Chapter I (2)

[63] HERODOTUS, ii. 172. For an earlier epoch, see the history
of a certain Ahmes, son of Abouna, as it is narrated upon his
sepulchral inscription, which dates from the reign of Amosis,
the founder of the eighteenth dynasty (DE ROUGÉ, _Mémoire sur
l'Inscription d'Ahmes, Chef des Nautoniers_, 4to. 1851, and
Brugsch, _Histoire d'Égypte_, t. i. p. 80). Starting as a
private soldier for the war against the Shepherds, undertaken
for the re-conquest of Avaris, he was noticed by the king for
his frequent acts of gallantry, and promoted until he finally
became something in the nature of high admiral.

The priests of the highest rank, the generals and officers of the army and the great civil functionaries, while they made no effort to rival the splendour of the royal creations, consecrated steles, images of the deity, and chapels, at their own expense. It was upon their tombs, however, that most of their care was lavished. These tombs furnish numberless themes of great interest to the historian. The tombs of the Memphite kings have not preserved for us anything that can fairly be called sculpture. All that we know of the style and methods of that art in those early times we owe to the burial-places which the members of the governing classes were in the habit of preparing during their lifetime in the necropolis of Memphis. We may say the same of the early centuries of the Middle Empire. The Egypt of the great kings belonging to the twelfth dynasty has been preserved for us upon the tombs of Ameni and Num-Hotep, the governors of the _nomes_ in which they were buried. It is to the burial chambers at Gizeh, at Sakkarah, at Meidoum, and at Beni-Hassan that we must go for complete types of sepulchral architecture at those epochs; to the statues in the recesses of their massive walls and to the bas-reliefs in their narrow chambers, we must turn for those features of early Egyptian civilization which remained for many centuries without material change; by these monuments we are enabled to build up piece by piece a trustworthy representation of the Egyptian people both in their labours and in their pleasures. Finally it is from these tombs of private individuals that the best works of Egyptian artists have been obtained, the works in which they approached most nearly to the ideal which they pursued for so many centuries.

Thanks to these monuments erected at the expense of the great lords and rich burghers of Egypt, thanks also to the climate and to the desert sand which has preserved them without material injury, the art of Egypt appears to us more comprehensive and varied than that of any other nation of which we shall have to treat; than that of Assyria for instance, which represents little but scenes of battle and conquest. A faithful mirror of Egyptian society, it has preserved for us an exhaustive record of the never-ceasing activity which created and preserved the wealth of the country; it has not even neglected the games and various pleasures in which the laborious Egyptian sought for his well earned repose. The king indeed, preserved his first place by the importance of the religious buildings which he raised, by the size of his tomb, and by the number and dimensions of the reproductions of his features; reproductions which show him in the various aspects demanded by the complex nature of the civilization over which he presided. But in the large number of isolated figures, groups, and scenes which have come down to us, we have illustrations of all classes that helped in the work of national development, from the ploughman with his ox, to the scribe crouching, cross-legged, upon his mat, from the shepherd with his flock or the hunter pushing his shallop through the brakes of papyrus, to the directors of the great public works and the princes of the blood who governed conquered provinces or guarded the frontiers of the country at the head of ever faithful armies.

Height 6-1/3 inches.

FIG. 29.--Herdsman. From a tomb at Sakkarah, 5th dynasty. (Boulak.)]

The art of Egypt resembled that of Greece in being a complete and catholic art, seeing everything and taking an interest in everything. It was sensitive to military glory, and at the same time it did not scorn to portray the peaceful life of the fields. It set itself with all sincerity to interpret the monarchical sentiment in its most enthusiastic and exaggerated form, but while it placed kings and princes above and almost apart from humanity, it did not forget the "humble and meek," on the contrary, it frankly depicted them in their professional attitudes, with all those ineffaceable characteristics, both of face and figure which the practice of some special trade so certainly imparts. Looked at from this point of view Egyptian art was popular, it might even be called democratic, but that such a phrase would sound curious when used in connection with the most absolute monarchy which the world has ever seen.

This absolute power, however, does not seem, speaking generally, to have been put in force in a hard or oppressive manner either by the king himself or by his agents. M. Maspero and others who, like him, live in intimate communion with the ancient Egyptians, declare that they were by no means unhappy. They tell us that the confidences whispered to them in the pictured tomb-houses of Sakkarah and Memphis complain of no misery, from the time of Mena to that of Psemethek, except during a few violent reigns and a few moments of national crisis. The country suffered only on those comparatively rare occasions when the sceptre passed into the hands of an incapable master or into those of some insatiable warrior who thought only of satisfying his own ambition, and sacrificed to the day the resources of the future. Egypt, with her river, her teeming soil and her splendid climate, found life easy as long as she enjoyed an easy and capable administration. She then gave to her princes almost without an effort all they could desire or demand.

It was one of the fundamental principles of Egyptian morality that those who were powerful should treat the poor and feeble with kindness and consideration. Their sepulchral inscriptions tell us that their kings and princes of the blood, their feudal lords and functionaries of every grade, made it a point of honour to observe this rule. They were not content with strict justice, they practised a bountiful charity which reminds us of that which is the chief beauty of the Christian's morality. The "Book of the Dead"--that passport for Egyptians into the other world which is found upon every mummy--gives us the most simple, and at the same time the most complete description of this virtue. "I have given bread to the hungry, I have given water to the thirsty, I have clothed the naked ... I have not calumniated the slave in the ears of his master." The lengthy panegyrics of which some epitaphs consist, are, in reality no more than amplifications of this theme. "As for me, I have been the staff of the old man, the nurse of the infant, the help of the distressed, a warm shelter for all who were cold in the Thebaïd, the bread and sustenance of the down-trodden, of whom there is no lack in Middle Egypt, and their protector against the barbarians."[64] The prince Entef relates that he has "arrested the arm of the violent, used brute force to those who used brute force, showed hauteur to the haughty, and lowered the shoulders of those who raised them up," that he himself on the other hand, "was a man in a thousand, wise, learned, and of a sound and truthful judgment, knowing the fool from the wise man, paying attention to the skilful and turning his back upon the ignorant, ... the father of the miserable and the mother of the motherless, the terror of the cruel, the protector of the disinherited, the defender of those whose goods were coveted by men stronger than themselves, the husband of the widow, the asylum of the orphan."[65]

[64] Louvre, c. i. Cf. MASPERO, _un Gouverneur de Thèbes au
temps de la douzième dynastie_.

[65] Quoted by MASPERO, _Conférence sur l'Histoire des Âmes dans
l'Égypte ancienne, d'après les Monuments du Musée du Louvre_
(_Association scientifique de France, Bulletin hebdomadaire_,
No. 594; _23 Mars, 1879_).

Amoni, hereditary prince of the nome of Meh, talks in the same fashion. "I have caused sorrow to no youth under age, I have despoiled no widow, nor have I repelled any labourer, I have imprisoned no shepherd, I have never taken for the labour gangs the serfs of him who had but five, there have been no paupers, nor has any man or woman starved in my time; for, although there have been years of scarcity, I have caused all the tillable land in Meh to be tilled, from the northern frontier to that of the south, and have made such arrangements and such provision for the people that there has been no famine among them; I have given to the widow and to the married woman alike, and I have never made any distinction between the great and the small in my gifts."[66]

[66] Translated by MASPERO (_la Grande Inscription de
Beni-Hassan_ in the _Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la Philologie
et à l'Archéologie égyptienne et assyrienne_ (t. i. pp.
173-174)).

Doubtless these laudatory self-descriptions may be exaggerated in some respects; hyperbole has ever been a favourite figure with the composers of epitaphs, and those of Egypt formed no exception to the rule. As M. Maspero remarks in connection with this question, "The man as he is, often differs very greatly from the man as he thinks he is." But we may safely say that the Egyptian realized some portion of the ideal which he set before himself. If only to obtain admiration and esteem, he would practice, to a certain extent, the virtues of which he boasted. Many signs combine to tell us that the Egyptians of all classes possessed a large fund of tenderness and good-will. The master was often both clement and charitable; the peasant, the servant, and the slave, were patient and cheerful, and that in spite of the fatigue of labours which could never enrich them. In a country so favoured by nature, men had so few wants that they had no experience of all that is implied by that doleful word poverty, with us. The pure skies and brilliant sunshine, the deep draughts of Nile water, and the moments of repose under the shadows of the sycamores, the freshness of the evening bath, the starry night with its reinvigorating breezes, were all enjoyments which the poorest could share.

We need feel no surprise therefore at the vivacity with which one of the most learned of the historians of Egypt, Brugsch-Bey, protests against the common misconception of the Egyptians "as a race grave, serious, morose, exclusive, religious, thinking much of the next world, and little of this; living, in a word, like the Trappists of former days. Are we to believe," he cries, "that this majestic river and the fertile soil through which it flows, this azure sky with its unclouded sun, produced a nation of living mummies, a race of solemn philosophers who looked upon life in this world as a burden to be shuffled off as quickly as possible? Travel over Egypt; examine the scenes painted and sculptured upon the walls of sepulchral chambers; read the inscriptions carved upon stone or traced in ink upon the rolls of papyrus, and you will find yourself compelled to modify the false notions you have imbibed as to the Egyptian philosophers. Nothing could be more cheerful, more amusing or more frank, than the social life of this pleasure-loving people. Far from wishing to die, they prayed to the gods for a long life and a happy old age; they prayed that, 'if possible, they might live to the perfect age of one hundred and ten.' They were addicted to all kinds of pleasures. They drank, they sang, they danced, they were fond of excursions into the country, where the sports of hunting and fishing were specially reserved for the upper class. As a natural effect of this desire for enjoyment, gay conversation and pleasantry which was sometimes rather free, jokes and what we should call chaff, were much in vogue: even their tombs were not sacred from their desire for a jest."[67]

[67] BRUGSCH-BEY, _Histoire d'Égypte_, pp. 14, 15.

The worst government, the sternest oppression, could never extinguish this natural gaiety; it was too intimately connected with the climate and the natural conditions of the country, conditions which had never changed since the days of Menes. Never were the Egyptians more roughly treated than under Mehemet Ali and the late viceroy; their condition was compared, with justice, to that of the negroes in Carolina and Virginia, who, before the American civil war, laboured under the whips of their drivers, and enjoyed no more of the fruits of their own labour than what was barely sufficient to keep life in their bodies. Torn from their homes and kept by force in the public works, the fellahs died in thousands; those who remained in the fields had to pay the taxes one or two years in advance; they were never out of debt, nominally, to the public treasury, and the rattan of the collector extorted from them such savings as they might make during years of plenty, up to the last coin. But still laughter did not cease in Egypt! Look, for instance, at the children in the streets of Cairo who let out mounts to sight-seeing Europeans. Let the tourist trot or gallop as he will, when he stops he finds his donkey-boy by his side, full of spirits and good humour; and yet perhaps while running behind his "fare" he has been making his midday meal upon a few grains of maize tied up in a corner of his shirt.

In 1862 I returned from Asia Minor in company with M. Edmond Guillaume, the architect, and M. Jules Delbet, the doctor, of our expedition to Ancyra. We took the longest way home, by Syria and Egypt. At Cairo, Mariette, after having shown us the museum at Boulak, wished to introduce us to his own "Serapeum." He took us for a night to his house in the desert, and showed us the galleries of the tomb of Apis by torchlight. We passed the next afternoon in inspecting those excavations in the necropolis of Sakkarah which have led to the recovery of so many wonders of Egyptian art. The works were carried on by the labour of four hundred children and youths, summoned by the _corvée_ for fifteen days at a time from some district, I forget which, of Middle Egypt. At sunset these young labourers quitted their work and seated themselves in groups, according to their native villages, upon the still warm sand. Each drew from a little sack, containing his provision for two or three weeks, a dry cake; those whose parents were comfortably off had also, perhaps, a leek or a raw onion. But even for such _gourmands_ as those, the repast was not a long one. Supper over, they chattered for a time, and then went to rest; the bigger and stronger among them took possession of some abandoned caves, the others stretched themselves upon the bare earth; but, before going to sleep they sang; they formed themselves into two choirs who alternated and answered one another, and this they kept up to an advanced hour of the night.

I shall never forget the charm of that night in the desert, nor the weird aspect of the moonlight upon the sea of sand. Were it not that no star was reflected upon its surface, and that no ray scintillated as it does even on the calmest sea, we might have thought ourselves in mid ocean. Sleep came to me reluctantly. While I listened to the alternate rise and fall of the chorus outside, I reflected upon how little those children required; upon the slender wants of their fathers and mothers, who, like them, sink into their nightly sleep with a song upon their lips. I compared this easy happiness with the restless and complicated existence which we should find, at the end of a few days, in the ambitious cities of the West, and I regretted that our year of travel, our twelve months of unrestrained life in the desert or the forest, had come to an end.

§ 5.--_The Egyptian Religion and its Influence upon the Plastic Arts._

We have still to notice the profoundly religious character of Egyptian art. "The first thing that excites our surprise, when we examine the reproductions of Egyptian monuments which have been published in our day, is the extraordinary number of scenes of sacrifice and worship which have come down to us. In the collection of plates which we owe to contemporary archæologists, we can hardly find one which does not contain the figure of some deity, receiving with impassive countenance the prayers or offerings of a prostrate king or priest. One would say that a country with so many sacred pictures and sculptures, must have been inhabited by gods, and by just enough men for the service of their temples.[68] The Egyptians were a devout people. Either by natural tendency or by force of education, they saw God pervading the whole of their universe; they lived in Him and for Him. Their imaginations were full of His greatness, their words of His praise, and their literature was in great part inspired by gratitude for the benefits which He showered upon them. Most of their manuscripts which have come down to us treat of religious matters, and even in those which are ostensibly concerned only with profane subjects, mythological names and allusions occur on every page, almost at every line."[69]

[68] The saying of one of the characters of Petronius might be
applied to Egypt: "This country is so thickly peopled with
divinities that it is easier to find a god than a man." The
place held by religious observances in the daily life of Egypt
is clearly indicated by HERODOTUS (ii. 37): "The Egyptians," he
says, "are very religious; they surpass all other nations in the
adoration with which they regard their deities."

[69] MASPERO, _Histoire ancienne_, pp. 26, 27.

An examination into the primitive religious beliefs of the Egyptians is full of difficulty. In discovering new papyri, in determining the signification of signs which have been puzzling egyptologists, the inquirer will undoubtedly do good work, and will establish facts which are sure not to lack interest and even importance; but even when documents abound and when every separate word they contain is understood, even then it is very difficult to penetrate to the root of their meaning. A glimpse will be caught of it, I admit, by one of those efforts of inductive divination which distinguish modern research; but even then it will remain to explain the primitive and only half-understood notions of five or six thousand years ago in the philosophical vocabularies of to-day. It is here that the most difficult and irksome part of the task begins. We who represent the old age, or, perhaps, the prime, of humanity, think of these matters and speak of them as abstractions, while the Egyptians, who were children compared to us, thought of them under concrete forms. Their very ideals were material, more or less vague and refined perhaps, but still material. Their only conception of a deity was of a figure larger, more vigorous and more beautiful than mortals; the powers and attributes with which it was endowed were all physical. If we attempt to express their conceptions in abstract terms, we falsify their meaning. We cannot avoid altering it to a certain extent, for exact equivalents are not to be found, and, in spite of all precautions, we give to the confused and childish ideas of ancient religion, a precision which is entirely modern.

If, under these reserves, we study the Egyptian theology in its most learned and refined form--namely, that which it attained during the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties--we shall dimly perceive that it implies a belief in the unity of the First Cause of all life. But this belief is obscured behind the numerous gods who are, in fact, emanations from its substance and manifestations of its indefatigable activity. It is in the person of these gods that the divine essence takes form. Each of them has his own name, his own figure, and his own special share in the management of the universe; each of them presides over the production of some particular order of phenomena and insures their regularity. These gods are related to each other as fathers, mothers, and sons. They thus form a vast hierarchy of beings, superior to man, and each enjoying a dignity corresponding to his rank in the series. There is, so to speak, most of divinity in those who are nearest to the "one God in heaven or earth who was not begotten." These deities are divided into groups of three, each group constituting a family, like those of earth, consisting of father, mother, and son. Thus from triad to triad, the concealed god develops his sovereign powers to all eternity, or, to use an expression dear to the religious schools of ancient Egypt, "he creates his own members, which are themselves gods."[70]

[70] This formula frequently occurs in the texts. To cite but
one occasion, we find upon a Theban invocation to Amen,
translated by P. PIERRET (_Recueil de Travaux relatifs à la
Philologie et à l'Archéologie égyptienne et assyrienne_, t. i.
p. 70), at the third line of the inscription: "Sculptor, thou
modelest thine own members; thou begettest them, not having
thyself been begotten."

How should the science of comparative religion class this form of faith? Should it be called polytheism or pantheism? The answer is, perhaps, not of great importance, and this is hardly the place for its discussion. It is certain that, practically, the Egyptians were polytheists. The Egyptian priests, indeed, had, by dint of long reflection, arrived at the comprehension, or at least at the contemplation, of that First Cause which had started the river of life--that inexhaustible stream of which the Nile with its fertilising waves was the concrete image--in its long journey across time and space. But the devotion of the people themselves never succeeded in mounting above the minor divinities, above those intermediaries in whom the divine principle and attributes became personified and put on the tangibility of body necessary to make them intelligible to childish understandings. So, too, was it with artists, and for still more powerful reasons; as by forms only could they express the ideas which they had conceived. Even in those religions which are most clearly and openly monotheistic and spiritual, such as Christianity, art has done something of the same kind. Aided in secret by one of the most powerful instincts of the human soul, it has succeeded, in spite of all resistance and protestation, in giving plastic expression to those parts of our belief which seem least fitted for such treatment; and it has caused those methods of expression to be so accepted by us that we see nothing unnatural in the representation under the features of an old man, of the first Person of the Trinity,--of that Jehovah who, in the Old Testament, proscribed all graven images with such impartial rigour; who, in the Evangel, described Himself as "the Truth and the Life."

In Egypt, both sculptors and painters could multiply their images to infinity without coming into collision with dogma, without provoking the regrets or censures of its most severe interpreters. Doctrine did not condemn these personifications, even when it had been refined and elaborated by the speculative theologians of Thebes and Heliopolis. In the interior of the temples, there was a small class of mystics who took pleasure in contemplating "the 'One' who exists by his own essential power, the only being who substantially exists." Even then men tried, as they have often done since, to define the undefinable, to grasp the incomprehensible, to perceive the supreme "I AM" through the shifting and transparent veil of natural phenomena. But those refined metaphysics never touched and influenced the crowd, and never will. The deity, in order to be perceived by them and to touch their feelings, must have his unity broken; he must, if the expression be admissible, be cut up into morsels for them.

By a process of "abstraction" which is as old as religion itself, the human intelligence is led to consider separately each of the qualities of existence, each of the forces which it perceives to be at work either within man himself or in the exterior world. At first it thinks those forces and qualities are distributed impartially to all creation. It confounds existence with life. Hence the reign of _fetishism_, when man believes, as young children do, that thought, passion, and volition like his own, are to be found in everything he meets. His own image seems to him reflected as in a mirror with a thousand converging facets, and he is unable to distinguish the real condition of things outside it.

Certain celestial and terrestrial bodies make a particularly strong impression upon his mind by their size, their beauty, by their evil or beneficial effects upon himself. They fill him with more than the average gratitude, admiration, or terror. Driven by the illusion which possesses him, he places the origin of those qualities which seem to him the highest and most important, in the bodies which have made so deep an impression upon his senses; to them he attributes the friendly or hostile influences which alternately excite his desire and his fear. According to circumstances a fetish might be a mountain, a rock or a river, a plant or an animal. It might be those heavenly bodies which exercised much more influence over the life of primitive man than they do over us; it might be the moon and stars, which tempered the darkness of the night and diminished its terrors; it might be the cloud, from whose bosom came rain and thunder; above all, it might be the sun which returned every morning to light and warm the world. Differences of climate and race had their modifying effect, but everywhere one common characteristic is to be found. It was always to some material and visible object that the human intellect referred those forces and qualities which it drew from its own consciousness; forces which, when thus united with something tangible, constituted the first types of those divine beings whom mankind have so long adored, to whom they have turned for ages in their hope and fear.

As the years passed away, man advanced beyond his primitive conceptions. He did not entirely renounce them--we may indeed see reminiscences of them all around us--but he superimposed others upon them which were more complex. His powers of observation, still imperfect though they were, began to insinuate into his mind a disbelief in the activity of inanimate matter, and those objects which were nearest to him, which he could touch with his hand, were the first victims of his disenchantment. Thus began a long course of intellectual development, the result of which we know, although the various stages of its progress are difficult to follow at this distance of time. It appears certain, however, that star worship formed the transition between _fetishism_ and _polytheism_. Men no longer attributed vital forces and pre-eminent qualities generally to bodies with which they themselves were in immediate contact, to stones and trees; but they found no difficulty in continuing to assign them to those great luminaries whose distance and beauty placed them, so to speak outside the material world. As they gradually deprived inanimate matter of the properties with which they had once gifted it, they sought for new objects to which they might attach those properties. These they found in the stars which shone in the firmament century after century, and knew neither old age nor death; and especially in the most brilliant, the most beneficent, and the most necessary of them all, in that sun whose coming they awaited every morning with an impatience which must once have been mixed with a certain amount of anxiety.

The attributes which awakened intelligence had taken away from the inanimate objects of the world could not be left floating in space. They became gradually and imperceptibly grouped in men's minds around the great luminary of day, and a bond of union was found for the different members of the group by endowing the sun with a personality modelled upon that of man. This operation was favoured by the constitution of contemporary language, by its idioms made up entirely of those images and metaphors which, by their frank audacity, surprise and charm us in the works of the early poets. It commenced with the first awakening of thought, when man endowed all visible nature with the bounding life which he felt in his own veins. No effort of intelligence was required for its commencement or for its prosecution. The sun became a young hero advancing, full of pride and vigour, upon the path prepared for him by Aurora; a hero who pursued his daily path in spite of all obstacle or hindrance, who, when evening came, went to his rest amid all the glories of an eastern sunset, and amid the confidence of all that after his hours of sleep he would take up his eternal task with renewed vigour. He was an invincible warrior. He was sometimes an angry master, whose glance killed and devoured. He was above all the untiring benefactor of mankind, the nurse and father of all life. Whether as Indra or as Amen-Ra, it was the same cry that went up to him from Egypt and Hindostan; the prayers which we find in the Vedas and in the papyri, breathe the same sentiments and were addressed to the same god.[71]

[71] See the fine hymns quoted and translated by M. Maspero in
his _Histoire ancienne_, pp. 30-37.

This solar god and the divinities who resemble him, form the transition from the simple fetish to complete deities, to those gods who played such an important part in the Egyptian religion, and attained to their highest and most complete development in the Hellenic mythology. In some respects, the luminous globe of the sun with its compulsory course, belonged to the same category as the material objects which received the first worship of humanity. But its brilliance, its tranquil and majestic movement, and the distance which conceals its real substance from the eye of man, allowed his imagination to endow it with the purest and noblest characteristics which the finest examples of humanity could show; while the phenomena which depend upon its action are so numerous that there was no hesitation in assigning to it qualities and energies of the most various kinds.

This type when once established was used for the creation of other deities, which were all, so to speak, cast in the same mould. As the intellect became more capable of abstraction and analysis, the personality and moral individuality of these gods gradually threw off its astral or physical characteristics, although it never lost all trace of their existence. It resulted that, both in Egypt and in Greece, there were deities who were mere entities, the simple embodiment of some power, some quality, or some virtue. It requires all the subtle _finesse_ of modern criticism to seek out and distinguish the obscure roots which attach these divinities to the naturalistic beliefs of earlier ages. Sometimes absolute certainty is not to be attained, but we may safely say that a race is polytheistic when we find these abstract deities among their gods, such deities as the Ptah, Amen, and Osiris of the Egyptians, and the Apollo and Athenè of the Greeks.[72]

[72] Several of the bronzes which we reproduce may belong to the
Ptolemaic epoch; but they are repetitions of types and
attributes which had been fixed for many centuries by tradition.
It is in this capacity chiefly that we reproduce them, as
examples of those forms which seemed to the Egyptian imagination
to offer the most satisfactory emblems of their gods.

We may, then, define polytheism as the partition of the highest attributes of life between a limited number of agents. The imagination of man could not give these agents life without at the same time endowing them with essential natural characteristics and with the human form, but, nevertheless, it wished to regard them as stronger, more beautiful and less ephemeral than man. The system had said its last word and was complete, when it had succeeded in embodying in some divine personality each of those forces whose combined energy produces movement in the world or guarantees its duration.

When religious evolution follows its normal course, the work of reflection goes on, and in course of time makes new discoveries. It refers, by efforts of conjecture, all phenomena to a certain number of causes, which it calls gods. It next perceives that these causes, or gods, are of unequal importance, and so it constitutes them into a hierarchy. Still later it begins to comprehend that many of these causes are but different names for one thing, that they form but one force, the application of a single law. Thus by reduction and simplification, by logic and analysis, is it carried on to recognize and proclaim the unity of all cause. And thus monotheism succeeds to polytheism.

In Egypt, religious speculation arrived on the threshold of this doctrine. Its depths were dimly perceived, and it was even taught by the select class of priests who were the philosophers of those days; but the monotheistic conception never penetrated into the minds of the great mass of the people.[73] Moreover, by the very method in which Egyptian mythology described it, it was easily adapted to the national polytheism, or even to fetish worship. The theory of emanations reconciled everything. The different gods were but the different qualities of the eternal substance, the various manifestations of one creative force. These qualities and energies were revealed by being imported into the world of form. They took finite shape and were made comprehensible to the intellect of man by their mysterious birth and generation. It was necessary, if the existence of the gods were to be brought home to mankind, that each of them should have a form and a domicile. Imagination therefore did well in commencing to distinguish and define the gods; artists were piously occupied when they pursued the same course. They gave precision of contour to the forms roughly sketched, and by the established definition which they gave to each divine figure, we might almost say that they created the gods.

[73] In his work entitled _Des deux Yeux du Disque solaire_, M.
GRÉBAUT seems to have very clearly indicated how far we are
justified in saying that Egyptian religious speculation at times
approached monotheism (_Recueil de Travaux, etc._, t. i. p.
120).

Their task was, in one sense, more difficult than that of the Greek artists. When newly born Greek art first began to make representations of Greek deities, the work of intellectual analysis and abstraction had already come to a state of maturity which it never reached in Egypt. The divinities were fewer in number and consequently more fixed and decided in their individual characteristics. The Egyptian polytheism was always more mixed, more strongly tinged with fetishism than that of Greece. Even in those centuries in which the ideas of the Egyptian people were most elevated and refined, the three successive stages, which are always found in the development of religious life, co-existed in the mind of the nation. A few more or less isolated thinkers were already seeking to formulate monotheism. The _élite_ of the nation--the king, the priest, and the military class--were adoring Amen and Ptah, Khons or Khonsu, Mouth, Osiris and Horus, Sekhet, Isis, Nephtis and many other divinities; all more or less abstract in their nature, and presiding over special phenomena. As for the lower orders of the people, they knew the names of these deities and associated themselves with the great public honours which were paid to them; but their homage and their faith were more heartily rendered to such concrete and visible gods as the sacred animals, as the bulls Apis and Mnevis, the goat of Mendes, the ibis, the hawk, &c. None of the peculiarities of Egyptian civilization struck Greek travellers with more amazement than this semiworship of animals.[74]

[74] HERODOTUS, ii. 75-86.

Later theology has succeeded in giving more or less subtle and specious explanations of these forms of worship. Each of these animals has been assigned, as symbol or attribute, to one of the greater deities. As for ourselves we have no doubt that these objects of popular devotion were no more than ancient fetishes. In the long prehistoric centuries, while the Egyptian race was occupied in making good its possession of the Nile valley and bringing it into cultivation, imagination deified these animals, some for the services which they rendered, others for the terror which they inspired; and it was the same with certain vegetables.

We find traces of this phenomenon, which at first seems so inexplicable, among the other races of antiquity, but it is nowhere else so marked as it is in Egypt. When Egypt, after being for three centuries subject to the influence and supremacy of the Greek genius, had lost all but the shadow of its former independence and national life; when all the energy and intellectual activity which remained to it was concentrated at the Greco-Syrian rather than Egyptian Alexandria, the ancient religion of the race lost all its highest branches.[75] The aspirations towards monotheism took a form that was either philosophical and Platonic or Christian; and as for the cultivated spirits who wished to continue the personification of the eternal forces of the world and of the laws which govern them, these laws and forces presented themselves to their minds in the forms which had been figured and described by the sculptors, painters, and writers of Greece. They accepted, without hesitation or dispute, the numbers and physical characteristics of the divine types of Greece. From end to end of the habitable earth, as the Greeks boasted, the gods of the Hellenic pantheon absorbed and assimilated all those of other nationalities; within the boundaries of the Roman Empire, at least, its polytheism became a kind of universal religion for civilized humanity, and was adopted by nations of the most diverse origin and language. The lower classes alone, who read neither Homer nor Hesiod and were unable to admire the statues of the Greek sculptors, were kept free from the powerful and softening influence of poetry and art. They guarded with obstinacy the ancient foundations of their early faith, and in the void left by the disappearance of the national gods, their primitive beliefs seem to have put on a new life and to have enjoyed a restored _prestige_. Thus we may see, in forest clearings, the ancient but still vigorous stumps of great trees which have been felled send out fresh shoots to renew their youth.

[75] We do not mean to say that the higher qualities of the
Egyptian religion were then altogether lost. In Roman Egypt the
fetish superstitions were no doubt predominant, but still it had
not lost all that theological erudition which it had accumulated
by its own intellectual energy. In an inscription cut in the
time of Philip the Arab, we find an antique hymn transcribed in
hieroglyphs upon the wall of a temple. We find abstract and
speculative ideas in all those Egyptian books which have come
down to us, in a form which betrays the last two centuries of
the Empire. Alexandria had its Egyptian Serapeum by the side of
its Greek one. Monuments are to be found there which are
Egyptian in every particular. Gnosticism was particularly
successful in Egypt, which was predestined to accept it by the
whole of its past. Certain doctrines of Plotinus are thus best
explained. More than one purely Egyptian notion may be found
interpreted in the works of Alexandrian philosophers and in the
phraseology of Greek philosophy. The principal sanctuaries did
not allow their rites and ceremonies to fall into disuse.
Although Thebes was nothing but a heap of ruins, a dead city
visited for its relics of the past, the worship of Vulcan, that
is of Ptah, at Memphis, was carried on up to the establishment
of Christianity. That of Isis, at Philæ, lasted until the time
of Justinian. Diocletian negotiated a treaty with the Blemmyes,
those people of Nubia who were at one time such redoubtable
soldiers, which guaranteed to them the free use of that temple.
It was not converted into a church until after the destruction
of the Blemmyes by Silco and the Christian kings of Ethiopia.

The old religion and theology of the Egyptians did not expire in
a single day. It was no more killed by the Roman conquest than
it was by that of the Ptolemies. But although its rites did not
cease, and some of its elaborate doctrines still continued to be
transmitted, its vitality had come to an end. It exercised some
remains of influence only on condition of being melted down and
re-modelled in the crucible of Greek philosophy. A little
_coterie_ of thinkers set themselves to complete this
transfusion, but the great mass of the people returned to simple
practices which had been sanctified by thousands of years, and
formed nearly the whole of their religion.

This persistence, this apparent recrudescence of fetishism made itself felt in Egypt alone. It amazed and scandalized both pagans and Christians during the early centuries of Christianity. They mocked at a people who "hardly dared to bite a leek or an onion; who adored divinities which grew in their own gardens,"[76] and a god which was nothing but a "beast wallowing on a purple carpet."[77] Guided by a more critical knowledge of the past, we are now better able to understand the origin of these beliefs and the secret of their long duration. We are enabled to account for them by that inexperience which falsifies all the judgments of infancy, in the race as well as in the individual; we see that they are the exaggeration of a natural sentiment, which becomes honourable and worthy of our sympathy when it is addressed to the useful and laborious helpers of man, to domestic animals, for instance, such as the cow and the draught ox.

[76] Porrum et cæpe nefas violare et frangere morsu.
O Sanctas gentes, quibus hæc nascuntur in hortis
Numina!--JUVENAL, xv. 9-11.

[77] CLEMENS ALEXANDRINUS, quoted by Maspero, _Histoire
ancienne_, p. 46.

It would be interesting to know why these beliefs were so curiously tenacious of life in Egypt; perhaps the reason is to be found in the prodigious antiquity of Egyptian civilization. That civilization was the oldest which the world has seen, the least remote from the day of man's first appearance upon the earth. It may therefore be supposed to have received more deeply, and maintained more obstinately, those impressions which characterize the infancy of men as well as of mankind. Add to this, that other races in their efforts to emerge from barbarism, were aided and incited by the example of races which had preceded them on the same road. The inhabitants of the Nile Valley, on the other hand, were alone in the world for many centuries; they had to depend entirely upon their own internal forces for the accomplishment of their emancipation; it is, therefore, hardly surprising that they should have remained longer than their successors in that fetish worship which we have asserted to be the first stage of religious development.[78]

[78] This was perceived by the President de Brosses, a _savant_
with few advantages but a bold and inquiring spirit, to whom the
language is indebted for the use of the term _fetishism_ as a
name for a definite state of religious conception. We can still
read with interest the book which he published anonymously in
1760, under the title: _Du Culte des Dieux fétiches; ou,
Parallèle de l'Ancienne Religion de l'Égypte avec la Religion
actuelle de Nigritie_ (12mo). The study of the fetish elements
of the Egyptian religion has been resumed lately with competent
knowledge and talent by a German egyptologist, Herr Pietschmann,
in an essay which appeared in 1878 in the _Zeitschrift für
Ethnologie_, which is published in Berlin under the direction of
M. Virchow. It is called _Der Ægyptische Fetischdienst und
Götterglaube--Prolegomena zur Ægyptischen Mythologie_ (28 pp.
8vo). A great many judicious observations and curious facts are
to be found in it; the realistic and materialistic character of
the Egyptian conceptions are very well grasped; it is perhaps to
be regretted that the author has not endeavoured to make the
creeds to which he gives this name of _fétichisme_ somewhat
clearer, and to show by what workings of the mind they were
adopted and abandoned. With regard to the Egyptian religion, we
shall find treated, in the excellent _Manuel de l'Histoire des
Religions_, by Tiele, which M. Maurice Vernes has just
translated from the Dutch (1 vol. 12mo, Ernest Leroux, 1880),
views much the same as those which we have just described. The
author denominates the religious state which we call fetishism
_animism_, but he points out the fact that this class of
conceptions had a perennial influence over the Egyptian mind.
"The Egyptian religion," he says, "like the Chinese, was nothing
to begin with but an organised _animism_." He finds traces of
this _animism_ in the worship of the dead, the deification of
the kings, and the adoration of animals. From his point of view
the custom of placing a symbol of the divinity rather than an
image in the temple, must be traced to fetishism (pp. 44 and 45
of the French version).

This stage must never be forgotten, if we wish to understand the part which art played in the figuring of the Egyptian gods. In most of the types which it created it mixed up the physical characteristics of man and beast. Sometimes the head of an animal surmounts the body of a man or woman; sometimes, though more rarely, the opposite arrangement obtains. The Sphinx, and the bird with a human head which symbolizes death, are instances of the latter combination. The usual explanation of these forms is as follows. When men began to embody for the eye of others the ideas which they had formed of the divine powers, they adopted as the foundation for their personifications the noblest living form they knew, that of man. In the next place they required some easy method for distinguishing their imaginary beings one from another. They had to give to each deity some feature which should be peculiar to him or her self, and should allow of his being at once identified and called by his own name. The required result was obtained in a very simple manner, by adding to the constant quantity the human figure, a varying element in the heads of different animals. These the fauna of Egypt itself afforded. In the case of each divinity, the particular animal was selected which had been consecrated to it, which was its symbol or at least its attribute, and the head or body, as the case might be, was detached in order to form part of a complex and imaginary being. The special characteristics of the animal made use of were so frankly insisted upon that no confusion could arise between one deity and another. Even a child could not fail to see the difference between Sekhet, with the head of a cat or a lioness, and Hathor, with that of a cow.

We do not refuse to accept this explanation, but yet we may express our surprise that the Egyptians, who were able, even in the days of the ancient empire, to endow the statues of their kings with so much purity and nobility of form, were not disgusted by the strangeness of such combinations, by their extreme grotesqueness, and by the disagreeable results which they sometimes produced. A certain beauty may be found in such creations as the Sphinx, and a few others, in which the human face is allied to the wings of a bird, and the trunk and posterior members of the most graceful and powerful of quadrupeds. But could any notion be more unhappy than that of crowning the bust of a man or woman with the ugly and ponderous head of a crocodile, or with the slender neck and flat head of a snake?

Every polytheistic nation attacked this problem in turn, and each solved it in its own manner. The Hindoos multiplied the human figure by itself, and painted or carved their gods with three heads and many pairs of arms and legs, of which proceeding traces are to be found among the Western Asiatics, the Greeks, and even the Latins. The Greeks represented all their gods in human form, and yet by the delicacy of their contours and the general coherence of their characterization, they were enabled to avoid all confusion between them. With them, too, costume and attributes helped to mark the difference. But even where these are absent, our minds are never left in doubt. Even a fragment of a torso can be at once recognized at sight as part of a statue of Zeus, of Apollo, or of Bacchus, and a head of Demeter or Hera would never be confounded with one of Artemis or Pallas.

It may be said that the artists of Egypt were lacking in the skill necessary for all this, or that they generalized their forms to such a degree as to leave no scope for such subtle differences. But, in fact, we find in their oldest statues a facility of execution which suggests that, had they chosen, they could have expressed anything which can be expressed by the chisel. That they did not do so, we know. They contented themselves with plastic interpretations so rough and awkward that, perhaps, we should rather seek their explanation in some hereditary predisposition, some habit of thought and action contracted in the infancy of the race and fortified by long transmission.

We have already spoken of that which we believe to be the cause of the peculiar forms under which the Egyptians figured their deities, namely, the fetish worship, which was the earliest, and for many centuries the only, form of religion which they possessed. That worship had struck its roots so deeply into the souls of the people, that it could not be torn up even when a large part of the nation had gradually educated itself to the comprehension of the highest religious conceptions. Its practices never fell into total neglect, and its influence was so far maintained that during the decadence of the nation it again became the ruling faith, so that foreign observers were led to believe that the Egyptian religion began and ended in the adoration of plants and sacred animals. The eyes and the imagination being thus educated by immemorial custom, it is not surprising that even the most cultivated section of the people should have seen nothing offensive in the representation of their gods sometimes under the complete form of an animal (Horus is often symbolized under the likeness of a hawk), sometimes as composite monsters with human bodies and animal heads.

Take, for a moment, the bird to which we have just alluded. The hawk, like the vulture, plays an important part in Egyptian art. The vulture symbolizes Maut, the spouse of Amen. It furnishes the sign by which her name is written, and sometimes, as the symbol of maternity, its head appears over the brow of the goddess, its wings forming her head-dress. The goddess Nekheb, who symbolizes the region of the South, is also represented by a vulture.[79] So it is with the ibis. It supplies the character by which the name Thoth is written, and that god is figured with the head of an Ibis. The part played by these birds in the representation of the gods, both in the plastic arts and in writing, is to be explained by the sentiments of gratitude and religious veneration of which they were the objects, sentiments which were the natural outcome of the practical services which they rendered to mankind.

[79] PIERRET, _Dictionnaire d'Archéologie Égyptienne_.