The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

84 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babylonia

in some cases, at least, can be shown to have been formed by
the union of foreign elements. Thus at Memphis the triad was
created by borrowing Nefer-Tum from Heliopolis and Sekhet
from Latopolis, and making the one the son of the local god
Pta%, and the other his wife. The famous trinity of Osiris, Isis,
and Horus, which became a pattern for the rest of Egypt, was
formed by transferring Nebhât and Anubis, the allies of Osiris, to
his enemy Set, and so throwing the whole of the Osirian legend
into confusion. The trinity of Thebes is confessedly modern; it
owed its origin to the rise of the Theban dynasties, when Thebes
became the capital of Egypt, and its god Amon necessarily
followed the fortunes of the local prince. Mut,“the mother,”a
mere title of the goddess of Southern Egypt, was associated with
him, and the triad was completed by embodying in it Pta%of
Memphis, who had been the chief god of Egypt when Thebes
was still a small provincial town. At a subsequent date, Khonsu,
the moon-god, took the place of Pta%.^62
We can thus trace the growth of the Egyptian trinity and the
ideas and tendencies which lay behind it. It was the culminating
stage in the evolution of the religious system which took its
first start among the priests of Heliopolis. First creation by
means of generation, then the Ennead, and lastly the triad and
[091] the trinity—such were the stages in the gradual process of
development. And the doctrine of the trinity itself reached its
highest point of perfection in that worship of Osiris of which I
shall speak in a future lecture.
But the Ennead had other results besides the Egyptian doctrine
of the trinity. Generation in the case of a god could not be the
same as in the case of a man. The very fact that Tum was wifeless
proved this. It was inevitable, therefore, that it should come to

(^62) This has been proved by a stela of AntefIV.{FNSof the Eleventh Dynasty,
discovered by M. Legrain in 1900, in the temple of Pta%. Khonsu was a
mere epithet of the moon-god, meaning“wanderer.”In a later age Khonsu was
himself superseded by Mentu.