The Dawn of History: An Introduction to Pre-Historic Study

by C. F. Keary

Another striking and peculiar feature of Egyptian scenery was the beautiful river—the one only river—on which the prosperity, the very existence, of the country depended. It, too, had a perpetual story to tell, a parable to unfold, as it flowed and swelled and contracted in its beneficent yearly course. They saw that all growth and life depended on its action; where its waters reached, there followed fruitfulness and beauty, and a thousand teeming forms of animal, vegetable, and insect life; where its furthest wave stayed, there the reign of nothingness and death began again. The Nile, therefore, became to the ancient Egyptians the token and emblem of a life-giving principle in nature, of that perpetual renewal, that passing from one form of existence into another, which has ever had so much hopeful significance for all thinking minds. Its blue colour when it reflected the sky was the most sacred of their emblems, and was devoted to funeral decorations and to the adornments of the dead, because it spoke to them of the victory of life over death, of the permanence of the life-principle amid the evanescent and vanishing forms under which it appeared. Of these two distinctive features of nature in Egypt, the unexplored western desert and the unending river, we must, then, think as exercising a modifying or intensifying effect on the impressions produced on the minds of ancient Egyptians by those aspects of nature which they had in common with other Eastern peoples. Let us think what these are. First and most conspicuous we must put the sun, in all his changing aspects, rising in gentle radiance over the eastern hills, majestically climbing the cloudless sky, sending down fierce perpendicular rays through all the hot noon, withdrawing his overwhelming heat towards evening as he sloped to his rest, and painting the western sky with colour and glory, on which the eyes of men could rest without being dazzled, vanishing from sight at last behind the white rocks in the west. And then the moon—white, cold, changeable, ruling the night and measuring time. Besides these, the planets and countless hosts of stars; the green earth constantly pouring forth food for man from its bosom; the glowing blue sky at noon and the purple midnight heaven; the moving wind; the darkness that seemed to eat up and swallow the day.

Sun-gods.

Amun.

Now let us see how the ancient Egyptians personified these into gods, and what were the corresponding moral or spiritual ideas of which each nature-power spake to their souls. We shall find the mythology easier to remember and understand if we group the personifications round the natural objects whose aspects inspired them, instead of enumerating them in their proper order as first, second, and third class divinities. So for the present we will class them as Sun-gods, Sky-gods, Wind-gods, etc.; and we will begin with the sun, which among ancient Egyptians occupied the first place, given, as we shall see, to the sky among our Aryan ancestors. The sun, indeed, not only occupies the most conspicuous position in Egyptian mythology, but is presented to us in so many characters and under so many aspects that he may be said to be the chief inspiration, the central object of worship, nothing else, indeed, coming near to his grandeur and his mystery. It is to be remarked, however—and this is a distinctive feature in the Egyptian system of worship—that the mystery of the sun’s disappearance during the night and his reappearance every morning is the point in the parable of the sun’s course to which the Egyptians attached the deepest significance, and to the personification of which they gave the most dignified place in their hierarchy of gods. Atum, or Amun, ‘the concealed one,’ was the name and title given to the sun after he had sunk, as they believed, into the under-world; and by this name they worshipped the concealed Creator of all things, the ‘Dweller in Eternity,’ who was before all, and into whose bosom all things, gods and men, would, they thought, return in the lapse of ages. The figure under which they represented this their oldest and most venerable deity was that of a man, sometimes human-headed and sometimes with the man’s face concealed under the head and horns of a ram—the word ‘ram’ meaning ‘concealment’ in the Egyptian language. The figure was coloured blue, the sacred colour of the Source of life. Two derivations are given for the name Amun. It means that which brings to light; but it also expresses the simple invitation ‘Come,’ and in this sense it appears to be connected with a sentence in the ritual, where Atum is represented as dwelling alone in the under-world in the ages before creation, and on ‘a day’ speaking the word ‘Come,’ when immediately Osiris and Horus (light and the physical sun) appeared before him in the under-world.

Osiris.

The aspect of the sun as it approached its mysterious setting exercised, perhaps, a still greater power over the thoughts of the Egyptians, and was personified by them in a deity, who, if not the most venerable, was the best loved of all their gods. Osiris was the name given from the earliest times to the kind declining sun, who appeared to men to veil his glory, and sheathe his dazzling beams in a lovely, many-coloured radiance, which soothed and gladdened the weary eyes and hearts of men, and enabled them to gaze fearlessly and lovingly on the dread orb from which during the day they had been obliged to turn their eyes. This was the god who loved men and dwelt among them, and for man’s sake permitted himself to be for a time quenched and defeated by the darkness—it was thus that the ancient people read the parable of the sun’s evening beauty and of his disappearance beneath the shades of night, amplifying it, as the needs of the human heart were more distinctly recognized, into a real foreshadowing of that glorious truth towards which the whole human race was yearning—the truth of which these shows of nature were, indeed, speaking continually to all who could understand. The return of Osiris every evening into the under-world invested him also, for the ancient Egyptians, with the character of guardian and judge of souls who were supposed to accompany him on his mysterious journey, or at all events to be received and welcomed by him in Amenti (the realm of souls) when they arrived there. Osiris therefore filled a place both among the gods of the living and those of the dead. He was the link which connected the lives of the upper and the under worlds together, and made them one—the Lover and Dweller among men while yet in the body, and also the Judge and Ruler of the spirit-realm to which they were all bound. Two distinct personifications showed him in these characters. As the Dweller among men and the Sharer of the commonness and materiality of their earth-life, he was worshipped under the form of a bull—the Apis, in which shape his pure soul was believed constantly to haunt the earth, passing from one bull to that of another on the death of the animal, but never abandoning the land of his choice, or depriving his faithful worshippers of his visible presence among them. In his character of Judge of the dead, Osiris was represented as a mummied figure, of the sacred blue colour, carrying in one hand the rod of dominion, and in the other the emblem of life, and wearing on his head the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt. In the judgment scenes he is seated on a throne at the end of the solemn hall of trial to which the soul has been arraigned, and in the centre of which stands the fateful balance where, in the presence of the evil accusing spirit and of the friendly funeral gods and genii who stand around, the heart of the man is weighed against a symbol of Divine Truth.

Next in interest to the setting sun is the personification under which the Egyptians worshipped the strong young sun, the victorious conqueror of the night, who each

Horus.

Ra.

morning appeared to rise triumphant from the blank realm of darkness in which the rays of yesterday’s sun had been quenched. They figured him as the eldest son of Osiris, Horus, the vigorous bright youth who loved his father, and avenged him, piercing with his spear-like ray the monster who had swallowed him up. Horus is represented as sailing up the eastern sky from the under-world in a boat, and slaying the serpent Night with a spear as he advances. The ultimate victory of life over death, of truth and goodness over falsehood and wrong, were the moral lessons which this parable of the sun’s rising read to the ancient Egyptians. The midday sun, ruling the heavens in unclouded glory, symbolized to them majesty and kingly authority, and was worshipped as a great and powerful god under the name of Ra, who was often identified with Amun and worshipped as Amun-Ra. This was especially the case at Thebes.