Lecture V. Animal Worship. 103
it was needful that he should be black. Nor was the worship
of the bull confined to the north. At Erment also, near Thebes,
Mentu, the god of the nome, was incarnated in the bull Bakis.^74
The sanctity of the bull is not difficult to understand among an
agricultural people in an early stage of development. In India the
bull is still sacred; and Sir Samuel Baker tells us that the tribes
of the Upper Nile still abstain from eating the flesh of the ox. In
Phrygia the slaughter of an ox was punishable with death;^75 the
first king of the country was supposed to have been a peasant,
and his ox-drawn cart was preserved in the temple of Kybelê.
Among the Egyptians themselves, as we have seen, the Pharaoh
was symbolised under the form of a bull at the very beginning of
history.
The bull, then, must have been worshipped in the
neighbourhood of Memphis and Heliopolis before it became
the incarnation of Pta%or Ra. It follows, moreover, that as yet
it was no one particular bull to whom divine honours were paid;
there was no one particular bull into whom the soul of one of
the gods of the Pharaonic Egyptians had as yet entered, thus [112]
setting it apart from all others. The bull was still a fetish pure
and simple; it was the whole species that was sacred, and not a
single member of it.
That this was indeed the case, is proved by a custom which
lasted down to the latest times. Not only was the sacred bull
or the sacred hawk mummified after death, but other bulls and
hawks also. There were cemeteries of mummified animals, just
as there were cemeteries of mummified men. Vast cemeteries
(^74) Late inscriptions call Bakh or Bakis“the living soul of Ra,”but this was
when Mentu and Ra had been identified together. Stelæ of the Roman period,
however, from Erment represent the sacred bull without any solar emblem,
while by the side of it stands a hawk-headed crocodile crowned with the orb of
the sun. It is possible that the latter may be connected with the hawk-headed
crocodile, with the orb of the sun on its head and an uræus serpent at the end
of its tail, which in Greekgraffitiat Philæ is called Ptiris.
(^75) Nicolaus Damascen.,Fr.128, ed. Müller.