The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia

by A. H. Sayce

the earth beneath was not named,

in the beginning the deep was their generator,

the chaos of the sea was the mother of them all.”

The lines are the introduction to a story of the Creation of which they form an integral part. On the walls of the Pyramid of Pepi i. we read again almost the same words. Pepi, it is said, “was born of his father Tum. At that time the heaven was not, the earth was not, men did not exist, the gods were not born, there was no death.”[194] But here the words have been introduced [pg 239] without connection with the context; they cohere neither with what precedes nor with what follows them, and are evidently nothing but an old formula torn from the cosmogony to which they once belonged, and repeated without a clear understanding of what they really meant. The phrases are found again in the later religious literature of Egypt, embedded in it like flies in amber or the fossils in an old sea-beach.[195] To recover their original meaning we must betake ourselves to the clay tablets of Assyria and Babylonia, and the cosmological theories of early Chaldæa. They presuppose that story of a creation out of the chaos of the deep which was indigenous in Babylonia alone.

This deep, which lay at the foundation of Babylonian cosmology, was symbolised in the temples by a “sea” across which the images of the gods were carried in “ships” on their days of festival. In Babylonia such “seas” had a reason for their existence. The Persian Gulf, it was believed, was the cradle of Babylonian culture; it was also the source of that cosmogony which saw in the deep the “mother” of all things. That it should have its mimic representatives in the temples of the country was but natural; it was from the “deep” that the gods had come, and the deep was still the home of the culture-god Ea.[196]

In Egypt, on the other hand, the sea was out of place nay more, it was altogether unnatural. If water were needed, the sacred Nile flowed at the foot of the temple or else there were canals which conducted the waters of the river through the temple lands. There was no primeval deep to be symbolised, no Persian Gulf out of [pg 240] which the culture-god had risen with the gifts of civilisation. If the gods desired to sail in their barks, it was reasonable to suppose that they would do so on the Nile or its tributary canals. And yet the supposition would be wrong. The gods had indeed their sacred “ships” as in Babylonia; but, as in Babylonia, it was on an artificially-constructed lake that they floated, and not, as a rule, on the river Nile. Could anything indicate more clearly the origin of the religious beliefs and practices of the Pharaonic Egyptians? Like the brick tombs of the Old Empire, with their recessed panels and pilasters, it points to Babylonia and the cosmological theories which had their birth in the Babylonian plain.[197]

The religion of ancient Egypt is thus no isolated fact. It links itself, on the one hand, with the beliefs and religious conceptions of the present, and, on the other hand, with those of a yet older past. But it is a linking only; Egyptian religion is no more the religion of ancient Babylonia than it is modern Christianity. In Egypt it assumed a form peculiar to itself, adapting itself to the superstitions and habits of the earlier inhabitants of the land, and developing the ideas which lay latent within it. It was characterised by the inexorable logic with which each of these ideas was followed to its minutest conclusions, and at the same time by the want of any attempt to harmonise these conclusions one with the other, however inconsistent they might be. It was also characterised by a spirit of creativeness; the Egyptian [pg 241] created new religious conceptions because he was not afraid to follow his premisses to their end.

But he was intensely practical. Abstractions as such had little attraction for him, and he translated them into material form. The symbolism of his system of writing favoured the process: even such an abstract idea as that of “becoming” became for him a “transformation” or “change of outward shape.” In spite, therefore, of the spirituality and profundity of much of his theology, his religion remained essentially materialistic. The gods might indeed pass one into the other and be but the manifold forms under which the ever-changing divine essence manifested itself, but this was because it was one with nature and the infinite variety which nature displays. Even the supreme god of Khu-n-Aten incorporated himself at it were in the visible orb of the sun.

The incarnation of the deity accordingly presented no difficulty to the Egyptian mind. It followed necessarily from the fundamental principles of his creed. The divinity which permeated the whole of nature revealed itself more clearly than elsewhere in that which possessed life. Egyptian religious thought never quite shook itself free from the influences of the primitive belief that life and motion were the same. Whatever moves possesses life, whatever lives must move;—such was, and still is, one of the axioms of primitive man. And since the deity manifested itself in movement, it could be recognised in whatever was alive. Man on the one side became a god in the person of the Pharaoh, the gods on the other side became men who had lived and died like Osiris, or had ruled over Egypt in the days of old. Even the ordinary man contained within him a particle or effluence of the divine essence which could never die; and the bodily husk in which it was incarnated could, under certain conditions, acquire the properties of that divinity to [pg 242] which it had afforded a home. That the divine essence could thus assume an individual form, was part of the doctrine which saw, in the manifold varieties of nature, the manifestations of a “single god.” The belief in the incarnation of the deity was a necessary consequence of a materialistic pantheism. And it mattered little whether the incarnation took place under a human or under an animal shape; the human and the animal god had alike been a heritage from elements which, diverse though they may have been in origin, combined to form the Egyptian people, and both the man and the beast were alike living and therefore divine. The beast was more mysterious than the man, that was all; the workings of its mind were more difficult to comprehend, and the language it spoke was more unintelligible. But on that very account it was better adapted for the symbolism which literature and education encouraged, and which became an essential part of the texture of Egyptian thought.

If, then, we would understand the conception of the divine formed by the educated Egyptian of the historical age, we must remember the characteristics of Egyptian thought which lay behind it. Materialism and symbolism constituted the background of Egyptian religion. The one presupposed the other, for the symbol presented the abstract idea in a material and visible shape, while the materialism of the Egyptian mind demanded something concrete which the senses could apprehend. The conception of the ka, with which Egyptian religion begins, is characteristic of Egyptian religious thought up to the last. It is like the “materialised spirits” of modern spiritualism, spirits which are merely matter in an etherialised form. The Egyptian gave not only shape but substance to his mental and spiritual creations; like the “ideas” of Plato, they became sensuous realities like the written symbols which expressed them. Not only were [pg 243] the name and the thing never dissociated from one another, the name was looked on as the essence of the thing, and the name included its expression in both sound and writing. The bird which represented the idea of “soul” became in time the soul itself.