Lecture V. Animal Worship. 115
of the gods were also their tombs, and even among the Greeks
the sepulchre of Zeus was pointed out in Krete. The same cult
was paid to the dead Naram-Sin or the dead Gudea in Chaldæa
that was paid to the dead Khufu in Egypt. We have no need
to seek in any peculiarly Egyptian beliefs an explanation of the
ancestor worship which, along with the deification of the king, it
shared with Babylonia.
The euhemerism of the Egyptian priesthood sounded the knell
of the old faith. As the centuries passed, purer and higher ideas
of the Godhead had grown up, and between the“formless”and
eternal Creator of the world and the man who had become a god,
the distance was too great to be spanned. On the one side, the
gods of the national creed had been resolved one into another, till
no distinctive shape or character was left to any one of them; on
the other side, they had been transformed into mere human kings
who had ruled over Egypt long ago. The pantheistic Creator and
the deified Egyptians of vulgar and prosaic history could not be
harmonised together. The multitude might be content with its
sacred animals and its amulets, but the thinking portion of the
nation turned to Greek metaphysics or a despairing scepticism.
Already, in the time of the Eleventh Dynasty, the poet who [125]
composed the dirge of king Antef gives pathetic expression to
his doubts^86 —
(^86) The versification is Canon Rawnsley's,Notes for the Nile, pp. 188, 189.
Professor Erman's literal translation is as follows (Life in Ancient Egypt, Eng.
tr., pp. 386, 387)—
“I heard the words of Imhotep and Har-dad-ef,
Who both speak thus in their sayings:
‘Behold the dwellings of those men, their walls fall down,
Their place is no more,
They are as though they had never existed.’
No one comes from thence to tell us what is become of them,
Who tells us how it goes with them, who nerves our hearts,
Until you yourselves approach the place whither they are gone.
With joyful heart forget not to glorify thyself
And follow thy heart's desire, so long as thou livest.