The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

150 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

We have, however, one or two facts to guide us in determining
the primitive character of the god. He was a mummified man
like Pta%of Memphis, and he was the brother and enemy of Set.
Set or Sut became for the later Egyptians the impersonation of
evil. He was identified with Apophis, the serpent of wickedness,
against whom the sun-god wages perpetual war; and his name
was erased from the monuments on which it was engraved. But
all this was because Set was the god and the representative of the
Asiatic invaders who had conquered Egypt, and aroused in the
Egyptian mind a feeling of bitter animosity towards themselves.
As late as the time of the Nineteenth Dynasty, the Pharaohs who
restored Tanis, the Hyksos capital, to something of its former
glory, called themselves after the name of the Hyksos deity.
ThothmesIII. of the Eighteenth Dynasty built a temple in honour
of Set of Ombos, who was worshipped near Dendera; and if we
go back to the oldest records of the united monarchy, we find Set
symbolising the north while Horus symbolises the south. Before
the days of Menes, Set was the god of Northern Egypt, Horus of
[163] Southern Egypt. In the prehistoric wars of the two kingdoms the
two gods would be hostile to one another, and yet brethren.
It was the armies of Set that were driven by Horus and his
metal-bearing followers from one end of Egypt to the other, and
finally overcome.^136 Set therefore represents in the legend the

Eleventh Dynasty (Daressy in theRecueil de Travaux, xiv. p. 23), this is only

in accordance with the Egyptian habit of transforming a divine epithet into a

separate deity.

(^135) Already in the Pyramid texts Horus is said to have assisted in the burial of
Osiris, who goes to the plains of Alu with“the great gods that proceed from
On”(Pepiii. 864-872); and we have perhaps a reminiscence of the spread of
the Osirian cult to the south and the identification of Osiris with Akhem, the
mummified Horus of Nekhen, inPepiii. 849, where we read:“Seb installs
by his rites Osiris as god, to whom the watchers in Pe make offering, and the
watchers in Nekhen venerate him”(Maspero in theRecueil de Travaux, xii.
p. 168). Pe and Nekhen were the capitals of the two pre-Menic kingdoms of
Northern and Southern Egypt, and on a stela from Nekhen (Kom el-A 136 %mar)
So in the Pyramid texts (e.g. Teta171, 172).