# The Religion of Ancient Egypt/Lecture I

THE SOURCES OF INFORMATION
RESPECTING THE
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN RELIGION.
The religion of ancient Egypt is known to us through authentic records of various kinds, extending through a period of not less than three thousand years. It may have been in existence for many centuries anterior to the earliest of the monuments which have been preserved. Its origin is a matter, not of history, but of speculation. Its last centuries coincide with the first centuries of the Christian religion which gradually supplanted it. During this period the zoolatry, or worship of the sacred animals, was the feature which chiefly attracted the notice of the Christian apologists who have made any observations upon the subject.
Clement of Alexandria, one of the most learned and philosophical of the Greek Fathers, introduces his ​account of the Egyptian worship in a chapter against the use or abuse of finery by Christian ladies. He compares those ladies who elaborately decorate their outside and neglect the soul, in which the image of God should be enshrined, to the Egyptians, who have magnificent temples, gleaming with gold, silver and electrum, and glittering with Indian and Ethiopian gems. "Their shrines," he continues, "are veiled with gold-embroidered hangings. But if you enter the penetralia of the enclosure and, in haste to behold something better, seek the image that is the inhabitant of the temple, and if any priest of those that offer sacrifice there, looking grave and singing a paean in the Egyptian tongue, remove a little of the veil to show the god, he will furnish you with a hearty laugh at the object of worship. For the deity that is sought, to whom you have rushed, will not be found within, but a cat, or a crocodile, or a serpent, or some such beast, unworthy of the temple, but quite worthy of a den, a hole or the dirt. The god of the Egyptians is revealed; a beast rolling on a purple couch."
The language of Origen is very similar to that of Clement. That Christian and Jewish controversialists should have felt the utmost disdain for the Egyptian ​worship is natural enough, but this disdain was fully shared by many of their heathen contemporaries. "You are never done," says Clement to the latter, "laughing every day of your lives at the Egyptians." He then quotes a Greek philosopher, Xenophanes of Colophon, who tells the Egyptians, "If you believe these brutes to be gods, do not mourn or bewail them; if you mourn or bewail them, do not any more regard them as gods." The comic writers of Greece had already made themselves merry upon the subject. Antiphanes, one of the most fertile and celebrated Athenian poets of the Middle Comedy, jests at the cleverness of the Egyptians who consider the eel as equal to the gods. Anaxandrides, another famous Athenian comic writer, tells the Egyptians: "I never could be your ally, for neither our customs nor our laws agree. They differ widely. You worship an ox, but I sacrifice him to the gods. You consider the eel a mighty demon; we think him by far the best of fish. You do not eat swine flesh, and I am particularly fond of doing so. You worship a dog, but I thrash him whenever I catch him stealing meat. Here the law is, that integrity of all their members is required of priests; with you, it appears, they must be circumcised. You weep if you see a cat ailing, but I like to kill and skin him. A shrew-mouse is an object of great consideration with you, not of the least with me." Timokles, in a play called "The Egyptians," asks, "How is it possible for ​an ibis or a dog to save you? For when men have sinned against the gods whom all acknowledge, whom will the altar of a cat repel by its terrors?" Classical scholars are familiar with the Satire commonly attributed to Juvenal: "Who does not know what kinds of monsters demented Egypt worships? One part adores the crocodile, another quakes before the ibis gorged with serpents. The golden image of a sacred long-tailed ape glitters where the magic chords resound from mutilated Memnon, and ancient Thebes lies in ruin, with her hundred gates. There whole towns venerate cats, here a river fish, there a dog, but no one Diana. It is impiety to violate and break with the teeth the leek and onion. O holy races, to whom such deities as these are born in their gardens!"
It is not wonderful that, with such evidence before them, many writers should at the present day speak of the Egyptian religion as one of the lowest and grossest forms of nature-worship, as consisting in what is commonly called African fetishism, or at least as being based upon it.
Yet the external aspect of a religion as presented to strangers is not often one that is to be trusted. "We ​have but to remember the accounts of the Jewish religion and of its history which have been left us by heathen writers, and the judgments which the most enlightened of these writers passed upon Christianity in the earliest and purest days of its existence. Christianity was not only considered as an exitiabilis superstitio, but was popularly supposed to involve the worship of a brute animal. Do you think the prejudices of men holding such opinions would have been weakened had they accidentally heard of "the Lamb of God who taketh away the sins of the world," or read in the Apocalypse of the Lamb with seven horns and seven eyes who is the Lord of lords and King of kings, and represented as receiving the worship of the four beasts, the four-and-twenty elders, and innumerable angels?
A Roman soldier, according to the historian Diodoros, incurred the furious wrath of an Egyptian village by the slaughter of a cat. But the fury of a Mohammedan population may at this day be aroused by an attack upon its wild dogs; and there are, or till very ​lately were, numerous Christian populations which resented the slaughter of doves or pigeons as impious and sacrilegious. Yet neither Moslems nor Christians have ever worshipped dogs or pigeons.
It is in the nature of things that persons living outside a religion, especially if they are not inclined to it, cannot understand it or its symbols unless their inquiries are conducted under conditions which are generally considered superfluous or wrong. Men are rarely conscious of the prejudices which really incapacitate them from forming impartial and true judgments on systems alien to their own habits of thought. And philosophers who may pride themselves on their freedom from prejudice may yet fail to understand whole classes of psychological phenomena which are the result of religious practice, and are familiar to those alone to whom such practice is habitual.
There is distinct evidence that the absurdity which the Egyptian religion presented to strangers disappeared on closer acquaintance with it. Philo, the philosophical ​Jew of Alexandria, tells us that foreigners coming for the first time into Egypt knew not what to do for laughter at the divine beasts, but that the universal superstition finished by overpowering them also. Apollonios of Tyana, according to his biographer Philostratos, decidedly condemned the Egyptian system as absurd and ridiculous. But the form which his objections assume is quite inconsistent with the notion of fetishism. He takes it for granted that the beasts are not deities, but symbols of deity. "If you place a hawk or an owl or a wolf or a dog in your temples to represent Hermes, Athene or Apollon, the beasts and birds may derive dignity from such representations, but the gods will lose theirs." "I think," said Thespesion, "you slight our mode of worship before you have given it a fair examination. For surely what we are speaking of is wise, if anything Egyptian is so; the Egyptians do not venture to give any form to their deities, they only give them in symbols which have an occult meaning that renders them more venerable." Apollonios, smiling at this, said, "O ye sages, great indeed is the advantage you have derived from the wisdom of Egyptians and Ethiopians, if you find anything worthy of your worship in a dog, an ibis or a goat; or if you think such creatures fit to represent your gods … If what the mind discovers couched under such symbolical figures is entitled to greater veneration, surely the condition of the gods in Egypt ​would be more highly respected if no statues whatever were erected to them, and if theology was treated in a different manner, with a little more wisdom and mystery … The mind forms to itself a something which it delineates better than what any art can do; but in the present instance you have taken from the gods the very power of appearing beautiful either to the eye or to the understanding."
I do not quote this conversation as in any way deserving to be considered authentic, but only as evidence that the Egyptian worship of animals was considered even by grave opponents as symbolical, and not as pure fetishism. Celsus is quoted by Origen as distinctly denying the worship by the Egyptians of brute creatures of a day (ζώων ἐφημερίων). And some Christian Fathers even admit that the symbolical worship of animals denotes a higher stage of culture than the worship of inanimate images, stocks and stones, or of deities whose actions are inconsistent with the most elementary notions of morality. Porphyry explains the animal worship from a Pantheistic point of view. All living creatures in their degree partake of the Divine essence, and "under the semblances of animals the Egyptians worship the universal power which the gods have revealed in the various forms of living nature." ​
After all, the religion of the Egyptians was not confined to the worship of the sacred animals. Herodotos, Plato and other classical writers, mention Amon, Osiris, Isis, Thoth, Neith and other divinities; and the belief in the soul's immortality is not only decidedly ascribed to the Egyptians, but is said to have been first taught by them. What relations did the various parts of this religion bear to each other? Was the religion in its later ages identical with the primitive religion of the country? Had there been advance or retrogression? The solution of these and many other obvious questions was quite impossible until very recently. The learned Brücker, in his Critical History of Philosophy, and Jablonski, in his Pantheon Aegyptiacum, have with indefatigable industry put together all the evidence that can be found in Greek and Latin writers. But they had no means of testing this evidence. No history can be learnt with certainty except from evidence contemporaneous with the events recorded; no religion can be studied with profit except in the very words of its own votaries. But the knowledge of the Egyptian language had not only actually perished, but the key to the decipherment of its writings was supposed to be irrecoverably lost. The hieroglyphic characters, consisting of representations of the sun, moon, animals, plants and other objects, either natural or ​artificial, which are painted or sculptured upon so many Egyptian monuments, were indeed looked upon as symbols under which the mysteries of the religion had been concealed from the vulgar, and several attempts were made to explain them. All these efforts, however, were destitute of any scientific basis. The most elaborate attempts proceeded from the learned Jesuit, Athanasius Kircher, who is not without merit as one of the restorers of Coptic; but his enormous folios upon hieroglyphic inscriptions are mere memorials of a frightful amount of time and thought elaborately wasted. Every hieroglyphic sign was supposed to represent an idea; and groups which we now know to stand for the names and titles of the Roman emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian, are converted into long sentences of mystical rubbish. Even at the beginning of the present century, the Chevalier Palin indulged in dreams not unworthy of Athanasius Kircher. Dr. Birch has briefly described his views as follows. He "did not hesitate to assert that it was only necessary to translate the Psalms of David into Chinese, and write them in the ancient characters of that language, in order to reproduce the Egyptian papyri, and that these contained many Biblical books."
Spurious monuments served the purposes of these interpreters quite as well as genuine ones. In the "Isiac table" Kircher discovered a variety of sacred ​mysteries favourable to Christianity; Pegnorius read in it precepts of moral and political wisdom. Another critic (Jablonski) considered it as a calendar of festivals; whilst a fourth attempted to persuade the learned world that "these characters described the properties and use of the magnet, and of the mariner's compass."
The discovery of the Rosetta stone put an end to all this guess-work. Most of you have probably seen this stone in the British Museum. It is a tablet of black basalt, about three feet long by about two and a half wide, and was erected in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes, 193 years before Christ. The inscriptions upon it are in three distinct characters, the third of which is Greek. The Greek text consists of a decree in honour of the king, and it is expressly stated in the last line that this decree is to be engraved on the tablet, τοῖς τε ἱεροῖς καὶ ἐγχωρίοις καὶ ἐλληνικοῖς γράμμασιν, "in the sacred characters, in the vernacular and in Greek." The tablet is unfortunately mutilated, great part of the hieroglyphic portion is lost, and so is the end of the Greek. Fifteen lines of the enchorial or (as it is now generally called) demotic part have lost their first letters or words.
The conditions of the problem to be solved were now of a very definite kind. The inquirer, instead of guessing at the sense of the hieroglyphic text, had the sense ​supplied to him. His problem lay in dividing the hieroglyphic text into groups or words corresponding to the Greek words. The problem would be completely solved if each Egyptian group were successfully analyzed and read, the verification of the result being found in the facility of reading and interpreting other texts by means of the alphabet and vocabulary thus obtained.
Several of the most eminent scholars in Europe attempted the problem, and some of them even with partial success. The great orientalist Silvestre de Sacy determined the demotic groups corresponding to Ptolemy, Berenike, Alexander and other proper names; and the Swedish scholar Akerblad already, in the year 1802, even drew up a phonetic alphabet of the demotic characters, which is remarkably correct as far as it goes. The complete key to the decipherment of Egyptian was, however, not revealed to the world till the publication of Champollion's letter to M. Dacier in the September of 1822.
It is even to this day a common habit of Englishmen to couple the name of their countryman Dr. Thomas Young with that of Champollion, as sharing with him the glory of this discovery. No person who knows anything of Egyptian philology can countenance so gross an error. Dr. Young was indeed a man of ​extraordinary genius, but the true direction of it was long unrecognized by those very countrymen of his who ridiculously put him forward as a rival of Champollion. "It fell to his lot," as Professor Tyndall has said, "to discover facts in Optics which Newton's theory was incompetent to explain; and he finally succeeded in placing on an immovable basis the Undulatory Theory of Light." Helmholtz, a kindred genius, thus speaks of him: "His was one of the most profound minds that the world has ever seen." But it is not true that he discovered the key to the decipherment of hieroglyphics, or even that his labours assisted Champollion in the discovery. When the key was once discovered and recognized as the true one, it was found that one or two of Young's results were correct. But there was nothing in his method or theory by which he or any one else could distinguish between his right and his wrong results, or which could lead him or any one else a single step in advance. Young was certainly right in assuming that the first two signs in the hieroglyphic name of Ptolemy were P and T, but his next step was a failure, and so was the next after that. He did not succeed in analyzing this royal name or that of Berenike. All his other attempts were simple failures. "He mistook Autokrator for Arsinoe, and Cæsar for ​Euergetes." "His translations," says Dr. Birch, "are below criticism, being as unfounded as those of Kircher." Besides being unable to identify more than a very few alphabetic characters, he failed to recognize the nature of determinatives, no less an essential part of the key than the phonetic.
Champollion's discovery was of a very different nature. Besides the two kinds of Egyptian characters which are used on the Rosetta stone, there is a third, commonly called the hieratic. The hieroglyphic characters, with their accurately elaborate designs of animals, plants and other objects, are very suitable for monumental inscriptions, but very unsuitable for the ordinary purposes of life; and the Egyptians had from the earliest times used a tachygraphic or cursive character which is a rough and abridged form of the hieroglyphic. The stones of the great Pyramid bear notes upon them in this character which were already written in the quarry. At a much more recent period (some seven centuries before Christ), the character was still further abridged and debased, and assumed the form now called demotic, and this is the second character on the Rosetta stone. A great many documents in our museums are written in this character. Long before he suspected the real nature of Egyptian writing, Champollion had patiently studied the relations ​between its three different kinds, and had discovered the essential identity of the three, demotic being a debasement of the hieratic, the hieratic a debasement of the hieroglyphic. Through M. Dacier he had presented two dissertations to the French Académie des Sciences, one on the hieratic and a second on the demotic character. His enemy Klaproth asserts that he suppressed the dissertation on the hieratic character for fear of its telling tales against him, and showing his need of Young's guidance. I do not know that it is true that Champollion tried to suppress this "Mémoire;" but if he did, it surely was not for the purpose malignantly asserted by Klaproth and ignorantly repeated in this country. The dissertation in question is a very excellent work, chiefly consisting in plates, wherein passages of the Book of the Dead written in hieroglyphics are placed side by side with the same passages copied from hieratic manuscripts, and the identity is made apparent to the most unlearned eye. And if, as Klaproth asserts, Champollion had wished to destroy all trace of certain passages which occur in his text, he would certainly not have repeated them, as he does, in his letter to M. Dacier. But the most important step in his progress was discovering the identity of certain demotic characters, the alphabetic nature of which had been demonstrated by Akerblad, with the corresponding hieratic ones, and consequently with their hieroglyphic originals. If any one has a right to be named in ​conjunction with Champollion, it is not Young, but Akerblad, to whom he does full justice (as he does indeed to Young himself) at the very beginning of his letter to M. Dacier. But in 1822, Champollion had not only one bilingual inscription before him, but two, the obelisk of Philæ having been found, with an Egyptian inscription and also a Greek one containing the name of Cleopatra, which offered special facility for decipherment, two of the letters in it being alike, and others being the same as in the name of Ptolemy. But in discussing this question, it must not be forgotten that the key to hieroglyphic decipherment does not consist in recognizing the phonetic nature of this or that sign, but in the knowledge of the simultaneous use of both phonetic and ideographic signs, not only ​in every line, but in nearly every word, and of the law of this use. And neither Akerblad, nor, since the language had ceased to be spoken, had any one else before Champollion a notion of this.
The truth of Champollion's alphabet was demonstrated by its enabling one to read the name not only of Ptolemy and Cleopatra, but of all the Persian, Greek and Roman sovereigns of the country. And, what was far more important still, the meanings of many hieroglyphic groups, on being read according to his system, were immediately known from the Coptic vocabulary. Champollion's hypothesis that the old Egyptian language was identical with Coptic, though a very imperfect one, and productive even at the present day of many errors among those who discard it, was not fatally wrong, for Coptic is in fact a later stage of the language in which the hieroglyphic texts are written, and the vocabulary of the latter is full of words which are as intelligible to the Coptic scholar as the infinitives of Latin verbs are to a mere Italian scholar. The remaining years of his short life were spent in copying, studying and interpreting Egyptian texts. The amount of work accomplished by him in eight years is almost incredible. He not only laid the foundations of a Grammar and Dictionary, but illustrated the history and religion of ancient Egypt by the translations and analyses of short but authentic texts, opening an entirely new world to the historical student, and ​convincingly proving that scarcely a single page which had hitherto been written upon Egyptian history or religion deserved the least credit. A splendid work which he had begun on the Egyptian Pantheon was even discontinued in consequence of the fresh information on the Egyptian religion which he was perpetually discovering.
During his lifetime, Champollion had many opponents and detractors, but not a single person can be named who in the slightest degree contributed to the modification or development of his views. Whatever corrections he adopted resulted from his own studies. His immediate disciples did not advance a step beyond what they learnt from him. One of them, Salvolini, was guilty of the infamous wickedness, after his master's death, of using the manuscripts of the latter for the purpose of winning glory for himself at the expense of the generous friend who had lent him his most valuable papers. It was not till 1837, several years after the death of Champollion, that his philological system was subjected to a thoroughly scientific criticism by Dr. Lepsius in his Letter to Rosellini, in which the obviously erroneous portions of the system were eliminated, the relations between the Coptic and the old Egyptian languages were set in a truer light, and a more accurate method of transcription was adopted.
For a good many years after this, Egyptian archaeology was chiefly cultivated by dilettanti, whose knowledge of the language seldom extended beyond the decipherment of royal names. Whole systems of Egyptian chronology have been devised by men incapable of reading and understanding a single line of Egyptian. Till 1850, the only genuine scholars who can be mentioned in addition to Lepsius, are Mr. Birch and Dr. Hincks in this country, M. Emmanuel de Rougé in France, and Dr. Brugsch (then a very young man) in Germany. But every one of these was a scholar of more than average ability, and has left his mark for ever upon the science. The important discoveries of M. Mariette belong to the next period, as also do the first works of M. Chabas and Mr. Goodwin, two scholars whose translations of some of the most difficult texts in the language caused the study of it to advance with gigantic strides. Since 1860, and particularly since the foundation in 1863 at Berlin of a journal in which everything connected with the language or archaeology of ancient Egypt might be discussed, the number of highly distinguished scholars has greatly increased. A very valuable journal of the same kind was founded in Paris in the year 1872. The names of Dümichen, Lauth, Ebers, Stern, Eisenlohr, Wiedeman, Bergman and Reinisch in Germany and Austria, Pleyte ​in Holland, Lieblein in Sweden, Golenischeff in Russia, Dévéria, J. de Rougé, Horrack, Maspero, Lefébure, Pierret, Grébaut, Robiou, Baillet and Rochemonteix in France, Naville at Geneva, Bossi, Szedlo and Schiaparelli in Italy, are autborities familiar to every Egyptologist. To these I must add Canon Cook and Professor Lushington in this country.
It is not without a melancholy feeling that I enumerate these names (many of them belonging to dear and valued friends), for the hand of death has already thinned our ranks, and some of us are growing old and disabled. The spell, however, is broken; the language of ancient Egypt has really been recovered—slowly, it is true, and step by step. The decipherment of a language does not at once put us in possession of a language. The ancient Etruscan writings are read with ease, but they are as unintelligible as ever. The relationship between Coptic and old Egyptian happily enabled Champollion to find the meanings of many words and the general sense of entire inscriptions. But the old Egyptian vocabulary, besides representing an earlier stage of the language, is very much more extensive than the Coptic, and the greater part of the words which compose it had to be recovered, one after another, by an inductive process. The truth of the vocabulary which has thus gradually been built up is ​verified by its enabling to read and understand entire documents of every kind. This alone ought to be considered sufficient proof, for no imaginary vocabulary can possibly adapt itself to the needs of an indefinite number of texts. But sceptics who are incapacitated by their imperfect acquaintance with the processes of philological science from feeling the force of this proof, may at least be referred to the confirmation of our vocabulary by the bilingual inscription of Canopus. In 1866, Dr. Lepsius discovered a tablet at San, in Lower Egypt, of the same nature as the Rosetta stone; that is to say, containing inscriptions in old Egyptian, demotic and Greek, but much more considerable in extent and quite perfect. The sense of this tablet, according to the vocabulary already received among Egyptologists, exactly agreed with that given by the Greek text. And the truth of the Grammar is proved in the same manner. Already in 1860, M. de Rougé declared that there was no kind of Egyptian text the translation of which might not be undertaken if only the necessary pains were employed. We are now able to read and understand not only the splendid and accurate texts of the public inscriptions, but the wretched scrawls of manuscripts in the cursive character. And some scholars—Mr. Goodwin, for instance, and Mr. Chabas, and before them Dr. Birch and M. de Rougé—have successfully translated texts so frightfully mutilated that in many places only fragments of letters ​were visible. But their familiarity with the cursive character enabled them to restore the text with an accuracy of which no competent critic can entertain a doubt. When I speak of our being able to read and comprehend the language, you will not understand me as implying that all Egyptologists are equally learned and skilful. Nor are all Egyptian texts equally easy of translation. As in all languages, some are very easy and others extremely difficult. There is one long and most interesting document, of which I shall have occasion to speak later on, which will, I fear, long continue to baffle the efforts of translators.
The progress of the study was greatly retarded at first by the difficulty of obtaining authentic copies of ​Egyptian texts. Almost all the old copies, not even excepting those made by Belzoni, are absolutely worthless. Science is insatiate, and its wants can never be adequately supplied, yet much has been done, both through the unassisted efforts of private individuals and through the munificence of governments and public bodies. The collection of published Egyptian texts which can be relied upon is now very considerable. To the plates contained in the Description de l'Egypte published in 1809 by the French government, as the result of a great scientific expedition, must be added the collections of Champollion, Rosellini and Prisse d'Avennes, Burton's Excerpta Hieroglyphica, Sharpe's Egyptian Inscriptions, Dr. Leemans's Monumens Egyptiens du Musée de Leide, Ungarelli's Obelisks, the magnificent Denkmaeler of Lepsius, the Hieratic Papyri of the British Museum, and many other splendid publications bearing the names of Lepsius, Chabas, Bonomi, Rhind, Brugsch, Dümichen, Mariette Bey, E. de Rougé, Rossi and Pleyte, Naville, Ebers and Stern, Maspero, Guyesse, Golenischeff, Bergman, Wiedeman and others. Some of these costly works reproduce the original text in facsimile; in some of them the accuracy of the copy is secured by photography.
But large as is the collection of these texts, it is but a fragment of the texts actually in existence. Mariette Bey has published four folio volumes of plates from the temple of Denderah alone, but he ​gives them only as a selection. To copy the whole would, he says, be the work of years. Dr. Dümichen has published another folio volume of texts of special interest, selected from the same temple, without interfering with those published by M. Mariette. Every square foot of the walls is in fact covered with picture or text. I had the pleasure of passing some time, one or two years ago, at Qurna, on the left bank of the Nile, near Thebes, with a great scholar, who had spent much time in copying the inscriptions of a single tomb; but though he worked indefatigably and rapidly, he was compelled to come away leaving a great part of his intended work unaccomplished. Would that we might rely upon the zeal of future labourers for the completion of such tasks as the present generation is unable to perform! Unfortunately the monuments are rapidly perishing, and there are no effectual means of arresting the progress of destruction. The tombs are convenient abodes for Arab families, who destroy the paintings and inscriptions either by the dense smoke of their fires or by actually pulling down walls. I was taken to see the "Lay of the Harper," one of the most interesting remains of Egyptian poetry, which was published a few years ago by Dr. Dümichen; but we found the walls on which the poem was written a mere heap of ruins. But the vandalism of European and American travellers is most fatal to the monuments. There is, or rather was, a ​famous picture at Benihassan which was formerly thought to represent Joseph presenting his brethren to Pharaoh. An English lady has been heard to request her guide to cut out for her the face of Joseph.
But this destruction in some form or other has been going on for centuries. Abd-el-Latif, a learned Arabian writer of the middle ages, tells us in his description of Egypt that the ruins of Memphis in his time extended half a day's journey in every direction, and that, in spite of the removal for building purposes of immense masses of materials, its ruins presented to the spectator a re-union of marvels sufficient to confound the intelligence, and which the most eloquent man would vainly undertake to describe. He then proceeds to give a very intelligent account of these marvels, which must have been scarce less astounding than those still to be seen at Thebes. But of Memphis there is at present hardly a trace left. And other great cities known to ancient travellers have disappeared with their monuments. Mummy-cases and coffins with most interesting inscriptions have for centuries been used as fuel. And innumerable manuscripts have suffered the same fate.
In speaking of our stock of information respecting the ancient world, Mr. Grote says that "we possess only what has drifted ashore from the wreck of a stranded vessel." If this be true with reference to such a literature as that of Greece, with its immortal ​poets, historians, orators and philosophers, how immeasurably more true is it of Egypt! Yet if we only look to quantity, the stock of original and trustworthy materials actually in existence illustrative of the religion of ancient Egypt, is more extensive than the corresponding materials extant for the religions of Palestine, Greece or Rome. Neither Romans nor Greeks have left any sacred books. They have left poetry of the highest order, but no psalms or hymns, litanies or prayers, as the Egyptians have so largely done. No people certainly were more remote than the Egyptians from the idea that religion could exist without outward forms of worship. In studying their religion, we have to deal, not with a mere sentiment, but with a vast and complicated system of beliefs and institutions, resulting from their view of man's relations to the unseen world.
Of the many thousands of texts which have been rescued from destruction and made accessible to us, there are extremely few which do not bear directly upon the subject of the present Lectures. There are two reasons for this. The first is to be found in the fact that the Egyptians were among the most religious of the ancient nations. Religion in some form or other was dominant in every relation of their lives. One of ​the most extensive Egyptian works which has been recovered is the great medical papyrus published by Dr. Ebers. That work, however, though a medical one, and descending to minute details about cosmetics and even to receipts against vermin, is essentially a religious book. The medical prescriptions are subordinate to the prayers or religious observances which give them their efficacy. If we wish to keep clear of religion in studying Egyptian literature, we shall have to confine ourselves to mathematics. There is on the staircase of the British Museum a papyrus treating of various kinds of mathematical problems, and I confess that in studying it I was surprised to find it of so purely secular a character as it really is. It is only at the very end that we meet at last with a mention of prayers for fine weather and a high Nile.
But the principal reason why most of the documents which have come down to us are of a religious character is, that all the ancient monuments of Egypt have perished except some which were necessarily of a religious nature—the temples and the tombs. The palaces of kings and nobles have utterly disappeared. Our knowledge of Egyptian civil architecture is derived from paintings in the tombs. Many texts of historical interest have been preserved, but their original intention was not historical, but religious. For us, the royal texts of Karnak, Abydos and Saqâra, are of historical value; but they have a purely religious ​meaning on the walls where they were found. We should in all probability never have recovered the Annals of Tehutimes III. except for the splendid donations to the god of Thebes which they commemorate. All the objects in our museums and other collections which seem to belong to civil or domestic life, have only been preserved by being buried in the tombs. On examining what appears to be a mere trinket, you will often find a prayer for the departed. And this is the case with the papyri, all of which would infallibly have perished had they not been deposited in tombs, and by the deep dry sand of the desert been rendered inaccessible to external influences. It is only accidentally that documents of a purely secular character have been preserved, and fragments of Greek and Coptic literature have in like manner been recovered from tombs. The information which we possess about Egyptian history is entirely derived from the public inscriptions on the walls of the temples, and accidental details contained in the funereal inscriptions of private individuals.
The first step to be taken in the endeavour to obtain light out of these materials is classification, and the most essential kind of classification at starting, is that of the order of succession. We shall never understand the development of the Egyptian, or of any other religion, if our ideas are uncertain as to the order in which the phenomena which represent it stand towards ​each other in reference to time. The speculations of the ablest men are sure to fail if their chronology is fatally wrong. I remember the time when men talked gravely and learnedly of reminiscences of primeval revelation respecting the Trinity and other Christian doctrines, as having been preserved, though in a very corrupt state, in the Hindu traditions about Trimûrti. Some, on the other hand, perhaps suspected that the Christian doctrine might have been derived through some unknown channel from a Hindu source. It is now acknowledged by all scholars that the Hindu doctrine, in question is extremely modern; the first traces of it are to be sought more than fourteen hundred years, not before, but after, the Christian era. The work upon India of P. Von Bohlen used to be considered a decisive authority respecting the influence of Indian upon Egyptian culture. No such influence can any longer be admitted. Many of you have probably read Mr. McLennan's articles on the Worship of Animals and Plants. In order to show that the ancient notions passed through what he calls the Totem stage, which he says must have been in pre-historic times, he appeals to the signs of the Zodiac. "The Zodiacal constellations figured on the porticos of Dendera and Esne in Egypt are," he says, "of great antiquity." The authority for this statement is a passage from Chambers' Encyclopaedia, to the effect that "Dupuis, in his Origine des Cultes, has, from a careful ​investigation of the position of these signs, and calculating precession at the usual rate, arrived at a conclusion that the earliest of them date from 4000 B.C. M. Fourier, in his 'Recherches sur la Science,' makes the representation at Esne 1800 years older than M. Dupuis." Mr. McLellan is here more than half a century behind his age. Every tourist on the Nile in possession of Murray's Handbook, knows that both Dupuis and Fourier were ludicrously mistaken. The Zodiacal representations in question, far from being of great antiquity, belong to the very latest period of Egyptian workmanship; they are not anterior to the Christian era or the Roman domination; they were borrowed from the Greeks, and were entirely unknown to the ancient Egyptians.
It is not sufficient to be in possession of trustworthy witnesses; it is also necessary to know the limit within which alone their evidence is really available. I am obliged, therefore, to say something about Egyptian chronology, especially as the current opinions on the subject are very vague and inaccurate. I shall not, however, detain you by entering into any of the questions which are still at issue between learned men who have given their attention to them, but will simply explain to you the nature of the undisputed evidence ​upon which we assign relative dates to the various periods of Egyptian civilization, and which imperatively demand that a very early date indeed should be assigned to the origin of that civilization.
* ↑ Paedagog. iii. c. 2.
* ↑ These comedians are quoted in Athen.: Deipnos. vii. p. 299.
* ↑ Juvenal, Sat. xv. 1. Mr. Lewis's translation.
* ↑ The Christians were popularly supposed to worship the ass, but this worship was naturally imagined to have been derived from the Jews, who worshipped not only the ass, but the swine. "Judaeus licet et porcinum numen adoret;" Petronius Arbiter, p. 224: Berlin, 1842. See Gill's Notices of the Jews and their Country by the Classic Writers of Antiquity, and an essay of Geiger (Juden u. Judenthum nach d. Auffassung d. Schriftsteller d. Alterthums) in the Illustrirte Monatshefte für die gesammten Interessen des Judenthums of Oct. 1865.
* ↑ Yet Mr. Herbert Spencer, Sociology, p. 354, after quoting a remark of Mr. McLennan that the dove is almost as great a god among the ancients as the serpent, says, "that the still extant symbolism of Christianity shows us the surviving effect of the belief in the ghostly character of the dove." N'est ce pas chercher midi à quatorze heures? Even if the schoolboy authorities on which Mr. McLellan relies were not absolutely worthless, surely the belief in the gospel narrative would be sufficient to account for the symbolism of the dove among populations who in their heathen condition had never heard of the dove as a divinity.
* ↑ Vit. Apollonii, vi. 19.
* ↑ De Abstinentia, iv. c. 9.
* ↑ That the oval rings contained royal names was first pointed out by the Danish scholar Zoega, who was also the first in modern times to assert that some hieroglyphic characters were phonetic.
* ↑ That Champollion never thought of hieroglyphic characters as phonetic till after Young's publication, is one of Klaproth's unscrupulous assertions which has been thoughtlessly repeated by some who should have known better. It has been refuted by M. Champollion-Figeac, who in the Revue Archéologique of 1856, 1857 and 1858, has produced abundance of evidence from his brother's writings between the years 1808 and 1814. In his Mémoire sur les Ecritures Egyptiennes, read on Aug. 7, 1810, before the Society of Sciences and Arts of Grenoble, Champollion strongly insists upon the necessity of phonetism, for otherwise how could foreign names, for which no symbolism existed, be expressed in writing? "L'inscription de Rosette présents les noms Grecs de Ptolémée, Bérénice, Arsinoe, Pyrrha, d'Aréia, de Diogènes, d'Aétes, d'Alexandre, etc.; ils ne pouvaient être exprimés dans la partie hiéroglyphique de ce monument, si ses hiéroglyphes n'avaient, comme nous l'avons dit, la faculté de produire des sons."
* ↑ Other questions than those of a purely philological nature often arise in reference to the texts translated. I do not quarrel with the translations given by M. de Rougé and other scholars of the great texts describing the invasion of Egypt in the time of Seti II. But I have always considered the identification of the foreign invaders with the Achaeans, Tyrrhenians, Sardinians and Sicilians, as in the highest degree improbable. Nor do I believe that the Danai or the Pelasgi have been really identified under hieroglyphic spelling. When we reflect that Deutschland is called Allemagne in French and Germany in English, that the people called Dutch by us are called Hollandais by the French, that the Greeks only knew themselves as Hellenes, that the name Egypt was unknown to the inhabitants of that country, and that its real name, Kamit, was unknown to Greeks and Romans, we should be very cautious in identifying names on the mere strength of similarity in sound.
* ↑ All Mr. McLennan's statements about the ancient nations are based on equally worthless authorities. He goes for his facts to Bryant and to Lempriere's Dictionary.