The Best of the Bureau/The_Best_of_the_Bureau_Bureau_Development_Inc._1992.iso/dp/0079/00795.txt

Text File | 1992-08-07 | 25KB | 397 lines

$Unique_ID{bob00795}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter II}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{god
gods
dead
re
old
kingdom
religion
egypt
osiris
even
see
tables
}
$Date{1913}
$Log{See Table 1*0079501.tab
}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Egypt
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter II

The Middle Kingdom And The Empire

     The Rise of Thebes - The Sun as Supreme God - Local Gods -
Identifications - Enneads and Triads - The Dead - Judgment before Osiris -
Moral Ideas - The Empire - Amon-Re the National God - Power of the Priesthood
- Attempt to Establish Solar Monotheism - Reaction - The Nineteenth Dynasty -
Mythology - Theban Tombs and Texts - The Book of the Dead - Amulets - The
Saite Restoration - Foreign Rule.

     Under the Sixth Dynasty the power of the kings declined; the governors of
the districts became virtually hereditary rulers and more and more independent
of the central authority.  The result was that the Old Kingdom disintegrated,
and Egypt, after a thousand years of union under a strong government, reverted
to the conditions which prevailed before the rise of the kingdom.  From the
following centuries royal monuments are lacking, but numerous tombs of
nomarchs and local notables show something of what was going on.  Toward the
end of these dim centuries Thebes first appears on the stage of history.
Hitherto it had been an insignificant provincial town; the chief city of the
canton was Hermonthis.  But beginning about 2150 B.C. the Intefs and
Mentuhoteps, Manetho's Eleventh Dynasty, laid the foundations of its
greatness.  The Twelfth Dynasty, also of Theban origin, reunited Egypt under a
strong rule, and not only extended their dominion in Nubia beyond the utmost
limits of the Old Kingdom, but carried their victorious arms far into Syria.
This recovery of power and prosperity was attended by a brilliant renaissance
of art.  In many ways these two centuries of the Middle Kingdom are the
culmination of Egyptian civilisation.

     The monuments of the Middle Kingdom show that in the intervening period
religion had continued to develop in the direction in which it was moving when
the Old Kingdom fell into decadence.  The Heliopolitan solar religion which
had been adopted by the state in the Fifth Dynasty had not gone under with the
state; its doctrines had, on the contrary, gained wider acceptance.  Re is now
a universal god, self-originated, the author and ruler of the world; a god, as
every one must see, not alone of higher attributes and greater power than the
tutelary and functional deities, but of a different kind.  His supremacy is
due to his nature, not to political circumstances such as might raise the god
of one city to a monarchy among the gods corresponding to the rule of a
dynasty from that city among men. The way had been prepared for Re by Horus,
and in fact Re makes himself heir of the sun-god of the earlier dynasties as
Re-Harakhte, that is, "Re, the Horus of the two Horizons"; but Horus had been
primarily the god of the kings, while Re was a god of priests.

     The exaltation of one god, especially of a great power of nature such as
Re, to the supreme place in the pantheon is a step toward monotheism; we shall
see how, in the New Empire, Ikhnaton tried to go the rest of the way and make
an exclusive solar monotheism the religion of Egypt. ^1 But, with the
exception of his unsuccessful attempt, the solar religion was not exclusive;
the theologians were content to let the other gods remain as ministers and
helpers of Re, or as names or forms of the sun-god - an accommodation of
theoretical monotheism to practical polytheism which has been found convenient
in other countries - in the theistic religions of India, for example.  This
pantheistic doctrine remained, however, a piece of priestly wisdom in the
possession of "them who know," and had no discoverable consequence in actual
religion even for them.

[Footnote 1: See below, pp. 181 ff.]

     The increased political importance of the provincial cities, which after
the fall of the Old Kingdom became independent states, gave a correspondingly
increased importance to their gods.  The rulers of the cantons erected new
temples to the deities under whose banners they fought with one another or
against their nominal overlords; the same conditions which had developed the
independent city religions in prehistoric Egypt now gave them new vitality.
Under these circumstances the effect of the higher theology was not that the
local god was subordinated to Re, much less superseded by him, but that Re was
identified with the local god, who thus appropriated the universal attributes
and powers of Re.  The incongruity of many of these identifications did not
hinder them when once they were in fashion; the crocodile-god of the Fayum has
as little trouble in becoming a sun-crocodile, Sebek-Re, as the ram of Thebes
in becoming Amon-Re, or the ithyphallic idol of Min in being similarly
promoted.  Practically, therefore, the whole gain of the higher theology
accrued to the lower religion, making it equally acceptable to the few who
were indoctrinated in the priestly wisdom and to the many to whom the god of
their fathers was good enough without any speculative improvements.  In the
end almost every Egyptian god who had a public cult was hyphenated with Re.
Osiris, notwithstanding an inextricable confusion with Re in magical
mystifications from the pyramid texts to the Book of the Dead, is hardly
identified out and out with Re; besides him, Ptah, the old god of Memphis, and
Thoth, the moon-god and vizier of Re, are almost the sole gods who in the end
escape the combination.

     From the Heliopolitan priests came also a theogony which put the god of
their city, Atum, at the beginning of all things, and derived from him,
through two intermediate generations, the gods of the Osirian circle as it
appeared in the Delta.  This Ennead, which had almost as great success as the
doctrine of Re, is thus constructed:


[See Table 1: The Ennead]

     The scheme, which is already found in the pyramid texts, combines
disparate elements.  The first and the last generations are gods in religion
as well as in myth, the two intervening pairs are cosmogonic figures.  Geb and
Nut are earth and sky, divine, doubtless, but having in early times no cult.
Shu and Tefnut may have been local deities somewhere in the Delta (they are
sometimes represented as lion-headed), but in this connection are conceived as
gods of the air or of atmospheric space; Shu supports the sky, whether the
latter is imaged as the celestial cow or in human form.

     The question how the sky is held aloft, or how it was ever raised up from
the earth, is one which much exercised primitive speculation.  In a well-known
Maori myth, heaven and earth, man and woman, lay for ages locked in close
embrace, until the offspring of their union, finding the quarters too close,
after much debate and with mighty effort, thrust their parents apart, and
lifted their father, the sky, into his present place.  In Egypt, by an
accident of grammatical gender, sky (Nut) was feminine and earth (Geb)
masculine.  In the representations of this myth, which are common in the
monuments, Geb is depicted as a prostrate giant, on whose body, to leave no
doubt of the significance of the figure, grass is often growing, while astride
over Geb's form stands Shu, upholding with his two arms the body of Nut (often
decorated with stars), whose inordinately long arms and legs dangle down to
the horizon, giving her some resemblance to the vault of heaven with its four
supporting columns.  The role of Shu in this myth obviously belongs, as in the
New Zealand parallel, to a child of the pair; and from this it is to be
inferred that the myth is independent of the genealogical scheme which now
inconsequently makes Shu the father of Geb and Nut.

     In a late magical papyrus, which notwithstanding its date bears intrinsic
marks of