Part 7 (1/2)

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 s.h.i.+nest 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 wors.h.i.+p 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 (_s.h.i.+_) 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.