Lecture IV. The Sun-God And The Ennead. 79
But it was only its first father and generator who was the god
of the nome in which the temple of Heliopolis stood. The deities
who were derived from him in the priestly cosmogony were
fetched from elsewhere. They were either elementary deities like
Shu and Seb, or else deities whose worship had already extended
all over Egypt, like Osiris and Isis. The goddess Nebhât seems
to have been invented for the purpose of providing Set with a
sister and a consort; perhaps Tefnut, too, had originally come
into existence for the same reason.
The Ennead, once created, was readily adopted by the other
nomes of Egypt. It provided an easy answer to that first question
of primitive humanity: what is the origin of the world into which [085]
we are born? The answer was derived from the experience of
man himself; as he had been born into the world, so, too, it
was natural to suppose that the world itself had been born. The
creator must have been a father, and, in a land where the woman
held a high place in the family, a mother as well. Though Tum
continued to be pictured as a man, no wife was assigned him;
father and mother in him were one.
It is impossible not to be reminded of similar supreme gods in
the Semitic kingdoms of Asia. Asshur of Assyria was wifeless;^56
so also was Chemosh of Moab. Nor does the analogy end
here. Creation by generation was a peculiarly Semitic or rather
Babylonian doctrine. The Babylonian Epic of the Creation
begins by describing the generation of the world out of Mummu
or Chaos. And the generation is by pairs as in the Ennead
of Heliopolis. First, Mummu, the one primeval source of all
things; then Lakhmu and Lakhamu, who correspond with Shu
and Tefnut; next, Ansar and Kisar, the firmament and the earth;
and lastly, the three great gods who rule the present world. Of
one of these, Ea, the ruler of the deep, Bel-Merodach the sun-god
(^56) The wife occasionally provided for Asshur by the scribes was a mere
grammatical abstraction, like Tumt, the feminine of Tum, whose name is now
and then met with in late Egyptian texts.