112 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia[121] the chronological registers, and find that it has returned exactly
when the five hundredth year is completed.”^82
The legend of the phœnix has grown up round the belief that
the disembodied soul could enter at will into the body of a bird.
The phœnix was allied to the hawk of Horus, and probably was
originally identical with that primitive symbol of the soul (khu),
the name of which means literally“the luminous.”It will be
remembered that the Pyramid texts speak of the“fourkhu”or
“luminous souls of Horus” “who live in Heliopolis,”and the
sun-god of that city was usually invoked by hisbauor“souls,”
figured as three birds which appear as three ostriches on objects
found in the tomb of Menes.^83 On an early seal-cylinder of
Babylonian type thebennuor khuis termed“the double of
Horus.”^84
The story of the phœnix illustrates the influence exercised by
the pictorial character of Egyptian writing upon the course of
religious thought. The soul was first symbolised by a bird. It
passed out of the corpse and into the air like a bird; it was free
to enter whatever body it chose, and the body of a bird was that
which it would naturally choose. Even to-day the belief is not
extinct in Europe that the spirits of the dead pass into the forms
of swallows or doves. But at first it was immaterial what bird
was selected to express pictorially the idea of a soul. It was
[122] the ostrich when the latter still existed in Southern Egypt; then
it became the plover, in consequence, probably, of a similarity
in sound between the name of the plover and that of the soul.
At other times the favourite symbol was the crested ibis, whose
name was identical with a word that signified“light.”Around the
(^82) See also Herodotos, ii. 73; Pliny,N. H.x. 2; Tertullian,De Resurr.13.
(^83) De Morgan,Recherches sur les Origines de l'Égypte, ii. p. 165.
(^84) Sayce,Proc. SBA., Feb. 1898, No. 8. On a monument discovered at Sân
(Petrie,Tanis, pt. ii. pl. x. 170), we read of“Horus in thebennuas a black
bull,” “Horus in thebennuas a horned bull.”The cemetery of Tanis was called
“the city of the phœnix”(bennu). At Edfu it is said that the phœnix (bennu)
“comes forth from the holy heart”of Osiris.