The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

130 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

interpreted the liturgy of the dead and the magic formulæ which
restored health to the sick and raised the dead to life. The Greeks
consequently identified him with Asklêpios.^110 Both Im-hotep
and Nofer-Tum were the sons of Sekhet, the lion-headed goddess
of Letopolis, from whence she must have been borrowed by the
Memphite priests when the ancient potter god had become a
generator, and a wife was needed for him.
With the decline of the Memphite dynasties and the fall of the
Old Empire, the commanding part played by Pta%in the Egyptian
pantheon was at an end. The god of the imperial city had been
identified with the gods of the provincial nomes; his temple
at Memphis had taken precedence of all others, and the local
priesthoods were content that their deities should have found a
shelter in it as forms of Pta%. He was even identified with$âpi,
the Nile, though perhaps the similarity in sound between the
sacred name of the river and that of the bull Apis ($api) may
[141] have assisted in the identification.^111

That the Nile should have been worshipped throughout the

land of Egypt is natural. The very land itself was his gift,

the crops that grew upon it and the population it supported all

depended upon his bounty. When the Nile failed, the people

starved; when the Nile was full, Egypt was a land of contentment

and plenty. It is only wonderful that the cult of the Nile should

not have been more prominent than it was. The temples built

in its honour were neither numerous nor important, nor were

its priests endowed as the priests of other gods. But the cause

of this is explained by history. The neolithic population of the

country lived in the desert; the Nile was for them little more

than the creator of pestilential swamps and dangerous jungles,

where wild beasts and venomous serpents lurked for the intruder.

(^110) Nofer-Tum and Im-hotep had human forms like their father. The first is a
man with a lotus flower on the head, the second a youth with a papyrus roll on
the knee.
(^111) There was a difference only in the vowel of the first syllable.