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

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СКАЧАТЬ stones from India and Ethiopia; the shrine within it is veiled by a curtain wrought with gold. But if you pass beyond into the remotest part of the enclosure in the expectation of beholding something yet more excellent, and look for the image which dwells in the temple, a pastophorus or some other minister, singing a pæan in the Egyptian language with a pompous air, draws aside a small portion of the curtain, as if about to show us the god; and makes us burst into a loud laugh. For no god is found therein, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent sprung from the soil, or some such brute animal … and the Egyptian deity is revealed as a beast that rolls itself on a purple coverlet.”

      St. Clement was a Christian philosopher and apologist, but the animal worship of the Egyptians was quite as much an object of ridicule to the pagan writers of Greece and Rome. “Who has not heard,” says Juvenal (Sat. [pg 101] xv.)—“who has not heard, where Egypt's realms are named—

      “What monster gods her frantic sons have framed?

      Here Ibis gorged with well-grown serpents, there

      The crocodile commands religious fear; …

      And should you leeks or onions eat, no time

      Would expiate the sacrilegious crime;

      Religious nations sure, and blest abodes,

      Where every orchard is o'errun with gods!”

      A Roman soldier who had accidentally killed a cat was torn to pieces by the mob before the eyes of Diodorus, although the Romans were at the time masters of the country, and the reigning Ptolemy did his utmost to save the offender.66 For the majority of the people the cat was an incarnate god.

      This worship of animals was a grievous puzzle to the philosophers of the classical age. The venerable antiquity of Egypt, the high level of its moral code, and, above all, the spiritual and exalted character of so much of its religion, had deeply impressed the thinking world of the Roman Empire. That world had found, in a blending of Egyptian religious ideas with Greek metaphysics, a key to the mysteries of life and death; in the so-called Hermetic books the old beliefs and religious conceptions of Egypt were reduced to a system and interpreted from a Greek point of view, while the Neo-Platonic philosophy was an avowed attempt to combine the symbolism of Egypt with the subtleties of Greek thought. But the animal worship was hard to reconcile with philosophy; even symbolism failed to explain it away, or to satisfy the mind of the inquirer. Plutarch had boldly denied that the worship of an animal was in any way more absurd than that of an image; the deity, if so he chose, could manifest himself in either [pg 102] equally well. Porphyry had recourse to the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. If the soul migrated after death into the body of some lower animal, he urged, it would communicate to the latter a portion of the divine essence. But after all this was no explanation of the worship paid to the animal; the soul had not been worshipped while it was still in the body of its original possessor, and there was therefore no reason why it should be worshipped when it was embodied in another form. Moreover, metempsychosis in the Greek sense was never an Egyptian doctrine. All the Egyptian held was that the soul, after it had been justified and admitted to a state of blessedness, could enter for a time whatever material form it chose; could fly to heaven, for instance, in the body of a swallow, or return to the mummified body in which it had once dwelt. But such embodiments were merely temporary, and matters of free choice; they were like a garment, which the soul could put on and take off at will.

      Modern writers have found it as difficult to explain the animal worship of ancient Egypt as the philosophers and theologians of Greece and Rome. Creuzer declared that it was the result of a poverty of imagination, and that the beasts were worshipped because they embodied certain natural phenomena. Lenormant argued, on the other hand, that it was due to a high spiritual conception of religion, which prevented the Egyptians from adoring lifeless rocks and stones like the other nations of antiquity. Of late the tendency has been to see in it a sort of totemism which prevailed among the aboriginal population of the country, and was tolerated by the higher religion of the Pharaonic immigrants. In this case it would represent the religion of the prehistoric race or races, and its admittance into the official religion would be paralleled by the history of Braḥmanism, which [pg 103] has similarly tolerated the cults and superstitions of the aboriginal tribes of India. Indeed, it is possible to discover an analogous procedure in the history of Christianity itself. The lower beliefs and forms of worship can be explained away wherever needful with the help of symbolism and allegory, while the mass of the people are left in the undisturbed enjoyment of the religious ideas and rites of their forefathers.

      Recent discoveries, however, have cast a new light on the matter. The early monuments of Egyptian history, found in the neolithic graves and among the remains of the first dynasties, have shown that the animal worship of Egypt was only part of a larger system. Slate plaques, on which are represented the actions of Pharaohs who preceded Menes or were his immediate successors, prove that the prevailing system of religion must have been one closely akin to African fetishism. The gods appear frequently, but they always appear under the form of what in later times were regarded as their symbols. Sometimes the symbol is an animal or bird, but sometimes also it is a lifeless object. The human forms, to which we are accustomed in later Egyptian art, are absent;67 there is nothing to tell us that the religion of the time was in any way distinguished from the fetishism of Dahomey or the Congo.

      Thus on a slate plaque from Kom el-Aḥmar (opposite El-Kab68) we see the Pharaoh entering the hall in which lie the bodies of his decapitated foes, while four standards are borne before him. On the first two are the hawks of Horus, on the third the jackal of Anubis, on the last [pg 104] an object which may be intended for a lock of hair.69 On the reverse of the plaque the god is bringing before him the prisoners of the north. But the god is a hawk, whose human hand grasps the rope by which the conquered enemy is dragged along. On a plaque of equally early date, found at Abydos, five standards are depicted, the foot of each of which is shaped like a hand holding a rope. Above the first two standards are the jackals of Anubis, on the next the ibis of Thoth, then the hawk of Horus, and, finally, the curious object which is the emblem of Min. On a still older plaque from the same locality the names of the cities ruled (or conquered) by the Pharaoh are inscribed, each within its battlemented wall, while above is the animal god by which it is said to be “beloved” or perhaps “destroyed.” The last of the cities is “the royal” capital, above which stand the two hawks of Horus, who are perched on the standards of the king; behind it are the names of the other towns under the protection of the scorpion of Selk, the lion of Sekhet, and the hawk of Horus.70

      But we can trace the standards and the symbols upon [pg 105] them still farther back. M. de Morgan has pointed out that the rude and primitive boats painted on the pottery of the prehistoric graves have their prows ornamented with standards which are precisely the same in shape as the standards that were borne before the Pharaoh. On the top of one is perched a hippopotamus, on another a fish; on another is a flowering branch, on another the sail of a ship.71 We may conclude, therefore, that both standards and symbols were characteristic of the older population of the country whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found when they entered it. But the symbols had no connection with any kind of writing; we look in vain, either on the pottery or on any other object of prehistoric art, for hieroglyphic signs. The standard may have been adopted by the invading race from their conquered subjects, and so introduced into their system of writing; originally it was nothing but a primeval flagstaff at the prow of a boat. And, like the flagstaff, the symbol that served as a flag must have been of aboriginal invention.

      Such, then, is the conclusion to which we are led by the newly-found monuments of early Egypt. On the Pharaonic monuments of that remote age the gods are not yet human; they are still represented by animals and other fetishes. And these fetishes have been borrowed from the older population of the valley of the Nile, along with the so-called standard on the top of which they were placed.

      The standard with the emblem upon it denoted a nome in the historical days of Egypt. The emblem СКАЧАТЬ