Drawn by Boudier,
from a photograph by Gautier.
He made his way into the dwelling of the ineffable god, and there, unobserved among the crowd, he witnessed scenes from the divine life represented by the priests on the lake by the light of torches, episodes of his passion, mourning, and resurrection. The priests did not disclose their subtler mysteries before barbarian eyes, nor did they teach the inner meaning of their dogmas, but the little they did allow him to discern filled the traveller with respect and wonder, recalling sometimes by their resemblance to them the mysteries in which he was accustomed to take part in his own country. Then, as now, but little attention was paid to the towns in the centre and east of the Delta; travellers endeavoured to visit one or two of them as types, and collected as much information as they could about the remainder. Herodotus and his rivals attached little importance to those details of landscape which possess so much attraction for the modern tourist. They bestowed no more than a careless glance on the chapels scattered up and down the country like the Mohammedan shrines at the present day, and the waters extending on all sides beneath the acacias and palm trees during the inundation, or the fellahin trotting along on their little asses beside the pools, did not strike them as being of sufficient interest to deserve passing mention in an account of their travels.
They passed by the most picturesque villages with indifference, and it was only when they reached some great city, or came upon some exceptionally fine temple or eccentric deity, that their curiosity was aroused. Mendes worshipped its patron god in the form of a live ram,* and bestowed on all members of the same species some share of the veneration it lavished on the divine animal. The inhabitants of Atarbêkhis,** on the island of Prosopitis, gave themselves up to the worship of the bull.
* Herodotus says that both the goats and the god were named
Mendes in Egyptian, but he is here confusing ordinary goats
with the special goat which was supposed to contain the soul
of Osiris. It was the latter that the Egyptians named after
the god himself, Baînibdîduît, i.e. the soul of the master
of the city of Diduît.
** The old explanation of this name as the City of Hathor has been rightly rejected as inconsistent with one of the
elementary rules of hieroglyphic grammar. The name, when
properly divided into its three constituent parts, means
literally the Castle of horus the Sparrow-hawk, or Hat-har-
baki
Drawn by Boudier,
from a photograph
by Gautier.
When one of these animals died in the neighbourhood they buried it, leaving one horn above the earth in order to mark the spot, and once every year the boats of Atarbêkhis made a tour round the island to collect the skeletons or decaying bodies, in order that they might be interred in a common burying-place.
The people of Busiris patronised a savage type of religion. During the festival of Isis they gave themselves up to fierce conflicts, their fanatical fury even infecting strangers who chanced to be present. The Carians also had hit upon a means of outdoing the extravagance of the natives themselves: like the Shiite Mohammedans of the present day at the festival of the Hassanên, they slashed their faces with knives amidst shrieks and yells. At Paprêmis a pitched battle formed part of the religious observances: it took place, however, under certain special conditions. On the evening of the festival of Anhurît, as the sun went down, a number of priests performed a hasty sacrifice in the temple, while the remainder of the local priesthood stationed themselves at the gate armed with heavy cudgels. When the ceremony was over, the celebrants placed the statue of the god on a four-wheeled car as though about to take it away to some other locality, but their colleagues at the gate opposed its departure and barred the way. It was at this juncture that the faithful intervened; they burst in the door and set upon the priests with staves, the latter offering a stout resistance. The cudgels were heavy, the arms that wielded them lusty, and the fight lasted a long time, yet no one was ever killed in the fray—at least, so the priests averred—and I am at a loss to understand why Herodotus, who was not a native of Paprêmis, should have been so unkind as to doubt their testimony.*
* The god whom the Greeks identified with their Ares was
Anhurît, as is proved by one of the Leyden Papyri. So, too,
in modern times at Cairo, it used to be affirmed that no
Mohammedan who submitted to the dôseh was ever seriously
injured by the hoofs of the horse which trampled over the
bodies extended on the ground.