24 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniacomposed, at most, of three elements, the Asiatic invaders from
the south, and two older races, which we may term aboriginal.
One of them Professor Petrie is probably right in maintaining to
be Libyan.^4
We thus have at least three different types of religious belief
and practice at the basis of Egyptian religion, corresponding with
the three races which together made up the Egyptian people.
Two of the types would be African; the third would be Asiatic,
perhaps Babylonian. From the very outset, therefore, we must be
prepared to find divergences of religious conception as well as
divergences in rites and ceremonies. And such divergences can
be actually pointed out.^5
The practice of embalming, for instance, is one which we have
been accustomed to think peculiarly characteristic of ancient
[024] Egypt. It is referred to in the Book of Genesis, and described
by classical writers. There are many people whose acquaintance
with the old Egyptians is confined to the fact that when they died
their bodies were made into mummies. It is from the wrappings
of the mummy that most of the small amulets and scarabs have
come which fill so large a space in collections of Egyptian
antiquities, as well as many of the papyri which have given us
an insight into the literature of the past. We have been taught to
believe that from times immemorial the Egyptians mummified
their dead, and that the practice was connected with an equally
immemorial faith in the resurrection of the dead; and yet recent
excavations have made it clear that such a belief is erroneous.
Mummification was never universal in Egypt, and there was a
time when it was not practised at all. It was unknown to the
prehistoric populations whom the Pharaonic Egyptians found on
their arrival in the country; and among the Pharaonic Egyptians
themselves it seems to have spread only slowly. Few traces of
(^4) See Schweinfurth, “Ueber den Ursprung der Aegypter,” in the
Verhandlungen der Berliner anthropologischen Gesellschaft, June 1897.
(^5) See W. M. Flinders Petrie,Religion and Conscience in Ancient Egypt, 1898.