98 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniafound monuments of early Egypt. On the Pharaonic monuments
of that remote age the gods are not yet human; they are still
represented by animals and other fetishes. And these fetishes
have been borrowed from the older population of the valley of
the Nile, along with the so-called standard on the top of which
they were placed.
The standard with the emblem upon it denoted a nome in the
historical days of Egypt. The emblem represented the god of
the nome, or rather of the chief sanctuary in the nome. Where
the god of the nome was Horus, the hawk appeared upon the
standard; where two Horus-gods were worshipped, there were
two hawks. As the prehistoric boat had been placed under the
[106] protection of the deity whose fetish or symbol was planted at
its prow, so the nome was under the protection of the god whose
emblem was erected on its standard. The standards borne before
the Pharaoh on the plaque of Kom el-A%mar were the standards
of the nomes over which he claimed rule.
It would seem, then, that the god of a nome was in most
instances the god of the aboriginal tribe which originally
inhabited it, and that the symbols by which these gods were
known were primitively the gods themselves. On the plaque of
Abydos it is not Selk or Sekhet who is the protecting deity of the
city, but the scorpion and the lion. And by the side of animals
and birds, as we have seen, we find also inanimate objects which
are on exactly the same footing as the animals and birds. The
primitive religion of Egypt must have been a form of fetishism.
But in passing from the older population to the Asiatic
immigrants it underwent a change. The same slate plaques
which portray Horus as a hawk and Anubis as a jackal, represent
the king under the likeness of a bull. It is a literal pictorial
rendering of the phrase so often met with in the inscriptions,
in which the Pharaoh is described as a bull trampling on his
enemies. The animal has ceased to represent the actual reality,
and has become a symbol.