The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

124 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

treated; even to-day the ape in the zoological gardens of Giza is
called by the lower classes at Cairo“the savage man.”Travellers
have described the dancing and screaming of troops of apes at
daybreak when the sun first lights up the earth, and it was natural
for primitive man to suppose that the dancing was in honour of
the return of the god of day. Dances in honour of the gods have
[134] been common all over the world; indeed, among barbarous and
savage peoples the dance is essentially of a religious character.
Even David danced before the ark, and boys still dance before the
high altar in the cathedral of Seville. That dances are represented
on the prehistoric pottery of Egypt, has been pointed out by M.
de Morgan;^98 and since the Danga dwarf came from the half-
mythical country in the south which was known to the Egyptians
as“the land of the gods,”and where, too, the apes of Thoth had
their home, it was reasonable to believe that he knew the dance
that would be pleasing to the gods.^99
I believe, therefore, that the apes of Thoth were at the outset
the dwarf-like apes or ape-like dwarfs who danced in his honour
in the temple of Hermopolis. Gradually they were taken hold
of by that symbolism which was inseparable from a religion so
intimately bound up with a pictorial system of writing; from
dancers they became the followers of the god, who sang to the
rising and setting sun the hymns which Thoth had composed.
But this would have been when the worship of the sun-god of
Heliopolis had already spread to Hermopolis, and the cult of
Thoth was mingling with that of Ra. The mutual influence of the
theories of creation taught by the priests of the two cities shows
at what a comparatively early date this would have happened.
It is possible that there was actually a connection between
the four baboons and the four elemental gods of Hermopolitan
theology. But it was not in the way of development. It was rather
that as the gods were four in number, the dancers in their temple

(^98) Recherches sur les Origines de l'Égypte, p. 65.
(^99) Maspero,Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie, p. 429 sqq.