The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia - A. H. Sayce

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buried in it; and even as late as the time of the Pyramid texts of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, when the northern sources of natron were known, it was still necessary for ceremonial purposes that the materials used by the embalmer should contain some of the natron of El-Kab.38

      What was difficult to harmonise with the belief in the resurrection of the mummy was the belief which made the risen man an “Osiris,” identified, that is to say, in substance with the god Osiris, and not his old material self. In the days, therefore, when Greek philosophy took it in hand to systematise and interpret the theology of Egypt, the risen mummy drops out of sight. The Khu, as we have seen, becomes the divine intelligence, which for a time is enshrouded in the human soul; and this again needs the envelope of the spirit, which sends the breath of life through the veins before it can tabernacle in the body of man. The Hermetic books tell us [pg 069] that while body, spirit, and soul are common to man and the beasts, the divine intelligence is his alone to possess, stripped, indeed, of its native covering of ethereal fire, but still the veritable spirit of God. Ever is it seeking to raise the human soul to itself, and so purify it from the passions and desires with which it is inspired by the body. But the flesh wages continual war against it, and endeavours to drag the soul down to its own level. If the soul yields, after death the intelligence returns to its original state, while the soul is arraigned before the judgment-seat of heaven, and there being accused by its conscience, the heart, is condemned to the punishment of the lost. First it is scourged for its sins, and then handed over to the buffetings of the tempests, suspended between earth and sky. At times in the form of an evil demon it seeks alleviation of its torments by entering the body of a man or animal, whom it drives to murder and madness. But at last, after ages of suffering, the end comes; it dies the second death, and is annihilated for ever.

      The good soul, on the other hand, which has listened in life to the voice of the divine intelligence, and struggled to overcome the lusts and passions of the flesh, obtains after death its reward. Guided by the intelligence, it traverses space, learning the secrets of the universe, and coming to understand the things that are dark and mysterious to us here. At length its education in the other world is completed, and it is permitted to see God face to face and to lose itself in His ineffable glory.

      I need not point out to you how deeply this Hellenised philosophy of Egypt has affected the religious thought of Christian Alexandria, and through Alexandria of Christian Europe. It may be that traces of it may be detected even in the New Testament. At any rate, [pg 070] much of the psychology of Christian theologians is clearly derived from it. We are still under the influence of ideas whose first home was in Egypt, and whose development has been the work of long ages of time. True or false, they are part of the heritage bequeathed to us by the past.

      [pg 071]

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      In my last lecture, when speaking of the form under which the soul of man was pictured by the Egyptians, I mentioned that it was often represented by a hawk, the symbol of the sun-god. Why the hawk should have thus symbolised the sun is a question that has often been asked. The Egyptians did not know themselves; and Porphyry, in the dying days of the old Egyptian faith, gravely declares that it was because the hawk was a compound of blood and breath! One explanation has been that it was because the hawk pounces down from the sky like the rays of the sun, which, like the eagle, he can gaze at without blinking; and a passage in the Odyssey of Homer (xv. 525) has been invoked in favour of this view, where the hawk is called “the swift messenger of Apollo.” But if there is any connection between the Homeric passage and the Egyptian symbol, it would show only that the symbol had been borrowed by the Greek poet. Originally, moreover, it was only the sun-god of Upper Egypt who was represented even by the Egyptians under the form of a hawk.

      This was Horus, often called in the later texts “Horus the elder” (Hor-ur, the Greek Aroêris), in order to distinguish him from a wholly different god, Horus the younger, the son of Isis. His symbol, the hawk, is found on the early Pharaonic monuments which recent excavations have brought to light. Sometimes the hawk stands [pg 072] on the so-called standard, which is really a perch, sometimes on the crenelated circle, which denoted a city in those primitive days. The standard is borne before the Pharaoh, representing at once his own title and the nome or principality over which he held rule; and its resemblance to the stone birds perched on similar supports, which Mr. Bent found in the ruins of Zimbabwe, suggests a connection between the prehistoric gold miners of Central Africa and the early inhabitants of Southern Egypt. On one of the early Egyptian monuments discovered at Abydos, two hawks stand above the wall of a city which seems to bear the name of “the city of the kings,”39 and a slate plaque found by Mr. Quibell at Kom el-Aḥmar shows us on one side the Pharaoh of Nekhen inspecting the decapitated bodies of his enemies with two hawks on standards carried before him, while, on the other side, a hawk leads the bridled “North” to him under the guise of a prisoner, through whose lips a ring has been passed.40 In the first case, the hawks may represent the districts of which the god they symbolised was the protecting deity;41 in the second case, the god and the king must be identified together. It was as Horus, the hawk, that the Pharaoh had conquered the Egyptians of the north, and it was Horus, therefore, who had given them into his hand.

      If Dr. Naville is right, Horus the hawk-god is again represented on the same plaque, with the symbol of “follower,” above a boat which is engraved over the bodies of the decapitated slain.42 Countenance is given [pg 073] to this view by a drawing on the rocks near El-Kab, in which the cartouches of two kings of the Fourth Dynasty, Sharu and Khufu, are carried in boats on the prows of which a hawk is perched, while above each name are two other hawks, standing on the hieroglyph of “gold,” and with the crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt on their heads. The title “follower of Horus” would take us back to the earliest traditions of Egyptian history. The “followers of Horus,” according to the later texts, were the predecessors of Menes and the First Dynasty of united Egypt, the Pharaohs and princes of the southern kingdom whose very names were forgotten in after days. Nevertheless, it was remembered that they had founded the great sanctuaries of the country; thus an inscription at Dendera declares that in the reign of king Pepi of the Sixth Dynasty there was found in the wall of the palace a parchment on which was a plan of the temple drawn upon it in the time of “the followers of Horus.” The legends of Edfu told how these followers of Horus had been smiths, armed with weapons of iron, and how they had driven the enemies of their leader before them until they had possessed themselves of the whole of Egypt.43 [pg 074] But many hard-fought battles were needed before this could be accomplished. Again and again had the foe been crushed—at Zadmit near Thebes, at Neter-Khadu near Dendera, at Minia, at Behnesa and Ahnas on the frontier of the Fayyûm, and finally at Zaru on the Asiatic borders of the Delta. Even here, however, the struggle was not over. Horus and his followers had to take ship and pursue the enemy down the Red Sea, inflicting a final blow upon them near Berenicê, from whence he returned across the desert in triumph to Edfu.

      In this legend, which in its present form is not older than the Ptolemaic period, echoes of the gradual conquest of Egypt by the first followers of the Pharaohs have probably been preserved, though they have been combined with a wholly different cycle of myths relating to the eternal struggle between Horus the son of Isis and his twin brother Set. But the confusion between the two Horuses must have arisen at an early time. Already a king of the Third Dynasty, whose remains have been found in the ruins of Nekhen, and who bore the title of him “who is glorified with the two sceptres, in whom the two Horus gods are united,” has above his name the crowned emblems of Horus and Set.44 The titles of the queens of the Memphite dynasties make it clear that by the two Horuses are meant the two kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and we must therefore see in Horus and Set the symbols of the South and North.45

      In the rock drawing, south of El-Kab, to which I have alluded a few minutes ago, the two Horus hawks stand on the symbol of “gold,” the one wearing the crown of Southern Egypt, the other that of the North. The “Golden Horus” was, in fact, one of the titles assumed [pg 075] by the Pharaoh at an early date. Whether the epithet applied to the god represented originally the golden colour of the wings of the sparrow-hawk, or whether, as is more probable,

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