Volume I Part 8 (2/2)

Take, for a moment, the bird to which we have just alluded The hawk, like the vulture, plays an iyptian art The vulture syn by which her name is written, and sometimes, as the symbol of maternity, its head appears over the brow of the Goddess, its wings for her head-dress The Goddess Nekheb, who syion of the South, is also represented by a vulture[79] So it is with the ibis

It supplies the character by which the naured with the head of an Ibis The part played by these birds in the representation of the Gods, both in the plastic arts and in writing, is to be explained by the sentiious veneration of which they were the objects, sentiments which were the natural outcome of the practical services which they rendered to yptienne_

[Illustration: FIG 43--Rannu (from Wilkinson)]

When the early fathers of the nation first established themselves upon the banks of the Nile, they found invaluable allies in those energetic birds of prey, and the alliance has been continued to their latest descendants After the annual inundation the das, by snakes and lizards and all kinds of creeping things Fishes, left by the retreating flood in pools which were soon dried up by the blazing sun, perished, and, deco, rendered the air noisome and malarious In addition to this there were the corpses of wild and domestic animals, and the offal of every kind which accus of the peasantry and rapidly becaypt If left to decompose they would soon have bred a pestilence, and in those days human effort was not to be reckoned upon in the work of sanitation To birds of prey, then, was assigned the indispensable work of elimination and transformation, an office which they yet fill satisfactorily in the towns and villages of Africa Thanks to their appetite and to the powerful wings which carried the to wherever their presence was required, the multiplication of the inferior ani anic life

Had these unpaid scavengers but struck work for a day, the plague, as Michelet puts it, would soon have become the only inhabitant of the country[80]

[80] See in _L'Oiseau_ the chapter-headed _L'epuration_ With his genius for history and poetry Michelet has well understood the sentiave birth to these pri provoked unjust contempt The whole of this beautiful chapter should be read; we shall only quote a few lines: ”In Ayptian law does still h they no longer enjoy their ancient worshi+p, they receive the friendly hospitality of yptian fellah why he allows hied and deafened by birds, why he patiently suffers the insolence of the crow perched upon the horn of the buffalo, on the hu down the fruit, he will say nothing Birds are allowed to do anything Older than the Pyramids, they are the ancients of the country Man's existence depends upon the labour of the ibis, the stork, the crow and the vulture”

[Illustration: FIG 44--Horus; froht 38 inches)]

The worshi+p of the hawk, the vulture, and the ibis, had, then, preceded by many centuries that of the Gods who correspond to the personages of the hellenic pantheon Rooted by long custom in the minds of the people, it did not excite the ire of the wise men of Heliopolis or Thebes The doctrine of emanation and of successive incarnations of the deity, per, even those things which at a later epoch seerossest creations of popular superstition

These objects of veneration were therefore enabled to maintain their places by the side of the superior Gods, to represent them in written characters and in plastic creations, and, in the latter case, to be blended with the forms of man himself To us, accustomed as we are to the types created by Greek anthropoyptians they seemed perfectly natural, for they offered the characteristic features of the animals which they had loved, respected, and adored ever since the birth of their civilization

[Illustration: FIG 45--Thoth Louvre Enamelled clay Actual size]

It is difficult for us to see things with the same eyes as the contemporaries of Cheops or even of Rameses; to enter into their ideas and sentiments so as to feel with them and to think with their brains

Let us attempt to do so for a moment; let us make one of those intellectual efforts which are demanded from the historian, and we shall then understand hoas, that the Egyptians were not offended by a combination of two classes of forms which, to us, seenity The deity took the form of an animal and revealed himself in it, just as he took that of a man, or of a statue which he was supposed to animate, and to which he was attached In one of hisessays, M Maspero explains that the sacred ani, the son of Amen; like the statue fashi+oned by the hands of a sculptor--the th and support of his life, his _double_, to use an expression dear to the Egyptians

At Memphis, Apis repeated and constantly renewed the life of Ptah; he was, in a word, his living statue[81]

[81] MASPERO, _Notes sur differents Points de Grammaire et d'Histoire dans le Recueil de Travaux relatifs a la Philologie et a l'Archeologie egyptienne et assyrienne_, vol i p 157

Egyptian art was, then, the faithful and skilful interpretation of the ideas of the people What the Egyptians wished to say, that they did say with great clearness and a rare happiness of plastic expression

To accuse them, as they have been sometimes accused, of a want of taste, would be to forainst both the method and the spirit of inality and admires it, and all art which is at once powerful and sincere arouses its interest We do not, however, wish to deny that their conception of divinity is less favourable to the plastic arts than the anthropouishi+ng one God fro to each, as his exclusive property, the head of some well-known anin rendered the task of the artist too easy, in giving hilance without any particular effort on his part

[Illustration: FIG 46--Sacrifice to Apis, from Mariette]

The value of an artistic result is in proportion to the difficulty of its achieve beyond the bodily forive a distinct individuality to each God and Goddess of his ed to make use of the most delicate and subtle distinctions of feature and contour This necessity was a great incentive to perfection; it drove hiy which, unhappily for hiyptian sculptor or painter

Art and religion have ever been so closely allied that it was necessary that we should give soyptian beliefs, but we shall make no attempt to describe, or even to enuyptian pantheon; such an atten to the purposes which we have in view We have, however, already ypt, and we shall have occasion to draw the attention of our readers to others, in speaking of the tombs and temples, the statues and bas-reliefs, of the country Now, each of these Gods began by being no more than the local divinity of sorew in importance, so did its peculiar God, and sos and a divinity were iypt by the power of e may call their native city In the course of time a number of successive deities thus held the supreme place, each of whonity which he had acquired during his period of supreyptian unity, had their capital in the nome of Abydos, the nome which contained the ton that, from one end to the other of the Nile valley, spread the worshi+p of that God; of that Osiris ith Isis, seeyptians co dynasties, whose capital was Memphis, Ptah rose into the first place; but, as if by a kind of coreat God of Abydos under the names of Ptah-Osiris and Ptah-Sokar-Osiris Toum, the chief deity of Heliopolis, never rose above the second rank because Heliopolis itself was neither a royal city nor even the birthplace of any powerful dynasty During all this period we hear nothing of Amen, the local deity of Thebes; his name is hardly to be found upon any monument earlier than the eleventh dynasty, but, with the rise of the Theban e the domination of the Hyksos, their national deity, Soutekh or Set, overshadowed the ancient divinities of the soil; but the final victory of Thebes under Ahmes I installed Anificent tes of the brilliant Theban dynasties

His successor would no doubt have been Aten, the solar disc, had Tell-el-Amarna, the new capital of Aurated, enjoyed a less epheained their supreravity was transported to the Delta, the local deities of the district, and especially Neith, conquered the first place in the religious sentiments of the people Under the Persians they returned to Aive back to the nation its former independence and power Under the Ptolemies, Horus and Hathor were in the ascendant, and later still, under the Roman emperors, the worshi+p of the Isis of Philae becaed in that island sanctuary until the sixth century of our era

[82] HERODOTUS, ii 42

The ypt was very different from e shall find in Greece We find no God, like that of the hellenes, whose pre-ein of the Aryan race, a pre-eminence which was never menaced or questioned;[83]

we find no Zeus, no Jupiter, whose Godhead was conceived froer and more purified spirit, until at last it was defined in the fas according to law” We have pointed out how greatly the Greek artists profited by their efforts to endow the piety of their country, which should be worthy of the popular faith in hiyptian artist could find no such inspiration in a long succession of Gods, no one of who supreme power in his hands No such ideal existed for theenius of the national poets created in the lord of Olyive birth to a Phidias; to an artist who should feel hienerations to produce a ious conception, to which the intelligence of the race had rees, should be realized in visible form

[83] JAMES DARMESTETER, _Le Dieu supreie indo-europeenne_ (in the _Revue de l'Histoire des Religions_, 1880)