Part 7 (2/2)
Also a small book, _The Religion of the Chinese_, 1910.
Beal, _Buddhism in China_, 1884.
Murray's _Guide to j.a.pan_.
J. Edkins' _Religion in China_, 1878, the account of a modern missionary, may be consulted.
On Taoism, Pfizmaier, _Die Losung der Leichname und Schwerter_, 1870; and _Die Tao-lehre von dem wahren Menschen und den Unsterblichen_, 1870. Julius Grill, _Lao-tsze's Buch vom hochsten Wesen und vom hochsten gut_. _Tao-te-King_, 1910. Vols. x.x.xix.-xl. of the _S.B.E._ give Taoist Texts.
Revon, _Le s.h.i.+ntoisme_, 1907.
CHAPTER IX THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
Egypt is a land of still more ancient civilisation than China, and its civilisation is of more interest to us, since from it the nations of the West obtained in part the seeds of their arts and sciences.
Even to antiquity everything Egyptian appeared venerable and mysterious, and the air of mystery is not yet removed from the country of the Nile. We have discovered the sources of the river and have learned to read the writing on Egyptian monuments; but the sphinx has other riddles than these--riddles not yet solved. Who are the Egyptians, and where did they come from? In ancient times they were thought to have descended from the interior of Africa; now the opinion gains ground that they were at a very early period connected with the ancestors of the Semitic races; their language is thought to show signs of this remote relations.h.i.+p. How, by whom, and when were they formed into a nation? No one can tell; they come before us four thousand years before Christ, a fully-formed nation, with an elaborately organised public service, and with a civilisation both broad and rich. And lastly, What is the religion of Egypt? What are the earliest G.o.ds of the land, and in what relation do the various G.o.ds which were wors.h.i.+pped in it stand to each other? That question cannot at the present time be fully answered. Even should it be proved, as it appears likely to be, that Egyptian civilisation was derived originally from Mesopotamia, much will still be dark and enigmatical. The foremost scholars in Egyptology confess that no history of Egyptian religion can as yet be written. Those who have tried to sketch it differ from each other as widely as possible, some alleging monotheism as its starting-point, and some the wors.h.i.+p of animals. The religion also comes into view at the early period we have mentioned as a fully-formed and stately public system, whose youthful struggles, if it had any, are long past. What is most peculiar in that religion is, that it embraces elements which appear at first sight to have nothing whatever in common, nay, to be quite irreconcilable with each other. We shall do well not to attempt any construction of Egyptian religion as a whole, but to content ourselves with examining one after another the various elements, almost amounting to different religions, which are found in it side by side. We shall no doubt learn something of the relations in which they stood to each other, but it may prove that we shall find ourselves unable to adopt any of the theological theories by which Egyptian priests or Greek philosophers sought to combine them in one system.
History and Literature.--The princ.i.p.al thing to be remembered, in order to understand the history of ancient Egypt, is that the country was divided into a number of provinces or nomes, which, there is every reason to think, were originally independent of each other. Of these nomes there were about twenty in Upper Egypt--that is, in the long gorge of the Nile from Elephantine in the south to Memphis in the north; and about the same number in Lower Egypt--that is, in the flatter country from Memphis to the sea. King Mena or Menes, founder of the first dynasty, whose date, if he was a historical character at all, and not a mythic founder like Minos of Crete, Manu of India, or Mannus of Germany, cannot be later than 3200 B.C., is said to have united for the first time the two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.
But though they became united under one ruler, the nomes never forgot their independence, nor did they cease to maintain their separate existence as states within the empire, each having its own army, its own ruler, its own system of taxation, its own wors.h.i.+p. The supreme power resided now in one nome and now in another. The first two dynasties belonged to that of Abydos; the succeeding dynasties, to which the earliest monuments belong, so that Egypt here begins its real history, had their seat at Memphis. The twelfth dynasty, which is known to us, but is both preceded and followed by a gap of half a millennium in Egyptian history, made Thebes the capital. Thebes was also the seat of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which came after the foreign domination of the shepherd kings, and under which Egypt was at the summit of its power. Ramses II. and his successors, the Pharaohs of the book of Genesis, belong to the nineteenth dynasty.
How splendid the Imperial Court of Egypt was at various periods, the monuments tell us; these palaces, temples, and tombs are in proportion to a power which considered itself to have the world at its feet, and to be the manifestation of the greatest G.o.ds.
Literature is at the same high level of development with the other arts, and writing is used for every branch of the public service.
This, the most ancient of the literatures of the world, is spread over the immense surfaces of ancient temples and tombs, and stored up in ma.s.ses of papyrus rolls, much of which is still to be explored.
Our knowledge of ancient Egypt and its religion is still in its infancy. The story of the decipherment of the various characters and of the recovery of the early language of Egypt is one of the most wonderful triumphs of scholars.h.i.+p. Only one remark, however, do we now make in connection with Egyptian writing, namely, that it ill.u.s.trates in a singular manner the conservatism of the Egyptian people, a feature of their character which is strikingly manifested in their religion also. The ancient Egyptian did not cast away an old usage when a new one, even a very superior one, had been introduced.
Long after metals had come into use, he still employed for various purposes, especially those connected with religion, implements of stone. The flint knives found in mummy-cases are connected with the work of embalming, and show the retention of an archaic usage. The same is true of the matter of writing. The earliest Egyptian writing was that which is called hieroglyphic, or picture-writing. In this system what is written down does not represent the sounds of words the writer uses, but the ideas in his mind; it is writing without words; a clumsy system we should say, and presenting the greatest possible difficulties to the reader. At a very early time, however, what is called hieratic writing was invented, in which the symbols used represent not things but sounds, though the symbols used are adapted from those of the earlier picture-writing. It is in this hieratic character that the great ma.s.s of Egyptian literature is preserved to us; but here again we find that the new system did not banish the old one from use. Especially in religious inscriptions and doc.u.ments, the matter is given both in the newer writing and in the older; the piece is written twice, first in hieroglyphic, the old and sacred form, and then in hieratic, the new form, which could be easily read. In the matter of different objects of wors.h.i.+p, too, it may perhaps be found that the same aversion to discard anything old and sacred manifests itself, the same disposition rather to carry on the old and the new together.
I. ANIMAL WORs.h.i.+P
We begin with that element in Egyptian religion which is to our eyes least rational. In the ages before and after the Christian era, when a number of Greek and Latin writers tell us about Egypt, we find that the religion of the country is described as consisting mainly in the wors.h.i.+p of animals. This excited the wonder of these writers in no small degree. Herodotus a.s.serts that the Egyptians counted all animals sacred, and gives a list of those which were specially wors.h.i.+pped. The hippopotamus, he says, is sacred at Papremis, the crocodile at Thebes; and some animals are sacred all over the country. He has much to tell of the manner in which the sacred animals are fed and tended, and of the honours paid to them at their death. Lucian says: ”In Egypt the temple is a building of great size and splendour, adorned with precious stones and decorated with gold and with inscriptions; but if you go in and look for the G.o.d, you find an ape or an ibis or a goat or a cat.” The same statement is made by Clement of Alexandria; and Celsus, the early Roman a.s.sailant of Christianity, speaks to the same effect. Thus the popular religion of Egypt, before and after the Christian era, had animals for its princ.i.p.al objects. A representative of the sacred species sat or crawled or hopped in the temple, and in that nome that animal was not eaten. In the nome in which the cat was sacred all cats were inviolable; any insult offered to a cat roused the whole population to frenzy, and one who killed a cat, even though he was a stranger in the place and unacquainted with its manners, forfeited his own life.
In the next nome the cat was not sacred but some other animal; and these local differences of religion might occasion war between one nome and another. Juvenal gives in his fifteenth satire an account of a religious war of old standing between two neighbouring nomes, each of which hated and insulted the animal which was wors.h.i.+pped in the other. This may explain why it was impossible for the Israelites to offer sacrifice to Jehovah in Egypt. They had to go out into the wilderness, off Egyptian soil, before they could sacrifice animals Egypt held sacred.
The wors.h.i.+p of a sacred animal in its own nome, a member of the species dwelling in the temple and the others enjoying respect and protection throughout that nome, this is the normal state of affairs.
Sometimes an individual animal acquires sacredness for Egypt generally, as the bull Apis of Memphis, the bull Mnevis of Heliopolis, or the goat of Mendes. These, though originally local deities, might obtain a wider reverence if the nome they belonged to rose to greater power. Animals of every size and kind were wors.h.i.+pped in Egypt. Besides the large animals we have mentioned, the ape, the dog, the little shrew-mouse, each had its local sacredness; also snakes, frogs, and various kinds of fishes. The beetle (_scarab_) can by no means be left without mention; and a number of trees and shrubs were also sacred,[1] but, very curiously, not the palm.
[Footnote 1: A very complete list of the sacred animals and trees will be found in Wilkinson's _Ancient Egyptians_, vol. iii. p. 258, _sqq._]
It will be observed that our account of Egyptian animal wors.h.i.+p is drawn from very late sources and applies to a late period of the religion. The religion of the earlier ages of Egypt is of quite a different kind; the kings and priests who wrote the inscriptions of the monuments tell us nothing about animal wors.h.i.+p. Is that because such wors.h.i.+p did not flourish in their day? Not necessarily. Perhaps they knew it well, but were not interested in it, or did not wish to encourage it. The Egyptians certainly did not believe the wors.h.i.+p of animals to have been a late innovation. Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote in the third century B.C., says that the wors.h.i.+p of animals was introduced under the second king of the second dynasty. That is as if we should say that an old custom of which we did not know the origin was introduced into Britain in the days of King Arthur. The priests of Manetho's day wished animal wors.h.i.+p to be considered a corruption of the original religion of their country, but they could not specify the time at which it had come in, and placed its origin in the mythical period of history. The story of Manetho therefore goes to prove that the origin of animal wors.h.i.+p is anterior to written records.
But we have other evidence to the same effect. The earliest representations of the deities of Egypt on the monuments testify in a way which can scarcely be mistaken that these great beings had originally some connection with members of the animal kingdom. The great G.o.ds of Egypt are designated on the monuments in three ways.
Their ultimate form is human, the G.o.d is a man or woman, and as the human figures of all the deities are drawn after one conventional male and one conventional female pattern, a symbol is added to the head to show which G.o.d or G.o.ddess is meant. Hathor is a woman with a cow's horns on her head, Seb has a duck on his head, and so on. But an earlier form of the written symbols of the deities is that which represents them partly in human and partly in animal form. Horus appears as a man with the head of a hawk, Hathor as a woman with the head and horns of a cow, Bast is a woman with the head of a cat, Osiris has the head of a bull or of an ibis, Chnum of a ram, Amon has the head now of a ram now of a hawk. Deities also occur with human bodies and the heads of mythical animals such as the phoenix. But along with these semi-human, semi-animal figures there are found still simpler symbols for the deities; they are drawn as animals. It is only about the twelfth dynasty that the change to the higher form takes place, but even after the step was made of representing the G.o.ds as half-human, the older pictures of them were not discarded, but placed side by side with the new ones. Thus we find on the same stone two representations of Horus, one of which gives him as a man with a hawk's head, while the other makes him simply a hawk; and similar double representations of the other G.o.ds occur. If the G.o.ds of Egypt were thus conceived and represented in the earliest times, then the animal wors.h.i.+p described by the Greek and Roman writers was not the invention of a late age of decadence, but had its roots at least far back in the past. The early G.o.ds of Egypt were animals, whatever else, whatever more they were. It may be that the animal wors.h.i.+p of the later and weaker Egyptian periods was a revival, such as takes place in weak periods, of a style of wors.h.i.+p which in earlier centuries had to a large extent disappeared in favour of a more spiritual faith.[2] Of this only an Egyptologist can judge, but at any rate animal wors.h.i.+p was not a new thing in Egypt, but a very old thing.
[Footnote 2: This is held by Le Page Renouf, in his Hibbert Lectures, _On the Origin and Growth of Religion, as Ill.u.s.trated by the Religion of Ancient Egypt_.]
Theories Accounting for Animal Wors.h.i.+p.--What did this wors.h.i.+p mean?
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