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

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СКАЧАТЬ of the nome, was incarnated in the bull Bakis.74 The sanctity of the bull is not difficult to understand among an agricultural people in an early stage of development. In India the bull is still sacred; and Sir Samuel Baker tells us that the tribes of the Upper Nile still abstain from eating the flesh of the ox. In Phrygia the slaughter of an ox was punishable with death;75 the first king of the country was supposed to have been a peasant, and his ox-drawn cart was preserved in the temple of Kybelê. Among the Egyptians themselves, as we have seen, the Pharaoh was symbolised under the form of a bull at the very beginning of history.

      The bull, then, must have been worshipped in the neighbourhood of Memphis and Heliopolis before it became the incarnation of Ptaḥ or Ra. It follows, moreover, that as yet it was no one particular bull to whom divine honours were paid; there was no one particular bull into whom the soul of one of the gods of the [pg 112] Pharaonic Egyptians had as yet entered, thus setting it apart from all others. The bull was still a fetish pure and simple; it was the whole species that was sacred, and not a single member of it.

      That this was indeed the case, is proved by a custom which lasted down to the latest times. Not only was the sacred bull or the sacred hawk mummified after death, but other bulls and hawks also. There were cemeteries of mummified animals, just as there were cemeteries of mummified men. Vast cemeteries of cats have been found at Bubastis, at Beni-Hassan, and other places; so too there were cemeteries of hawks and crocodiles, of jackals and bulls. We are still ignorant of the exact conditions under which these creatures were embalmed and buried. It is impossible to suppose that a solemn burial was provided for all the individual members of a species which was accounted sacred in a particular nome, much less for all its individual members throughout Egypt, as seems to have been imagined by Herodotus (ii. 41); there must have been certain limitations within which such a burial was permitted or ordained. And sometimes there was no burial at all; the mummy of the sacred animal of Set, for instance, has never been found.

      Still the fact remains that not only were the bodies of the Apis or the Mnevis mummified and consigned to a special burying-place, but the bodies of other bulls as well. Doubtless the Egyptian of the Pharaonic period had an excellent reason to give for the practice. Just as the servants of the prince were buried around their master, or as the ushebti-figures were placed in the tomb of the dead, so the ordinary bull was interred like the divine incarnations of Ptaḥ and Ra, in the hope that its double might accompany the spirit of the god in the other world. The scenes of country life painted on the [pg 113] walls of the tombs contain pictures of sheep and cattle whose kas were, in some way or other, believed to exist in the Egyptian paradise, and a mummified bull had as much right to the hope of a future existence as a mummified man. The very act of embalming implied the possibility of its union with Osiris.

      Egyptian logic soon converted the possibility into a fact. With the growth of the Osirian cult the dead Apis became, like the pious Egyptian, one with Osiris, the lord of the other world. His identity with Ptaḥ paled and disappeared before his newer identity with Osiris. At first he was Osiris-Apis, “the Osirified bull-god,” as guardian only of the necropolis of Memphis; then as god also of both Memphis and Egypt in life as well as in death. Under the Ptolemies, Greek ideas gathered round the person of a deity who thus united in himself the earlier and later forms of Egyptian belief, and out of the combination rose the Serapis of the classical age, whose worship exercised so great an influence on the Roman world. In the features of the human Serapis, with his majestic face and flowing beard, it is difficult to recognise the bull-god of primitive Egypt.

      The history of Serapis is on a large scale what that of the other sacred animals of Egypt is on a smaller scale. Mnevis was a lesser Apis; as Heliopolis waned before Memphis, so did its divine bull before the rival deity of the capital. They had both started on an equal footing, and had followed the fortunes of the cities where they were adored. At Mendes it was not a bull, but a ram, that was the object of worship, and in which the priests beheld an incarnation of Ra,76 though the accidental fact that the word ba meant alike “ram” and “soul” caused later generations to identify it with the “soul” of Osiris. In the Fayyûm it was the crocodile which naturally became [pg 114] the god Sebek or Sukhos, and at a later time Pete-sukhos, “the gift of Sukhos.” In the latter name we read the signs of a growing disinclination to see in the animal the god himself or even his soul or double; the Sukhos becomes “the gift of Sukhos,” separate from the god, and bestowed by him upon man.

      There were other nomes besides the Fayyûm in which the crocodile was worshipped. It was the sacred animal of Onuphis in the Delta, and of Ombos in the far south of Egypt. But we must not expect to find a Sebek and a sacred crocodile always accompanying one another. There could be cases in which the crocodile was identified with other gods than Sebek—with Set, for example, as at Nubti, near Dendera. The sacred animal existed before the god whose incarnation he afterwards became. The neolithic races were in the valley of the Nile before the Pharaonic Egyptians, and the deities they adored were consequently also there before the gods of the intruding race. Ptaḥ, with his human figure, would not have been transformed into the bull Apis if the bull had not been already in possession.

      The name of the god Thoth is itself a proof of this. Thoth was the god of Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên, and his patronage of writing and books shows that he must have been the deity of the Pharaonic race. The god to whom the invention of the hieroglyphs was ascribed, could not have been the god of an illiterate population.

      Now the Egyptian form of the name Thoth is Deḥuti (or Zeḥuti), “he who belongs to the ibis.”77 Thoth, therefore, [pg 115] was not originally the ibis, and, in spite of his bird's head, the human body which he retained was a traditional evidence of the fact. He was merely “attached to the ibis,”—attached, that is to say, to the place where the ibis was the fetish of the aborigines.

      According to Manetho, it was not until the reign of the second king of the Second Dynasty that Apis, Mnevis, and Mendes “were adjudged to be gods.” This must mean that it was then that the State religion admitted for the first time that the official gods of Memphis, Heliopolis, and Mendes were incarnated in the sacred animals of the local cults. That the statement is historically correct, may be gathered from the fact that the temples of Memphis and Heliopolis were dedicated to Ptaḥ and Tum, and not to Apis and Mnevis. When they were built the divinity of the bull had not yet been officially recognised. The gods in whose honour they were founded were gods of human form, and gods of human form they continued to be. Down to the last days of Egyptian paganism the sun-god of Heliopolis was not a bull, but a man; and though the mummified Apis watched over the cemeteries of Memphis, the god of its great temple remained a mummified man and not a mummified bull.

      One of the legends elaborately concocted in the temples out of old folk-tales and etymological puns explained the animal forms of the gods as the result of the murder of Osiris by Typhon or Set. The fear of sharing his fate made them hide themselves, it was related, in the bodies of the beasts.78 But the explanation must belong to an age when the introduction of foreign ideas had thrown discredit on the old worship of animals. In earlier times no explanation was needed. The belief in the power possessed by the soul of migrating from one body into another, and the symbolism of which the hieroglyphic [pg 116] writing was at once the expression and the cause, formed an easy bridge by which the fetishism of neolithic Egypt and the anthropomorphism of historical Egypt could be joined together. Horus is a hawk and the Pharaoh is a bull on the earliest monuments we possess, and such visible symbols necessarily reacted on a people, one half at least of whom already acknowledged the hawk and the bull as their gods. The official recognition of Apis and Mnevis and Mendes was the last step in the process of incorporating the aboriginal superstitions and practices into the State religion, and giving them official sanction. The parallelism with Braḥmanism in India is complete.

      But we have still to ask why it was that the bull was worshipped in one district of prehistoric Egypt, the hawk in another? Why was it that a particular fetish was the protecting deity of a particular sanctuary or nome? To this there can be but one answer. A modified form of totemism must once have been known in the valley of the Nile. The sacred animal must have been the last СКАЧАТЬ