Lecture IV. The Sun-God And The Ennead. 73
Maspero, that Horus was originally the sky, and is in favour of
the general belief of Egyptologists, that he was from the outset
the sun-god. Such, at all events, was the opinion of the Egyptians
themselves in the later period of their history. In the Pyramid
texts Horus already appears as a solar deity, and it is only as
the sun-god that his identification with the Pharaohs can be [078]
explained. It was not the sky but the sun who watched over the
names of their doubles. It is true that the two eyes of Horus were
said to be the sun and the moon, and that a punning etymology,
which connected his name with the wordheror“face,”caused
him to be depicted as the face of the sky, the four locks of hair of
which were the four cardinal points. But the etymology is late,
and there is no more difficulty in understanding how the solar
and lunar discs can be called the eyes of the sun-god, than there
is in understanding how the winged disc was distinguished from
him, or how even in modern phrase the“eye”may be used as a
synonym of the whole man. When we speak of“the eye of God,”
we mean God Himself.^49
There is, however, one newly-discovered monument which
may be claimed in support of Professor Maspero's theory. Above
the Horus-hawk which surmounts the name of the Third Dynasty
king found at Nekhen, is the hieroglyph of the sky. But the
explanation of this is not difficult to find. On the one hand, the
hieroglyph embraces the hawk as the sky does the sun; on the
other hand, it gives the pronunciation of the name of Horus, the
sky in Egyptian beingherorhor,“the high”and uplifted. And
the name of Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis,“the Horus who issues
from the two horizons,”must be quite as old as the monument
of Nekhen. What the two horizons were is shown us by the
(^49) Hor-merti,“Horus of the two eyes,”was worshipped at Shedennu in the
Pharbæthite nome of the Delta. Grébaut's view, that the two eyes originally
represented the light, seems to me too abstract a conception for an early period
(Recueil de Travaux, pp. 72-87, 112-131). In the Pyramid texts (Rec.iv. p.
42), mention is made of Horus with“the blue eyes.”