Another god, Anubis, worshiped in the form of a human being with the head of a dog, is represented as an Egyptian Hermes.
Whatever higher religious ideas may have been held by learned priests, the worship of the common people was chiefly adoration of [349] animals. The sacred bull, called Apis, was worshiped at Memphis with the highest honors. All Egypt rejoiced on his annual birthday festival, and there was a public mourning when he died. The dog, the hawk, the white ibis, and the cat, were also specially revered. The sparrow-hawk, with human head and outspread wings, denoted the soul flying through space, to animate a new body. Thus we find mingled, in the religion of Egypt, gross superstition in the masses of the people, along with the spiritual conceptions of cultivated minds.
The Future Life.—In a papyrus-book, discovered in the royal tombs of Thebes, called the Book of the Dead, we read in pictured writing of a second life, and of a Hall of Judgment, where the god Osiris sits, provided with a balance, a secretary, and forty-two attendant-judges. In the balance the soul is weighed against a statue of divine justice, placed in the other scale, which is guarded by the god Anubis. The assistant-judges give separate decisions, after the person on trial has pleaded his cause before them. The soul rejected as unworthy of the Egyptian heaven was believed to be driven off to some dark realm, to assume the form of a beast, in accordance with a low character and sensual nature. An acquitted soul joined the throng of the blest.
Embalming.—The religion of the people was connected with the practice of embalming the bodies of the dead. This art seems to have derived its origin from the idea that the preservation of the body was necessary for the return of the soul to the human form after it had completed its cycle of existence of three or ten thousand years. The art appears as old as 4000 B. C., at least, for the bodies of Cheops, Mycerinus, and others of the age of the fourth dynasty, were embalmed.
EGYPTIAN ARCHITECTURE AND SCULPTURE
The chief feature of Egyptian architecture is its colossal, massive grandeur, from the use of enormous blocks of masonry, and from the vast extent of the buildings, which produce in the beholder an unequalled impression of sublimity and awe. The approaches to the palaces and temples were paved roads, lined with obelisks and sphinxes; and the temples and the palaces themselves surpassed in size, and in elaborate ornament of sculpture and of painting, all other works of man.
The Pyramids.—Of about forty pyramids now left standing in Middle Egypt, the most remarkable are the group of nine at Gizeh, near the site of ancient Memphis. The removal of the vast blocks of stone from distant quarries, and their elevation to heights, which have sorely puzzled modern engineers, were effected, not by the ingenuity of mechanical contrivance, but by the lavish use of human labor. Thousands of men were employed for months in moving single stones.
The Temple Columns.—Egyptian columns were formed by their architects on the model of the palm-tree, whose feathery crown of foliage was ever before their eyes, or of the full-blown or budding papyrus. We find constantly in the mural decorations the figure of the famous lotus-plant, or lily of the Nile, beheld by the Egyptians with veneration, and used in sculpture and in painting as no mere ornament, but as a religious symbol. This water-lily of Egypt was consecrated to Isis and Osiris, and typified the creation of the world from water. It also symbolized the rise of the Nile and the return of the sun in his full power.
SCULPTURE AND PAINTING
Egyptian sculpture displays size, simplicity, stiffness, and little of what modern art calls taste or beauty. Neither did the Egyptians become true artists of the pictorial class. They used simple colors of brilliant hue; but of light and shade only little was known; and of perspective, nothing.