But Amon-hotep iii. was not the first of whom it had been said that his father was a god. Fragments of a similar text have been found by Dr. Naville at Dêr el-Bâharî, from which we may gather that queen Hatshepsu also claimed to have been born of Amon. How much further back in Egyptian history the belief may go we do not know: the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties called themselves sons of the sun-god, and the Theban monarchs whose virgin-mothers were wedded to Amon, incarnate in the flesh, did but work out the old conception in a more detailed and definite way.
It was given to the Egyptians to be one among the few inventive races of mankind. They were pioneers of civilisation; above all, they were the inventors of religious ideas. The ideas, it is true, were not self-evolved; they presupposed beliefs which had been bequeathed by the past; but their logical development and the forms which they assumed were the work of the Egyptian people. We owe to them the chief moulds into which religious thought has since been thrown. The doctrines of emanation, of a trinity wherein one god manifests himself in three persons, of absolute thought as the underlying and permanent substance of all things, all go back to the priestly philosophers of Egypt. Gnosticism and Alexandrianism, the speculations of [pg 251] Christian metaphysic and the philosophy of Hegel, have their roots in the valley of the Nile. The Egyptian thinkers themselves, indeed, never enjoyed the full fruition of the ideas they had created; their eyes were blinded by the symbolism which had guided their first efforts, their sight was dulled by overmuch reverence for the past, and the materialism which came of a contentment with this life. They ended in the scepticism of despair or the prosaic superstitions of a decadent age. But the task which dropped from their hands was taken up by others; the seeds which they had sown were not allowed to wither, and, like the elements of our culture and civilisation, the elements also of our modes of religious thought may be traced back to the “dwellers on the Nile.” We are heirs of the civilised past, and a goodly portion of that civilised past was the creation of ancient Egypt.
Part II. The Religion Of The Babylonians.
Lecture I. Introductory.
It is now fourteen years ago since I delivered a course of lectures for the Hibbert Trustees on the religion of the ancient Babylonians. The subject at that time was almost untouched; even such materials as were then accessible had been hardly noticed, and no attempt had been made to analyse or reduce them to order, much less to draw up a systematic account of ancient Babylonian religion. It was necessary to lay the very foundations of the study before it could be undertaken, to fix the characteristic features of the Babylonian faith and the lines along which it had developed, and, above all, to distinguish the different elements of which it was composed. The published texts did not suffice for such a work; they needed to be supplemented from that great mass of unpublished cuneiform documents with which the rooms of our museums are filled. My lectures were necessarily provisional and preliminary only, and I had to content myself with erecting a scaffold on which others might build. The time had not yet come for writing a systematic description of Babylonian religion, and of the phases through which it passed during the long centuries of its existence.
Nor has the time come yet. The best proof of this is the unsatisfactory nature of the attempts that have recently been made to accomplish the task. Our evidence is still too scanty and imperfect, the gaps in it are too numerous, to make anything of the sort possible. Our knowledge of the religious beliefs of Babylonia and Assyria is at best only piecemeal. Now and again we have inscriptions which illustrate the belief of a particular epoch or of a particular class, or which throw light on a particular side of the official or popular religions; but such rays of light are intermittent, and they penetrate the darkness only to be succeeded by a deeper obscurity than before. All we can hope to do is to discover the leading conceptions which underlay the religion of Babylonia in its various forms, to determine and distinguish the chief elements that went to create it, and to picture those aspects of it on which our documentary materials cast the most light. But anything like a systematic description of Babylonian religion will for many years to come be altogether out of the question; it must wait until the buried libraries of Chaldæa have been excavated, and all their contents studied. We are but at the beginning of discoveries, and the belief that our present conclusions are final is the belief of ignorance.