“The oldest sculptures show us no acts of adoration or of sacrifice,” says Mr. Loftie, “except those of worship at the shrine of a deceased ancestor or relative.” This is fully in keeping with what we know of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and with the immense importance always attached to the preservation of the mummy intact throughout the whole long course of Egyptian history. The Egyptian, in spite of his high civilisation, remained always at the first or corpse-preserving stage of custom as regards the dead. To him, therefore, the life after death was far more serious than the life on earth: he realised it so fully that he made endless preparations for it during his days above, and built himself a tomb as an eternal mansion. The grave was a place of abode, where the mummy was to pass the greater part of his existence; and even in the case of private persons (like that famous Tih whose painted sepulchre at Sakkarah every tourist to Cairo makes a point of visiting) it was sumptuously decorated with painting and sculpture. In the mortuary chambers or chapels attached to the tombs, the relations of the deceased and the priests of the cemetery celebrated on certain fixed dates various ceremonies in honour of the dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the mummy within. “The tables of offerings, which no doubt formed part of the furniture of the chambers, are depicted on the walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits, bread, and wine which had to be presented in kind.” These parentalia undoubtedly formed the main feature of the practical religion of early Egypt, as exhibited to us on all the monuments except the late tomb-caves of royal personages, devoted to the worship of the equally mummified great gods.
The Egyptian tomb was usually a survival of the cave artificially imitated. The outer chamber, in which the ceremonies of the offertory took place, was the only part accessible, after the interment had been completed, to the feet of survivors. The mummy itself, concealed in its sarcophagus, lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by the end of a corridor often containing statues or idols of the deceased. These idols, says M. Maspero, were indefinitely multiplied, in case the mummy itself should be accidentally destroyed, in order that the Ka (the ghost or double) might find a safe dwelling-place. Compare the numerous little images placed upon the grave by the Coast Negroes. It was the outer chamber, however, that sheltered the stele or pillar which bore the epitaph, as well as the altar or table for offerings, the smoke from which was conveyed to the statues in the corridor through a small aperture in the wall of partition. Down the well beyond, the mummy in person reposed, in its eternal dwelling-place, free from all chance of violation or outrage. “The greatest importance,” says Mr. Renouf, “was attached to the permanence of the tomb, to the continuance of the religious ceremonies, and to the prayers of passers-by.” Again, “there is a very common formula stating that the person who raised the tablet ‘made it as a memorial to his fathers who are in the nether world, built up what he found was imperfect, and renewed what was found out of repair.’” In the inscription on one of the great tombs at Beni-Hâssan the founder says: “I made to flourish the name of my father, and I built chapels for his ka [or ghost]. I caused statues to be conveyed to the holy dwelling, and distributed to them their offerings in pure gifts. I instituted the officiating priest, to whom I gave donations in land and presents. I ordered funeral offerings for all the feasts of the nether world [which are then enumerated at considerable length]. If it happen that the priest or any other cease to do this, may he not exist, and may his son not sit in his seat.” All this is highly instructive from the point of view of the origin of priesthood.
How long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is shown by Mr. Renouf himself in one instructive passage. The kings who built the Pyramids in the Early Empire endowed a priestly office for the purpose of celebrating the periodical rites of offering to their ghosts or mummies. Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a certain person who lived under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before his time. We have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors who filled the same office immediately after Khufu’s death. So that in this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch continued for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “If in the case of private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we find no proof of so persistent a veneration, that is because in ordinary tombs the ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children or descendants of the deceased person. Often, at the end of a few generations, either through negligence, removals, ruin, or extinction of the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out altogether.”
For this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense importance was attached by the Egyptians to the begetting of a son who should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed by others after him. The duty of undertaking these rites is thoroughly insisted upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while on the other hand, the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the most terrible of all ancient Egyptian imprecations. “Many centuries after the construction of a tomb, Egyptian travellers have left a record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, of the abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the funeral formula.” In fact, the whole practical religion of the ordinary Egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of the ka—the genii, manes, or lares of the departed.
If even the common herd were thus carefully embalmed—if even the lesser functionaries of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs, daintily painted and exquisitely sculptured—it might readily be believed that the great kings of the mighty conquering dynasties themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special splendour and becoming magnificence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt, their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in Upper Egypt they are artificial caves. The dreary desert district west of the Nile and south of Cairo consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of Memphis—a vast and mouldering city of the dead—whose chief memorials are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the desecrated tombs piled up for the kings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. There, under stone tumuli of enormous size,—barrows or cairns more carefully constructed,—the Pharaohs of the Old Empire reposed, in peace in sepulchres unmarked by any emblems of the mystic gods or sacred beasts of later imagination. But still more significant and infinitely more beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, belonging to the great monarchs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development. Those magnificent subterranean halls form in the truest and most literal sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions for the officers of state, still destined to attend upon their sovereign in the nether world. Some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal palaces of Medinet-Hâbu or the corridors of Luxor.
M. Mariette has further shown that the huge Theban temples which skirt in long line the edge of the desert near the Valley of Tombs were really cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and worshipped. Thus the Rameseum was the mastabah or mortuary chapel for the tomb and ghost of Rameses II.; the temple of Medinet-Hâbu fulfilled the same purpose for Rameses III.; the temple of Kurneh for Rameses I.; and so forth throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins, with their correlated group of subterranean excavations.
At any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial person to examine the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the Nile without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central object of worship—that the entire practical religion of the people was based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal offerings to the manes of ancestors. Everything in Egypt points to this one conclusion. Even the great sacred ritual is the Book of the Dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that they were really enjoying everlasting life. Mors janua vitae is the short summing-up of Egyptian religious notions. Death was the great beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship.
Moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of the religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship to God-Worship. Thus, in the tombs of Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire (Fifth Dynasty), all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. The quotations from (or anticipations of) the Book of the Dead are few and short. The great gods are rarely alluded to. Again, in the grottos of Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty) the paintings mostly represent scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities are still absent. The doctrine of rewards and punishments remains as yet comparatively in abeyance. It is only at the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes (of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire chapters of the Book of the Dead are transcribed at length, and the walls are covered with “a whole army of grotesque and fantastic divinities.”
“But the Egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods, distinct from their ancestors—national, or local, or common gods—whose names and figures have come down to us inscribed upon all the monuments.” Quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors—gods whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. But it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various ruling families or dominant cities; and in one or two of the most important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.
I will take, to begin with, one typical example. There is no single god in the Egyptian pantheon more important or more universally diffused than Osiris. In later forms of the national religion, he is elevated into the judge of the departed and king of the nether world: to be “justified by Osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “a justified Osiris,” is the prayer of every corpse as set forth in his funeral inscription; and identification with Osiris is looked upon as the reward of all the happy and faithful dead. Now Osiris, in every one of his representations and modes, is simply—a Mummy. His myth, to be sure, assumed at last immense proportions; and his relations with Isis and Horus form the centre of an endless series of irreconcilable tales, repeated over and over again in art and literature. If we took mythology as our guide, instead of the monuments, we should be tempted to give him far other origins. He is identified often with other gods, especially with Amen; and the disentanglement of his personality in the monuments of the newer empire, when Ra, the sun-god, got mixed up inextricably with so many other deities, is particularly difficult. But if we neglect these later complications of a very ancient cult, and go back to the simplest origin of Egyptian history and religion, we shall, I think, see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental symbolism into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to be—a revered and worshipped Mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the town or little district of This by Abydos.