Lecture II. Egyptian Religion. 37
in a somewhat changed form. They became the nomes of
Pharaonic Egypt, separate districts resembling to a certain degree
the States of the American Republic, and preserving to the last
their independent life and organisation. Each nome had its own
capital, its own central sanctuary, and its own prince; above all,
it had its own special god or goddess, with their attendant deities,
their college of priests, their ceremonies and their festivals.
Up to the age of the Hyksos conquest the hereditary princes
of the nomes were feudal lords, owning a qualified obedience
to the Pharaoh, and furnishing him with tribute and soldiers
when called upon to do so. It was not till after the rise of the
Eighteenth Dynasty that the old feudal nobility was replaced
by court officials and a bureaucracy which owed its position to
the king; and even then the descendants of the ancient princes
were ever on the watch to take advantage of the weakness of the
central authority and recover the power they had lost. Up to the
last, too, the gods of the several nomes preserved a semblance
of their independent character. It was only with the rise of the
new kingdom and the accession of the Eighteenth Dynasty that
that process of fusion set in to any real purpose which identified
the various deities one with another, and transformed them into
kaleidoscopic forms of Amon or Ra. The loss of their separate
and independent character went along with the suppression of the
feudal families with whom their worship had been associated for
unnumbered generations. The feudal god and the feudal prince
disappeared together: the one became absorbed into the supreme
god of the Pharaoh and his priests, the other into a functionary of [039]
the court. It was only in the hearts and minds of the people that
Thoth remained what he had always been, the lord and master of
Hermopolis, and of Hermopolis alone.
The principalities of primitive Egypt gradually became unified
into two or three kingdoms, and eventually into two kingdoms
only, those of Upper and Lower Egypt. Recent discoveries have
thrown unexpected light on this early period of history. At one