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

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СКАЧАТЬ origin of Semitic religion in the habits and superstitions of low-caste Bedâwin, is like looking to the gipsies for an explanation of European Christianity. Such a procedure is the abuse, not the use, of the anthropological method. Folk-lore gives us a key to the mind of the child, and of the childlike portion of society; it sheds no light on the beginnings either of religion or of civilisation, and to make it do so is to mistake a will-o'-the-wisp for a beacon-light. It is once more to find “survivals” where they exist only in the mind of the inquirer. So long as civilised society has lasted, it has contained the ignorant as well as the learned, the fool as well as the wise man, and we are no more justified in arguing from the ignorance of the past than we should be in arguing from the ignorance of the present. So far as folk-tales genuinely reflect the mind of the unlearned and childlike only, they are of little help to the student of the religions of the ancient civilised world.

      We must, then, beware of discovering allegory and symbol where they do not exist; we must equally beware of overlooking them where they are actually to be found. And we must remember that, although the metaphors and symbolism of the earlier civilisations are not likely to be those which seem natural to the modern European, this is no reason why we should deny the existence of them. In fact, without them religious language and beliefs are impossible; it is only through the world of the senses that a way lies to a knowledge [pg 019] of the world beyond. The conditions into which we were born necessitate our expressing and realising our mental, moral, and religious conceptions through sensuous imagery and similitude. Only we must never forget that the imagery is not the same for different races or generations of mankind.

      Before concluding, I must say a few words in explanation of the title I have given to the course of lectures I have the honour of delivering before you. It is not my intention to give a systematic description or analysis of the ancient religions of Egypt and Babylonia. That would hardly be in keeping with the terms of Lord Gifford's bequest, nor would the details be interesting, except to a small company of specialists. Indeed, in the case of the ancient religion of Babylonia, the details are still so imperfect and disputed, that a discussion of them is fitted rather for the pages of a learned Society's journal than for a course of lectures. What the lecturer has to do is to take the facts that have been already ascertained, to see to what conclusions they point, and to review the theories which they countenance or condemn. The names and number of the gods and goddesses worshipped by the Egyptians and Babylonians is of little moment to the scientific student of religion: what he wants to know is the conception of the deity which underlay these manifold forms, and the relation in which man was believed to stand to the divine powers around him. What was it that the civilised Babylonian or Egyptian meant by the term “god”? What was the idea or belief that lay behind the polytheism of the popular cult, and in what respects is it marked off from the ideas and beliefs that rule the religions of our modern world? The old Egyptian, indeed, might not have understood what we mean by “polytheism” and “monotheism,” but would he not have already recognised the two [pg 020] tendencies of thought which have found expression among us in these words? Was St. Paul right when he declared that the old civilised nations had sought after the God of Christianity, “if haply they might feel after Him and find Him,” or is there an impassable gulf between the religious conceptions of paganism and those of Christian Europe? Such are some of the questions to whose solution I trust that the facts I have to bring before you may contribute, in however humble a degree.

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Lecture II. Egyptian Religion.

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      It is through its temples and tombs that ancient Egypt is mainly known to us. It is true that the warm and rainless climate of Upper Egypt has preserved many of the objects of daily life accidentally buried in the ruins of its cities, and that even fragments of fragile papyrus have come from the mounds that mark the sites of its villages and towns; but these do not constitute even a tithe of the monuments upon which our present knowledge of ancient Egyptian life and history has been built. It is from the tombs and temples that we have learned almost all we now know about the Egypt of the past. The tombs were filled with offerings to the dead and illustrations of the daily life of the living, while their walls were adorned with representations of the scenes at which their possessor had been present, with the history of his life, or with invocations to the gods. The temples were storehouses of religious lore, which was sculptured or painted on their walls and ceilings. In fact, we owe most of our knowledge of ancient Egypt to the gods and to the dead; and it is natural, therefore, that the larger part of it should be concerned with religion and the life to come.

      We are thus in an exceptionally good position for ascertaining, at all events in outline, the religious ideas of the old Egyptians, and even for tracing their history through long periods of time. The civilisation of Egypt [pg 022] goes back to a remote past, and recent discoveries have carried us almost to its beginnings. The veil which so long covered the origin of Egyptian culture is at last being drawn aside, and some of the most puzzling inconsistencies in the religion, which formed so integral a part of that culture, are being explained. We have learnt that the religion of the Egypt which is best known to us was highly composite, the product of different races and different streams of culture and thought; and the task of uniting them all into a homogeneous whole was never fully completed. To the last, Egyptian religion remained a combination of ill-assorted survivals rather than a system, a confederation of separate cults rather than a definite theology. Like the State, whatever unity it possessed was given to it by the Pharaoh, who was not only a son and representative of the sun-god, but the visible manifestation of the sun-god himself. Its unity was thus a purely personal one: without the Pharaoh the Egyptian State and Egyptian religion would alike have been dissolved into their original atoms.

      The Pharaonic Egyptians—the Egyptians, that is to say, who embanked the Nile, who transformed the marsh and the desert into cultivated fields, who built the temples and tombs, and left behind them the monuments we associate with Egyptian culture—seem to have come from Asia; and it is probable that their first home was in Babylonia. The race (or races) they found in the valley of the Nile were already possessed of a certain measure of civilisation. They were in an advanced stage of neolithic culture; their flint tools are among the finest that have ever been made; and they were skilled in the manufacture of vases of the hardest stone. But they were pastoral rather than agricultural, and they lived in the desert rather than on the river-bank. They proved no match for the newcomers, with their weapons of [pg 023] copper; and, little by little, the invading race succeeded in making itself master of the valley of the Nile, though tradition remembered the fierce battles which were needed before the “smiths” who followed Horus could subjugate the older population in their progress from south to north.

      How far the invaders themselves formed a single race is still uncertain. Some scholars believe that, besides the Asiatics who entered Egypt from the south, crossing the Red Sea and so marching through the eastern desert to the Nile, there were other Asiatics who came overland from Mesopotamia, and made their way into the Delta across the isthmus of Suez. Of this overland invasion, however, I can myself see no evidence; so far as our materials at present allow us to go, the Egyptians of history were composed, at most, of three elements, the Asiatic invaders from the south, and two older races, which we may term aboriginal. One of them Professor Petrie is probably right in maintaining to be Libyan.4

      We thus have at least three different types of religious belief and practice at the basis of Egyptian religion, corresponding with the three races which together made up the Egyptian people. Two of the types would be African; the third would be Asiatic, perhaps Babylonian. From the very outset, therefore, we must be prepared to find divergences of religious conception as well as divergences in rites and ceremonies. And such divergences can be actually pointed out.5

      The practice of embalming, for instance, is one which we have been accustomed to think peculiarly characteristic of ancient Egypt. It is referred to in the Book of [pg 024] Genesis, and described by classical writers. There are many СКАЧАТЬ