The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

120 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

We have already dealt with an important class of gods, those
which had a solar origin. There were other gods of an elemental
character, whose worship does not seem to have been originally
confined to one particular locality. Such were Seb, the earth, Nut,
the sky, and Nu, the primeval deep. But they played only a small
part in the religion of the country. Seb was known in later days
chiefly as the father of Osiris; at an earlier epoch he had been
therpâ, or“hereditary prince, of the gods,”a title which takes
us back to the feudal period of Egypt, when as yet there was no
Pharaoh who ruled over the whole of the land. The animal sacred
to him was the goose, perhaps on account of some similarity in
its name; but he was never identified with it, and continued to
the last to be depicted in human form. His symbol, however,
gave rise to a cosmological myth. The goose became the mother
of the egg out of which the universe was born.
Nut was the wife of Seb, wedded to him as the sky is wedded
to the earth. It seems reasonable to see in her the feminine form
of Nu, the primeval chaos of waters; and so the Egyptians of
[130] the historical period believed, since they identified her with the
wife of the Nile, and represented her as sitting in the sycamore
and pouring the water of life on the hands of a soul at the foot
of the tree. It has been suggested, however, that Nu was of later
origin than Nut, who became a Nile goddess with the head of a
snake only when Nu himself had been changed into the Nile.^92
But the idea of a watery chaos is not one which would have
grown up on Egyptian soil. There it was rather the desert which
represented the unformed beginning of things; the Nile spread
itself over the already existing land at regular intervals, and was
no dreary waste of waters, out of which the earth emerged for the
first time. The geographical home of the idea was in Babylonia,
on the shores of the ever-retreating Persian Gulf. And from
Babylonia we find that the belief in a primeval deep spread itself

(^92) See above, p. 83.