REMARKS 85
which bears the ka name of the king; and when we see the drawings of the ba bird or soul flying down the well to the sepulchre, it appears as if the hawk were the royal ba bird (ordinary men having a ba bird with a human head); and that the well-known first title of each king represents the royal soul or ba bird perched on the door of the sepulchre, resting on his way to and from the visit to the corpse below. The soul or ba of the king at his death thus flew away as a hawk to meet the sun.
The veil drawn over the fate of the inhuman princess is well conceived. That she should die a sharp death has been foretold; but how Bata should slay the divine creation—his wife—his mother—is a matter that the scribe reserves in silence; we only read that "he judged with her before him, and the great nobles agreed with him." That judgment is best left among the things unwritten.
86 ANPU AND BATA
The strange manner in which we can see incident after incident in the latter part of the tale, each to refer to some ceremony or belief, even imperfect as our knowledge of such must be, and the evidence that the whole being of Bata is a transference of the myth of Atys, must lead us to look on this, the marvellous portion, as woven out of a group of myths, ceremonies, and beliefs which were joined and explained by the formation of such a tale. How far it is due to purely Egyptian ideas, indicated by the Apis bull and the analogies in present African beliefs, and how far it is Asiatic and belonging to Atys, it would be premature to decide. But from the weird confusion and mystery of these transformations, we turn back with renewed pleasure to the simple and sweet picture of peasant life, and the beauty of Bata, and we see how true a poet the Egyptian was in feeling and in expression.
XIXth DYNASTY, PTOLEMAIC WRITING
SETNA AND THE MAGIC BOOK