to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and a shelter to the stranger. I honored the gods with sacrifices, and the dead with offerings." A rock at Lycopolis pleads for an ancient ruler thus : "I never took the child from its mother's bosom, nor the poor man from the side of his wife." Hundreds of stones in Egypt announce as the best gifts which the gods can bestow on their favorites, " the respect of men, and the love of women."* Religion, therefore, in Egypt, connected itself with morality and the duties of daily life. But kings and conquerors were not above the laws of their religion. They were obliged to recognize their power and triumphs as not their own work, but that of the great gods of their country. Thus, on a monumental stele discovered at Karnak by M. Mariette, and translated by De Rougé, is an inscription recording the triumphs of Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty (about B. c. 1600), which sounds like the song of Miriam or the Hymn of Deborah. We give some stanzas in which the god Amun addresses Thothmes : "I am come to thee have I given to strike down Syrian princes; "I am come to thee have I given to strike down Asian peoples; Decked in royal robes, I made them see thy glory; In glittering arms and fighting, high in thy lofty chariot. "I am come to thee have I given to strike down western nations; "I am come to thee have I given to strike down Lybian archers; Like a regal lion, I made them see thy glory; Couched by the corpse he has made, down in the rocky valley. "I am come to thee have I given to strike down the ends of the ocean. In the grasp of thy hand is the circling zone of the waters; Like the soaring eagle, I have made them see thy glory, Whose far-seeing eye there is none can hope to escape from." * Brugsch, as above. + Lenormant, Ancient History of the East, I. 234, in the English translation. A similar strain of religious poetry is in the Papyrus of Sallier, in the British Museum.* This is an epic by an Egyptian poet named Pentaour, celebrating the campaigns of Ramses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, of the nineteenth dynasty. This great king had been called into Syria to put down a formidable revolt of the Kheta (the Hittites of the Old Testament). The poem seems to have been a famous one, for it had the honor of being carved in full on the walls at Karnak, a kind of immortality which no other epic poet has ever attained. It particularly describes an incident in the war, when, by a stratagem of the enemy, King Ramses found himself separated from the main body of his army and attacked by the enemy in full force. Pentaour describes him in this situation as calling on Amun, God of Thebes, for help, recounting the sacrifices he had offered to him, and asking whether he would let him die in this extremity by the ignoble hands of these Syrian tribes. "Have I not erected to thee great temples? Have I not sacrificed to thee thirty thousand oxen? I have brought from Elephantina obelisks to set up to thy name. I invoke thee, O my father, Amun. I am in the midst of a throng of unknown tribes, and alone. But Amun is better to me than thousands of archers and millions of horsemen. Amun will prevail over the enemy." And, after defeating his foes, in his song of triumph, the king says, "Amun-Ra has been at my right and my left in the battles; his mind has inspired my own, and has prepared the downfall of my enemies. Amun-Ra, my father, has brought the whole world to my feet." + Thus universal and thus profound was the religious sentiment among the Egyptians. § 3. Theology of Egypt. Sources of our Knowledge concerning it. As regards the theology of the Egyptians and their system of ideas, we meet with difficulty from the law of secrecy which was their habit of mind. The Egyptian * Translated by De Rougé. See Revue Contemporaine, August, 1856. † Egypt 3300 Years ago. By Lanoye. priesthood enveloped with mystery every opinion, just as they swathed the mummies, fold above fold, in preparing them for the tomb. The names and number of their gods we learn from the monuments. Their legends concerning them come to us through Plutarch, Herodotus, Diodorus, and other Greek writers. Their doctrine of a future life and future judgment is apparent in their ceremonies, the pictures on the tombs, and the papyrus Book of the Dead. But what these gods mean, what are their offices, how they stand related to each other and to mankind, what is the ethical bearing of the religion, it is not so easy to learn. Nevertheless, we may find a clew to a knowledge of this system, if in no other way, at least by ascertaining its central, ruling idea, and pursuing this into its details. The moment that we take this course, light will begin to dawn upon us. But before going further, let us briefly inquire into the sources of our knowledge of Egyptian mythology. The first and most important place is occupied by the monuments, which contain the names and tablets of the gods of the three orders. Then come the sacred books of the Egyptians, known to us by Clemens Alexandrinus. From him we learn that the Egyptians in his time had forty-two sacred books in five classes. The first class, containing songs or hymns in praise of the gods, were very old, dating perhaps from the time of Menes. The other books treated of morals, astronomy, hieroglyphics, geography, ceremonies, the deities, the education of priests, and medicine. Of these sacred Hermaic books, one is still extant, and perhaps it is as interesting as any of them. We have two copies of it, both on papyrus, one found by the French at Thebes, the other by Champollion in Turin. And Lepsius considers this last papyrus to be wholly of the date of the eighteenth or nineteenth dynasty, consequently fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred years before Christ, and the only example of an Egyptian book transmitted from the times of the Pharaohs. Bunsen believes it to belong to the fourth class of Hermaic books, containing Ordinances as to the First Fruits, Sacrifices, Hymns, and Prayers. In this book the deceased is the person who officiates. His soul journeying on gives utterance to prayers, confessions, invocations. The first fifteen chapters, which make a connected whole, are headed," Here begins the Sections of the Glorification in the Light of Osiris." It is illustrated by a picture of a procession, in which the deceased soul follows his own corpse as chief mourner, offering prayers to the Sun-God. Another part of the book is headed, "The Book of Deliverance, in the Hall of twofold Justice,' and contains the divine judgments on the deceased. Fortytwo gods occupy the judgment-seat. Osiris, their president, bears on his breast the small tablet of chief judge, containing a figure of Justice. Before him are seen the scales of divine judgment. In one is placed the statue of Justice, and in the other the heart of the deceased, who stands in person by the balance containing his heart, while Anubis watches the other scale. Horus examines the plummet indicating which way the beam inclines. Thoth, the Justifier the Lord of the Divine Word, records the sentence.* § 4. Central Idea of Egyptian Theology and Religion. Animal Worship. We now proceed to ask what is the IDEA of Egyptian mythology and theology? We have seen that the idea of the religion of India was Beside the monuments and the papyri, we have as sources of information the remains of the Egyptian historians Manetho and Eratosthenes; the Greek accounts of Egypt by Herodotus, Plato, Diodorus Siculus, Plutarch, Jamblichus; and the modern researches of Heeren, Champollion, Rossalini, Young, Wilkinson. The more recent writers to be consulted are as follows: Bunsen's "Egypten's Stelle in der Weltgeschichte. Hamburg." (First volume printed in 1845.) This great work was translated by C. C. Cottrel in five 8vo volumes, the last published in 1867, after the death of both author and translator. The fifth volume of the translation contains a full translation of the "Book of the Dead," by the learned Samuel Birch of the British Museum. Essays in the Revue Archéologique and other learned periodicals, by the Vicomte de Rougé, Professor of Egyptian Philology at Paris. Works by M. Chabas, M. Mariette, De Brugsch, "Aus dem Orient," etc., Samuel Sharpe, A. Maury, Lepsius, and others. Spirit; the One, the Infinite, the Eternal; a pure spiritual Pantheism, from which the elements of time and space are quite excluded. The religion of Egypt stands at the opposite pole of thought as its antagonist. Instead of Spirit, it accepts Body; instead of Unity, Variety; instead of Substance, Form. It is the physical reaction from Brahmanism. Instead of the worship of abstract Deity, it gives us the most concrete divinity, wholly incarnated in space and time. Instead of abstract contemplation, it gives us ceremonial worship. Instead of the absorption of man into God, it gives us transmigration through all bodily forms.* It so completely incarnates God, as to make every type of animal existence divine; hence the worship of animals. It makes body so sacred, that the human body must not be allowed to perish. As the Brahman, contemplating eternity, forgot time, and had *The Egyptian doctrine of transmigration differed from that of the Hindoos in this respect, that no idea of retribution seems to be connected with it. According to Herodotus (II. 123), the soul must pass through all animals, fishes, insects, and birds; in short, must complete the whole circuit of animated existence, before it again enters the body of a man; "and this circuit of the soul," he adds, "is performed in three thousand years." According to him, it does not begin "until the body decays." This may give us one explanation of the system of embalming; for if the circuit of transmigration is limited to three thousand years, and the soul cannot leave the body till it decays (the words of Herodotus are, "the body decaying,” τοῦ σώματος δὲ καταφθίνοντος), then if embalming delays decay for one thousand years, so much is taken off from the journey through animals. That the soul was believed to be kept with the body as long as it was undecayed is also expressly stated by Servius (Comm. on the Æneid of Virgil): "The learned Egyptians preserve the corpse from decay in tombs in order that its soul shall remain with it, and not quickly pass into other bodies." Hence, too, the extraordinary pains taken in ornamenting the tombs, as the permanent homes of the dead during a long period. Diodorus says that they ornamented the tombs as the enduring residences of mankind. Transmigration in India was retribution, but in Egypt it seems to have been a condition of progress. It was going back into the lower organizations, to gather up all their varied life, to add to our own. Tennyson suggests, "If, through lower lives I came, Though all experience past became Consolidate in mind and frame," etc. So Beside the reason for embalming given above, there may have been the motive arising from the respect for bodily organization, so deeply rooted in the Egyptian mind. |