganism.

It was, after all, a mark of fidelity to the oldest traditions of the race, but the bulk of the Egyptians, who had forgotten these, invented reasons taken from the history of the divine dynasties to explain the fact.

The judgment of Thot or of Sibû had not put an end to the machinations of Sît: as soon as Horus had left the earth, Sît resumed them, and pursued them, with varying fortune, under the divine kings of the second Ennead.

Now, in the year 363 of Harmakhis, the Typhonians reopened the campaign.

Beaten at first near Edfû, they retreated precipitately northwards, stopping to give battle wherever their partisans predominated,--at Zatmîfc in the Theban nome,[*] at Khaîtnûtrît to the north-east of Denderah, and at Hibonû in the principality of the Gazelle.

* Zatmît appears to have been situate at some distance from Bayadîyéh, on the spot where the map published by the Egyptian Commission marks the ruins of a modern village.

There was a necropolis of considerable extent there, which furnishes the Luxor dealers with antiquities, many of which belong to the first Theban empire.

[Illustration: 287. jpg THE SOUL GOING FORTH INTO ITS GARDEN BY DAY.

2] 2 Copied by Faucher-Gudin from the survey-drawings of the tomb of Anni by Boussac, member of the _Mission française_ in Egypt (1891).

The inscription over the arbour gives the list of the various trees in the garden of Anni during his lifetime.

Several bloody combats, which took place between Oxyrrhynchos and Heracleopolis Magna, were the means of driving them finally out of the Nile Valley; they rallied for the last time in the eastern provinces of the Delta, were beaten at Zalû, and giving up all hope of success on land, they embarked at the head of the Gulf of Suez, in order to return to the Nubian Desert, their habitual refuge in times of distress.

The sea was the special element of Typhon, and upon it they believed themselves secure.

Horus, however, followed them, overtook them near Shas-hirît, routed them, and on his return to Edfu, celebrated his victory by a solemn festival.

By degrees, as he made himself master of those localities which owed allegiance to Sit, he took energetic measures to establish in them the authority of Osiris and of the solar cycle.

In all of them he built, side by side with the sanctuary of the Typhonian divinities, a temple to himself, in which he was enthroned under the particular form he was obliged to assume in order to vanquish his enemies.

Metamorphosed into a hawk at the battle of Hibonû, we next see him springing on to the back of Sit under the guise of a hippopotamus; in his shrine at Hibonû he is represented as a hawk perching on the back of a gazelle, emblem of the nome where the struggle took place.

Near to Zalû he became incarnate as a human-headed lion, crowned with the triple diadem, and having feet armed with claws which cut like a knife; it was under the form, too, of a lion that he was worshipped in the temple at Zalû.

The correlation of Sit and the celestial Horus was not, therefore, for these Egyptians of more recent times a primitive religious fact; it was the consequence, and so to speak the sanction, of the old hostility between the two gods.

[Illustration: 289. jpg] Horus had treated his enemy in the same fashion that a victorious Pharaoh treated the barbarians conquered by his arms: he had constructed a fortress to keep his foe in check, and his priests formed a sort of garrison as a precaution against the revolt of the rival priesthood and the followers of the rival deity.

In this manner the battles of the gods were changed into human struggles, in which, more than once, Egypt was deluged with blood.

The hatred of the followers of Osiris to those of Typhon was perpetuated with such implacability, that the nomes which had persisted in adhering to the worship of Sit, became odious to the rest of the population: the image of their master on the monuments was mutilated, their names were effaced from the geographical lists, they were assailed with insulting epithets, and to pursue and slay their sacred animals was reckoned a pious act.

Thus originated those skirmishes which developed into actual civil wars, and were continued down to Roman times.

The adherents of Typhon only became more confirmed in their veneration for the accursed god; Christianity alone overcame their obstinate fidelity to him.

[*] * This incident in the wars of Horus and Sit is drawn by Faucher-Gudin from a bas-relief of the temple of Edfû.

On the right, Har-Hûdîti, standing up in the solar bark, pierces with his lance the head of a crocodile, a partisan of Sît, lying in the water below; Harmâkhis, standing behind him, is present at the execution.

Facing this divine pair, is the young Horus, who kills a man, another partisan of Sît, while Isis and Har-Hûdîti hold his chains; behind Horus, Isis and Thot are leading four other captives bound and ready to be sacrificed before Harmâkhis.

The history of the world for Egypt was therefore only the history of the struggle between the adherents of Osiris and the followers of Sît; an interminable warfare in which sometimes one and sometimes the other of the rival parties obtained a passing advantage, without ever gaining a decisive victory till the end of time.

The divine kings of the second and third Ennead devoted most of the years of their earthly reign to this end; they were portrayed under the form of the great warrior Pharaohs, who, from the eighteenth to the twelfth century before our era, extended their rule from the plains of the Euphrates to the marshes of Ethiopia.

A few peaceful sovereigns are met with here and there in this line of conquerors--a few sages or legislators, of whom the most famous was styled Thot, the doubly great, ruler of Hermopolis and of the Hermopolitan Ennead.

A legend of recent origin made him the prime minister of Horus, son of Isis; a still more ancient tradition would identify him with the second king of the second dynasty, the immediate successor of the divine Horuses, and attributes to him a reign of 3226 years.

He brought to the throne that inventive spirit and that creative power which had characterized him from the time when he was only a feudal deity.

Astronomy, divination, magic, medicine, writing, drawing--in fine, all the arts and sciences emanated from him as from their first source.

He had taught mankind the methodical observation of the heavens and of the changes that took place in them, the slow revolutions of the sun, the rapid phases of the moon, the intersecting movements of the five planets, and the shapes and limits of the constellations which each night were lit up in the sky.

Most of the latter either remained, or appeared to remain immovable, and seemed never to pass out of the regions accessible to the human eye.

Those which were situate on the extreme margin of the firmament accomplished movements there analogous to those of the planets.

[Illustration: 293. jpg ONE OF THE ASTRONOMICAL TABLES OF THE TOMB OF RAMSES IV.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a copy by Lepsius, _Denkm.

_, iii.

227, 3. Every year at fixed times they were seen to sink one after another below the horizon, to disappear, and rising again after an eclipse of greater or less duration, to regain insensibly their original positions.

The constellations were reckoned to be thirty-six in number, the thirty-six _decani_ to whom were attributed mysterious powers, and of whom Sothis was queen--Sothis transformed into the star of Isis, when Orion (Sâhû), became the star of Osiris.

The nights are so clear and the atmosphere so transparent in Egypt, that the eye can readily penetrate the depths of space, and distinctly see points of light which would be invisible in our foggy climate.

The Egyptians did not therefore need special instruments to ascertain the existence of a considerable number of stars which we could not see without the help of our telescopes; they could perceive with the naked eye stars of the fifth magnitude, and note them upon their catalogues.

[*] It entailed, it is true, a long training and uninterrupted practice to bring their sight up to its maximum keenness;

but from very early times it was a function of the priestly colleges to found and maintain schools of astronomy.

The first observatories established on the banks of the Nile seem to have belonged to the temples of the sun; the high priests of Râ--who, to judge from their title, were alone worthy to behold the sun face to face--were actively employed from the earliest times in studying the configuration and preparing maps of the heavens.

The priests of other gods were quick to follow their example: at the opening of the historic period, there was not a single temple, from one end of the valley to the other, that did not possess its official astronomers, or, as they were called, "watchers of the night."

[**] * Biot, however, states that stars of the third and fourth magnitude "are the smallest which can be seen with the naked eye."

I believe I am right in affirming that several of the fellahîn and Bedawîn attached to the "service des Antiquités" can see stars which are usually classed with those of the fifth magnitude.

** _Urshu_: this word is also used for the soldiers on watch during the day upon the walls of a fortress.

Birch believed he had discovered in the British Museum a catalogue of observations made at Thebes by several astronomers upon a constellation which answered to the Hyades or the Pleiades;

it was merely a question in this text of the quantity of water supplied regularly to the astronomers of a Theban temple for their domestic purposes.

In the evening they went up on to the high terraces above the shrine, or on to the narrow platforms which terminated the pylons, and fixing their eyes continuously on the celestial vault above them, followed the movements of the constellations and carefully noted down the slightest phenomena which they observed.

A portion of the chart of the heavens, as known to Theban Egypt between the eighteenth and twelfth centuries before our era, has survived to the present time; parts of it were carved by the decorators on the ceilings of temples, and especially on royal tombs.

The deceased Pharaohs were identified with Osiris in a more intimate fashion than their subjects.

They represented the god even in the most trivial details; on earth--where, after having played the part of the beneficent Onnophris of primitive ages, they underwent the most complete and elaborate embalming, like Osiris of the lower world; in Hades--where they embarked side by side with the Sun-Osiris to cross the night and to be born again at daybreak; in heaven--where they shone with Orion-Sâhu under the guardianship of Sothis, and, year by year, led the procession of the stars.

The maps of the firmament recalled to them, or if necessary taught them, this part of their duties: they there saw the planets and the _decani_ sail past in their boats, and the constellations follow one another in continuous succession.

The lists annexed to the charts indicated the positions occupied each month by the principal heavenly bodies--their risings, their culminations, and their settings.

Unfortunately, the workmen employed to execute these pictures either did not understand much about the subject in hand, or did not trouble themselves to copy the originals exactly: they omitted many passages, transposed others, and made endless mistakes, which made it impossible for us to transfer accurately to a modern map the information possessed by the ancients.