Lecture VI. The Gods Of Egypt. 127
Hence he is called“the creator of all this, the fashioner of that
which exists, the father of fathers, the mother of mothers,” “the
creator of the heaven and the earth, the lower world, the water
and the mountains,” “who has formed the male and female of
fowl and fish, wild beasts, cattle, and creeping things.”
In Babylonia, Ea, the culture-god and creator, was also termed
the“potter,”and it was thus that he moulded the gods as well
as men.^102 At the same time, like Khnum, he was a god of the
waters. While the Cataract of the Nile was the home of Khnum,
the Persian Gulf was the dwelling-place of Ea. The connection
between the water and the modeller in clay is obvious. It is
only where the water inundates the soil and leaves the moist clay
behind it that the art of the potter can flourish.^103
But was there also a connection between the Babylonian god
who was worshipped in the ancient seaport of Chaldæa and the
god of the Egyptian Cataract? We have seen that the wife of
Khnum was entitled“the Asiatic,”the very form of the name
being Babylonian. We have further seen that her companion
Ânuqet was also from Asia, and that her traditional head-dress [138]
preserved a memory of the fact. There is a road from the Red
Sea to Assuan as well as to El-Kab; it may be that it goes back to
those prehistoric times when the Pharaonic Egyptians made their
way across the desert into the valley of the Nile, as their Semitic
potter's table.
(^102) See Scheil,Recueil de Travaux, xx. p. 124 sqq.
(^103) Thekhnumor“pot”is often used to express the name of Khnum in the
hieroglyphics. It reminds us of the vase on early Babylonian seal-cylinders
from the two sides of which flow the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, and which
is often held in the hands of the water-god Ea. The design is reproduced
with modifications on early Syrian cylinders, and the name of the zodiacal
sign Aquarius shows to what an antiquity it must reach back. The primitive
Egyptians believed that the Nile issued from a grotto to which theqertior
“two gulfs”of the Cataract gave access (Maspero,Dawn of Civilisation, pp.
19, 38, 39), and Khnum was the god of the Cataract. Perhaps the classical
representation of the Tiber and other rivers holding urns from which a stream
of water flows is derived from Egypt.