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

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      For how many centuries the two kingdoms existed side by side, sometimes in peaceful intercourse, sometimes in hostile collision, it is impossible to say. The fact that Egypt had once been divided into two kingdoms was never forgotten; down to the last days of the Egyptian monarchs the Pharaoh bore the title of “lord of the two lands,” and on his head was placed the twofold crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. Nekhen was under the protection not only of Horus, the god of the Pharaonic Egyptians, but also of Nekheb, the tutelary goddess of the whole of the southern land. From the Cataract northward her dominion extended, but it was [pg 040] at El-Kab opposite Nekhen, where the road from the Red Sea and the mines of the desert reached the Nile, that her special sanctuary stood. Besh calls himself on his vases “the son of Nekheb”; and even as late as the time of the Sixth Dynasty the eldest son of the king was entitled “the royal son of Nekheb.”12

      Nekheb, the vulture, was the goddess of the south, in contradistinction to Uazit, the serpent, the goddess of the north. But in both the south and the north the same dominant race held rule, the same customs prevailed, and the same language was spoken. The Pharaonic Egyptians, in their northern advance, had carried with them a common legacy of ideas and manners. Their religious conceptions had been the same, and consequently the general form assumed by the religious cult was similar. In spite of local differences and the self-centred character of the numerous independent principalities, there was, nevertheless, a family likeness between them all. Ideas and customs, therefore, which grew up in one place passed readily to another, and the influence of a particular local sanctuary was easily carried beyond the limits of the district in which it stood.

      One of the most fundamental of the beliefs which the Pharaonic Egyptians brought with them was that in the [pg 041] divine origin of certain individuals. The prince who led them was not only the son of a god or goddess, he was an incarnation of the god himself. The belief is one of the many facts which link the Pharaonic civilisation with the culture of primitive Babylonia. In Babylonia also the king was divine. One of the early kings of Ur calls himself the son of a goddess, just as Besh does at Nekhen; and the great conquerors of primeval Asia, Sargon of Akkad and his son Naram-Sin, give themselves the title of “god” in their inscriptions; while Naram-Sin is even invoked during his lifetime as “the god of the city of Agadê” or Akkad. For many generations the Babylonian kings continued to receive divine honours while they were still alive; and it was not until after the conquest of Babylonia by a tribe of half-civilised foreigners from the mountains of Elam that the old tradition was broken, and the reigning king ceased to be a god. Like the doctrine of the divine right of kings in England, which could not survive the fall of the Stuarts, the doctrine of the divine nature of the monarch did not survive in Babylonia the fall of the native dynasties.

      In Babylonia also, as in Egypt, the king continued to be invoked as a god after his death. Chapels and priests were consecrated to his memory, and stated sacrifices and offerings made to him. It was not necessary that the deified prince should be the supreme sovereign, it was sufficient if he were the head of a feudal principality. Thus, while Dungi, the supreme sovereign of Babylonia, receives in his inscriptions the title of “god,” his vassal Gudea, the high priest and hereditary prince of the city of Lagas, is likewise worshipped as a deity, whose cult lasted for many centuries. Gudea was non-Semitic in race, but most of the Babylonian kings who were thus deified were Semites. It is therefore possible that the [pg 042] deification of the ruler was of Semitic origin, and only adopted from them by the older Sumerian population, as in the case of Gudea; it is also possible that it was one of the consequences of that fusion of the two races, Sumerian and Semitic, which produced the later population and culture of Babylonia. However this may be, the apotheosis of the Babylonian king during his lifetime can be traced back as far as Sargon and Naram-Sin, 3800 b.c. Sargon incorporated Palestine, “the land of the Amorites,” as it was then called, into his empire, while Naram-Sin extended his conquests to Mâgan or the Sinaitic Peninsula, thus bringing the arms and civilisation of Babylonia to the very doors of Egypt. The precise nature of the connection which existed between the Babylonian and the Egyptian belief in the divinity of the ruler must be left to future research.

      In the Egyptian mind, at all events, it was a belief that was deeply implanted. The Pharaoh was a god upon earth. Like the Incas of Peru, he belonged to the solar race, and the blood which flowed in his veins was the ichor of the gods. The existence of a similar belief in Peru shows how easy it was for such a belief to grow up in regard to the leader of a conquering people who brought with them a higher culture and the arts of life. But it presupposes religious conceptions which, though characteristic of Babylonia, are directly contrary to those which seem to underlie the religion of Egypt. Among the Babylonians the gods assumed human forms; man had been made in the likeness of the gods, and the gods therefore were of human shape. The converse, however, was the case in Egypt. Here the gods, with few exceptions, were conceived of as brute beasts. Horus was the hawk, Nekheb the vulture, Uazit of Buto the deadly uræus snake.

      There is only one way of explaining the anomaly. [pg 043] The conception of the gods which made them men must have come from outside, and been imposed upon a people whose gods were the brute beasts. It must have been the Pharaonic invaders from Asia to whom the leader they followed was an incarnate god. Hence it was just this leader and no other who was clothed with divinity. Hence, too, it was that the older worship of animals was never really harmonised with the worship of the Pharaoh. The inner contradiction which existed between the new religious conceptions remained to the end, in spite of all the efforts of the priestly colleges to make them agree. Religious art might represent the god with the head of a beast or bird and the body of a man, the sacred books might teach that the deity is unconfined by form, and so could pass at will from the body of a man into that of a beast; but all such makeshifts could not hide the actual fact. Between the deity who is human and the deity who is bestial no true reconciliation is possible.

      We must therefore trace the deification of the Pharaoh back to Asia, and the Asiatic element in the Egyptian population. The Pharaonic conquerors of the valley of the Nile were those “followers of Horus” who worshipped their leader as a god. It was a god in human form who had led them to victory, and Horus accordingly continued to be represented as a man, even though the symbolism of the hieroglyphs united with the creed of the prehistoric races of Egypt in giving him the head of a hawk.

      At first the ruler of each of the small kingdoms into which prehistoric Egypt was divided, was honoured as a god, like Gudea in Babylonia. When the kingdoms became, first, vassal principalities under a paramount lord, and then nomes, the old tradition was still maintained. Divine titles were given to the nomarchs even in the later times of the united monarchy, and after their [pg 044] death worship continued to be paid to them.13 Christian writers tell us how at Anabê particular individuals were regarded as gods, to whom offerings were accordingly brought; and Ptah, the tutelary deity of Memphis, was pictured as a man in the wrappings of a mummy, while to Anhur of This the human figure was assigned.

      With the coalescence of the smaller principalities into two kingdoms, the deification of the ruler was confined within narrower bounds. But for that very reason it became more absolute and intense. The supreme sovereign, the Pharaoh as we may henceforth call him, was a veritable god on earth. To his subjects he was the source, not only of material benefits, but of spiritual blessings as well. He was “the good god,” the beneficent dispenser of all good things.14 The power of life and death was in his hand, and rebellion against him was rebellion against the gods. The blood that flowed in his veins was the same as that which flowed in the veins of the gods; it was even communicated to him from time to time by his divine brethren; and the bas-reliefs of a later age, when the traditional belief had become little more than a symbolical allegory, still depict him with his back towards the statue of the god, who is transfusing the ichor of heaven through his veins.15

      Menes, the king of Upper Egypt, first united under one sceptre the two kingdoms of the Nile. The divinity which had hitherto been shared between the Pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt now passed in all it fulness to him. He became the visible god of Egypt, just as [pg 045] Sargon or Naram-Sin was the visible god of Akkad. All the attributes СКАЧАТЬ