28 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonialatest of things jostled one another, and it was often difficult to
say which of the two looked the older. The past was preserved
in a way that it could not be elsewhere; nothing perished except
by the hand of man. And man, brought up in such an atmosphere
of continuity, became intensely conservative. Nature itself only
increased the tendency. The Nile rose and fell with monotonous
regularity; year after year the seasons succeeded each other
without change; and the agriculturist was not dependent on the
variable alternations of rain and sunshine, or even of extreme
heat and cold. In Egypt, accordingly, the new grew up and was
adopted without displacing the old. It was a land to which the
rule did not apply that“the old order changeth, giving place
to new.”The old order might, indeed, change, through foreign
invasion or the inventions of human genius, but all the same it
did not give place to the new. The new simply took a place by
the side of the old.
The Egyptian system of writing is a striking illustration of
the fact. All the various stages through which writing must
pass, in its development out of pictures into alphabetic letters,
exist in it side by side. The hieroglyphs can be used at once
ideographically, syllabically, and alphabetically. And what is
true of Egyptian writing is true also of Egyptian religion. The
various elements out of which it arose are all still traceable in
it; none of them has been discarded, however little it might
harmonise with the elements with which it has been combined.
Religious ideas which belong to the lowest and to the highest
forms of the religious consciousness, to races of different origin
and different age, exist in it side by side.
It is true that even in organised religions we find similar
[029] combinations of heterogeneous elements. Survivals from a
distant past are linked in them with the conceptions of a later
age, and beliefs of divergent origin have been incorporated by
them into the same creed. But it is a definite and coherent creed
into which they have been embodied; the attempt has been made