The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

52 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

history. Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that it is presupposed
by the so-called Banner name of the Egyptian Pharaohs.^20 Ever
since the first days of hieroglyphic decipherment, it has been
[054] known that besides the name or names given to the Pharaoh at
birth, and commonly borne by him in life, he had another name
not enclosed in a cartouche, but in something that resembled a
banner, and was surmounted by the hawk of the god Horus. It
actually represented, however, not a banner, but the panel above
the false door of a tomb, and the name written within it was the
name of the Ka of the Pharaoh rather than of the Pharaoh himself.
It was accordingly the name by which he was known after death,
the name inscribed on the objects buried in his tomb, and also the
name under which he was worshipped whether in this life or in
the next. As the Horus or deified leader who had subjugated the
older inhabitants of Egypt and founded the Pharaonic dynasties,
it was right and fitting that he should be known by the name
of his Ka. It was not so much the Pharaoh that was adored by
his subjects, as the Ka of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was god
because the blood of Horus flowed in his veins.
The earliest monuments of the Pharaohs yet discovered give
almost invariably only the Ka-name of the king. The fact is
doubtless due in great measure to their general character. With
few exceptions they consist of tombstones and other sepulchral
furniture. But the objects found in the foundations of the temple
of Nekhen are also examples of the same fact. The fusion was
not yet complete, at all events in the south, between the Pharaoh
as man and the Pharaoh as god; it was his Ka that was divine,
rather than the bodily husk in which it sojourned for a time.
The Ka accordingly occupies a prominent place in the names
of the Pharaohs of the Old Empire, while the sacred art of the
temples continued the ancient tradition down to the latest times.
Horus and the Nile-gods, for instance, present the Ka of Amon-

(^20) A Season in Egypt, 1887, pp. 21, 22.