The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

32 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

himself overmuch with abstract thought. The concrete symbols
were ever before his eyes, and it was their mental pictures which
took the place for him of abstract ideas.
It must, of course, be remembered that the foregoing
generalisations apply to the Egyptian people as a whole. There
were individual exceptions; there was even a class the lives
of whose members were not devoted to agricultural or other
labour, and whose religious conceptions were often spiritual and
sublime. This was the class of priests, whose power and influence
increased with the lapse of time, and who eventually moulded
the official theology of Egypt. Priestly colleges arose in the great
sanctuaries of the country, and gradually absorbed a considerable
[033] part of its land and revenues. At first the priests do not seem to
have been a numerous body, and up to the last the higher members
of the hierarchy were comparatively few. But in their hands the
religious beliefs of the people underwent modification, and even
a rudimentary systematisation; the different independent cults of
the kingdom were organised and combined together, and with
this organisation came philosophic speculation and theorising.
If Professor Maspero is right, the two chief schools of religious
thought and systematising in early Egypt were at Heliopolis, near
the apex of the Delta, and Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên,
in Central Egypt. In Hermopolis the conception of creation, not
by voice merely, but even by the mere sound of the voice, was
first formed and worked out while Heliopolis was the source of
that arrangement of the deities into groups of nine which led to
the identification of the gods one with another, and so prepared
the way for monotheism.^7 If Heliopolis were indeed, as seems
probable, the first home of this religious theory, its influence
upon the rest of Egypt was profound. Already in the early part of
the historical period, in the age of the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties,
when the religious texts of the Pyramids were compiled, the

(^7) See Maspero,Études de Mythologie et d'Archéologie égyptiennes, ii. p. 372
sqq.