The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

It must, of course, be remembered that the foregoing generalisations apply to the Egyptian people as a whole. There were individual exceptions; there was even a class the lives of whose members were not devoted to agricultural or other labour, and whose religious conceptions were often spiritual and sublime. This was the class of priests, whose power and influence increased with the lapse of time, and who eventually moulded the official theology of Egypt. Priestly colleges arose in the great sanctuaries of the country, and gradually absorbed a considerable part of its land and revenues. At first the [pg 033] priests do not seem to have been a numerous body, and up to the last the higher members of the hierarchy were comparatively few. But in their hands the religious beliefs of the people underwent modification, and even a rudimentary systematisation; the different independent cults of the kingdom were organised and combined together, and with this organisation came philosophic speculation and theorising. If Professor Maspero is right, the two chief schools of religious thought and systematising in early Egypt were at Heliopolis, near the apex of the Delta, and Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên, in Central Egypt. In Hermopolis the conception of creation, not by voice merely, but even by the mere sound of the voice, was first formed and worked out while Heliopolis was the source of that arrangement of the deities into groups of nine which led to the identification of the gods one with another, and so prepared the way for monotheism.[7] If Heliopolis were indeed, as seems probable, the first home of this religious theory, its influence upon the rest of Egypt was profound. Already in the early part of the historical period, in the age of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the religious texts of the Pyramids were compiled, the scheme which placed the Ennead or group of nine at the head of the Pantheon had been accepted throughout the country. It was the beginning of an inevitable process of thought, which ended by resolving the deities of the official cult into forms or manifestations one of the other, and by landing its adherents in pantheism.

To a certain extent, therefore, the general incapacity for abstract thought which distinguished the Egyptians did not hold good of the priestly colleges. But even among the priests the abstract was never entirely dissociated [pg 034] from the symbol. Symbolism still dominates the profoundest thoughts and expressions of the later inscriptions; the writer cannot free himself from the sensuous image, except perhaps in a few individual cases. At the most, Egyptian thought cannot rise further than the conception of “the god who has no form”—a confession in itself of inability to conceive of what is formless. It is true that after the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty the deity is addressed as Kheper zes-ef, “that which is self-grown,” “the self-existent”; but when we find the same epithet applied also to plants like the balsam and minerals like saltpetre, it is clear that it does not possess the abstract significance we should read into it to-day. It simply expresses the conviction that the god to whom the prayer is offered is a god who was never born in human fashion, but who grew up of himself, like the mineral which effloresces from the ground, or the plant which is not grown from seed. Similarly, when it is said of him that he is “existent from the beginning,”—kheper em ḥat,—or, as it is otherwise expressed, that he is “the father of the beginning,” the phrase is less abstract than it seems at first sight to be. The very word kheper or “existent” denotes the visible universe, while ḥat or “beginning” is the hinder extremity. The phrase can be pressed just as little as the epithet “lord of eternity,” applied to deities whose birth and death are nevertheless asserted in the same breath. Perhaps the most abstract conception of the divine to which the Egyptian attained was that of “the nameless one,” since the name was regarded as something very real and concrete, as, in fact, the essence of that to which it belonged. To say, therefore, that a thing was nameless, was equivalent to either denying its existence or to lifting it out of the world of the concrete altogether.

There was a moment in the history of Egypt when [pg 035] an attempt was made to put a real signification into the apparently abstract terms and phrases addressed to the gods. The Pharaoh Khu-n-Aten, towards the close of the Eighteenth Dynasty, appears suddenly on the scene as a royal reformer, determined to give life and meaning to the language which had described the supreme deity as “the sole and only god,” the absolute ruler of the universe, who was from all eternity, and whose form was hidden from men. But the impulse to the reform came from Asia. Khu-n-Aten's mother was a foreigner, and his attempt to engraft Asiatic ideas upon Egyptian religion, or rather to substitute an Asiatic form of faith for that of his fathers, proved a failure. The worship of the one supreme deity, whose visible symbol was the solar disc, though enforced by persecution and by all the power of the Pharaoh himself, hardly survived his death. Amon of Thebes and his priesthood came victorious out of the struggle, and the pantheistic monotheism of Khu-n-Aten was never revived. Symbolism remained, while the abstract thought, to which that symbolism should have been a stepping-stone, failed to penetrate into Egyptian religion. The Egyptian continued to be content with the symbol, as his father had been before him. But in the priestly colleges and among the higher circles of culture it became less materialistic; while the mass of the people still saw nothing but the symbol itself, the priests and scribes looked as it were beyond it, and saw in the symbol the picture of some divine truth, the outward garment in which the deity had clothed himself. What constituted, however, the peculiarity of the Egyptian point of view was, that this outward garment was never separated from that which it covered; it was regarded as an integral part of the divine essence, which could no more be dissociated from it than the surface of a statue can be dissociated from the stone of which it [pg 036] is made. The educated Egyptian came to see in the multitudinous gods of the public worship merely varying manifestations or forms of one divine substance; but still they were manifestations or forms visible to the senses, and apart from such forms the divine substance had no existence. It is characteristic that the old belief was never disavowed, that images were actually animated by the gods or human personalities whose likeness they bore, and whom they were expressively said to have “devoured”; indeed, the king still received the Sa or principle of immortality from contact with the statue of the god he served; and wonder-working images, which inclined the head towards those who asked them questions, continued to be consulted in the temples.[8] At Dendera the soul of the goddess Hathor was believed to descend from heaven in the form of a hawk of lapis-lazuli in order to vivify her statue;[9] and the belief is a significant commentary on the mental attitude of her worshippers.

One result of the Egyptian's inability or disinclination for abstract thought was the necessity not only of representing the gods under special and definite forms, but even of always so thinking of them. The system of writing, with its pictorial characters, favoured the habit; and we can well understand how difficult the most educated scribe must have found it to conceive of Thoth otherwise than as an ibis, or of Hathor otherwise than as a cow. Whatever may have been the origin of the Egyptian worship of animals, or—which is something very different—of the identification of certain individual animals with the principal gods, its continuance was materially assisted by the sacred writing of the scribes [pg 037] and the pictures that adorned the walls of the temples. To the ordinary Egyptian, Thoth was indeed an ibis, and the folk-lore of the great sanctuaries accordingly described him as such.[10] But to the cultured Egyptian, also, the ibis was his symbol; and in Egypt, as we have seen, the symbol and what is symbolised were apt to be confounded together.

The beast-worship of Egypt excited the astonishment and ridicule of the Greeks and Romans, and the unmeasured scorn of the Christian apologists. I shall have to deal with it in a later lecture. For the present it is sufficient to point out how largely it owed its continued existence to the need for symbolism which characterised Egyptian thought, in spite of the fact that there was another and contradictory conception which held sway within Egyptian religion. This was the conception of the divinity of man, which found its supreme expression in the doctrine that the Pharaoh was the incarnation of the sun-god. It was not in the brute beast, but in man himself, that the deity revealed himself on earth.

The origin of the conception must be sought in the early history of the country. Egypt was not at first the united monarchy it afterwards became. It was divided into a number of small principalities, each independent of the other and often hostile. It is probable that in some cases the inhabitants of these principalities did not belong to the same race; that while in one the older population predominated, in another the Pharaonic Egyptians held absolute sway. At all events the manners and customs of their inhabitants were not uniform, any more than the religious beliefs they held and the rites they practised. The god who was honoured in one place [pg 038] was abhorred in another, and a rival deity set over against him.

True to its conservative principles, Egypt never forgot the existence of these early principalities. They continued to survive in a somewhat changed form. They became the nomes of Pharaonic Egypt, separate districts resembling to a certain degree the States of the American Republic, and preserving to the last their independent life and organisation. Each nome had its own capital, its own central sanctuary, and its own prince; above all, it had its own special god or goddess, with their attendant deities, their college of priests, their ceremonies and their festivals. Up to the age of the Hyksos conquest the hereditary princes of the nomes were feudal lords, owning a qualified obedience to the Pharaoh, and furnishing him with tribute and soldiers when called upon to do so. It was not till after the rise of the Eighteenth Dynasty that the old feudal nobility was replaced by court officials and a bureaucracy which owed its position to the king; and even then the descendants of the ancient princes were ever on the watch to take advantage of the weakness of the central authority and recover the power they had lost. Up to the last, too, the gods of the several nomes preserved a semblance of their independent character. It was only with the rise of the new kingdom and the accession of the Eighteenth Dynasty that that process of fusion set in to any real purpose which identified the various deities one with another, and transformed them into kaleidoscopic forms of Amon or Ra. The loss of their separate and independent character went along with the suppression of the feudal families with whom their worship had been associated for unnumbered generations. The feudal god and the feudal prince disappeared together: the one became absorbed into the supreme god of the Pharaoh and his [pg 039] priests, the other into a functionary of the court. It was only in the hearts and minds of the people that Thoth remained what he had always been, the lord and master of Hermopolis, and of Hermopolis alone.

The principalities of primitive Egypt gradually became unified into two or three kingdoms, and eventually into two kingdoms only, those of Upper and Lower Egypt. Recent discoveries have thrown unexpected light on this early period of history. At one time the capital of the southern kingdom was Nekhen, called Hierakonpolis in the Greek period, the site of which is now represented by the ruins of Kom el-Ahmar, opposite El-Kab. Here, among the foundations of the ancient temple, Mr. Quibell has found remains which probably go back to an age before that of Menes and the rise of the united Egyptian monarchy. Among them are huge vases of alabaster and granite, which were dedicated by a certain king Besh in the year when he conquered the people of Northern Egypt. On the other hand, on a stela now at Palermo a list is given of kings who seem to have reigned over Northern Egypt while the Pharaohs of Nekhen were reigning in the south.[11]

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.