Keep, then, these great facts clearly in your minds: the position of these two big empires to west and east, and the comparatively narrow bridge between them, by which they could communicate with each other. If you have this, like a map without any of the other names filled in, in the background of your minds, you will be able to fit in the happenings as they occur.
And now for our chapter on the Egyptian religions, beliefs, customs, and so on.
CHAPTER III
EGYPTIAN RELIGIONS, SACRED WRITINGS, ETC.
Talking, if you will carefully think of it, you will find to be just sending messages to one another by means of sounds. You learned to talk—that is to say, to send messages in this way—when you were a child, before you learned to write. So did the early Egyptians and all early peoples. But the difference between you and them is that you had some one to teach you to write, and they had not. They had to invent a way of doing this for themselves.
When you were a child you saw the sun rising, winter and summer following each other, and all the rest of the events in Nature, and you had some one to tell you how they all happened. The early Egyptians and the others saw all these things, but they had no one to tell them how they happened. They had to puzzle them out, or try to do so, for themselves.
They saw that such things were entirely beyond the power of any mere man to make to happen; therefore they attributed the happenings to some invisible power or powers immensely stronger and more gifted than themselves. And of course they were perfectly right in so doing. Only the mistake, or one of the mistakes, they made was this: they imagined each of the greatest marvels that they saw to be caused by a power which was busied with that particular marvel. Thus they thought that it was one power which made the corn to grow in the spring-time, for instance; another power that caused the sun to rise in the morning, and so on. They would see the flowing of a river, with its appearance of being a live thing as it went along, now smooth, now rippling, and they would go so far as to imagine that each stream had its own particular power or god looking after it.
Or they might actually look on the marvellous thing as itself a god. The sun, for instance, which they saw to give them light and warmth and to be a very splendid object—many races thought, and not unnaturally, that the sun itself was a god, and a very great god. They saw the moon, and to some of them it seemed that the moon was a power not unlike the sun, but less strong, and so it occurred to them that perhaps the moon was a goddess and the wife of the great god the sun. But the Egyptians, unlike others, looked on the moon as a male deity. When they had gone thus far in guesses about the heavenly bodies, they did not have to go any great way farther in order to ascribe all sorts of power—less than the power of the sun or of the moon—to the other planets and stars.
Sacrifices