We are better off, fortunately, as regards the religion of ancient Egypt. Thanks more especially to Professor Maspero's unrivalled combination of learning [pg vi] and genius, we are beginning to learn what the old Egyptian faith actually was, and what were the foundations on which it rested. The development of its dogmas can be traced, at all events to a certain extent, and we can even watch the progress of their decay.
There are two facts which, I am bound to add, have been forced upon me by a study of the old religions of civilised humanity. On the one hand, they testify to the continuity of religious thought. God's light lighteth every man that cometh into the world, and the religions of Egypt and Babylonia illustrate the words of the evangelist. They form, as it were, the background and preparation for Judaism and Christianity; Christianity is the fulfilment, not of the Law only, but of all that was truest and best in the religions of the ancient world. In it the beliefs and aspirations of Egypt and Babylonia have found their explanation and fulfilment. But, on the other hand, between Judaism and the coarsely polytheistic religion of Babylonia, as also between Christianity and the old Egyptian faith,—in spite of its high morality and spiritual insight,—there lies an impassable gulf. And for the existence of this gulf I can find only one explanation, unfashionable and antiquated though it be. In the language of a former generation, it marks the dividing-line between revelation and unrevealed religion. It is like that “something,” hard to define, yet impossible to deny, which separates man from the ape, even though on the physiological side the ape may be the ancestor of the man.
A. H. Sayce.
October 1902.
Part I. The Religion Of Ancient Egypt.
Lecture I. Introduction.
It was with a considerable amount of diffidence that I accepted the invitation to deliver a course of lectures before this University, in accordance with the terms of Lord Gifford's bequest. Not only is the subject of them a wide and comprehensive one; it is one, moreover, which is full of difficulties. The materials upon which the lectures must be based are almost entirely monumental: they consist of sculptures and paintings, of objects buried with the dead or found among the ruins of temples, and, above all, of texts written in languages and characters which only a century ago were absolutely unknown. How fragmentary and mutilated such materials must be, I need hardly point out. The Egyptian or Babylonian texts we possess at present are but a tithe of those which once existed, or even of those which will yet be discovered. Indeed, so far as the Babylonian texts are concerned, a considerable proportion of those which [pg 002] have already been stored in the museums of Europe and America are still undeciphered, and the work of thoroughly examining them will be the labour of years. And of those which have been copied and translated, the imperfections are great. Not infrequently a text is broken just where it seemed about to throw light on some problem of religion or history, or where a few more words were needed in order to explain the sense. Or again, only a single document may have survived to us out of a long series, like a single chapter out of a book, leading us to form a wholly wrong idea of the author's meaning and the object of the work he had written or compiled. We all know how dangerous it is to explain a passage apart from its context, and to what erroneous conclusions such a practice is likely to lead.