Lecture IX. The Popular Religion Of Egypt. 191
trees, however, that of Matarîya, is an object of veneration to
the Christian rather than to the Mohammedan. The Holy Family,
it is said, once rested under its branches during their flight into
Egypt; in reality it represents a sycamore in which the soul of Ra
of Heliopolis must have been believed to dwell.
Professor Maspero has drawn attention to certain stelæ in the
museum of Turin, which show how, even in the lower middle
class, it was the animal itself and not the official god incarnated in
it that was the object of worship. On one of them, which belongs
to the age of the Eighteenth Dynasty, huge figures of a swallow
and a cat are painted, with a table of offerings standing before
them, as well as two kneeling scribes, while the accompanying
inscriptions tell us that it was to“the good”swallow and the [208]
“good”cat, and not to any of the State gods who may have
hidden themselves under these animal forms, that flowers were
being offered and prayers made. On another stela we find two
pet cats, who are sitting on a shrine and facing one another,
and whom their mistresses—two of the women who wailed at
funerals—adore in precisely the same language as that which
was used of Osiris or Amon.^166 In the quarries north of Qurna is
a similar representation of a cow and a cobra, which stand face to
face with a table of offerings between them, while a worshipper
kneels at the side, and a half-obliterated inscription contains the
usual formulæ of adoration.^167 Still more curious is a stela, now
in the museum of Cairo, on which an ox is represented inside a
Osiris.”
(^166) Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie, ii. p. 395 sqq.
(^167) The influence of the State religion is visible in the picture, as the cow
has the solar disc between its horns, and the cobra is crowned not only with
horns, but also with the solar disc. Behind the cobra is the leafy branch of a
tree. There is no reason for supposing with Wiedemann (Muséon, 1884) that
the monument is Ethiopian: what is decipherable in the inscription is purely
Egyptian. Professor Wiedemann calls the animal on the left a ram, but my
drawing made it a cow. At the feet of the cow, which has a garland round the
neck, are two vases.