History of Egypt, Chaldæa, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 2 (of 12)

by G. Maspero

Two things were specially needful both for them and for Pharaoh in order to maintain or increase their authority—the protection of the gods, and a military organization which enabled them to mobilize the whole of their forces at the first signal. The celestial world was the faithful image of our own; it had its empires and its feudal organization, the arrangement of which corresponded to that of the terrestrial world. The gods who inhabited it were dependent upon the gifts of mortals, and the resources of each individual deity, and consequently his power, depended on the wealth and number of his worshippers; anything influencing one had an immediate effect on the other. The gods dispensed happiness, health, and vigour;* to those who made them large offerings and instituted pious foundations, they lent their own weapons, and inspired them with needful strength to overcome their enemies. They even came down to assist in battle, and every great encounter of armies involved an invisible struggle among the immortals. The gods of the side which was victorious shared with it in the triumph, and received a tithe of the spoil as the price of their help; the gods of the vanquished were so much the poorer, their priests and their statues were reduced to slavery, and the destruction of their people entailed their own downfall.

* I may here remind my readers of the numberless bas-reliefs
and stelae on which the king is represented as making an
offering to a god, who replies in some such formula as the
following: “I give thee health and strength;” or, “I give
thee joy and life for millions of years.”

It was, therefore, to the special interest of every one in Egypt, from the Pharaoh to the humblest of his vassals, to maintain the good will and power of the gods, so that their protection might be effectively ensured in the hour of danger. Pains were taken to embellish their temples with obelisks, colossi, altars, and bas-reliefs; new buildings were added to the old; the parts threatened with ruin were restored or entirely rebuilt; daily gifts were brought of every kind—animals which were sacrificed on the spot, bread, flowers, fruit, drinks, as well as perfumes, stuffs, vases, jewels, bricks or bars of gold, silver, lapis-lazuli, which were all heaped up in the treasury within the recesses of the crypts.* If a dignitary of high rank wished to perpetuate the remembrance of his honours or his services, and at the same time to procure for his double the benefit of endless prayers and sacrifices, he placed “by special permission” ** a statue of himself on a votive stele in the part of the temple reserved for this purpose,—in a courtyard, chamber, encircling passage, as at Karnak,*** or on the staircase of Osiris as in that leading up to the terrace in the sanctuary of Abydos; he then sealed a formal agreement with the priests, by which the latter engaged to perform a service in his name, in front of this commemorative monument, a stated number of times in the year, on the days fixed by universal observance or by local custom.

* See the “Poem of Pentaûîrît” for the grounds on which
Ramses II. bases his imperative appeal to Araon for help:
“Have I not made thee numerous offerings? I have filled thy
temple with my prisoners. I have built thee an everlasting
temple, and have not spared my wealth in endowing it for
thee; I lay the whole world under contribution in order to
stock thy domain.... I have built thee whole pylons in
stone, and have myself reared the flagstaffs which adorn
them; I have brought thee obelisks from Elephantine.”
** The majority of the votive statues were lodged in a
temple “by special favour of a king “—em HOSÎtû nti KUÎr
sûton—as a recompense for services rendered. Some only of
the stelae bear an inscription to the above effect, no
authorization from the king was required for the
consecration of a stele in a temple.
*** It was in the encircling passage of the limestone temple
built by the kings of the XIIth dynasty, and now completely
destroyed, that all the Karnak votive statues were
discovered. Some of them still rest on the stone ledge on
which they were placed by the priests of the god at the
moment of consecration.

For this purpose he assigned to them annuities in kind, charges on his patrimonial estates, or in some cases, if he were a great lord, on the revenues of his fief,—such as a fixed quantity of loaves and drinks for each of the celebrants, a fourth part of the sacrificial victim, a garment, frequently also lands with their cattle, serfs, existing buildings, farming implements and produce, along with the conditions of service with which the lands were burdened. These gifts to the god—“notir hotpûû”—were, it appears, effected by agreements analogous to those dealing with property in mortmain in modern Egypt; in each nome they constituted, in addition to the original temporalities of the temple, a considerable domain, constantly enlarged by fresh endowments. The gods had no daughters for whom to provide, nor sons among whom to divide their inheritance; all that fell to them remained theirs for ever, and in the contracts were inserted imprecations threatening with terrible ills, in this world and the next, those who should abstract the smallest portion from them. Such menaces did not always prevent the king or the lords from laying hands on the temple revenues: had this not been the case, Egypt would soon have become a sacerdotal country from one end to the other. Even when reduced by periodic usurpations, the domain of the gods formed, at all periods, about one-third of the whole country.*

* The tradition handed down by Diodorus tells us that the
goddess Isis assigned a third of the country to the priests;
the whole of Egypt is said to have been divided into three
equal parts, the first of which belonged to the priests, the
second to the kings, and the third to the warrior class.
When we read, in the great Harris Papyrus, the list of the
property possessed by the temple of the Theban Amon alone,
all over Egypt, under Ramses III., we can readily believe
that the tradition of the Greek epoch in no way exaggerated
matters.

Its administration was not vested in a single body of Priests, representing the whole of Egypt and recruited or ruled everywhere in the same fashion. There were as many bodies of priests as there were temples, and every temple preserved its independent constitution with which the clergy of the neighbouring temples had nothing to do: the only master they acknowledged was the lord of the territory on which the temple was built, either Pharaoh or one of his nobles. The tradition which made Pharaoh the head of the different worships in Egypt* prevailed everywhere, but Pharaoh soared too far above this world to confine himself to the functions of any one particular order of priests: he officiated before all the gods without being specially the minister of any, and only exerted his supremacy in order to make appointments to important sacerdotal posts in his domain.**

* The only exception to this rule was in the case of the
Theban kings of the XXIst dynasty, and even here the
exception is more apparent than real. As a matter of fact,
these kings, Hrihor and Pinozmû, began by being high priests
of Amon before ascending the throne; they were pontiffs who
became Pharaohs, not Pharaohs who created themselves
pontiffs. Possibly we ought to place Smonkharî of the XIVth
dynasty in the same category, if, as Brugsch assures us, his
name, Mîr-mâshâù, is identical with the title of the high
priest of Osiris at Mendes, thus proving that he was pontiff
of Osiris in that town before he became king.
** Among other instances, we have that of the king of the
XXIst Tanite dynasty, who appointed Mankhopirrî, high priest
of the Theban Amon, and that of the last king of the same
dynasty, Psûsennes IL, who conferred the same office on
prince Aûpûti, son of Sheshonqû. The king’s right of
nomination harmonized very well with the hereditary
transmission of the priestly office through members of the
same family, as we shall have occasion to show later on.

He reserved the high priesthood of the Memphite Phtah and that of Râ of Heliopolis either for the princes of his own family or more often for his most faithful servants; they were the docile instruments of his will, through whom he exerted the influence of the gods, and disposed of their property without having the trouble of administrating it. The feudal lords, less removed from mortal affairs than the Pharaoh, did not disdain to combine the priesthood of the temples dependent on them with the general supervision of the different worships practised on their lands. The princes of the Gazelle nome, for instance, bore the title of “Directors of the Prophets of all the Gods,” but were, correctly speaking, prophets of Horus, of Khnûmû master of Haoîrît, and of Pakhît mistress of the Speos-Artemidos. The religious suzerainty of such princes was the complement of their civil and military power, and their ordinary income was augmented by some portion at least of the revenues which the lands in mortmain furnished annually. The subordinate sacerdotal functions were filled by professional priests whose status varied according to the gods they served and the provinces in which they were located. Although between the mere priest and the chief prophet there were a number of grades to which the majority never attained, still the temples attracted many people from divers sources, who, once established in this calling of life, not only never left it, but never rested until they had introduced into it the members of their families. The offices they filled were not necessarily hereditary, but the children, born and bred in the shelter of the sanctuary, almost always succeeded to the positions of their fathers, and certain families thus continuing in the same occupation for generations, at last came to be established as a sort of sacerdotal nobility.*

* We possess the coffins of the priests of the Theban Montû
for nearly thirty generations, viz. from the XXVth dynasty
to the time of the Ptolemies. The inscriptions give us their
genealogies, as well as their intermarriages, and show us
that they belonged almost exclusively to two or three
important families who intermarried with one another or took
their wives from the families of the priests of Amon.