The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

190 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

of Pta%and Ra to whom the worship was really addressed, it was
an explanation about which the people neither knew nor cared.
The divine honours they paid to the bulls and ram were paid to
the animals themselves, and not to the gods of the priestly cult.
Here and there a few evidences have been preserved to us
that such was the fact. In the tomb of Ra-zeser-ka-seneb, for
instance, at Thebes, the artist has introduced a picture of a
peasant making his morning prayer to a sycamore which stands
at the end of a corn-field, while offerings of fruit and bread and
water are placed on the ground beside it.^163 The official religion
endeavoured to legalise this old tree worship much in the same
way as Christianity endeavoured to legalise the old worship of
springs, by attaching the tree to the service of a god, and seeing
in it one of the forms in which the deity manifested himself. Thus
“the sycamore of the south”became the body of Hathor, whose
[207] head was depicted appearing from its branches, while opposite
Siût it was Hor-pes who took the goddess's place.^164 Like other
beliefs and practices which go back to the neolithic population of
Egypt, the ancient tree worship is not yet extinct. On either side
of the Nile sacred trees are to be found, under which the offering
of bread and water is still set, though the god of the official cult of
Pharaonic Egypt, to whom the worship was nominally paid, has
been succeeded by a Mohammedan saint. By the side of the tree
often rises the white dome of the tomb of a“shêkh,”to whom the
place is dedicated, reminding us of a picture copied by Wilkinson
in a sepulchre at Hû, in which a small chapel, representing the
tomb of Osiris, stands by the side of a tree on whose branches
is perched thebennuor phœnix.^165 The most famous of these

(^163) Scheil,“Tombeaux thébains”inMémoires de la Mission archéologique
française du Caire, v. 4, pl. 4.
(^164) So in the Pyramid texts (Unas170) reference is made to“thebaqt,”or
“ben-nut tree which is in On.”The tree is theMoringa aptera Gærtner, from
the fruit of which the myrobalanum oil was extracted (Joret,Les Plantes dans
l'Antiquité et au Moyen Age, i. pp. 133, 134).
(^165) Ancient Egyptians, iii. p. 349. Thebennuis described as“the soul of