Lecture II. Egyptian Religion. 23
a combination of ill-assorted survivals rather than a system, a
confederation of separate cults rather than a definite theology.
Like the State, whatever unity it possessed was given to it by
the Pharaoh, who was not only a son and representative of the
sun-god, but the visible manifestation of the sun-god himself.
Its unity was thus a purely personal one: without the Pharaoh
the Egyptian State and Egyptian religion would alike have been
dissolved into their original atoms.
The Pharaonic Egyptians—the Egyptians, that is to say, who
embanked the Nile, who transformed the marsh and the desert into
cultivated fields, who built the temples and tombs, and left behind
them the monuments we associate with Egyptian culture—seem
to have come from Asia; and it is probable that their first home
was in Babylonia. The race (or races) they found in the valley
of the Nile were already possessed of a certain measure of
civilisation. They were in an advanced stage of neolithic culture;
their flint tools are among the finest that have ever been made;
and they were skilled in the manufacture of vases of the hardest
stone. But they were pastoral rather than agricultural, and they
lived in the desert rather than on the river-bank. They proved
no match for the newcomers, with their weapons of copper; [023]
and, little by little, the invading race succeeded in making itself
master of the valley of the Nile, though tradition remembered
the fierce battles which were needed before the“smiths”who
followed Horus could subjugate the older population in their
progress from south to north.
How far the invaders themselves formed a single race is still
uncertain. Some scholars believe that, besides the Asiatics who
entered Egypt from the south, crossing the Red Sea and so
marching through the eastern desert to the Nile, there were other
Asiatics who came overland from Mesopotamia, and made their
way into the Delta across the isthmus of Suez. Of this overland
invasion, however, I can myself see no evidence; so far as our
materials at present allow us to go, the Egyptians of history were