The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 01

by Unknown

The only rational explanation of this confusion appears to be the alleged fact that in an early prehistoric day the various communities of Egypt, not yet consolidated under a single government, had each its own special deity. This local deity, presiding jealously over the interests of its own people, came naturally to have greater or less importance in proportion to the growth or decay of the community over which it presided. Moreover, there must have been a constant tendency, through a shifting of portions of the population from one community to another, to confuse the attributes of the various gods even from the earliest time; since the person who removed from one village to another could not well be expected quite to forget the local god who had formerly been the chief object of his worship. Then as one community or another became dominant after the government was centralised, there must have been a tendency in successive ages to emphasise the importance of one local god or another.

Thus it is clear that in the time of the New Kingdom, when Thebes became the capital and chief centre of the empire, Amen, the local god of Thebes, came to assume an importance hitherto denied him. At last it was even customary to identify Amen with Ra, the greatest god of all, or king of the gods, and the compound name, Amen-Ra, came into use. Various other names were compounded through a similar confusion of attributes, chiefly perhaps through the natural tendency to identify one’s local god with a god of more widely recognised authority. A moment’s reflection makes it clear that the tendency of all this was towards the recognition of a most important central god, who, to a certain extent, ruled over and controlled the hierarchy of the lesser deities. But indeed, it seems clear that from the earliest times the existence of such a supremely powerful god had been everywhere recognised.

It may be doubted even whether it is possible for any religion worthy of the name to fail of an analysis leading to this result. The human mind naturally reaches back from effect to cause, and while it cannot quite clearly grasp the idea of an ultimate single cause, yet neither can it escape the analysis that leads to that idea.

In this view it might be contended that the Egyptian religion, and indeed, every other religion, is monotheistic; certainly its trend was towards monotheism, and certainly this conception best accords with the natural cast of the Oriental mind. It is natural to attempt to visualise, in the spiritual world, a state of things not widely different from the conditions of the actual world, and a people who had no higher conception of the body politic than the thought of an autocracy presided over by a single supreme monarch, would have been strangely untrue to their psychological prejudices had they failed to conceive a like state of things existing in the hierarchy of the gods.

Side by side with this tendency towards monotheism, however, exists always the counter tendency towards a multiplication of deities. The founding of a new city or colony would imply, sooner or later, the creation of a god to preside over the new community. If at first an old god were transplanted for the purpose, local jealousy would be sure to demand a deity whose sole interests in the local community could be expected. Again, the deification of kings and perhaps the other departed notables must of necessity lead to a perpetual enhancement of the list of gods. But this multiplicity of minor deities must not be supposed to be necessarily antagonistic to the essential monotheistic idea in the case of the Egyptian, any more than the multiplication of saints affects the status of the Christian religion.

Over and above all other gods, from first to last, there seems always to have been a conception of Ra, the Uncreated, the autocrat of the heavens. Horus the sun-god, who fought each day in the interest of mankind against the malicious demon Set, or Sutekh, and who was overcome each night only to revive again and renew the combat with each succeeding morning, was a god of great and widely recognised power. Yet it appears that he was not quite identified, as has sometimes been supposed, with the supreme god Ra. To the latter attached a certain intangibility, a certain vagueness inconsistent with the obvious visual reality of the sun-god, or with the being of any other god whose qualities could be explicitly defined. In the very nature of the case the conception of Ra was vague. He represented the last analysis of thought, from which the mind recoils dazed and acknowledging itself baffled.

While we can hardly doubt that this must have been the status of the supreme god Ra in the minds of the most philosophical thinkers of Egypt, yet it is no less certain that there was a constant tendency to associate the qualities of various other gods with the qualities of the supreme deity; in other words, to elevate a lesser deity to the kingship of the gods, somewhat as an important subject might now and again be elevated to the earthly kingship.

The most tangible effort in this direction was made late in the XVIIIth Dynasty by Amenhotep IV, who came afterwards to be known as Khun-aten, “the splendour of the sun-disk,” and whom later generations characterised as the heretic king. This monarch strove to subordinate, if not indeed to eliminate, all the hosts of minor gods by instituting the kingship of the sun-god alone as the supreme, perhaps as the only, deity. The effort was not successful, and the reaction that followed left the old religion more firmly fixed than ever, in its previous beliefs and observances. None the less, the attempt has great historic interest, partly because it shows that the idea of essential monotheism underlying a superficial plurality of gods was current in Egypt, and even attained official recognition at just about the time of the Egyptian captivity of the Children of Israel. It is aside from the present purpose to inquire to what extent the ideas of the latter may have been influenced by this strong current of Egyptian thought.

It has just been said that the reaction against the sun-worship heresy left the old faith more firmly established than before. Never again was a prominent and conspicuous effort made to depart from the ancient faith. Whatever details of variation may have been introduced, the religion as a whole remained unchanged throughout the remaining course of Egyptian history. But this fixity again, far from being peculiar to the Egyptians, is but the history of every great theological system. The very fulcrum of such a system is the reliance upon the authority of the past. The abiding support of a traditional faith is that conservatism which lies at the foundation of all civilisation, and indeed, paradoxical though it seems, of all progress. The conservative, his eye fixed on the past, plants himself firmly in the path of progress, crying “Halt!” to every innovation. Yet during the time of a nation’s vitality this attempted damming up of the stream of progress results in, at most, a temporary stasis, since now and again the stress of new ideas suffices to burst the bonds. But there may come a time when the vitality of a nation is sapped, and when the power of conservatism may avail against all progressive movements.

Such a time came in Egypt at just about the era when the nations of Persia and of Greece were preparing to take hand in the world combat, and from that time on traditional theology, as represented by the priestcraft, was dominant in Egypt, and the once potent civilisation of the Nile Valley ceased to hold its own. The records that outside nations have given us of Egyptian conditions date solely from this later period, and must therefore always be taken with certain reservations. Nevertheless, as regards the more tangible things which they describe, they perhaps are not greatly different from what they would have been if written a thousand years earlier. They tell us of great pyramids that were the tombs of kings, of strange customs of mummifying the dead, and of the worship of animals, so crass in character as to be almost inconceivable to the modern mind. The pyramids, to be sure, dated from an ancient epoch; moreover, they still stand, defiant of time, to testify to the truth of the Greek recitals. The mummies have been preserved in countless numbers, and if animal worship died out with the incoming of a new religion after the Macedonian invasion, there is no reason to doubt the substantial accuracy, as regards mere externals, of the accounts of it which the Greeks preserve to us.