The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

82 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Egyptian temples. This was the identification of one god with
another, or, to speak more exactly, the loss of their individuality
[088] on the part of the gods. The process was begun when the priests
of Heliopolis took such of the divinities as were recognised
throughout Egypt, and transmuted them into successive phases
in the creative action of their local god. It was completed when
other religious centres followed the example of Heliopolis, and
formed Enneads of their own. In each case the local god stood
of necessity at the head of the Ennead, and in each case also he
was assimilated to Tum. Whatever may have previously been
his attributes, he thus became a form of the sun-god. A dual
personality was created, which soon melted into one.
But it was not as Tum that the sun-god of Heliopolis thus
made his way victoriously through the land of Egypt. It was
under the more general and undefined name of Ra that he was
accepted in the Egyptian sanctuaries. Tum remained the local
god of Heliopolis, or else formed part of a solar trinity in which
he represented the setting sun. But Ra became a divine Pharaoh,
in whom the world of the gods was unified.
The kings of the Fifth Dynasty called themselves his sons.
Hitherto the Pharaohs had been incarnations of the sun-god,
like the earlier monarchs of Babylonia; henceforward the title of
Horus was restricted to their doubles in the other world, while that
of“Son of the Sun”was prefixed to the birth-name which they
bore on earth. The same change took place also in Babylonia.
There it was due to the invasion of foreign barbarians, and the
establishment of a foreign dynasty at Babylon, where the priests
refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of a king who had not
been adopted as son by the sun-god Bel-Merodach. Perhaps a
similar cause was at work in Egypt. The Fifth Dynasty came from
Elephantinê, an island which was not only on the extreme frontier
of Egypt, but was inhabited then as now by a non-Egyptian race;
[089] it may be that the price of their acknowledgment by the priests
and princes of Memphis was their acceptance of the title of“Son