The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

and his flocks through his orchards!”[113]

The supremacy of Memphis was replaced by that of Thebes, and under the Theban dynasties, accordingly, Amon, the god of Thebes, became paramount in the State religion of Egypt. But before we trace the history of his rise to supremacy, it is necessary to say a few words regarding the Egyptian goddesses. The woman occupied an important position in the Egyptian household; purity of blood was traced through her, and she even sat on the throne of the Pharaohs. The divine family naturally corresponded to the family on earth. The Egyptian goddess was not always a pale reflection of the god, like the Semitic consort of Baal; on the contrary, there were goddesses of nomes as well as gods of nomes, and the nome-goddess was on precisely the same footing as the nome-god. Nit of Sais or Hathor of Dendera differed in no way, so far as their divine powers were concerned, from Ptaḥ of Memphis or Khnum of the Cataract. Like the gods, too, they became the heads of Enneads, or were embodied in Trinities, when first the doctrine of the Ennead, and then that of the Trinity, made its way through the theological schools. They are each even called “the father of fathers” as well as “the mother of mothers,” and take the place of Tum as the creators of heaven and earth.[114]

Nit rose to eminence with the Twenty-sixth Dynasty. Her city of Sais had previously played no part in history, but both its goddess and its sanctuary were of old [pg 144] date.[115] Of the nature of the goddess, however, we know little. She is represented as a woman with a shuttle as her emblem, and in her hands she carries a bow and arrow, like Istar of Assyria or Artemis of Greece. But the twin arrow was also a symbol of the nome, which was a border district, exposed to the attacks of the Libyan tribes. The Greeks identified her with their Athêna on account of a slight similarity in the names.

Sekhet, or Bast of Bubastis, is better known. Sometimes she has the head of a lion, sometimes of a cat. At Philæ it is said of her that “she is savage as Sekhet and mild as Bast.”[116] But the lion must have preceded the cat. The earlier inhabitants of the valley of the Nile were acquainted with the lion; the cat seems to have been introduced from Nubia in the age of the Eleventh Dynasty. In the time of the Old Empire there was no cat-headed deity, for there were no cats. But the cat, when once introduced, was from the outset a sacred animal.[117] The lion of Sekhet was transformed into a cat; and as the centuries passed, the petted and domesticated animal was the object of a worship that became fanatical. Herodotos maintains that when a house took fire the Egyptians of his time thought only of preserving the cats; and to this day the cat is [pg 145] honoured above all other animals on the banks of the Nile. The chief sanctuary of Bast was at Bubastis, where, however, the excavations of Dr. Naville have shown that she did not become the chief divinity before the rise of the Twenty-second Dynasty.[118]

The goddesses passed one into the other even more readily than the gods. Sekhet developed by turns into Uazit and Mut, Selk the scorpion, and Hathor of Dendera. Pepi I., even at Bubastis, still calls himself the son of Hathor.

Hathor played much the same part among the goddesses that Ra played among the gods. She gradually absorbed the other female divinities of Egypt. They were resolved into forms of her, as the gods were resolved into forms of Ra. The kings of the Sixth Dynasty called themselves her sons, just as they also called themselves sons of the sun-god. She presided over the underworld; she presided also over love and pleasure. The seven goddesses, who, like fairy godmothers, bestowed all good things on the newborn child, were called by her name, and she was even identified with Mut, the starry sky. Her chief sanctuary was at Dendera, founded in the first days of the Pharaonic conquest of Egypt. Here she was supreme; even Horus the elder and the younger,[119] when compelled to form with her a trinity, remained lay figures and nothing more.

She was pictured sometimes as a cow, sometimes as a woman with the head of a cow bearing the solar disc between her horns: for from the earliest days she was associated with the sun. Sometimes she is addressed as the daughter of Ra;[120] sometimes the sun-god is her son. [pg 146] At Dendera the solar orb is represented as rising from her lap, while its rays encircle her head, which rests upon Bâkhu, the mountain of the sun. In another chamber of the same temple we see her united with her son Horus as a hawk with a woman's head in the very middle of the solar disc, which slowly rises from the eastern hills. When Isis is figured as a cow, it is because she is regarded as a form of Hathor.[121]

The original character of Hathor has been a matter of dispute. Some scholars have made her originally the sky or space generally, others have called her the goddess of light, while she has even been identified with the moon. In the legend of the destruction of mankind by Ra, she appears as the eye of the sun-god who plies her work at night; and a text at Dendera speaks of her as “resting on her throne in the place for beholding the sun's disc, when the bright one unites with the bright one.” In any case she is closely connected with the rising sun, whose first rays surround her head.

Egyptian tradition maintained that she had come from the land of Punt, from those shores of Arabia and the opposite African coast from which the Pharaonic immigrants had made their way to the valley of the Nile. She was, moreover, the goddess of the Semitic nomads of the Sinaitic Peninsula; in other words, she was here identified with the Ashtoreth or Istar of the Semitic world.[122] Now the name of Hathor does not seem to be Egyptian. It is written with the help of a sort of rebus, so common in ideographic forms of writing. [pg 147] The pronunciation of the name is given by means of ideographs, the significations of which have nothing in common with it, though the sounds of the words they express approximate to its pronunciation. The name of Hathor, accordingly, is denoted by writing the hawk of Horus inside the picture of a “house,” the name of which was Hât. A similar method of representing names is frequent in the ideographic script of ancient Babylonia; thus the name of Asari, the Egyptian Osiris, is expressed by placing the picture of an eye (shi) inside that of a place (eri).

The name of Hathor, therefore, had primitively nothing to do with either Horus or the house of Horus, whatever may have been the speculations which the priests of a later day founded upon the written form of the name. It was only an attempt, similar to those common in the early script of Babylonia, to represent the pronunciation of a name which had no meaning in the Egyptian language. But it is a name which we meet with in the ancient inscriptions of Southern Arabia. There it appears as the name of the god Atthar. But Atthar itself was borrowed from Babylonia. It is the name of the Babylonian goddess Istar, originally the morning and evening stars, who, an astronomical text tells us, was at once male and female. As a male god she was adored in South Arabia and Moab; as the goddess of love and war she was the chief goddess of Babylonia, the patron of the Assyrian kings, and the Ashtoreth of Canaan. When, with the progress of astronomical knowledge, the morning and evening stars were distinguished from one another, in one part of Western Asia she remained identified with the one, in another part with the other.