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

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СКАЧАТЬ acquaintance with the old Egyptians is confined to the fact that when they died their bodies were made into mummies. It is from the wrappings of the mummy that most of the small amulets and scarabs have come which fill so large a space in collections of Egyptian antiquities, as well as many of the papyri which have given us an insight into the literature of the past. We have been taught to believe that from times immemorial the Egyptians mummified their dead, and that the practice was connected with an equally immemorial faith in the resurrection of the dead; and yet recent excavations have made it clear that such a belief is erroneous. Mummification was never universal in Egypt, and there was a time when it was not practised at all. It was unknown to the prehistoric populations whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found on their arrival in the country; and among the Pharaonic Egyptians themselves it seems to have spread only slowly. Few traces of it have been met with before the age of the Fourth and Fifth Dynasties, if, indeed, any have been met with at all.

      But, as we shall see hereafter, the practice of mummification was closely bound up with a belief in the resurrection of the dead. The absence of it accordingly implies that this belief was either non-existent, or, at all events, did not as yet occupy a prominent place in the Egyptian creed. Like embalming, it must have been introduced by the Pharaonic Egyptians; it was not until the older races of the country had been absorbed by their conquerors that mummification became general, along with the religious ideas that were connected with it. Before the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty it seems to have been practically confined to the court and the official priesthood.

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      On the other hand, one at least of the prehistoric races appears to have practised secondary burial. The skeletons discovered in its graves have been mutilated in an extraordinary manner. The skull, the legs, the arms, the feet, and the hands have been found dissevered from the trunk; even the backbone itself is sometimes broken into separate portions; and there are cases in which the whole skeleton is a mere heap of dismembered bones. But, in spite of this dismemberment, the greatest care has been taken to preserve the separate fragments, which are often placed side by side. An explanation of the dismemberment has been sought in cannibalism, but cannibals do not take the trouble to collect the bones of their victims and bury them with all the marks of respect; moreover, the bones have not been gnawed except in one or two examples, where wild beasts rather than man must have been at work. It seems evident, therefore, that the race whose dismembered remains have thus been found in so many of the prehistoric cemeteries of Egypt, allowed the bodies of the dead to remain unburied until the flesh had been stripped from their bones by the birds and beasts of prey, and that it was only when this had been done that the sun-bleached bones were consigned to the tomb. Similar practices still prevail in certain parts of the world; apart from the Parsi “towers of silence,” it is still the custom in New Guinea to leave the corpse among the branches of a tree until the flesh is entirely destroyed.6

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      Between mummification and secondary burial no reconciliation is possible. The conceptions upon which the two practices rest are contradictory one to the other. In the one case every effort is made to keep the body intact and to preserve the flesh from decay; in the other case the body is cast forth to the beasts of the desert and the fowls of the air, and its very skeleton allowed to be broken up. A people who practised secondary burial can hardly have believed in a future existence of the body itself. Their belief must rather have been in the existence of that shadowy, vapour-like form, comparable to the human breath, in which so many races of mankind have pictured to themselves the imperishable part of man. It was the misty ghost, seen in dreams or detected at night amid the shadows of the forest, that survived the death of the body; the body itself returned to the earth from whence it had sprung.

      This prehistoric belief left its traces in the official religion of later Egypt. The Ba or “Soul,” with the figure of a bird and the head of a man, is its direct descendant. As we shall see, the conception of the Ba fits but ill with that of the mummy, and the harmonistic efforts of a later date were unable altogether to hide the inner contradiction that existed between them. The soul, which fled on the wings of a bird to the world beyond the sky, was not easily to be reconciled with the mummified body which was eventually to lead a life in the other world that should be a repetition and reflection of its life in this. How the Ba and the mummy were to be united, the official cult never [pg 027] endeavoured to explain; the task was probably beyond its powers. It was content to leave the two conceptions side by side, bidding the individual believer reconcile them as best he could.

      The fact illustrates another which must always be kept in mind in dealing with Egyptian religion. Up to the last it remained without a philosophic system. There were, it is true, certain sides of it which were reduced to systems, certain parts of the official creed which became philosophies. But as a whole it was a loosely-connected agglomeration of beliefs and practices which had come down from the past, and one after the other had found a place in the religion of the State. No attempt was ever made to form them into a coherent and homogeneous whole, or to find a philosophic basis upon which they all might rest. Such an idea, indeed, never occurred to the Egyptian. He was quite content to take his religion as it had been handed down to him, or as it was prescribed by the State; he had none of that inner retrospection which distinguishes the Hindu, none of that desire to know the causes of things which characterised the Greek. The contradictions which we find in the articles of his creed never troubled him; he never perceived them, or if he did they were ignored. He has left to us the task of finding a philosophic basis for his faith, and of fixing the central ideas round which it revolved; the task is a hard one, and it is rendered the harder by the imperfection of our materials.

      The Egyptian was no philosopher, but he had an immense veneration for the past. The past, indeed, was ever before him; he could not escape from it. Objects and monuments which would have perished in other countries were preserved almost in their pristine freshness by the climate under which he lived. As to-day, so too in the age of the Pharaohs, the earliest [pg 028] and the latest of things jostled one another, and it was often difficult to say which of the two looked the older. The past was preserved in a way that it could not be elsewhere; nothing perished except by the hand of man. And man, brought up in such an atmosphere of continuity, became intensely conservative. Nature itself only increased the tendency. The Nile rose and fell with monotonous regularity; year after year the seasons succeeded each other without change; and the agriculturist was not dependent on the variable alternations of rain and sunshine, or even of extreme heat and cold. In Egypt, accordingly, the new grew up and was adopted without displacing the old. It was a land to which the rule did not apply that “the old order changeth, giving place to new.” The old order might, indeed, change, through foreign invasion or the inventions of human genius, but all the same it did not give place to the new. The new simply took a place by the side of the old.

      The Egyptian system of writing is a striking illustration of the fact. All the various stages through which writing must pass, in its development out of pictures into alphabetic letters, exist in it side by side. The hieroglyphs can be used at once ideographically, syllabically, and alphabetically. And what is true of Egyptian writing is true also of Egyptian religion. The various elements out of which it arose are all still traceable in it; none of them has been discarded, however little it might harmonise with the elements with which it has been combined. Religious ideas which belong to the lowest and to the highest forms of the religious consciousness, to races of different origin and different age, exist in it side by side.

      It is true that even in organised religions we find similar combinations of heterogeneous elements. Survivals [pg 029] from a distant past are linked in them with the conceptions of a later age, and beliefs of divergent origin have been incorporated by them into the same creed. But it is a definite and coherent creed into which they have been embodied; the attempt has been made to fuse them into a harmonious whole, and to explain away their apparent divergencies and contradictions. Either the assertion is made that the creed of the present has come down unchanged from the past, or else it is maintained that the doctrines and rites of the past have developed normally and gradually into those of the present.

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