Lecture I. Introduction. 13
Godhead, and use the language of the purest monotheism. But
such monuments represent the beliefs and ideas of the cultured
few rather than of the Egyptians as a whole, or even of the
majority of the educated classes. They set before us the highest
point to which the individual Egyptian could attain in his spiritual
conceptions—not the religion of the day as it was generally
believed and practised. To regard them as representing the
popular faith of Egypt, would be as misleading as to suppose that
Socrates or Plato were faithful exponents of Athenian religion.
That this view of the literary monuments of ancient Egypt is
correct, can be shown from two concrete instances. On the one
side, there is the curious attempt made by Amon-hotepIV., of
the Eighteenth Dynasty, to revolutionise Egyptian religion, and
to replace the old religion of the State by a sort of monotheistic
pantheism. The hymns addressed to the solar disk—the visible
symbol of the new God—breathe an exalted spirituality, and
remind us of passages in the Hebrew Scriptures.“O God,”we
read in one of them.“O God, who in truth art the living one, who
standest before our eyes; thou created that which was not, thou
formest it all”;“We also have come into being through the word
of thy mouth.” [012]
But all such language was inspired by a cult which was not
Egyptian, and which the Egyptians themselves regarded as an
insult to their national deity, and a declaration of war against
the priesthood of Thebes. Hardly was its royal patron consigned
to his tomb when the national hatred burst forth against those
who still adhered to the new faith; the temple and city of the
solar disk were levelled with the ground, and the body of the
heretic Pharaoh himself was torn in pieces. Had the religious
productions of the court of Amon-hotepIV. alone survived to us,
we should have formed out of them a wholly false picture of the
religion of ancient Egypt, and ascribed to it doctrines which were
held only by a few individuals at only one short period of its
history,—doctrines, moreover, which were detested and bitterly