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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter II}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
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$Subject{god
gods
dead
re
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kingdom
religion
egypt
osiris
even
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$Date{1913}
$Log{See Table 1*0222401.tab
}
Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of Egypt
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter II

The Middle Kingdom And The Empire

     The Rise of Thebes - The Sun as Supreme God - Local Gods -
Identifications - Enneads and Triads - The Dead - Judgment before Osiris -
Moral Ideas - The Empire - Amon-Re the National God - Power of the Priesthood
- Attempt to Establish Solar Monotheism - Reaction - The Nineteenth Dynasty -
Mythology - Theban Tombs and Texts - The Book of the Dead - Amulets - The
Saite Restoration - Foreign Rule.

     Under the Sixth Dynasty the power of the kings declined; the governors of
the districts became virtually hereditary rulers and more and more independent
of the central authority.  The result was that the Old Kingdom disintegrated,
and Egypt, after a thousand years of union under a strong government, reverted
to the conditions which prevailed before the rise of the kingdom.  From the
following centuries royal monuments are lacking, but numerous tombs of
nomarchs and local notables show something of what was going on.  Toward the
end of these dim centuries Thebes first appears on the stage of history.
Hitherto it had been an insignificant provincial town; the chief city of the
canton was Hermonthis.  But beginning about 2150 B.C. the Intefs and
Mentuhoteps, Manetho's Eleventh Dynasty, laid the foundations of its
greatness.  The Twelfth Dynasty, also of Theban origin, reunited Egypt under a
strong rule, and not only extended their dominion in Nubia beyond the utmost
limits of the Old Kingdom, but carried their victorious arms far into Syria.
This recovery of power and prosperity was attended by a brilliant renaissance
of art.  In many ways these two centuries of the Middle Kingdom are the
culmination of Egyptian civilisation.

     The monuments of the Middle Kingdom show that in the intervening period
religion had continued to develop in the direction in which it was moving when
the Old Kingdom fell into decadence.  The Heliopolitan solar religion which
had been adopted by the state in the Fifth Dynasty had not gone under with the
state; its doctrines had, on the contrary, gained wider acceptance.  Re is now
a universal god, self-originated, the author and ruler of the world; a god, as
every one must see, not alone of higher attributes and greater power than the
tutelary and functional deities, but of a different kind.  His supremacy is
due to his nature, not to political circumstances such as might raise the god
of one city to a monarchy among the gods corresponding to the rule of a
dynasty from that city among men. The way had been prepared for Re by Horus,
and in fact Re makes himself heir of the sun-god of the earlier dynasties as
Re-Harakhte, that is, "Re, the Horus of the two Horizons"; but Horus had been
primarily the god of the kings, while Re was a god of priests.

     The exaltation of one god, especially of a great power of nature such as
Re, to the supreme place in the pantheon is a step toward monotheism; we shall
see how, in the New Empire, Ikhnaton tried to go the rest of the way and make
an exclusive solar monotheism the religion of Egypt. ^1 But, with the
exception of his unsuccessful attempt, the solar religion was not exclusive;
the theologians were content to let the other gods remain as ministers and
helpers of Re, or as names or forms of the sun-god - an accommodation of
theoretical monotheism to practical polytheism which has been found convenient
in other countries - in the theistic religions of India, for example.  This
pantheistic doctrine remained, however, a piece of priestly wisdom in the
possession of "them who know," and had no discoverable consequence in actual
religion even for them.

[Footnote 1: See below, pp. 181 ff.]

     The increased political importance of the provincial cities, which after
the fall of the Old Kingdom became independent states, gave a correspondingly
increased importance to their gods.  The rulers of the cantons erected new
temples to the deities under whose banners they fought with one another or
against their nominal overlords; the same conditions which had developed the
independent city religions in prehistoric Egypt now gave them new vitality.
Under these circumstances the effect of the higher theology was not that the
local god was subordinated to Re, much less superseded by him, but that Re was
identified with the local god, who thus appropriated the universal attributes
and powers of Re.  The incongruity of many of these identifications did not
hinder them when once they were in fashion; the crocodile-god of the Fayum has
as little trouble in becoming a sun-crocodile, Sebek-Re, as the ram of Thebes
in becoming Amon-Re, or the ithyphallic idol of Min in being similarly
promoted.  Practically, therefore, the whole gain of the higher theology
accrued to the lower religion, making it equally acceptable to the few who
were indoctrinated in the priestly wisdom and to the many to whom the god of
their fathers was good enough without any speculative improvements.  In the
end almost every Egyptian god who had a public cult was hyphenated with Re.
Osiris, notwithstanding an inextricable confusion with Re in magical
mystifications from the pyramid texts to the Book of the Dead, is hardly
identified out and out with Re; besides him, Ptah, the old god of Memphis, and
Thoth, the moon-god and vizier of Re, are almost the sole gods who in the end
escape the combination.

     From the Heliopolitan priests came also a theogony which put the god of
their city, Atum, at the beginning of all things, and derived from him,
through two intermediate generations, the gods of the Osirian circle as it
appeared in the Delta.  This Ennead, which had almost as great success as the
doctrine of Re, is thus constructed:


[See Table 1: The Ennead]

     The scheme, which is already found in the pyramid texts, combines
disparate elements.  The first and the last generations are gods in religion
as well as in myth, the two intervening pairs are cosmogonic figures.  Geb and
Nut are earth and sky, divine, doubtless, but having in early times no cult.
Shu and Tefnut may have been local deities somewhere in the Delta (they are
sometimes represented as lion-headed), but in this connection are conceived as
gods of the air or of atmospheric space; Shu supports the sky, whether the
latter is imaged as the celestial cow or in human form.

     The question how the sky is held aloft, or how it was ever raised up from
the earth, is one which much exercised primitive speculation.  In a well-known
Maori myth, heaven and earth, man and woman, lay for ages locked in close
embrace, until the offspring of their union, finding the quarters too close,
after much debate and with mighty effort, thrust their parents apart, and
lifted their father, the sky, into his present place.  In Egypt, by an
accident of grammatical gender, sky (Nut) was feminine and earth (Geb)
masculine.  In the representations of this myth, which are common in the
monuments, Geb is depicted as a prostrate giant, on whose body, to leave no
doubt of the significance of the figure, grass is often growing, while astride
over Geb's form stands Shu, upholding with his two arms the body of Nut (often
decorated with stars), whose inordinately long arms and legs dangle down to
the horizon, giving her some resemblance to the vault of heaven with its four
supporting columns.  The role of Shu in this myth obviously belongs, as in the
New Zealand parallel, to a child of the pair; and from this it is to be
inferred that the myth is independent of the genealogical scheme which now
inconsequently makes Shu the father of Geb and Nut.

     In a late magical papyrus, which notwithstanding its date bears intrinsic
marks of antique conception, the place of Atum in the Heliopolitan scheme is
taken by Nun, the primeval watery chaos out of which in certain other myths Re
emerges, and it is at least a plausible surmise that Atum in the Heliopolitan
Ennead was elevated by his priests to the position originally occupied in the
cosmogony by chaos.  Furthermore, inasmuch as the obvious motive of the
cosmogonic theogony is to provide a proper ancestry for Osiris and his group,
the conjecture is not remote that the system originated, not in Heliopolis,
where there was no particular reason for interest in the Osirian gods, but at
some other centre of the Delta - perhaps Busiris - where the origin of these
gods was a matter of concern to their worshippers.

     In the form which it assumed at Heliopolis the Ennead was adopted and
imitated all over Egypt.  But in this instance also the obstinacy of the local
religions asserted itself; each city in accepting the Nine Gods made a place
for its own god in the group, sometimes replacing one of the minor figures,
often usurping the supreme position of Atum.  Upon the model of the Great
Ennead, a second group of Nine, the Lesser Ennead, was also fashioned by the
priests of Heliopolis.  Only one rival system managed to maintain itself.  At
Hermopolis Magna we find Thoth, the god of the district, in his character of
creator, accompanied by four gods and a corresponding number of goddesses,
sometimes represented as four frog-headed men and four women with serpents'
heads, sometimes as eight baboons dancing around Thoth, the principal baboon.
The goddesses in this scheme are plainly supernumerary, introduced in
imitation of the Heliopolitan Nine: the original scheme at Heliopolis knew but
five, Thoth himself, and the deities of the four corners of the earth, or
rather of the supports of heaven at the four corners of the earth.

     Besides these artificial constructions of theologians and their
imitators, the gods form natural family groups.  In the commonest type, the
chief god of a canton has a wife and a son, who are associated with him in
worship as subordinate figures.  The spouse is often a goddess whose seat was
in another town in the district or in the capital of a neighbouring nome, and
the son is borrowed in a similar way.  Thus, Amon of Thebes makes Montu (who,
as the god of the older capital, Hermonthis, had been the god of the canton
while Amon was still a local nobody), his son, thus emphasising Amon's newly
established superiority; Amon's consort is Mut, a vulture goddess, who was by
that sign identified with Nekhebt, the goddess of the original capital of
Upper Egypt, Eleithyiapolis.  Another name is Amont, a deity created by the
simple device of adding a feminine ending to Amon.  In his character of
sun-god, Amon-Re, however, took the moon god, Khonsu, as his son, and Montu
was thus supplanted.  If the cantonal deity was a goddess, she took a husband
from among the neighbouring gods, but in her own temple kept him in a position
of masculine subordination.  An unnecessary deal of nonsense has been written
about these groups of three gods, on which the question-begging name "Egyptian
Trinities" has been bestowed.  They have not even a mythological significance,
much less a metaphysical.

     The greater independence of the provincial cities was evidently
accompanied by greater prosperity.  Whereas under the Old Kingdom the wealth
of all Egypt was drawn off to the capital, the residence of the court and the
high officials, where even the governors of distant corners of the kingdom
were buried, now the cities in the provinces themselves grew rich from
agriculture and trade.  One of the results of these political and economic
changes was the rise of a well-to-do middle class, who, after the manner of
middle classes in all the world, conformed as far as they could to the customs
and fashions of the nobility.  Accordingly, we now find tombs not only of the
lords and lordlings of the district, but of prosperous tradesmen and artisans;
and since the tombs even of the rich were now much less luxurious than in the
days of the Old Kingdom, even people of moderate means could provide
themselves with respectable burial-places.  The rulers of the nomes, indeed,
perpetuated the old style of tombs with numerous chambers, on the walls of
which the possessions of the deceased were represented; but the common form
was a small brick pyramid, before which, in the place of the old false door,
is a stela inscribed with the name of the occupant, and often bearing a relief
showing him surrounded by his family at the funeral feast.

     In the burial-chamber are usually models of houses and granaries, and
clay figures of servants kneading bricks, carrying sacks of grain, grinding
meal, baking bread, brewing beer, and preparing dinner; also models of boats
and their crews.  Similar figures and scenes painted on the wooden coffin may
take the place of the pottery figurines.  All this makes it evident that the
old beliefs about the continued existence of the dead in the tomb and their
needs persisted.  As a substitute for an offering of real bread and beer,
haunches of beef, and roast geese, stone imitations of these viands cut in low
relief on the surface of the table of offerings are common.  By a form of
words they were supposed to be transubstantiated into digestible food, or
provisions corresponding to those thus represented were conveyed by Anubis or
Osiris to the deceased.  By this device the danger that through the neglect of
his descendants or the dying out of the family the dead man might be left
without sustenance was averted.  It was only necessary that the passer-by
should recite the formula to procure for the dead man "a thousand loaves, a
thousand jars of beer, a thousand roast geese," and to this pious service the
inscription summons all who read it "as they love life and hate death."

     The assistance of the gods is hardly necessary to enable the occupant of
the tomb to eat what is set before him on his own table; their offices are
required to make the offerings at the tomb of use to the dead in the
underworld.  Thus the old customs were made to fit into another circle of
ideas and serve a second purpose.  The instance is characteristic of the
propensity of the Egyptians to put new patches on the old garment, oblivious
of the ensuing rents.

     The beliefs about the abodes and destinies of souls became more confused
also through the appropriation by ordinary mortals of hopes and prospects
which were originally confined to the king.  In the texts which were now
written on the inside of coffins, passages borrowed from the inscriptions in
the pyramids appear side by side with new pieces of similar intent but of more
general application, the beginnings of the heterogeneous aggregation to which
the name Book of the Dead is given.  Among these are many for the protection
of the dead on his perilous way to the other world, on which he is beset by
many fearful and monstrous enemies against whom he can defend himself only by
the use of magical formulas or rites.  One of the most effective means is to
identify himself with some god, especially one of the great gods of light, who
has safely passed through the same perils.  The god of the city also is
frequently invoked to protect his faithful worshipper.

     At the same time moral conditions of future blessedness become more
prominent.  Many inscriptions, particularly on the tombs of the nobles or
officials, proclaim their uprightness, justice, humanity, and goodness toward
those under their authority or dependent upon them.  The conception of a
formal judgment of the dead is completely developed.  In the old myth of
Osiris his implacable enemy Set, pursuing him even beyond the tomb, brings
grave charges against him, of which the god Thoth vindicates him. ^1 After
this example every man now desires to be justified as Osiris was, and to hear
the favourable sentence which declares him "true of speech." In the Book of
the Dead ^1 the judgment scene is not only described in words, but is often
portrayed in an accompanying picture.  The trial takes place before Osiris,
the king of the dead.  The deceased is led by Anubis into a great hall, around
the sides of which are seated the forty-two associate justices of this great
court. ^2 In the presence of this august court the man protests his innocence
of sins against gods and men.  To determine whether his protestation of
innocence is true or not, his heart, witness of all his words and deeds, is
weighed by Anubis in a balance against an ostrich-feather, the symbol of Maat,
the goddess of right and truth, while Thoth, with tablet and stylus, as clerk
of the court, records the issue. Thereupon Horus conducts the justified man
into the inner shrine, where Osiris, with sceptre and scourge in his hands, is
seated upon his throne. What would happen if the trial resulted unfavourably
is impressively suggested by a monster with the body of a hippopotamus and the
head and jaws of a crocodile which squats beside the scales with open mouth.
The name of this monster is "Devouress." She "lives on the entrails of the
great on the day of the great reckoning."

[Footnote 1: Originally Thoth seems to have appeared as the advocate of Osiris
before the tribunal of the gods of Heliopolis, or before Re.]

[Footnote 1: Chapter 125 of the Theban recension.]

[Footnote 2: The number forty-two corresponded to the number of the nomes in
the age when these texts were given their present form.]

     The protestation of innocence, in one form, runs thus:

     Hail to thee, great god, lord of truth.  I have come to thee, my lord,
and am led hither to see thy beauty.  I know thy name; I know the names of the
forty-two gods who are with thee in the hall of truth, who live on evil-doers
and devour their blood on the day of reckoning of character before Wennofre
(Osiris).  Behold, I come to thee; I bring to thee righteousness and I expel
for thee sin.  I have committed no sin against people. . . .  I have not done
evil in the place of truth.  I knew no wrong.  I did no evil thing. . . .  I
did not do what the god abominates. I did not report evil of a servant to his
master.  I allowed no one to hunger.  I caused no one to weep.  I did no
murder.  I did not command to murder.  I caused no man misery.  I did not
diminish the food in the temples.  I did not decrease the offerings of the
gods.  I did not take away the food-offerings of the dead.  I did not commit
adultery.  I did not pollute myself in the pure precinct of my city god.  I
did not diminish the grain measure.  I did not diminish the span.  I did not
diminish the land measure.  I did not load the weight of the balances.  I did
not deflect the index of the scales.  I did not take milk from the mouth of
the child.  I did not drive the cattle away from their pasturage.  I did not
snare the fowl of the gods.  I did not catch the fish in their pools.  I did
not hold back the water in its time.  I did not dam up the running water.  I
did not quench the fire in its time.  I did not withhold the herds of the
temple endowments.  I did not interfere with the god in his payments.  I am
purified four times; I am as pure as the great Phoenix is pure which is in
Heracleopolis. . . .

     There arises no evil thing against me in this land, in the hall of truth,
because I know the names of these gods who are therein, the followers of the
great god. ^1

[Footnote 1: Translation by Breasted, Religion in Ancient Egypt, pp. 299 f.]

     In another version of the protestation, which is found as a doublet in
the completer recensions of the Book of the Dead, the sins are with some
difficulty made to count forty-two, and the names of the forty-two assessors
which the dead man professes to know are enumerated.  Among them are such
terrifying compounds as "Bone-Breaker from Heracleopolis," "Fiery-Eyes from
Letopolis," "White-Teeth from the Hidden Land," "Devourer of Bowels,"
"Blood-Eater." It is no less necessary to be able to recite these names
correctly than to be free from sin; and lest the unfortunate should forget
them, or be unable to connect them with their several owners, the likenesses
of the infernal judges are commonly depicted in the copies of the Book of the
Dead which were laid in the coffin, distinctly labelled with their names.

     These professions of rectitude exemplify the moral side of Egyptian
religion.  As is natural, in view of the religious character of the judgment,
offences against the gods, especially trespass upon their rights of property,
and wrongs done to men, are not discriminated.  Among the latter are murder,
theft, oppression, adultery, lying, fraud, false witness, slander, abusive
speech, and tale-bearing.  Like the second table of the Mosaic Decalogue,
these are elementary things, against which even savage society reacts in
self-defence, and by no means indicate a particularly advanced morality.  Nor
is it a mark of signal progress that the customary morals of the community are
put under the sanction of religion - that also is common among peoples on a
much lower level of civilisation.  What is noteworthy is the extension of the
divine sanction of morals over the future life; for this is by no means so
inevitable as it might appear to us.  Nothing of the kind seems to have taken
place in the religion of Babylonia and Assyria, nor in that of China; and in
Israel, notwithstanding the strongly ethical character of the religion and the
large development of the idea of divine retribution, the belief that men's lot
after death is determined by their conduct in this life came very late and not
without foreign stimulus.

     While the conceptions of what awaits man after death thus took more
definite shape in the Osirian doctrine - and perhaps in natural reaction from
them - sceptical voices begin to be heard. ^1 From that world about which
priests profess to know so much no traveller has returned; the famous kings
and sages of olden time are dead and gone, only their names remain; we are
following them to the grave; let us make the most of our brief span on earth,
denying ourselves no pleasure it affords.  Such is the refrain of the Song of
the Harper at the Feast, one of the best-known poems of the Middle Kingdom.
What gives it more significance is the fact that it is not the utterance of a
solitary pessimist, but of a court poet, enlivening the guests at the banquet
with the Egyptian version of "let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die."

[Footnote 1: So, in the Old Testament, much confident talk about the accuracy
of divine retribution and the new doctrine of immortality provoked the author
of Ecclesiastes to give voice to his disbelief.]

     Several interesting writings from the time of the Middle Kingdom exhibit
the moral principles of members of the ruling class or throw light on the
moral conditions of the age.  The Wisdom of Ptahhotep is in the form of
instructions delivered by an aged vizier to his son and designated successor.
The instructions are chiefly counsels for the deportment of a minister in
official and private relations.  He should be upright, just, true, discreet,
moderate, knowing how to assert his own dignity without arrogance; warning is
given against avarice and the pride of possessions; vices are to be shunned,
but the wise man will not deny himself the enjoyment of life nor make it
bitter with vain regrets.  If the son will follow this wholesome advice and
the example of his father, it will go well with him.  In an Instruction for a
Minister, purporting to be delivered by a king to a vizier at his
installation, the vizier is enjoined to deal justly and impartially with all,
not favouring his own kin nor showing respect of persons to princes and
counsellors.  A story with an evident moral, called The Peasants' Appeal,
tells how a poor man who had been unjustly treated by underlings, and even by
the high steward, gets redress from the Pharaoh himself.

     Other texts are filled with loud complaints of the degeneracy of the age
- "righteousness is cast out, iniquity is in the midst of the council hall";
society is thoroughly corrupt.  A very interesting papyrus, The Prophecies of
an Egyptian Sage, paints in even darker colours the universal demoralisation
and disorders of the age, aggravated as they were by foreign invasion.  The
only imaginable remedy for these ills is a wise and good king, and the author
depicts such an ideal ruler, "the shepherd of all the people, who has no evil
in his heart," in a strain in which a resemblance has been seen to the
Messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, though the Egyptian parallel has no
distinctly predictive element.