History Of Egypt, Chaldea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Vol. 1 — 09 - Vol. 01, Ch. 02: The Gods of Egypt, pt. 1

THE GODS OF EGYPT

The incredible number of religious scenes to be found among the representations on the ancient monuments of Egypt is at first glance very striking.

Nearly every illustration in the works of Egyptologists brings before us the figure of some deity receiving with an impassive countenance the prayers and offerings of a worshipper.

One would think that the country had been inhabited for the most part by gods, and contained just sufficient men and animals to satisfy the requirements of their worship.

[Illustration: 108. jpg THE GODDESS NAPKÎT, STAPÎT. 1] 1 The goddess Naprît, Napît; bas-relief from the first chamber of Osiris, on the east side of the great temple of Denderah.

Drawn by Faucher-Gudin.

On penetrating into this mysterious world, we are confronted by an actual rabble of gods, each one of whom has always possessed but a limited and almost unconscious existence.

They severally represented a function, a moment in the life of man or of the universe; thus Naprît was identified with the ripe ear, or the grain of wheat;[**] ** The word _naprît_ means _grain_, the grain of wheat.

The grain-god is represented in the tomb of Seti I. as a man wearing two full ears of wheat or barley upon his head.

He is mentioned in the _Hymn to the Nile_ about the same date, and in two or three other texts of different periods.

The goddess _Naprît_, or _Napît_, to whom reference is here made, was his duplicate; her head-dress is a sheaf of corn, as in the illustration.

*** This goddess, whose name expresses and whose form personifies the brick or stone couch, the child-bed or -chair, upon which women in labour bowed themselves, is sometimes subdivided into two or four secondary divinities.

She is mentioned along with Shaît, _destiny_, and Raninît, _suckling_.

Her part of fairy godmother at the cradle of the new-born child is indicated in the passage of the Westcar Papyrus giving a detailed account of the births of three kings of the fifth dynasty.

She is represented in human form, and often wears upon her head two long palm-shoots, curling over at their ends.

Maskhonît appeared by the child's cradle at the very moment of its birth;[*] and Raninît presided over the naming and the nurture of the newly born.

[*] Neither Raninît, the fairy godmother, nor Maskhonît exercised over nature as a whole that sovereign authority which we are accustomed to consider the primary attribute of deity.

Every day of every year was passed by the one in easing the pangs of women in travail; by the other, in choosing for each baby a name of an auspicious sound, and one which would afterwards serve to exorcise the influences of evil fortune.

No sooner were their tasks accomplished in one place than they hastened to another, where approaching birth demanded their presence and their care.

From child-bed to child-bed they passed, and if they fulfilled the single offices in which they were accounted adepts, the pious asked nothing more of them.

Bands of mysterious cynocephali haunting the Eastern and the Western mountains concentrated the whole of their activity on one passing moment of the day.

They danced and chattered in the East for half an hour, to salute the sun at his rising, even as others in the West hailed him on his entrance into night.

[**] * Raninît presides over the child's suckling, but she also gives him his name, and hence, his fortune.

She is on the whole the nursing goddess.

Sometimes she is represented as a human-headed woman, or as lioness-headed, most frequently with the head of a serpent; she is also the urseus, clothed, and wearing two long plumes on her head, and a simple urous, as represented in the illustration on p. 169. ** This is the subject of a vignette in the _Book of the Dead_, ch. xvi.

, where the cynocephali are placed in echelon upon the slopes of the hill on the horizon, right and left of the radiant solar disk, to which they offer worship by gesticulations.

It was the duty of certain genii to open gates in Hades, or to keep the paths daily traversed by the sun.

[*] These genii were always at their posts, never free to leave them, and possessed no other faculty than that of punctually fulfilling their appointed offices.

Their existence, generally unperceived, was suddenly revealed at the very moment when the specific acts of their lives were on the point of accomplishment.

These being completed, the divinities fell back into their state of inertia, and were, so to speak, reabsorbed by their functions until the next occasion.

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

pp. 34, 35. *** The Egyptians employed a still more forcible expression than our word "absorption" to express this idea.

It was said of objects wherein these genii concealed themselves, and whence they issued in order to re-enter them immediately, that these forms _ate_ them, or that they _ate_ their own forms.

[Illustration: 110. jpg SOME FABULOUS BEASTS OF THE EGYPTIAN DESERT.

2] 2 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin from Champollion's copies, made from the tombs of Beni-Hassan.

To the right is the _sha_, one of the animals of Sit, and an exact image of the god with his stiff and arrow-like tail.

Next comes the _safir_, the griffin; and, lastly, we have the serpent-headed _saza_.

Scarcely visible even by glimpses, they were not easily depicted; their real forms being often unknown, these were approximately conjectured from their occupations.

The character and costume of an archer, or of a spear-man, were ascribed to such as roamed through Hades, to pierce the dead with arrows or with javelins.

Those who prowled around souls to cut their throats and hack them to pieces were represented as women armed with knives, carvers--_donît_--or else as lacerators--_nokit_.

Some appeared in human form; others as animals--bulls or lions, rams or monkeys, serpents, fish, ibises, hawks; others dwelt in inanimate things, such as trees,[*] sistrums, stakes stuck in the ground;[**] and lastly, many betrayed a mixed origin in their combinations of human and animal forms.

These latter would be regarded by us as monsters; to the Egyptians, they were beings, rarer perhaps than the rest, but not the less real, and their like might be encountered in the neighbourhood of Egypt.

[***] * Thus, the sycamores planted on the edge of the desert were supposed to be inhabited by Hâthor, Nûît, Selkît, Nît, or some other goddess.

In vignettes representing the deceased as stopping before one of these trees and receiving water and loaves of bread, the bust of the goddess generally appears from amid her sheltering foliage.

But occasionally, as on the sarcophagus of Petosiris, the transformation is complete, and the trunk from which the branches spread is the actual body of the god or goddess.

Finally, the whole body is often hidden, and only the arm of the goddess to be seen emerging from the midst of the tree, with an overflowing libation vase in her hand.

** The trunk of a tree, disbranched, and then set up in the ground, seems to me the origin of the Osirian emblem called _tat_ or _didu_.

The symbol was afterwards so conventionalized as to represent four columns seen in perspective, one capital overtopping another; it thus became the image of the four pillars which uphold the world.

*** The belief in the real existence of fantastic animals was first noted by Maspero, _Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie Égyptiennes_, vol. i.

pp. 117, 118, 132, and vol. ii.

p. 213. Until then, scholars only recognized the sphinx, and other Egyptian monsters, as allegorical combinations by which the priesthood claimed to give visible expression in one and the same being to physical or moral qualities belonging to several different beings.

The later theory has now been adopted by Wiedemann, and by most contemporary Egyptologists.

How could men who believed themselves surrounded by sphinxes and griffins of flesh and blood doubt that there were bull-headed and hawk-headed divinities with human busts?

The existence of such paradoxical creatures was proved by much authentic testimony; more than one hunter had distinctly seen them as they ran along the furthest planes of the horizon, beyond the herds of gazelles of which he was in chase; and shepherds dreaded them for their flocks as truly as they dreaded the lions, or the great felidse of the desert.

[*] * At Beni-Hassan and in Thebes many of the fantastic animals mentioned in the text, griffins, hierosphinxes, serpent- headed lions, are placed along with animals which might be encountered by local princes hunting in the desert.

This nation of gods, like nations of men, contained foreign elements, the origin of which was known to the Egyptians themselves.

They knew that Hâthor, the milch cow, had taken up her abode in their land from very ancient times, and they called her the Lady of Pûanît, after the name of her native country.

Bîsû had followed her in course of time, and claimed his share of honours and worship along with her.

He first appeared as a leopard; then he became a man clothed in a leopard's skin, but of strange countenance and alarming character, a big-headed dwarf with high cheek-bones, and a wide and open mouth, whence hung an enormous tongue; he was at once jovial and martial, the friend of the dance and of battle.

[*] * The hawk-headed monster with flower-tipped tail was called the saga.

In historic times all nations subjugated by the Pharaohs transferred some of their principal divinities to their conquerors, and the Libyan Shehadidi was enthroned in the valley of the Nile, in the same way as the Semitic Baâlû and his retinue of Astartes, Anitis, Eeshephs, and Kadshûs. These divine colonists fared like all foreigners who have sought to settle on the banks of the Nile: they were promptly assimilated, wrought, moulded, and made into Egyptian deities scarcely distinguishable from those of the old race.

This mixed pantheon had its grades of nobles, princes, kings, and each of its members was representative of one of the elements constituting the world, or of one of the forces which regulated its government.

[Illustration: 113. jpb SOME FABULOUS BEASTS OF THE EGYPTIAN DESERT 1] 1 Bîsû, pp. 111-184. The tail-piece to the summary of this chapter is a figure of Bîsû, drawn by Faucher-Gudin from an amulet in blue enamelled pottery.

The sky, the earth, the stars, the sun, the Nile, were so many breathing and thinking beings whose lives were daily manifest in the life of the universe.

They were worshipped from one end of the valley to the other, and the whole nation agreed in proclaiming their sovereign power.

But when the people began to name them, to define their powers and attributes, to particularize their forms, or the relationships that subsisted among them, this unanimity was at an end.

Each principality, each nome, each city, almost every village, conceived and represented them differently.

Some said that the sky was the Great Horus, Haroêris, the sparrow-hawk of mottled plumage which hovers in highest air, and whose gaze embraces the whole field of creation.

Owing to a punning assonance between his name and the word _horû_, which designates the human countenance, the two senses were combined, and to the idea of the sparrow-hawk there was added that of a divine face, whose two eyes opened in turn, the right eye being the sun, to give light by day, and the left eye the moon, to illumine the night.

The face shone also with a light of its own, the zodiacal light, which appeared unexpectedly, morning or evening, a little before sunrise, and a little after sunset.

These luminous beams, radiating from a common centre, hidden in the heights of the firmament, spread into a wide pyramidal sheet of liquid blue, whose base rested upon the earth, but whose apex was slightly inclined towards the zenith.

The divine face was symmetrically framed, and attached to earth by four thick locks of hair; these were the pillars which upbore the firmament and prevented its falling into ruin.

A no less ancient tradition disregarded as fabulous all tales told of the sparrow-hawk, or of the face, and taught that heaven and earth are wedded gods, Sibû, and Nûît, from whose marriage came forth all that has been, all that is, and all that shall be.

[Illustration: 115. jpg NÛÎT THE STARRY ONE.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a painted coffin of the XXIth dynasty in Leyden.

Most people invested them with human form, and represented the earth-god Sibû as extended beneath Nûît the Starry One; the goddess stretched out her arms, stretched out her slender legs, stretched out her body above the clouds, and her dishevelled head drooped westward.

But there were also many who believed that Sibû was concealed under the form of a colossal gander, whose mate once laid the Sun Egg, and perhaps still laid it daily.

From the piercing cries wherewith he congratulated her, and announced the good news to all who cared to hear it--after the manner of his kind--he had received the flattering epithet of _Ngagu oîrû_, the Great Cack-ler.

Other versions repudiated the goose in favour of a vigorous bull, the father of gods and men, whose companion was a cow, a large-eyed Hâthor, of beautiful countenance.

The head of the good beast rises into the heavens, the mysterious waters which cover the world flow along her spine; the star-covered underside of her body, which we call the firmament, is visible to the inhabitants of earth, and her four legs are the four pillars standing at the four cardinal points of the world.

[Illustration: 116. jpg THE GOOSE-GOD FACING THE CAT-GODDESS, THE LADY OF HEAVEN.

1] 1 Drawn by Faucher-Gudin, from a stella in the museum of Gîzeh.

This is not the goose of Sibû, but the goose of Amon, which was nurtured in the temple of Karnak, and was called Smonû.

Pacing it is the cat of Maût, the wife of Amon.

Amon, originally an earth-god, was, as we see, confounded with Sibû, and thus naturally appropriated that deity's form of a goose.

The planets, and especially the sun, varied in form and nature according to the prevailing conception of the heavens.

The fiery disk _Atonû_, by which the sun revealed himself to men, was a living god, called Râ, as was also the planet itself.

[*] Where the sky was regarded as Horus, Râ formed the right eye of the divine face: when Horus opened his eyelids in the morning, he made the dawn and day; when he closed them in the evening, the dusk and night were at hand.

* The name of Râ has been variously explained.

The commonest etymology is that deriving the name from a verb râ, _to give, to make to be_ a person or a thing, so that Râ would thus be the great organizer, the author of all things.

Lauth goes so far as to say that "notwithstanding its brevity, Râ is a composite word (r-a, _maker--to be_)" As a matter of fact, the word is simply the name of the planet applied to the god.

It means the _sun_, and nothing more.

[Illustration: 117. jpg THE COW HÂTHOR, THE LADY OP HEAVEN.

3] 3 Drawn by Boudier, from a XXXth dynasty statue of green basalt in the Gîzeh Museum (Maspero, _Guide du Visiteur_, p. 345, No. 5243).

The statue was also published by Mariette, _Monuments divers_, pl.

96 A-B, and in the _Album photographique du Musée de Boulaq_, pl.

x.

Where the sky was looked upon as the incarnation of a goddess, Râ was considered as her son,[**] his father being the earth-god, and he was born again with every new dawn, wearing a sidelock, and with his finger to his lips as human children were conventionally represented.

** Several passages from the Pyramid texts prove that the _two eyes_ were very anciently considered as belonging to the face of Nûît, and this conception persisted to the last days of Egyptian paganism.

Hence, we must not be surprised if the inscriptions generally represent the god Râ as coming forth from Nûît under the form of a disc, or a scarabaeus, and born of her even as human children are born.

He was also that luminous egg, laid and hatched in the East by the celestial goose, from which the sun breaks forth to fill the world with its rays.

[**] ** These are the very expressions used in the seventeenth chapter of the _Book of the Dead_ (Naville's edition, vol. i.

pl.

xxv.

lines 58-61; Lepsius, _Todtenbuch_, pl.

ix.

11. 50, 51).

[Illustration: 118. jpg THE TWELVE STAGES IN THE LIFE OF THE SUN AND ITS TWELVE FORMS THROUGHOUT THE DAY.

1] 1 The twelve forms of the sun during the twelve hours of the day, from the ceiling of the Hall of the New Year at Edfu.

Drawing by Faucher-Gudin.

Nevertheless, by an anomaly not uncommon in religions, the egg did not always contain the same kind of bird; a lapwing, or a heron, might come out of it,[*] or perhaps, in memory of Horus, one of the beautiful golden sparrow-hawks of Southern Egypt.

A Sun-Hawk, hovering in high heaven on outspread wings, at least presented a bold and poetic image;

but what can be said for a Sun-Calf?

Yet it is under the innocent aspect of a spotted calf, a "sucking calf of pure mouth,"[**] that the Egyptians were pleased to describe the Sun-God when Sibu, the father, was a bull, and Hâthor a heifer.

* The lapwing or the heron, the Egyptian _bonû_, is generally the Osirian bird.

The persistence with which it is associated with Heliopolis and the gods of that city shows that in this also we have a secondary form of Râ.

** The calf is represented in ch. cix.

of the _Book of the Dead_ (Naville's edition, pl.

cxx.

), where the text says (lines 10, 11), "I know that this calf is Harmakhis the Sun, and that it is no other than the Morning Star, daily saluting Râ."

The expression "_sucking calf of pure mouth_" is taken word for word from a formula preserved in the Pyramid texts (Ûnas, 1. 20).

But the prevalent conception was that in which the life of the sun was likened to the life of man.

The two deities presiding over the East received the orb upon their hands at its birth, just as midwives receive a new-born child, and cared for it during the first hour of the day and of its life.

It soon left them, and proceeded "under the belly of Nûît," growing and strengthening from minute to minute, until at noon it had become a triumphant hero whose splendour is shed abroad over all.

But as night comes on his strength forsakes him and his glory is obscured; he is bent and broken down, and heavily drags himself along like an old man leaning upon his stick.

At length he passes away beyond the horizon, plunging westward into the mouth of Nûît, and traversing her body by night to be born anew the next morning, again to follow the paths along which he had travelled on the preceding day.

A first bark, the _saktit_, awaited him at his birth, and carried him from the Eastern to the Southern extremity of the world.

_Mâzît_, the second bark, received him at noon, and bore him into the land of Manu, which is at the entrance into Hades; other barks, with which we are less familiar, conveyed him by night, from his setting until his rising at morn.

[*] Sometimes he was supposed to enter the barks alone, and then they were magic and self-directed, having neither oars, nor sails, nor helm.

[**] * In the formulæ of the _Book of Knowing that which is in Hades_, the dead sun remains in the bark Saktit during part of the night, and it is only to traverse the fourth and fifth hours that he changes into another.

** Such is the bark of the sun in the other world.

Although carrying a complete crew of gods, yet for the most part it progresses at its own will, and without their help.

The bark containing the sun alone is represented in many vignettes of the _Book of the Dead_, and at the head of many stelæ.

Sometimes they were equipped with a full crew, like that of an Egyptian boat--a pilot at the prow to take soundings in the channel and forecast the wind, a pilot astern to steer, a quartermaster in the midst to transmit the orders of the pilot at the prow to the pilot at the stern, and half a dozen sailors to handle poles or oars.

Peacefully the bark glided along the celestial river amid the acclamations of the gods who dwelt upon its shores.

But, occasionally, Apôpi, a gigantic serpent, like that which hides within the earthly Nile and devours its banks, came forth from the depth of the waters and arose in the path of the god.

[*] As soon as they caught sight of it in the distance, the crew flew to arms, and entered upon the struggle against him with prayers and spear-thrusts.

Men in their cities saw the sun faint and fail, and sought to succour him in his distress; they cried aloud, they were beside themselves with excitement, beating their breasts, sounding their instruments of music, and striking with all their strength upon every metal vase or utensil in their possession, that their clamour might rise to heaven and terrify the monster.

After a time of anguish, Râ emerged from the darkness and again went on his way, while Apôpi sank back into the abyss,[**] paralysed by the magic of the gods, and pierced with many a wound.

* In Upper Egypt there is a widespread belief in the existence of a monstrous serpent, who dwells at the bottom of the river, and is the genius of the Nile.

It is he who brings about those falls of earth (_batabît_) at the decline of the inundation which often destroy the banks and eat whole fields.

At such times, offerings of durrah, fowls, and dates are made to him, that his hunger may be appeased, and it is not only the natives who give themselves up to these superstitious practices.

Part of the grounds belonging to the Karnak hotel at Luxor having been carried away during the autumn of 1884, the manager, a Greek, made the customary offerings to the serpent of the Nile.

** The character of Apôpi and of his struggle with the sun was, from the first, excellently defined by Champollion as representing the conflict of darkness with light.

Occasionally, but very rarely, Apôpi seems to win, and his triumph over Râ furnishes one explanation of a solar eclipse.

A similar explanation is common to many races.

In one very ancient form of the Egyptian legend, the sun is represented by a wild ass running round the world along the sides of the mountains that uphold the sky, and the serpent which attacks it is called _Haiû_.

Apart from these temporary eclipses, which no one could foretell, the Sun-King steadily followed his course round the world, according to laws which even his will could not change.

Day after day he made his oblique ascent from east to south, thence to descend obliquely towards the west.

During the summer months the obliquity of his course diminished, and he came closer to Egypt; during the winter it increased, and he went farther away.

This double movement recurred with such regularity from equinox to solstice, and from solstice to equinox, that the day of the god's departure and the day of his return could be confidently predicted.

The Egyptians explained this phenomenon according to their conceptions of the nature of the world.

The solar bark always kept close to that bank of the celestial river which was nearest to men; and when the river overflowed at the annual inundation, the sun was carried along with it outside the regular bed of the stream, and brought yet closer to Egypt.

As the inundation abated, the bark descended and receded, its greatest distance from earth corresponding with the lowest level of the waters.

It was again brought back to us by the rising strength of the next flood; and, as this phenomenon was yearly repeated, the periodicity of the sun's oblique movements was regarded as the necessary consequence of the periodic movements of the celestial Nile.