Lecture V. Animal Worship. 109
has been said that such composite creatures were as real to the
Egyptian as the cattle and sheep he tended in the fields; that he
was quite as much prepared to meet with them in the desert, as the
ancient Greek would have been to meet with a satyr in the woods
or a Highlander with a kelpie by the waterside. Very possibly
that was the case; it will not, however, explain their origin, or the
forms that were assigned to them. Why, for instance, should the
sphinx of Giza be in the form of a lion with a human head? [118]
Once more we must look to Asia for an explanation. The
sphinx of Giza was the guardian of the tombs of the dead; it
protected them from the spiritual foes whose home was in the
desert. “I protect thy sepulchral chapel,”it is made to say in
an inscription,“I watch over thy sepulchral chamber, I keep
away the stranger who would enter, I overthrow the foe with
their weapons, I drive the wicked from thy tomb, I annihilate
thy opponents ... so that they return no more.”^79 The sphinx, in
fact, performed precisely the same office as the winged bulls that
guarded the entrance to an Assyrian palace, or the cherubim who
stood at the gates of the garden of Eden.
The winged bulls and the cherubim were composite creatures,
and came originally from Babylonia. Babylonia was the primal
home, indeed, of all such animal combinations. They were
painted on the walls of the temple of Bel at Babylon, and their
existence formed an essential part of the Babylonian cosmogony.
That cosmogony rested on the doctrine of a contest between the
powers of light and darkness, of order and chaos, and on the final
victory of the gods of light. There was a world of chaos as well as
a world of order; and before the present creation could be evolved
with its settled laws and definite boundaries, there had been of
necessity another creation in which all things were confused and
chaotic. The brood of Tiamat, the dragon of chaos, corresponded
with the creatures of the actual world which the gods of light had
(^79) Zeitschrift für Aegyptische Sprache(1880) p. 50.