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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter I: Part I}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{egypt
god
gods
dynasty
horus
kingdom
old
worship
egyptian
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$Date{1913}
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Egypt
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter I: Part I

The Religion Of The Old Kingdom

     The Nomes and Their Gods - Divine Beasts - The Old Kingdom - Celestial
Deities, Temples, Priests, Worship - Tombs - Conservation of the Body - Souls
- Abodes of the Dead - Heaven and the Nether World - Morals and Magic.

     Egypt and Babylonia are the oldest seats of civilisation.  The
investigations of Eduard Meyer have led him to believe that the Egyptian
calendar was established in the year 4241 B.C., on the basis of observations
that must have taken centuries to accumulate.  Whether this precise date be
confirmed or not, there is no doubt that the accession of Menes, the first
king in Manetho's catalogue of dynasties, falls before 3000 B.C., ^1 and that
the kingdom of all Egypt which he founded was preceded by the two kingdoms of
Upper and of Lower Egypt through a period so long that the dualism was
indelibly impressed on the institutions of the country.  The rulers before
Menes, who were for Manetho semi-mythical, turn out to be real men of flesh
and blood; and before them the stage of culture at which the Egyptians had
arrived in the age of its first monuments demands for its development
centuries which we have no means of counting.

[Footnote 1: Meyer, 3315; Sethe, 3360; Breasted, 3400.  The dates of the great
epochs of Egyptian history, according to Breasted, History of Egypt, are as
follows: (Old Kingdom) Fourth Dynasty, 2900-2750 B.C.; Fifth Dynasty,
2750-2625; (Middle Kingdom) Twelfth Dynasty, 2000-1788; (New Empire)
Eighteenth Dynasty, 1580-1350; Nineteenth Dynasty, 1350-1205; Twenty-second
Dynasty, 945-745; (Saite Restoration) Twenty-sixth Dynasty, 663-525.]

     The earliest burials show that many centuries before the dawn of Egyptian
history the valley of the Nile, from the Delta to Nubia, was occupied by the
same race which inhabited it in later times, and which, notwithstanding
subsequent admixture of foreign blood, maintained its characteristics
essentially unaltered to the last.  The conditions of tillage in the valley,
with its long narrow strip of arable land watered and fertilised by the
inundation, not only constrained the earliest inhabitants to settle in towns,
but to undertake common works for the regulation and distribution of the
water, and in this necessity of co-operative labour under directive authority
we may see, as under similar conditions in Babylonia and in the valley of the
Yellow River in China, one great reason why these regions were the predestined
cradles of civilisation.  Egypt possessed other advantages in being by its
situation and configuration comparatively secure against attacks from without,
and of having in the river the means of easy communication not only between
neighbouring towns, but throughout its whole length from the first cataract to
the sea; conditions which, even before the establishment of any political
unity, tended to a certain equalisation of progress.  The observation of
Herodotus that Egypt is the gift of the Nile is true in a larger meaning than
was in his mind.

     The towns, each possessing its belt of tillage within the reach of the
overflow, its pasture-land on higher ground, and perhaps its unreclaimed
marshes, were the oldest political units.  If they had been originally clan
settlements, every trace of this origin had long disappeared; they were, at
the beginning of our knowledge, communities held together, not by real or
imaginary ties of kinship, but by common social and economic interests. When
Egypt was united under one sovereign, the old city-states lost their
independence, but not their political existence; in the centralised rule of
the Old Kingdom they preserved as administrative divisions much of their
former importance; in the decadence of the monarchy they regained a large
measure of autonomy as hereditary feudal counties; upon its fall they reverted
to independence.  Reduced for a time to the status of provinces under the
Empire, as its power declined they again recovered themselves; down to
Ptolemaic and Roman times these earliest political centres, called by the
Greeks "nomes," survived all the vicissitudes of native rule and foreign
conquest.

     Each of these primitive city-states had its own god, who presided over
all its interests.  He made its husbandry fruitful and gave the increase of
its flocks and herds; his standard was carried before his people when they
went out to war.  His house - primitively a wattle-and-daub hut, like the
habitations of men - stood in the middle of the town, with a pair of tall
masts before it, a rude fence marking off the sacred precincts.  The political
head of the community, by whatever name we should call him, was by virtue of
his headship the chief minister of the god, though the ordinary services were
doubtless performed by other hands.  The gods of the several nomes were alike
in character and operations; each was the god of his city, and its people were
his people.  What distinguished one from another was his relation to a
particular community: "He of Edfu," "She of Nekheb," suffices for a
designation, and some of the gods never got any other.  Besides these gods,
who concerned themselves with the public interest of the community, there were
many functional deities, who had for their province single specific moments or
spheres of life, existing, so to speak, only in and for these activities, like
the gods who are catalogued in the Roman Indigitamenta.  In a corresponding
way there were demons for every kind of mischief.

     The gods of several different cities often bear the same name: Horus, for
instance, is the god of three nomes in Upper and of two in Lower Egypt (and,
with distinguishing titles, of two or three more), Hathor is the goddess of
five in Upper Egypt and of one in Lower.  In some cases this may be the result
of migration, the colonists naturally worshipping the god of the old home, or
of political causes; but it is probable that in most cases the name of a more
famous deity, especially of one connected with the great powers of nature, has
been assumed by the originally nameless god of the place - a thing to which
the religion of Greece, for example, offers many parallels, and of which the
subsequent identification of all the local gods of Egypt with Re, the sun, is
a further development.

     A feature of the Egyptian religion which struck the first Greek observers
as characteristic was the intimate relation of the gods with animals.  Many of
the Greek gods also were associated with certain animals, but in the age in
which the Greeks became acquainted with Egypt these animals were little more
than conventional attributes - the eagle of Zeus, the owl of Athene, the dove
of Aphrodite - while in Egypt, on the contrary, there was in that period a
distinct recrudescence of animal worship.  The irrationality of this worship,
especially in a people of immemorial civilisation and a great reputation for
wisdom, made the Greeks think that it must have some mysterious profundity, an
impression which the Egyptian priests probably fostered.  Modern writers,
especially in the days when symbolism was a great word with them, have
sometimes deluded themselves in the same way.

     There can be no doubt that in early Egypt the animal was the manifest
god; Khnum of Elephantine was a ram, Hathor a cow, Nekhhebt a vulture, Bast a
cat, Horus a falcon, Anubis a jackal, Sebek a crocodile, Thoth an ibis, and so
on.  Both domestic animals and beasts and birds of prey are found in the list,
which, indeed, fairly comprehends the fauna of Egypt.  By exception, one or
two gods appear only in human form.  What determined the selection of the
particular species of animal in different places can seldom be discovered.  A
crocodile is a suitable god for the Fayum district, and the connection of the
falcon with a god of the sun has many analogies; but in most cases the
association is beyond guessing.  Divine powers may also be embodied in trees
or lodge in them; and an originally anonymous "Sycamore-tree-deity" may be
succeeded by a "Hathor of the Sycamore," quite like Artemis Kedreatis or
Karyatis.

     Various theories of the origin of Egyptian animal worship have been
proposed.  De Brosses included it in his voluminous "fetishism"; in recent
years it has become fashionable to call it "totemism." A label, however, even
if rightly applied, is not an explanation, and in this case the propriety of
the label is more than questionable: there is no evidence that the Egyptians
of the Hare Nome, for instance, regarded themselves as descended from a divine
hare ancestor, nor is there any trace of the distinctive social organisation
nor of the divine sacrifice which have been commonly regarded as
characteristics of totemism.  Succession in the female line, which persisted
in the great houses, is doubtless the survival of a primitive form of the
family, but has no necessary relation to totemism. And even if proof were
forthcoming that the forefathers of the prehistoric Egyptians were totemists
of strict observance according to modern doctrine, the question how they came
to worship animals as their divine progenitors would be as far from an answer
as ever.

     The motives which have led savages in all the ends of the earth to
worship animals are various but not mysterious; the only thing that is
peculiar in Egypt is the perpetuation of this worship as a common pattern for
religion to the latest times.  This is itself only a phase of the general
conservatism of Egyptian cult, in which, as in other respects, the Egyptians
like the Chinese paid the penalty of early - we might almost say prematurely -
attaining a very high stage of civilisation; in the centuries of decadence
which followed the Old Kingdom men looked back to the golden age and fixed the
habit.  Partly for this reason, partly from temperamental causes, the
Egyptians of later ages could learn but not forget - the most fatal of all
disqualifications for progress.

     If we could get a glimpse of the history, say in the beginning of the
fourth millennium B. C., we should probably find that some of the city-states,
favoured by situation and by stronger or wiser rulers, had outgrown their
neighbours and made them tributary, to be, in the vicissitudes of dominion,
subjected by their former subjects or by a more powerful city; and that,
ambition growing with might, larger kingdoms were formed, or many cities
brought under the hegemony or rule of one, as happened in Babylonia.  We know
at least that the union of all Egypt in one kingdom was preceded by the two
kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, corresponding to the natural divisions of
the land, the former including the long narrow valley of the Nile, and the
latter the Delta.  Evidence of more than one kind indicates that at the
beginning these kingdoms contended for the supremacy under the banners of
different deities: the god of the rulers of the Delta was Horus, of the kings
of Upper Egypt, Set.  The hostility of these brothers is an old and persistent
trait of the mythology, the origin of which appears to be political rather
than natural. The union of the two kingdoms finds expression in the coupling
of the two gods; a title of the queen is "She who beholds Horus-Set," i.e.,
the king. At a later stage in the history the kingdoms are "the two kingdoms
of the worshippers of Horus," from which we may infer that a dynasty from the
Delta had established itself on the throne of Upper Egypt.  As the god of the
kings in the south as well as the north, Horus became the first national god
in Egypt, and it is probably in consequence of this that he became the god of
several cities in Upper Egypt - perhaps of cities which were at one time or
another the residence of the kings.

     The union of the two kingdoms under one sceptre was accomplished in the
thirty-fourth century B. C.  Menes, who stands at the head of Manetho's
catalogue, may not have been the first who ruled over all Egypt, but he was
the founder of the first dynasty that perpetuated itself upon the throne. The
kingdom of Menes and his successors was a dual monarchy.  The king wore the
two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt, and adopted the insignia and titles of
both kings; the administration was throughout twofold, with distinct
treasuries, for example.  In the separate kingdoms the autonomy of the nomes
had evidently been lost; the united kingdom is not organised on a feudal
basis, but as an absolute monarchy with a thoroughly centralised
administration, as in ancient China.  This centralisation did not, however,
invade the sphere of religion.  The kings might worship Horus as the god of
the royal house - and in this sense of the state - and promote his worship in
the capital and the court, but in the cities the old gods continued to be the
gods of the people.  Horus did not even take a place beside them. The local
priesthoods were independent; the priesthood of Horus had no primacy or
supervision over them, and there was no such thing as a ministry of religion.

     The king was not a plain mortal like his subjects, but was himself Horus
in human form, an incarnation of the deity, and he bore a name expressive of
the fact.  He ruled, therefore, by divine right and was addressed with titles
of divinity, but there is no indication that religious worship in any form was
paid to the living ruler.

     The union of all Egypt under a strong rule was followed by a great
advance in civilisation.  The vast resources of wealth and labour at the
command of the king were lavishly expended in the building and adorning of
palaces and temples which have long since perished, and of imperishable tombs,
and the high officials of the state emulated the royal example.  The capital
was established, for obvious reasons, near the old frontier between the two
kingdoms, and there, in the vicinity of Memphis, the kings of succeeding
dynasties built their "eternal houses," the pyramids.  Only a few years ago it
was the universal opinion that the culmination of Egyptian art was reached
under the Twelfth Dynasty (from about 2000 B. C.); recent discoveries have
shown that nearly a thousand years earlier, in the age of the
pyramid-builders, particularly under the Fourth Dynasty, a perfection had been
attained which was never afterward surpassed.  In this age the Egyptian
religion, also, already appears in the forms which were perpetuated without
essential change to the end.

     It has been already observed that the gods were first of all the gods of
cities or districts which they protected and on whose inhabitants they
bestowed "life, health, strength, victory, and prosperity." However strange
the beast or bird in which the deity is embodied, he is inwardly not beast but
man, with human character and motives; his relation to his worshippers is
similar to that of a beneficent ruler to his people.  Even the myths - such
fragments as survive - are not animal myths, but doings of manlike beings.
The powers of nature were also great gods, especially the sun and moon and the
sky.  The Nile, too, was a beneficent deity, but less eminent than the
dependence of Egypt on the river for its very existence might lead us to
expect. ^1 These powers, however, bestow their blessings on all alike.  They
do not favour one locality above another, and for that reason they were not in
the beginning the gods of any particular communities.  In actual religion,
therefore, of which worship is the measure, they were subordinate figures.

[Footnote 1: In some places in the pyramid texts Osiris seems to be a
Nile-god; but nothing in the myth or cult indicates that he was originally the
divine stream.]

     Under the first dynasties, however, and in all probability in the earlier
kingdoms of the Horus worshippers, Horus, the falcon god, was the sky (the sun
is the eye of Horus) or - and this view prevailed - the sun itself; and then,
naturally, his old enemy, Set, became the power of darkness.  It is not
unlikely that the political consolidation of the kingdom favoured this
development; the god of the king and the state is not a local deity of some
obscure nome who has risen to his high place by conquest, but a universal god.
But the solar religion which eventually prevailed in Egypt had a different
origin.  At On (Heliopolis), only a few miles from Memphis, the god of the
nome was Atum, whose sacred animal was apparently a bull (Mnevis).  The
worship of the sun (Re) assumed at this place, for reasons which are beyond
our conjecture, a far greater prominence than elsewhere; he had a priesthood
of his own and a temple of peculiar type.  The priests of Re at Heliopolis
were the first religious thinkers in Egypt, and their theology, as we shall
see, made its way in the course of time to general acceptance.  The
fundamental doctrine of this theology was that the sun (Re, the visible sun in
the sky) is the greatest of all gods.

     With the Fifth Dynasty (2750 B. C.) the solar religion of Heliopolis
became the religion of the state.  A legend of the Middle Kingdom related that
the founders of this dynasty were three sons of the god Re, born at a single
birth by the wife of a priest of Re, at Sadkhu, not far below Memphis.  It is
possible that in this legend may be preserved the memory that the founder of
the new dynasty was a priest of Re.  These kings are the first to assume, in
addition to the Horus name, a throne title containing the name of Re.  The
temples of this dynasty, of which that at Abu Gurab has been most completely
excavated, were constructed on an altogether singular plan.  They consisted of
a large open court, at the farther end of which, upon a basis in the form of a
truncated pyramid, stood an obelisk with a pyramidal apex, the seat of the
god, upon which, later inscriptions say, "the soul of the god rested when it
came out of heaven" as upon its body.  The obelisk, therefore, took the place
of the cultus image in the sanctuary of other temples.  In front of the
obelisk stood the great altar of the god; the whole worship was thus carried
on under the open sky.  At Abu Gurab the covered passage which leads out on to
the basis of the obelisk was decorated both on the inner and outer sides, and
in one series of these pictures the seasons of the year are represented as
bringing offerings to the king, exhibiting thus the occupations and products
of each season, a motive unique in Egyptian temple decoration.

     Another characteristic feature of these temples was that on either side,
on a brick foundation, was set a ship, representing the two barges in which
the sun god sailed through the sky in the day and the night respectively.  The
temple was richly endowed, and its services maintained by a body of priests of
five different ranks.  Each of the earlier kings of the dynasty built a new
temple of the same type, of which the same priesthood assumed charge.  The
temples bear such names as "Favourite Abode of Re," "Satisfaction of Re."
Although temples of this style were no longer built after the Fifth Dynasty,
the religion of Re had, through the zeal of the Heliopolitan priests and of
the kings of this period, gained a pre-eminence which it never afterward lost.
In the same age we find the first of those identifications of the old local
deity with the sun god which was destined in the end to embrace almost every
Egyptian deity; Atum-Re of Heliopolis was the natural beginning.

     The course of the sun through the heavens and the way in which he goes
back again at night to his daily starting-point are things which had exercised
primitive fancy among the Egyptians as in other countries. Sometimes they
imagined him as a falcon (Horus. (Horus, later identified with Re) winging his
way across the sky; sometimes as a dung-beetle (Scarboeus Aegyptiorum) rolling
the solar globe, from which, by combination of associations, they thought the
new sun was to be born; sometimes he was a calf, self-begotten, born each day
of the cow-goddess of the sky, Hathor. The commonest representation, however,
made him traverse his course along the belly or on the back of the sky-cow in
a boat such as the king used in making a progress on the Nile.  At evening he
exchanged the boat of day for another, in which during the night he returned
to the east either by a subterranean river or by a circuit which passed
through the dark north quarter.  The sky, as we have seen, was imagined as an
immense cow, whose four legs were planted at the corners of the earth and who
is usually upheld besides by a number of deities.  The name of this goddess,
Hathor, "House of Horus," is appropriate to the sky; the notion of the
celestial cow has parallels elsewhere.  The identification with earthly
cow-goddesses, in particular with the nameless local deity of Dendera, is in
all probability secondary.

     The moon likewise traversed the sky in a boat, whence his name Khonsu,
"the sailor." But it was early connected also with the ibis-headed god Thoth,
a deity who enjoyed a great reputation for wisdom and was esteemed to be the
inventor of letters and patron of literature, and the great authority in
medicine, astronomy, and other sciences.  Since this character is in no way
suggested by the ibis head, nor by the dog-headed baboon, in which form also
Thoth appears, the most probable conjecture is that the priests of Thoth had
at an early time distinguished themselves in learning and science, and that
the god appropriated their reputation. ^1 The association with the moon, who
as a measurer of time may easily be imagined to have astronomical knowledge,
possibly came about in this way.

[Footnote 1: The case of Ea in Babylonia is similar.]

     Among the stars Sirius was especially honoured as a goddess, Sothis, who
was early identified with Isis.  The place thus given to Sirius is explained
not alone by the splendour of the star, but by its fundamental importance in
the Egyptian calendar.  Various constellations, notably Orion, have a place in
the myths, but do not seem to have been of any corresponding significance in
religion.  The circumpolar stars which never sink below the horizon were
called the "imperishable ones," and were sometimes imagined to be the abodes
of the blessed dead.

     Except the peculiar temples of Re from the Fifth Dynasty described above,
no temples of the gods dating from the Old Kingdom are preserved. Many of them
doubtless fell into decay during the period of eclipse which followed the
brilliant dawn of the Egyptian kingdom, while such as survived were replaced
by larger and more splendid structures in the time of the Middle Kingdom, as
the latter, in turn, almost everywhere had to make room for the immense
temples of the Theban Empire.  The ruins of pyramid temples of the Old
Kingdom, of which enough remains to show their plan and construction, make it
probable that the temples of the gods did not differ in their essential
features from those of later times, as, indeed, we should infer from the
conservatism of the Egyptians in all such matters. We should imagine them,
therefore, as consisting of a dark cella, within which, screened from vulgar
gaze, was the image of the god; before the cella a larger hypostyle hall, and
in front of the latter the principal altar.  The whole temple stood in the
midst of a walled court, around which lay rooms for the use of the priests and
storehouses for utensils and materials for worship.