The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

126 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

of the Old Testament. The foreign nature of Ânuqet has long
been recognised, for she wears on her head the non-Egyptian
head-dress of a cap fringed with feathers. It is the same head-
dress as that worn by the god Bes, whom the Egyptians derived
from the land of Punt on the shores of the Red Sea. A similar
cap is worn by the Zakkal on the coast of Palestine, in the
near neighbourhood of“the sons of Ânaq,”as well as by the
Babylonian king Merodach-nadin-akhi, on a monument now
in the British Museum.^100 1100). The stone was found at
Abu-Habba, and is now in the British Museum (WAI.v. 57).
Everything, therefore, points to its having been an Asiatic char-
acteristic; perhaps it was made of the ostrich feathers which
are still collected in Arabia and even on the eastern side of the
Jordan.
The Greeks identified Ânuqet with Hestia, and Sati with Hêra.
This was probably because Sati was the wife of Khnum (or
Kneph), the god of the Cataract. As such Sati was also known as
Heket,“the frog,”which was supposed to be born from the mud
left by the inundation of the Nile. It thus became a symbol of
the resurrection, and was consequently adopted by the Christians
of Egypt. Hence the frequency with which it is represented on
lamps of the late Roman period.
Khnum, like the god of Thebes, was a ram, and is accordingly
usually depicted with a ram's head. But he could not originally
have been so. Once more the old fetish of the district, the sacred
animal of the nome, must have been fused with the god whom
the Pharaonic invaders brought with them. For Khnum was a
potter, as his name signifies, and at Philæ it is said of him that he
[137] was“the moulder (khnum) of men, the modeller of the gods.”^101

(^100) The same cap is worn by the god who sits behind a scorpion-man on a stone
containing a grant of land by the Babylonian king NebuchadrezzarI.{FNS
(B.C.{FNS
(^101) Maspero (Dawn of Civilisation, p. 157) reproduces a picture in the temple
of Luxor representing Khnum moulding Amon-hotepIII.{FNSand hisKaon a