In the light of these astronomic considerations, it is interesting to think of the fanatical act of Cambyses in slaying the Apis Bull, as one prompted not only by fury at seeing the high honour paid to the Egyptian god, but also by an insane pride, which made him desire to imitate the triumph of Mithras—the Persian sun-god—over the Bull in the heavens, by killing its earthly representative, the Apis Bull.
In the days of Cambyses, when Apis worship prevailed in Egypt, and even still earlier when the children of Israel, in imitation of this worship, set up the golden calf in the wilderness, the raison d’être for the honour paid to Taurus as a star mark of the autumnal season no longer existed; for we know that about 1800 B.C., the equinoctial colure had left that constellation, and had entered the eastern degrees of the constellation Aries. Egyptian history assures us, however, that the institution of the Apis worship was effected by some king of the first dynasty in the far back ages when Taurus, Scorpio, Leo, and Aquarius did actually preside over the four seasons of the year. Moreover, the recent discoveries of the tombs of kings and other personages, in the first Egyptian dynasty, lead us back to the remote date of 4000 B.C., when the very earliest observations of the colures in the four above-named constellations could have been made.
In these ancient tombs, amongst other objects, have been found slate slabs of various shapes—some of them, in their general outline, as it appears to me, representing in the flat the form of a jar or vase. In the accompanying cuts, a proposed restoration of the broken-off top of one of the slates is given, and is distinguished from the existing portion of the slate by being drawn in dotted lines. Both sides of these slabs are covered by finely executed carvings, not incised but in relief. The subjects of the reliefs are very varied, but prominent amongst them, and exactly repeated more than once, is the figure of a bull trampling under his feet, and preparing to gore with his horns, a fallen human foe. Lions are also portrayed in many attitudes, and on one slate, where in the upper register this triumphing bull is represented, below it in a crenellated cartouche a lion and an urn or jar are to be seen in close proximity to each other. On another slate, a scorpion is delineated above a crenellated cartouche; and representations of scorpions carved in relief on mace-heads and on jars, and scorpions carved in the round, have been met with in great numbers in the excavations at Hierakonpolis—the site also of the discovery of one of the most important of the carved slates here described.
It is difficult, I think, to resist the conclusion that we have in the carvings on these ancient slate objects references not to merely terrestrial bulls, lions, scorpions, and water jars, but rather to the constellations, already imagined under those forms, whose stars, at the date when these carvings were made, marked in conjunction with, and in opposition to, the sun, the four seasons of the year.[119]
[119] In the centre of many, if not of all, of the slates under our notice, there is carved on the obverse a ring surrounding a depression. “Mr Quibell’s theory, which is still adhered to by Professor Petrie, is that this ring was intended to receive the green paint with which it is supposed the earliest Egyptians painted their faces,” but Mr Legge in his Paper, from which I have here quoted (contributed to the Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology, May 1900, pp. 137, 138), puts forward a different view, which, if it is correct, would lend support to the astronomic interpretation above proposed for some of the carved representations. Mr Legge considers that the rings represented the sun, and that “it is quite possible that this significance was heightened by the introduction of some bright substance, such as gold foil.” He points out that the composite monsters of the slates, all of which are represented on certain ivories, which he names, are always associated with the sun-disk. He believes these figures to have a symbolic meaning, though he does not in his Paper claim the especial astronomic interpretations I have above advocated.
Outlines of two carved slates drawn from Plates I. and III. in The Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archæology for May 1900.
[To face p. 236.