The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

192 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

shrine, while underneath it is a Greek inscription declaring that
the“Kretan”who had dedicated the monument could interpret
dreams, thanks to the commandment of“the god.”The god, it
will be noticed, is not Apis, but an ordinary ox.
But of all the animals who thus continued to be the real gods
of the people in spite of priestly teaching and State endowments,
none were so numerous or were so universally feared and
venerated as the snakes. The serpent was adored where Amon was
but a name, and where Ra was looked upon as belonging, like fine
horses and clothes, to the rich and the mighty. The prominence
[209] of the serpent in Egyptian mythology and symbolism indicates
how plentiful and dangerous it must have been in the early days
of Egypt, and what a lasting impression it made upon the native
mind. When the banks of the Nile were an uninhabitable morass,
and the neolithic tribes built their huts in the desert, the snake
must indeed have been a formidable danger. The most deadly
still frequent the desert; it is only in the cultivated land that they
are comparatively rare. In Egypt, as elsewhere, the cultivation
of the soil and the habits of civilised life have diminished their
number, and driven them into the solitudes of the wilderness. But
when the Pharaonic Egyptians first arrived in the valley of the
Nile, when the swamps were being drained, the jungle cleared
away, and the land sown with the wheat of Babylonia, the serpent
was still one of the perils of daily life. A folk-tale which has been
appropriated and spoilt by the priestly compilers of the legend of
Ra, tells how the sun-god was bitten by a venomous snake which
lay in his path, and how the poison ran through his veins like
fire. The symbol of royalty adopted by the earliest Pharaohs was
the cobra; it symbolised the irresistible might and deadly power
of the conquering chieftain which, like the dreaded cobra of the
desert, overcame the inhabitants of the country, and compelled
them to regard him with the same awe and terror as the serpent
itself.
Down to the last the embalmers and gravediggers and others