It seems curious enough that Osiris should be at one time identified with the sun, the god of the heavens, and yet be the ruler of the under-world, where the souls of dead men and women went after death. Perhaps it seems less curious when we remember that the sun himself was supposed to sail nightly underneath the earth. But it is quite impossible for us to have any clear idea of how they reasoned about these things, partly because the accounts we have of it are all very vague and given to us only by the records of the inscriptions which survive, and by travellers, like the Greek Herodotus, to whom the priests would not tell a great deal, and partly because the ideas of the people even who held those beliefs must have been very far from clear.
We know that they worshipped a great number of gods, and different gods in different places. The bull, Apis, was a sacred animal which was worshipped especially at Memphis, the capital of Lower Egypt. Bast was the cat goddess, worshipped principally at Bubastis, where thousands of mummied bodies of cats have been found. Horus, the falcon; Seth, an animal not quite clearly identified; and Anubis, the jackal, I have mentioned already. And they worshipped the crocodile, the serpent, the ram, and many other creatures, but especially the sacred beetle, the scarabæus, in whose likeness those "scarabs" which we have in great numbers from Egypt, were made. Very often the "scarabs," in stone or glazed pottery, were engraved with the crests of the kings and used as seals.
The priests
There were a very great many priests. Every town seems to have had its temple to one or other of the many gods, and there were priests attached to every temple. But all the priests were not only priests and nothing else. I mean, that they might do other business as well; rather as if a clergyman here were to be a tradesman or a lawyer as well as doing his work in the Church. Sometimes the principal priest would be the great man of the district, the chief land-owner. But where religions were so many and so different, the customs must have differed very much too.
During the course of the eighteenth dynasty, with which the new empire and the great power of Egypt began, one of the kings tried to do away with all these different religions and to extend the worship of Osiris, identified with Ra, the Sun-god, over the whole of Egypt. And he succeeded; but his success was only for a time, and after a short period the Egyptians went back to the worship of their many gods again.
It was very important, in the opinion of the Egyptians, that the gods at each place, and of each kind, should be worshipped with the exactly right ceremonies. If the ceremonies were not rightly performed the god might be angry and bring all kinds of calamities upon you. It seemed to them far more important that these rites should be properly performed than that those who performed them should lead very good lives. They had their laws and their customs which regulated their conduct, but they do not seem to have feared that the gods would visit them with punishment in this life for any wrong-doing. They did, however, consider that any acts of injustice, such as robbery or dishonesty, would affect the state of their soul after death. That would be the business of Osiris, the ruler of the dead, to look after. We will speak of that in a minute.
The priests were the people who knew exactly how the worship of the gods at each place should be performed. They could read the religious instructions which were written in what is called the hieroglyphic—the sacred engravings. The hieroglyphic was probably the beginning of all writing.
If you can imagine a time when writing was unknown, and when there was need to send communications from one to another, and that these communications must not be known to the bearer of the message, how would you set about doing it?
Well, one way, at least, of doing it would be by sending signs marked on papyrus or parchment or on a slate, or whatever you might have convenient for making marks on, and to hope that the man you were sending them to would be clever enough to understand what you meant, and that the man by whom you were sending them would not. And if you wanted to send a message about any particular thing, the most easy and obvious way to begin would be by making a simple drawing of that thing. So, if you wanted to send a message about a bird, you would draw the figure, or outline, of a bird. If you wanted to send a message about an eye, a human eye, you might draw the figure of an eye. I suggest these two things because they are two of the most simple figures that actually do appear in the picture-writing which is the old Egyptian hieroglyphic.