The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

14 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

resented by the orthodox adherents of the old creeds.
My other example is taken from a class of literature which
exists wherever there is a cultured society and an ancient
civilisation. It is the literature of scepticism, of those minds
who cannot accept the popular notions of divinity, who are
critically contemptuous of time-honoured traditions, and who
find it impossible to reconcile the teaching of the popular cult
with the daily experiences of life. It is not so much that they
deny or oppose the doctrines of the official creed, as that they
ignore them. Their scepticism is that of Epicurus rather than of
the French encyclopædists. Let the multitude believe in its gods
and its priests, so long as they themselves are not forced to do
the same.
Egypt had its literary sceptics like Greece or Rome. Listen,
for instance, to the so-called Song of the Harper, written as long
ago as the age of the Eleventh Dynasty, somewhere about 2500
B.C. This is how a part of it runs in Canon Rawnsley's metrical
[013] translation, which faithfully preserves the spirit and sense of the
original—^1

“What is fortune? say the wise.

Vanished are the hearths and homes;

What he does or thinks, who dies,

None to tell us comes

Eat and drink in peace to-day,

When you go your goods remain;

He who fares the last long way,

Comes not back again.”

(^1) Notes for the Nile, pp. 188, 189.