Lecture VI. The Gods Of Egypt. 139
the Hyksos conquest of Egypt, but in the end the check proved
only a fresh impulse. It was the princes of Thebes, the servants
of Amon, who raised the standard of revolt against the Asiatic
intruder, and finally drove him back to Asia. Amon had been their
helper in the war of independence, and it was he who afterwards
gained their victories for them in Syria and Ethiopia. The glory
and wealth of Egypt were all due to him, and upon his temple and
city accordingly the spoils of Asia were lavished, and trains of [150]
captives worked under the lash. The Hyksos invasion, moreover,
and the long war of independence which followed, destroyed
the power of the old feudal princes, while it strengthened and
developed that of the Pharaoh. The influence of the provincial
gods passed away with the feudal princes whose patrons they had
been; the supremacy of the Pharaoh implied also the supremacy
of the Pharaoh's god. There was none left in Egypt to dispute the
proud boast of the Theban, that Amon was“the one god.”
But he became the one god not by destroying, but by absorbing
the other gods of the country. The doctrines of the Ennead and
the Trinity had prepared the way. They had taught how easily
the gods of the State religion could be merged one into the other;
that their attributes were convertible, and yet, at the same time,
were all that gave them a distinct personality. The attributes were
to the Egyptian little more than the concrete symbols by which
they were expressed in the picture writing; the personality was
little more than a name. And both symbols and name could be
changed or interchanged at will.
The process of fusion was aided by the identification of Amon
with Ra. The spread of the solar cult of Heliopolis had introduced
the name and worship of Ra into all the temples of Egypt; the
local gods had, as it were, been incorporated into him, and even
the goddesses forced to become his wives or his daughters. The
Pharaoh, even the Theban Pharaoh, was still“the son of the
sun-god”; as Amon was also his“father,”it was a necessary
conclusion that Amon and Ra were one and the same.