The Weighing of Actions.
Nor is it the conflicts and triumphs of the human spirit alone that are portrayed, but the conflicts and triumphs of the gods themselves. We read in a very ancient chapter of the sacred book: ‘I am Ra in his first supremacy—the great god, self-existing. There was a battle-field of the gods prepared when I spake.’ Later on a more tangible shape and form is given to this great battle. In the tomb of Seti i. we may see it all in allegory and mystic symbol. Here is depicted in a series of tableaux the ‘passage of the Sun through the hours of the day and of the night,’ i.e. of the visible and invisible world, beholding and ruling all, both mortal and immortal. Ra in his bark, the ‘ancient and unknown One in his mystery,’ accompanied by gods and spirits, finds the ‘field of battle prepared.’ The serpent of evil, Apepi, lies in wait, hidden beneath the waves of the celestial rivers—the ether. After a hard struggle he is drawn out and destroyed, and the heavenly bark disappears in peace behind the western horizon, received by the mother goddess Nut.[63] A hymn addressed to Ra, ‘Lord of the horizon,’ celebrates his triumph: ‘Thou awakenest, triumphant and blessed One, thou who comest in radiance and travellest in thy disk! Thy divine bark[64] speeds on, blest by thy mother Nut each day; thy foes fall as thou turnest thy face to the western heaven. Glad are the mariners of thy bark; Ra hath quelled his impious foe, he striketh down the evil one, thou breakest his strength, casting him into the fire that encircleth in its season the children of wickedness.’
An eminent writer who has devoted himself to the study of ancient religions says:—‘In spite of the abundance of materials, in spite of the ruins of temples and numberless statues and half-deciphered papyri—I must confess that we have not yet come very near the beatings of the heart that gave life to all this strange and mysterious grandeur.’[65] This is only what might be expected; for the symbolism of any religion is apt to assume an unmeaning and often a grotesque appearance in the eyes of men professing another faith, and no religion was ever so pervaded by symbolism as that of ancient Egypt. Symbols are not, in any sense, works of art; they are never chosen for intrinsic worth or beauty,[66] and are valueless, excepting for the sake of some association of idea, which led to their selection. They are intended to represent, but not seldom also to veil, thoughts and mysteries that cannot be uttered in language, or expressed in any form or image. But in all religions there is a tendency to separate the symbol from the thought, and this, carried to its fullest extent, ends in idolatry; the mere symbol seems to the ignorant and superstitious to be endowed with power and divine attributes, and becomes itself a god. That which gave the Egyptian religion an especially strange and even absurd aspect, in the eyes of Greek and Roman travellers of a later day, was its use of living symbols, i.e. of the sacred animals, which was then so excessive as to have become its prominent feature on first sight, and which led to idolatry of the most base and degraded kind.
There are a few traces of the existence of animal worship under the early dynasties; they are but few, however, and, so far as I am aware, no notice of sacred animals occurs between the age of Khufu and the reign of Rameses ii. Nor are the gods depicted in the memorial chambers of the departed before the times of the eighteenth dynasty. Under Thothmes iii., their figures are constantly met with, often with the head of the symbolic creature that was their emblem ([see p. 119]). The reason for the selection is often plain. The bull or the ram might denote undaunted strength and the protection of the weak, the hawk unerring sight, the crocodile terror, the scarabæus tender foresight and unwearied care for its offspring. And not only were the gods represented under the form of these and other objects, but the living animals themselves were symbolic and sacred. Each district had its own sacred animal, fed and tended with the devoutest care. Certain of them, however, attained to far greater celebrity than the rest—the Ram of Mendes; Mnevis, the bull sacred to Ra, at Heliopolis; and, above all, Apis, the bull sacred to Ptah, at Memphis. The eldest son of Rameses, named Khamus, who was governor of Memphis, was also high priest of Ptah, and more especially under his form or manifestation as Apis. It requires very little knowledge of human nature, and very little acquaintance with history, to feel assured that the crowds who gathered round these symbolic creatures would regard them with superstitious reverence, and that to not a few the animal would be no longer a symbol but a god.
Animal worship grew and developed immensely after the days of Rameses. At a later period we find Greek and Roman travellers noticing it with curiosity or contempt. Herodotus and Strabo saw the sacred crocodiles in the Fayoum, adorned with golden ornaments, and fed with the flesh of the sacrifices. Diodorus tells us of the furious wrath of Egyptian villagers against a Roman soldier who had killed a cat. The comic writers of Greece and the satirists of Rome made merry over these peculiar deities.
‘You are never done laughing every day of your lives at the Egyptians,’ says an early Christian writer to his heathen contemporaries. Philo, the Jewish philosopher of Alexandria, tells us that foreigners coming to Egypt knew not what to do for laughter at the divine animals, but that in the end they were themselves overpowered by the superstition. There were not wanting those who, acknowledging that the animals were to be regarded merely as symbolic, based their arguments against the custom on that very ground.[67] The days of foreign criticism were, however, as yet in the distant future when the kings of the nineteenth dynasty were on the throne.
The growth of animal worship seems to speak of degradation in the national religion, and there are not wanting at the same time evidences both of a decay in the national morality and of a decline in art. When art is required to work by the acre its productions are not likely to be distinguished by high excellence or exquisite finish. In the drawings of the time of Rameses the heads indeed are still good and the portraits characteristic, but the figures are ill-drawn in the extreme, and often most hastily finished off. Egyptian art suffered severely under the influence of certain fixed rules concerning the drawing and the proportion of figures. Under the earlier dynasties there are signs of greater freedom of treatment than prevailed at a later period, when the conventional rules, which no one ventured to infringe, had checked the progress of all true art by putting a stop to its free exercise. This following of a stereotyped pattern, combined with the absence of perspective, gives the Egyptian drawings a very odd and stiff appearance. The portraiture remained excellent, and much spirit was often shown in the drawing of animals and in humorous scenes; indeed, the manner in which, in hieroglyphic writing, the individual character of an animal or bird is given in a few minute lines is quite wonderful. The graceful outline of their pottery, the exquisite workmanship of their jewellery, show how much true artistic power was there, had it only been allowed free scope. But there never was a nation that clung so tenaciously to fixed laws and forms. Their monarchy, their religion, lasted unchanged as no other has yet done;[68] the very fashion of their dress varied but little with the centuries, and their magnificent temples were built and rebuilt on the same scheme. But already, under the nineteenth dynasty, other influences were strongly at work. The Delta was full of foreign settlers, and the names of some of its cities were Semitic. Literature was affected, and the younger writers of the day were given to introducing Semitic words and phrases—just as an English or German author does with French. Whole bodies of mercenary troops were employed in the army under a special commander; others were used in the naval service, which was never very popular in Egypt, but which was becoming of more and more importance. Others again, not judged fit for these branches, were reduced to serfage, being employed in the service of the kings and of the temples, or in still harder bondage on the public buildings, in the quarries, or the mines. Many of these, we learn, were branded with the name of the god or master to whom they were assigned, and here we see at once the arising of that distrust and fear which always beset the ease of the owners of the slave. Slavery was universal in the ancient world, but in Egypt it had always worn a milder aspect than it ever assumed in any other country, unless it were Greece, much of whose early civilisation came from the land of the Nile. Even in the days of harsher servitude at which we have now arrived, there were no such hideous cruelties as we meet with in the blood-stained pages of Roman, Carthaginian, or American slavery. The Egyptian slave was well fed, and by the moral and religious code maltreatment of a slave was an offence. We do not know the legal code on this subject, but the moral tone is clearly shown in the confession every ruler had to make before Osiris: ‘I have allowed no master to maltreat his slave.’ But moral feeling can grow blunt, and maltreatment was not wanting in the days of Rameses ii.
The Hebrew colony in Goshen, so warmly welcomed by the Hyksos kings, must have been regarded with distrust on the accession of the native dynasty, which ‘knew not Joseph,’ and had the utmost aversion for aught that was connected with the rulers he had served. Under Rameses, or one of his predecessors, the Hebrews had been reduced to cruel bondage; ‘they built for Pharaoh treasure-cities, Pithom and Raamses.’[69] Their future deliverer, rescued from death by a princess of the royal house,[70] must have spent many years at Zoan, the favourite residence of Rameses, which was close to the district of Goshen, and there he would have the opportunity at any moment of ‘going out to his brethren and looking upon their burdens.’