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it was altogether unnatural. If water were needed, the sacred Nile
flowed at the foot of the temple or else there were canals which
conducted the waters of the river through the temple lands. There
was no primeval deep to be symbolised, no Persian Gulf out of
which the culture-god had risen with the gifts of civilisation. [240]
If the gods desired to sail in their barks, it was reasonable to
suppose that they would do so on the Nile or its tributary canals.
And yet the supposition would be wrong. The gods had indeed
their sacred“ships”as in Babylonia; but, as in Babylonia, it was
on an artificially-constructed lake that they floated, and not, as
a rule, on the river Nile. Could anything indicate more clearly
the origin of the religious beliefs and practices of the Pharaonic
Egyptians? Like the brick tombs of the Old Empire, with their
recessed panels and pilasters, it points to Babylonia and the
cosmological theories which had their birth in the Babylonian
plain.^197
The religion of ancient Egypt is thus no isolated fact. It links
itself, on the one hand, with the beliefs and religious conceptions
of the present, and, on the other hand, with those of a yet older
past. But it is a linking only; Egyptian religion is no more
the religion of ancient Babylonia than it is modern Christianity.
In Egypt it assumed a form peculiar to itself, adapting itself
to the superstitions and habits of the earlier inhabitants of the
land, and developing the ideas which lay latent within it. It was
characterised by the inexorable logic with which each of these
ideas was followed to its minutest conclusions, and at the same
time by the want of any attempt to harmonise these conclusions
one with the other, however inconsistent they might be. It
(^197) The serpent with the seven necks (Unas630,Teta305) is the Babylonian
“serpent with the seven heads,”and points to Babylonia, where alone seven
was a sacred number. Other coincidences between Egyptian and Babylonian
mythology that may be noted are“the tree of life”(khet n ânkh) which grew
in Alu, and was given by the stars to the dead that they might live for ever
(Pepi431); and the“great house,”the Babylonianê-gal, which is several times
referred to in the Pyramid texts.