with full sleeves, and the leopard-skin above; sometimes one or two feathers in the head. Chaplets and flowers were laid upon the altars, such as the lotus and papyrus, also grapes and figs in baskets, and ointment in alabaster vases. Also necklaces, bracelets, and jewelry, were offered as thanksgivings and invocations. Oxen and other animals were sacrificed, and the blood allowed to flow over the altar. Libations of wine were poured on the altar. Incense was offered to all the gods in censers. Processions were usual with the Egyptians; in one, shrines were carried on the shoulders by long staves passed through rings. In others the statues of the gods were carried, and arks like those of the Jews, overshadowed by the wings of the goddess of truth spread above the sacred beetle. The prophets were the most highly honored of the priestly order. They studied the ten hieratical books. The business of the stolists* was to dress and undress the images, to attend to the vestments of the priests, and to mark the beasts selected for sacrifice. The scribes were to search for the Apis, or sacred bull, and were required to possess great learning. The priests had no sinecure; their life was full of minute duties and restrictions. They seldom appeared in public, were married to one wife, were circumcised like other Egyptians, and their whole time was occupied either in study or the service of their gods. There was a gloomy tone to the religion of Egypt, which struck the Greeks, whose worship was usually cheerful. Apuleius says "the gods of Egypt rejoice in lamentations, those of Greece in dances." Another Greek writer says, " The Egyptians offer their gods tears." Until Swedenborg † arrived, and gave his disciples the These designations are the Greek form of the official titles. +I do not know if it has been noticed that the principle of Swedenborg's heaven was anticipated by Milton (Paradise Lost, V. 573), "What surmounts the reach Of human sense I shall delineate so By likening spiritual to corporeal forms, As may express them best; though what if Earth precise measure and form of the life to come, no religion has ever taught an immortality as distinct in its outline and as solid in its substance as that of the Egyptians. The Greek and Roman hereafter was shadowy and vague; that of Buddhism remote; and the Hebrew Beyond was wholly eclipsed and overborne by the sense of a Divine presence and power immanent in space and time. To the Egyptian, this life was but the first step, and a very short one, of an immense career. The sun (Ra) alternately setting and rising, was the perpetually present type of the progress of the soul, and the Sothiac period (symbolized by the Phoenix) of 1421 years from one heliacal rising of Sirius at the beginning of the fixed Egyptian year to the next, was also made to define the cycle of human transmigrations. Two Sothiac periods correspond nearly to the three thousand years spoken of by Herodotus, during which the soul transmigrates through animal forms before returning to its human body. Then, to use the Egyptian language, the soul arrived at the ship of the sun and was received by Ra into his solar splendor. On some sarcophagi the soul is symbolized by a hawk with a human head, carrying in his claws two rings, which probably signify the two Sothiac cycles of its transmigrations. The doctrine of the immortality of the soul, says Mr. Birch,* is as old as the inscriptions of the twelfth dynasty, many of which contain extracts from the Ritual of the Dead. One hundred and forty-six chapters of this Ritual have been translated by Mr. Birch from the text of the Turin papyrus, the most complete in Europe. Chapters of it are found on mummy-cases, on the wraps of mummies, on the walls of tombs, and within the coffins on papyri. This Ritual is all that remains of the Hermetic Books which constituted the library of the priesthood. Two antagonist classes of deities appear in this liturgy as contending for the soul of the deceased, Osiris and his triad, Set and his devils. The Sun-God, source of life, is also present. An interesting chapter of the Ritual is the one hundred * Bunsen, Egypt's Place, Vol. V. p. 129, note. and twenty-fifth, called the Hall of the Two Truths. It is the process of "separating a person from his sins," not by confession and repentance, as is usual in other religions, but by denying them. Forty-two deities are said to be present to feed on the blood of the wicked. The soul addresses the Lords of Truth, and declares that it has not done evil privily, and proceeds to specifications. He says: I have not afflicted any. I have not told falsehoods. I have not made the laboring man do more than his task. I have not been idle. I have not murdered. I have not committed fraud. I have not injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not cheated by false weights. I have not kept milk from sucklings. I have not caught the sacred birds." Then, addressing each god by name, he declares: "I have not been idle. I have not boasted. I have not stolen. I have not counterfeited, nor killed sacred beasts, nor blasphemed, nor refused to hear the truth, nor despised God in my heart." According to some texts, he declares, positively, that he has loved God, that he has given bread to the hungry, water to the thirsty, garments to the naked, and an asylum to the abandoned. Funeral ceremonies among the Egyptians were often very imposing. The cost of embalming, and the size and strength of the tomb, varied with the position of the deceased. When the seventy days of mourning had elapsed, the body in its case was ferried across the lake in front of the temple, which represented the passage of the soul over the infernal stream. Then came a dramatic representation of the trial of the soul before Osiris. The priests, in masks, represented the gods of the under world. Typhon accuses the dead man, and demands his punishThe intercessors plead for him. A large pair of scales is set up, and in one scale his conduct is placed in a bottle, and in the other an image of truth. These proceedings are represented on the funeral papyri. One of these, twenty-two feet in length, is in Dr. Abbott's collection of Egyptian antiquities, in New York. It is beauti fully written, and illustrated with careful drawings. One ment. represents the Hall of the Two Truths, and Osiris sitting in judgment, with the scales of judgment before him.* Many of the virtues which we are apt to suppose a monopoly of Christian culture appear as the ideal of these old Egyptians. Brugsch says a thousand voices from the tombs of Egypt declare this. One inscription in Upper Egypt says: "He loved his father, he honored his mother, he loved his brethren, and never went from his home in bad-temper. He never preferred the great man to the low one." Another says: I was a wise man, my soul loved God. I was a brother to the great men and a father to the humble ones, and never was a mischief-maker." An inscription at Sais, on a priest who lived in the sad days of Cambyses, says: "I honored my father, I esteemed my mother, I loved my brothers. I found graves for the unburied dead. I instructed little. children. I took care of orphans as though they were my own children. For great misfortunes were on Egypt in my time, and on this city of Sais." Some of these declarations, in their "self-pleasing pride" of virtue, remind one of the noble justification of himself by the Patriarch Job.† Here is one of them, from the tombs of Ben-Hassan, over a Nomad Prince: "What I have done I will say. My goodness and my kindness were ample. I never oppressed the fatherless nor the widow. I did not treat cruelly the fishermen, the shepherds, or the poor laborers. There was nowhere in my time hunger or want. For I cultivated all my fields, far and near, in order that their inhabitants might have food. I never preferred the great and powerful to the humble and poor, but did equal justice to all." A king's tomb at Thebes gives us in few words the religious creed of a Pharaoh : "I lived in truth, and fed my soul with justice. What I did to men was done in peace, and how I loved God, God and my heart well know. I have given bread to the hungry, water *This Museum also contains three large mummies of the sacred bull of Apis, a gold ring of Suphis, a gold necklace with the name of Menes, and many other remarkable antiquities. † Book of Job, Chap. xxix. to the thirsty, clothes to the naked, and a shelter to the stranger. I honored the gods with sacrifices, and the dead with offerings." A rock at Lycopolis pleads for an ancient ruler thus: "I never took the child from its mother's bosom, nor the poor man from the side of his wife." Hundreds of stones in Egypt announce as the best gifts which the gods can bestow on their favorites, "the respect of men, and the love of women."* Religion, therefore, in Egypt, connected itself with morality and the duties of daily life. But kings and conquerors were not above the laws of their religion. They were obliged to recognize their power and triumphs as not their own work, but that of the great gods of their country. Thus, on a monumental stele discovered at Karnak by M. Mariette, and translated by De Rougé,† is an inscription recording the triumphs of Thothmes III., of the eighteenth dynasty (about B. c. 1600), which sounds like the song of Miriam or the Hynn of Deborah. We give some stanzas in which the god Amun addresses Thothmes : "I am come to thee have I given to strike down Syrian princes; "I am come to thee have I given to strike down Asian peoples; In glittering arms and fighting, high in thy lofty chariot. "I am come to thee have I given to strike down western nations; "I am come to thee have I given to strike down Lybian archers; Like a regal lion, I made them see thy glory; Couched by the corpse he has made, down in the rocky valley. "I am come to thee have I given to strike down the ends of the ocean. In the grasp of thy hand is the circling zone of the waters; Like the soaring eagle, I have made them see thy glory, Whose far-seeing eye there is none can hope to escape from." * Brugsch, as above. Lenormant, Ancient History of the East, I. 234, in the English translation. |
