* Zatmît appears to have been situate at some distance from
Bayadîyéh, on the spot where the map published by the
Egyptian Commission marks the ruins of a modern village.
There was a necropolis of considerable extent there, which
furnishes the Luxor dealers with antiquities, many of which
belong to the first Theban empire.
2 Copied by Faucher-Gudin from the survey-drawings of the
tomb of Anni by Boussac, member of the Mission française in Egypt (1891). The inscription over the arbour gives the
list of the various trees in the garden of Anni during his
lifetime.
Several bloody combats, which took place between Oxyrrhynchos and Heracleopolis Magna, were the means of driving them finally out of the Nile Valley; they rallied for the last time in the eastern provinces of the Delta, were beaten at Zalû, and giving up all hope of success on land, they embarked at the head of the Gulf of Suez, in order to return to the Nubian Desert, their habitual refuge in times of distress. The sea was the special element of Typhon, and upon it they believed themselves secure. Horus, however, followed them, overtook them near Shas-hirît, routed them, and on his return to Edfu, celebrated his victory by a solemn festival. By degrees, as he made himself master of those localities which owed allegiance to Sit, he took energetic measures to establish in them the authority of Osiris and of the solar cycle. In all of them he built, side by side with the sanctuary of the Typhonian divinities, a temple to himself, in which he was enthroned under the particular form he was obliged to assume in order to vanquish his enemies. Metamorphosed into a hawk at the battle of Hibonû, we next see him springing on to the back of Sit under the guise of a hippopotamus; in his shrine at Hibonû he is represented as a hawk perching on the back of a gazelle, emblem of the nome where the struggle took place. Near to Zalû he became incarnate as a human-headed lion, crowned with the triple diadem, and having feet armed with claws which cut like a knife; it was under the form, too, of a lion that he was worshipped in the temple at Zalû. The correlation of Sit and the celestial Horus was not, therefore, for these Egyptians of more recent times a primitive religious fact; it was the consequence, and so to speak the sanction, of the old hostility between the two gods.
Horus had treated his enemy in the same fashion that a victorious Pharaoh treated the barbarians conquered by his arms: he had constructed a fortress to keep his foe in check, and his priests formed a sort of garrison as a precaution against the revolt of the rival priesthood and the followers of the rival deity. In this manner the battles of the gods were changed into human struggles, in which, more than once, Egypt was deluged with blood. The hatred of the followers of Osiris to those of Typhon was perpetuated with such implacability, that the nomes which had persisted in adhering to the worship of Sit, became odious to the rest of the population: the image of their master on the monuments was mutilated, their names were effaced from the geographical lists, they were assailed with insulting epithets, and to pursue and slay their sacred animals was reckoned a pious act. Thus originated those skirmishes which developed into actual civil wars, and were continued down to Roman times. The adherents of Typhon only became more confirmed in their veneration for the accursed god; Christianity alone overcame their obstinate fidelity to him.[*]
* This incident in the wars of Horus and Sit is drawn by
Faucher-Gudin from a bas-relief of the temple of Edfû. On
the right, Har-Hûdîti, standing up in the solar bark,
pierces with his lance the head of a crocodile, a partisan
of Sît, lying in the water below; Harmâkhis, standing behind
him, is present at the execution. Facing this divine pair,
is the young Horus, who kills a man, another partisan of
Sît, while Isis and Har-Hûdîti hold his chains; behind
Horus, Isis and Thot are leading four other captives bound
and ready to be sacrificed before Harmâkhis.
The history of the world for Egypt was therefore only the history of the struggle between the adherents of Osiris and the followers of Sît; an interminable warfare in which sometimes one and sometimes the other of the rival parties obtained a passing advantage, without ever gaining a decisive victory till the end of time. The divine kings of the second and third Ennead devoted most of the years of their earthly reign to this end; they were portrayed under the form of the great warrior Pharaohs, who, from the eighteenth to the twelfth century before our era, extended their rule from the plains of the Euphrates to the marshes of Ethiopia. A few peaceful sovereigns are met with here and there in this line of conquerors—a few sages or legislators, of whom the most famous was styled Thot, the doubly great, ruler of Hermopolis and of the Hermopolitan Ennead. A legend of recent origin made him the prime minister of Horus, son of Isis; a still more ancient tradition would identify him with the second king of the second dynasty, the immediate successor of the divine Horuses, and attributes to him a reign of 3226 years. He brought to the throne that inventive spirit and that creative power which had characterized him from the time when he was only a feudal deity. Astronomy, divination, magic, medicine, writing, drawing—in fine, all the arts and sciences emanated from him as from their first source. He had taught mankind the methodical observation of the heavens and of the changes that took place in them, the slow revolutions of the sun, the rapid phases of the moon, the intersecting movements of the five planets, and the shapes and limits of the constellations which each night were lit up in the sky. Most of the latter either remained, or appeared to remain immovable, and seemed never to pass out of the regions accessible to the human eye. Those which were situate on the extreme margin of the firmament accomplished movements there analogous to those of the planets.