The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

106 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Egyptians, and the deities they adored were consequently also
there before the gods of the intruding race. Pta%, with his human
figure, would not have been transformed into the bull Apis if the
bull had not been already in possession.
The name of the god Thoth is itself a proof of this. Thoth was
the god of Hermopolis, the modern Eshmunên, and his patronage
of writing and books shows that he must have been the deity
of the Pharaonic race. The god to whom the invention of the
hieroglyphs was ascribed, could not have been the god of an
illiterate population.
Now the Egyptian form of the name Thoth is De%uti (or
[115] Ze%uti),“he who belongs to the ibis.”^77 Thoth, therefore, was
not originally the ibis, and, in spite of his bird's head, the human
body which he retained was a traditional evidence of the fact. He
was merely“attached to the ibis,”—attached, that is to say, to
the place where the ibis was the fetish of the aborigines.
According to Manetho, it was not until the reign of the second
king of the Second Dynasty that Apis, Mnevis, and Mendes
“were adjudged to be gods.”This must mean that it was then
that the State religion admitted for the first time that the official
gods of Memphis, Heliopolis, and Mendes were incarnated in
the sacred animals of the local cults. That the statement is
historically correct, may be gathered from the fact that the
temples of Memphis and Heliopolis were dedicated to Pta%and
Tum, and not to Apis and Mnevis. When they were built the
divinity of the bull had not yet been officially recognised. The
gods in whose honour they were founded were gods of human
form, and gods of human form they continued to be. Down to the

(^77) Griffith (Proc. of Society of Biblical Archæology, xxi. p. 278) has recently
proposed to see in De%uti a derivative from the name of the nome De%ut, like
Anzti, the title of Osiris at Busiris, from the name of the nome Anzet. But this
is“putting the cart before the horse.”It was not the nomes that were birds or
men, but the deities worshipped in them. Anz (perhaps from the Semitic'az,
“the strong one”) meant“king,”and represented the human Osiris.