[501] Bunsen’s Egypt, v. 429. According to Castor, the two Swords pointed at the throat of a kneeling man was the priest’s stamp denoting pure beasts, fit for sacrifice. He has noted that this survival points distinctly to human sacrifice in older days.
[502] Yet the tombs at Beni Hasan date 900 years before the popular era of the Trojan war.
[503] Monum. 262 fol., plates 11, 15.
[504] Rosellini shows a long tapering blade with a mid-rib, apparently sunken, and a raised surface on each side. The length is divided into five parts, smooth and hatched (?).
[505] The Somal have retained three other notable peculiarities of ancient Egypt; the wig (worn by the old Nilotes); the Uts (
) or wooden head-stool acting pillow, which further north was a half-cylinder of alabaster finely carved; and the ostrich-feather head-gear The latter was a symbol of Truth among the old Egyptians, because, says Hor Apollo, the wing-feathers are of equal length. The Romans adopted it as a military decoration. ‘Your courage has not yet given your helmet wherewithal to shade your face from the burning sun,’ say the Kurds, who add to the crest a new feather for every foe slain in fight. The Somal, after victory or murder, stick the white variety in the mop-head. We still use the phrase ‘a feather in his cap.’ The ‘Prince of Wales’ feather’ is an Egyptian ideograph of Truth. Mr. Gerald Massey seems to think that Wilkinson’s ‘Thmei’ (II. chap. viii.) is ‘only a backward rendering of the Greek “Themis”‘; that the feathers are ‘Shu’ (
), and that the goddess is ‘Ma’ (
