The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

72 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

with the wings of the hawk.^48 A legend inscribed on the walls
of the temple, which is a curious mixture of folklore and false
etymologising, worked up after the fashion of Lemprière by the
[077] priests of the Ptolemaic period, knows exactly when it was that
this emblem of the god came into existence. It was in the three
hundred and sixty-third year of the reign of Ra-Harmakhis on
earth, when he fled from the rebels who had risen against him
in Nubia and had landed at Edfu. Here Hor-be%udet, the local
deity, paid homage to his suzerain and undertook to destroy his
enemies. But first, he flew up to the sun“as a great winged
disc,”in order that he might discover where they were. Then in
his new form he returned to the boat of Harmakhis, and there
Thoth addressed Ra, saying:“O lord of the gods, the god of
Edfu (Be%udet) came in the shape of a great winged disc: from
henceforth he shall be called Hor-be%udet.”It was after this that
Horus of Edfu and his followers,“the smiths,”smote the foe
from the southern to the northern border of Egypt.
The legend, or rather the prosaic fiction in which it has
been embodied, has been composed when the original character
of Horus had long been forgotten, and when the sun-god of
Heliopolis had become the dominant god of Egypt. It belongs to
the age of theological syncretism, when the gods of Egypt were
resolved one into the other like the colours in a kaleidoscope,
and made intangible and ever-shifting forms of Ra. But it bears
witness to one fact,—the antiquity of the worship of Horus of
Edfu and of the emblem which was associated with him. The
winged solar disc forms part of his earliest history.
The fact is difficult to reconcile with the view of Professor

(^48) When this emblem was first invented we do not know; it probably goes back
to the præ-Menic period, like the composite animals on the early monuments
of Nekhen and Abydos. Its first dateable occurrence is on a boulder of granite
in the island of Elephantinê above the name and figure of Unas of the Fifth
Dynasty. It is also engraved above the double figure of an Old Empire king
on a great isolated rock near El-Kab, which is probably of the same date. The
tablet on which it is engraved faces south-east.