36 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia[037] writing of the scribes and the pictures that adorned the walls of
the temples. To the ordinary Egyptian, Thoth was indeed an ibis,
and the folk-lore of the great sanctuaries accordingly described
him as such.^10 But to the cultured Egyptian, also, the ibis was
his symbol; and in Egypt, as we have seen, the symbol and what
is symbolised were apt to be confounded together.
The beast-worship of Egypt excited the astonishment and
ridicule of the Greeks and Romans, and the unmeasured scorn
of the Christian apologists. I shall have to deal with it in a later
lecture. For the present it is sufficient to point out how largely
it owed its continued existence to the need for symbolism which
characterised Egyptian thought, in spite of the fact that there was
another and contradictory conception which held sway within
Egyptian religion. This was the conception of the divinity of
man, which found its supreme expression in the doctrine that the
Pharaoh was the incarnation of the sun-god. It was not in the
brute beast, but in man himself, that the deity revealed himself
on earth.
The origin of the conception must be sought in the early
history of the country. Egypt was not at first the united monarchy
it afterwards became. It was divided into a number of small
principalities, each independent of the other and often hostile. It is
probable that in some cases the inhabitants of these principalities
did not belong to the same race; that while in one the older
population predominated, in another the Pharaonic Egyptians
held absolute sway. At all events the manners and customs of
their inhabitants were not uniform, any more than the religious
beliefs they held and the rites they practised. The god who was
[038] honoured in one place was abhorred in another, and a rival deity
set over against him.
True to its conservative principles, Egypt never forgot the
existence of these early principalities. They continued to survive
(^10) In the Pyramid texts the dead are described as being carried across the lake
which separates this world from the fields of Alu, on the wings of Thoth.