Lecture II. Egyptian Religion. 43
with his back towards the statue of the god, who is transfusing
the ichor of heaven through his veins.^15
Menes, the king of Upper Egypt, first united under one sceptre
the two kingdoms of the Nile. The divinity which had hitherto
been shared between the Pharaohs of Upper and Lower Egypt
now passed in all it fulness to him. He became the visible god
of Egypt, just as Sargon or Naram-Sin was the visible god of [045]
Akkad. All the attributes of divinity belonged to him, as they
were conceived of by his subjects, and from him they passed to
his successors. Legitimacy of birth was reckoned through the
mother, and through the mother accordingly the divine nature
of the Pharaoh was handed on. Only those who had been born
of a princess of the royal family could be considered to possess
it in all its purity; and where this title was wanting, it was
necessary to assume the direct intervention of a god. The mother
of Amon-hotepIII. was of Asiatic origin; we read, therefore, on
the walls of the temple of Luxor, that he was born of a virgin
and the god of Thebes. Alexander, the conqueror of Egypt, was
a Macedonian; it was needful, accordingly, that he should be
acknowledged as a son by the god of the oasis of Ammon.^16
But such consequences of the old Egyptian belief in the
incarnation of the deity in man are leading us away into a field of
investigation which will have to be traversed in a future lecture.
For the present, it is sufficient to keep two facts steadily before
the mind: on the one side, the old Egyptian belief in the divinity of
the brute beast; on the other, the equally old belief in the divinity
of man. The two beliefs are not really to be harmonised one with
the other; they were, in fact, derived from different elements in
(^15) See the illustration from the temple of Amon-hotepIII.{FNSat Luxor, in
Maspero,Dawn of Civilisation, p. 111.
(^16) The Westcar Papyrus, which was written in the time of the Middle Empire,
already describes the first three kings of the Fifth Dynasty as born of Ruddadt
(the wife of a priest of the sun-god) and the god Ra of Sakhab (Erman,
“Die Märchen des Papyrus Westcar,”i. p. 55, in theMittheilungen aus den
orientalischen Sammlungen zu Berlin, 1890).