The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

104 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

of cats have been found at Bubastis, at Beni-Hassan, and other
places; so too there were cemeteries of hawks and crocodiles, of
jackals and bulls. We are still ignorant of the exact conditions
under which these creatures were embalmed and buried. It is
impossible to suppose that a solemn burial was provided for all
the individual members of a species which was accounted sacred
in a particular nome, much less for all its individual members
throughout Egypt, as seems to have been imagined by Herodotus
(ii. 41); there must have been certain limitations within which
such a burial was permitted or ordained. And sometimes there
was no burial at all; the mummy of the sacred animal of Set, for
instance, has never been found.
Still the fact remains that not only were the bodies of the Apis
or the Mnevis mummified and consigned to a special burying-
place, but the bodies of other bulls as well. Doubtless the
Egyptian of the Pharaonic period had an excellent reason to give
for the practice. Just as the servants of the prince were buried
around their master, or as theushebti-figures were placed in the
tomb of the dead, so the ordinary bull was interred like the divine
incarnations of Pta%and Ra, in the hope that its double might
accompany the spirit of the god in the other world. The scenes of
[113] country life painted on the walls of the tombs contain pictures of
sheep and cattle whosekaswere, in some way or other, believed
to exist in the Egyptian paradise, and a mummified bull had as
much right to the hope of a future existence as a mummified
man. The very act of embalming implied the possibility of its
union with Osiris.
Egyptian logic soon converted the possibility into a fact. With
the growth of the Osirian cult the dead Apis became, like the
pious Egyptian, one with Osiris, the lord of the other world.
His identity with Pta%paled and disappeared before his newer
identity with Osiris. At first he was Osiris-Apis,“the Osirified
bull-god,”as guardian only of the necropolis of Memphis; then
as god also of both Memphis and Egypt in life as well as in death.