Lecture V. Animal Worship. 105
Under the Ptolemies, Greek ideas gathered round the person of
a deity who thus united in himself the earlier and later forms of
Egyptian belief, and out of the combination rose the Serapis of
the classical age, whose worship exercised so great an influence
on the Roman world. In the features of the human Serapis, with
his majestic face and flowing beard, it is difficult to recognise
the bull-god of primitive Egypt.
The history of Serapis is on a large scale what that of the
other sacred animals of Egypt is on a smaller scale. Mnevis
was a lesser Apis; as Heliopolis waned before Memphis, so did
its divine bull before the rival deity of the capital. They had
both started on an equal footing, and had followed the fortunes
of the cities where they were adored. At Mendes it was not a
bull, but a ram, that was the object of worship, and in which
the priests beheld an incarnation of Ra,^76 though the accidental
fact that the wordbameant alike“ram”and“soul”caused later
generations to identify it with the“soul”of Osiris. In the Fayyûm
it was the crocodile which naturally became the god Sebek or [114]
Sukhos, and at a later time Pete-sukhos,“the gift of Sukhos.”In
the latter name we read the signs of a growing disinclination to
see in the animal the god himself or even his soul or double; the
Sukhos becomes“the gift of Sukhos,”separate from the god, and
bestowed by him upon man.
There were other nomes besides the Fayyûm in which the
crocodile was worshipped. It was the sacred animal of Onuphis
in the Delta, and of Ombos in the far south of Egypt. But we
must not expect to find a Sebek and a sacred crocodile always
accompanying one another. There could be cases in which the
crocodile was identified with other gods than Sebek,—with Set,
for example, as at Nubti, near Dendera. The sacred animal existed
before the god whose incarnation he afterwards became. The
neolithic races were in the valley of the Nile before the Pharaonic
(^76) De Rougé,Monnaies de nomes, p. 46.