230 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia
But Amon-hotepIII. was not the first of whom it had been said
that his father was a god. Fragments of a similar text have been
found by Dr. Naville at Dêr el-Bâharî, from which we may gather
that queen Hatshepsu also claimed to have been born of Amon.
How much further back in Egyptian history the belief may go we
do not know: the kings of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties called
themselves sons of the sun-god, and the Theban monarchs whose
virgin-mothers were wedded to Amon, incarnate in the flesh, did
but work out the old conception in a more detailed and definite
way.
It was given to the Egyptians to be one among the few inventive
races of mankind. They were pioneers of civilisation; above all,
they were the inventors of religious ideas. The ideas, it is true,
were not self-evolved; they presupposed beliefs which had been
bequeathed by the past; but their logical development and the
forms which they assumed were the work of the Egyptian people.
We owe to them the chief moulds into which religious thought
has since been thrown. The doctrines of emanation, of a trinity
wherein one god manifests himself in three persons, of absolute
thought as the underlying and permanent substance of all things,
lxxi., where, however, the copy of the inscriptions is very incorrect. My
translation is made from a copy of my own. The whole inscription is as
follows:“Said by Amon-Ra, etc.: He (the god) has incarnated himself in the
royal person of this husband, ThothmesIV.{FNS, etc.; he found her lying in her
beauty; he stood beside her as a god. She has fed upon sweet odours emanating
from his majesty. He has gone to her that he may be a father through her. He
caused her to behold him in his divine form when he had gone upon her that
she might bear a child at the sight of his beauty. His lovableness penetrated her
flesh, filling it with the odour of all his perfumes of Punt.
“Said by Mut-em-ua before the majesty of this august god Amon, etc., the
twofold divinity: How great is thy twofold will, how [glorious thy] designs in
making thy heart repose upon me! Thy dew is upon all my flesh in ... This
royal god has done all that is pleasing to him with her.
“Said by Amon before her majesty: Amon-hotep is the name of the son
which is in thy womb. This child shall grow up according to the words which
proceed out of thy mouth. He shall exercise sovereignty and righteousness in