Lecture VI. The Gods Of Egypt. 123
Ashmunên), and who were often addressed as“the god eight,”
like“the god seven”in Babylonia. Professor Maspero sees in
them a philosophical development of the four cynocephalous
apes who accompanied Thoth and saluted the first streak of
dawn. But the development is difficult to follow, and the apes
who are the companions of the god probably had another origin.
They certainly must have come from the Sudân; no apes were
indigenous in Egypt in historical times. Moreover, it was only the
Thoth of Hermopolis in Upper Egypt in whose train they were
found; the Thoth of Hermopolis Parva in the Delta, properly [133]
speaking, knew them not. But from an early epoch“the five
gods”—Thoth and his four ape-followers, whose likeness he
sometimes adopted—had been worshipped at Eshmunên. Its
temple was called“the Abode of the Five,”and its high priest
“the great one of the House of the Five.”^97
How the half-human apes of Central Africa came to be
associated with Thoth we do not know. Between the baboons
who sing hymns to the rising and setting sun and the moon, or
the culture-god, there is little or no connection. But a curious
biography found in a tomb at Assuan throws light upon it.
Herkhuf, the subject of the biography, was sent by Hor-em-saf
of the Sixth Dynasty on an exploring expedition into the Libyan
desert south of the First Cataract, and he brought back with him
a Danga dwarf“who danced the dances of the god,”like another
Danga dwarf brought from Punt in the neighbourhood of Suâkim
or Massawa in the time of the Fifth Dynasty. The dwarf was
evidently regarded by Herkhuf as a species of baboon, if we may
judge from the account he gives of the way in which he was
(^97) See Maspero,Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie, ii. pp. 257 sqq. and
375 sqq. In an inscription discovered by Professor Petrie in the tombs of the
first two dynasties at Abydos, Thoth is represented as a seated ape (The Royal
Tombs of Abydos, pt. i. pl. xvii. 26). On the other hand, on the broken Abydos
slate figured in de Morgan,Recherches sur les Origines de l'Égypte, pl. ii.,
which is probably prehistoric, Thoth appears as an ibis.