The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia. A. H. Sayce

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СКАЧАТЬ uplifted. And the name of Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis, “the Horus who issues from the two horizons,” must be quite as old as the monument of Nekhen. What the two horizons were is shown us by the hieroglyph which depicts them. They were the twin mountains between which the sun came forth at dawn, and between which he again passes at sunset.

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      The hieroglyph belongs to the very beginning of Pharaonic Egyptian history. It may have been brought by the Pharaonic immigrants from their old home in the East. It is at least noticeable that in the Sumerian language of primitive Babylonia the horizon was called kharra or khurra, a word which corresponds letter for letter with the name of Horus. The fact may, of course, be accidental, and the name of the Egyptian god may really be derived from the same root as that from which the word for “heaven” has come, and which means “to be high.” But the conception of the twin-mountains between which the sun-god comes forth every morning, and between which he passes again at nightfall, is of Babylonian origin. On early Babylonian seal-cylinders we see him stepping through the door, the two leaves of which have been flung back by its warders on either side of the mountains, while rays of glory shoot upward from his shoulders. The mountains were called Mas, “the twins,” in Sumerian; and the great Epic of Chaldæa narrated how the hero Gilgames made his way to them across the desert, to a land of darkness, where scorpion-men, whose heads rise to heaven while their breasts descend to hell, watched over the rising and the setting of the sun. It is difficult to believe that such a conception of the horizon could ever have arisen in Egypt. There the Delta is a flat plain with no hills even in sight, while in the valley of Upper Egypt there are neither high mountains nor twin peaks.

      Horus himself is, I believe, to be found in the Babylonian inscriptions. Mention is occasionally made in them of a god Khar or Khur, and in contracts of the time of Khammurabi (b.c. 2200) we find the name of Abi-Khar, “my father is Khar.” But the age of Khammurabi was one of intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt, and the god Khar or Horus is therefore probably [pg 080] borrowed from Egypt, just as a seal-cylinder informs us was the case with Anupu or Anubis.50

      But though the name of Khar or Khur is and must remain Egyptian, Horus has much in common with the Babylonian sun-god Nin-ip. They are both warrior-gods; and just as the followers of Horus were workers in iron, so Nin-ip also was the god of iron. One of his titles, moreover, is that of “the southern sun”; and on a boundary-stone the eagle standing on a perch is stated to be “the symbol of the southern sun.”51

      The goddess with whom Horus of Nekhen was associated was Nekheb with the vulture's head. Her temple stood opposite Nekhen at El-Kab on the eastern bank of the Nile, and at the end of the long road which led across the desert from the Red Sea. It was at once a sanctuary and a fortress defending Nekhen on the east. But Nekheb was the goddess not only of Nekhen, but of all Southern Egypt. We find her in the earliest inscriptions on the sacred island of Sehêl in the Cataract, where she is identified with the local goddess Sati. We find her again at Thebes under the name of Mut, “the mother.” Her supremacy, in fact, went back to the days when Nekhen was the capital of the south, and its goddess accordingly shared with it the privileges of domination. When Nekhen fell back into the position of a small provincial town, Nekheb also participated in its decline. Under the Theban dynasties, it is true, the name of Mut of Karnak became honoured throughout Egypt, but her origin by that time had been forgotten. The Egyptian who brought his offering to Mut never [pg 081] realised that behind the mask of Mut lay the features of Nekheb of Nekhen.

      Mut, however, continued to wear the vulture form, and the titles assumed by the king still preserved a recollection of the time when Nekheb was the presiding goddess of the kingdom of the south. From the days of Menes onward, in the title of “king of Upper and Lower Egypt,” while the serpent of Uazit symbolised the north, the vulture of Nekheb symbolised the south. At times, indeed, the uræus of Uazit is transferred to Nekheb; but that was at an epoch when it had come to signify “goddess,” as the Horus-hawk signified “god.” From the earliest ages, however, the plant which denoted the south, and formed part of the royal title, was used in writing her name. She was emphatically “the southerner,” the mistress of the south, just as her consort, the mummified Horus, was its lord.

      The euhemerising legends of Edfu made Horus the faithful vassal of his liege lord Ra Harmakhis of Heliopolis. But from a historical point of view the relations between the two gods ought to have been reversed, and the legends themselves contained a reminiscence that such was the case. In describing the victorious march of Horus and his followers towards the north, they tell us how he made his way past Heliopolis into the Delta, and even established one of his “forges” on its easternmost borders. The Horus kings of Upper Egypt made themselves masters of the northern kingdom, introducing into it the divine hawk they worshipped and the Horus title over their names.

      The sun-god of Heliopolis was represented, like the gods of Babylonia, as a man and not as a hawk. He was known as Tum or Atmu, who, in the later days of religious syncretism, was distinguished from the other forms of the sun-god as representing the setting sun. [pg 082] But Tum was the personal name of the sun-god; the sun itself was called Ra. As time went on, the attributes of the god were transferred to the sun; Ra, too, became divine, and, after being first a synonym of Tum, ended by becoming an independent deity. While Tum was peculiarly the setting sun, Ra denoted the sun-god in all his forms and under all his manifestations. He was thus fitted to be the common god of all Egypt, with whom the various local sun-gods could be identified, and lose in him their individuality. Ra was a word which meant “the sun” in all the dialects of the country, and its very want of theological associations made it the starting-point of a new phase of religious thought.

      It was not until the rise of the Twelfth Dynasty that a special temple was built to Ra in Heliopolis.52 Up to that time Ra had been content to share with Tum the ancient temple of the city, or rather had absorbed Tum into himself and thus become its virtual possessor. But his religious importance goes back to prehistoric times. The temple of Heliopolis became the centre of a theological school which exercised a great influence on the official religion of Egypt. It was here that the sun-worship was organised, and the doctrine of creation by generation or emanation first developed; it was here, too, that the chief gods of the State religion were formed into groups of nine.53

      The doctrine of these Enneads or groups of nine was destined to play an important part in the official creed. From Heliopolis it spread to other parts of Egypt, and eventually each of the great sanctuaries had its own [pg 083] Ennead, formed on the model of that of Heliopolis. At Heliopolis the cycle of the nine supreme gods contained Shu and Tefnut, Seb and Mut, Osiris and Isis, Set and Nebhât, the four pairs who had descended by successive acts of generation from Tum, the original god of the nome. We owe the explanation and analysis of the Ennead to Professor Maspero, who has for the first time made the origin of it clear.54

      Tum, who is always represented in human form, was the ancient sun-god and tutelary deity of Heliopolis. To him was ascribed the creation of the world, just as it was ascribed by each of the other nomes to their chief god. But whereas at the Cataract the creator was a potter who had made things from clay, or at Memphis an artist who had carved them out of stone, so it was as a father and generator that Tum had called the universe into being. In the Book of the Dead it is said of him that he is “the creator of the heavens, the maker of (all) existences, who has begotten all that there is, who gave birth to the gods, who created himself, the lord of life who bestows upon the gods the strength of youth.” An origin, however, was found for him in Nu, the primeval abyss of waters, though it is possible that Professor Maspero may be right in thinking that Nu really owes his existence to the goddess Nut, and that he was introduced into the cosmogony of Heliopolis under the influence of Asiatic ideas. However this may be, Shu and Tefnut, who immediately emanated from him, apparently represented the air. Later art pictured them in Asiatic style as twin lions sitting back to back and supporting between them the rising or setting sun.55 But an old [pg 084] legend described Shu as having raised the heavens above the earth, where he still keeps them suspended above him like the Greek Atlas. A text at Esna, which identifies him with Khnum, describes him as sustaining СКАЧАТЬ