The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

148 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

Egypt the bodies of the dead were brought to the sacred ground,
that they might be interred as near as possible to the tomb of the
god, and so their mummies might repose beside him on earth
as they hoped their souls would do in the paradise of the Blest.
[160] Even the rise of the Memphite dynasties did not deprive Abydos
of its claim to veneration. Its sanctity was too firmly established;
hundreds of Egyptians still continued to be buried there, rather
than in the spacious necropolis of the Memphite Pharaohs.^133
Abydos, with its royal memories, threw the older city of Osiris
into the shade. He still, it is true, retained his ancient title of“lord
of Daddu,”but it was an archaism rather than a reality, and it was
as“lord of Abydos”that he was now with preference addressed.
But other sanctuaries disputed with Abydos its claim to possess
the tomb of the god of the dead. Wherever a temple was erected in
his honour, his tomb also was necessarily to be found. An attempt
was made to harmonise their conflicting claims by falling back
on the old tradition of the custom of dismembering the dead: the
head of the god was at Abydos, his heart at Athribis, his neck at
Letopolis. But even so the difficulty remained: the separate limbs
would not suffice for the number of the tombs, and the same
member was sometimes claimed by more than one locality. At
Memphis, for example, where Osiris was united with Apis into
the compound Serapis, his head was said to have been interred
as well as at Abydos.
Abydos, at the outset, was the cemetery, or rather one of the
cemeteries, of This. And the god of This was the sun-god Anher,
who was depicted in human form. In the age which produced
the doctrine of the Ennead, Anher was identified with Shu, the
atmosphere, or, more strictly speaking, the god of the space

(^133) Not unfrequently a rich Egyptian who was buried at Saqqâra had a cenotaph
at Abydos. I believe that the fashion had been set by the founder of the united
monarchy himself, and that besides the tomb of Menes at Negada there was
also a cenotaph of the king at Abydos. At all events clay impressions of his
Ka-name A%a have been found there in the Omm el-Ga'ab.