[434] In Egypt not only was the sow identified with Isis, but "lucky pigs" were worn on necklaces just like the earlier cowry-amulets (Budge, "Guide to the Egyptian Collections" (British Museum), p. 96).
[435] Malinowski, Trans. and Proc. Royal Society, South Australia, XXXIX, 1915, p. 587 et. seq.
[436] Seler, "Die Tierbilder der mexikanischen und der Maya-Handschriften," Zeitsch. f. Ethnologie, Bd. 41, 1909, p. 405, and Fig. 242 in Maudslay, "Biologia Centrali-Americana," Vol. III, Pl. 13.
Gold and the Golden Aphrodite.
The evidence which has been collected by Mr. Wilfrid Jackson seems to suggest that the shell-cults originated in the neighbourhood of the Red Sea.
With the introduction of the practice of wearing shells on girdles and necklaces and as hair ornaments the time arrived when people living some distance from the sea experienced difficulty in obtaining these amulets in quantities sufficient to meet their demands. Hence they resorted to the manufacture of imitations of these shells in clay and stone. But at an early period in their history the inhabitants of the deserts between the Nile and the Red Sea (Hathor's special province) discovered that they could make more durable and attractive models of cowries and other shells by using the plastic yellow metal which was lying about in these deserts unused and unappreciated. This practice first gave to the metal gold an arbitrary value which it did not possess before. For the peculiar life-giving attributes of the shells modelled in the yellow metal came to be transferred to the gold itself. No doubt the lightness and especially the beauty of such gold models appealed to the early Egyptians, and were in large measure responsible for the hold gold acquired over mankind. But this was an outcome of the empirical knowledge gained from a practice that originally was inspired purely by cultural and not æsthetic motives. The earliest Egyptian hieroglyphic sign for gold was a picture of a necklace of such amulets; and this emblem became the determinative of the Great Mother Hathor, not only because she was originally the personification of the life-giving shells, but also because she was the guardian deity both of the Eastern wadys where the gold was found and of the Red Sea coasts where the cowries were obtained. Hence she became the "Golden Hathor," the prototype of the "Golden Aphrodite".
Fig. 9.—The Egyptian emblem for gold, the sign nub. It represents a collar from which golden amulets, probably representing cowries, are suspended.