But Monotheism bases itself entirely6 upon the great God of the Hebrews. To him, therefore, we must next address ourselves. Is he too resoluble, as I hinted before, into a Sacred Stone, the monument and representative of some prehistoric7 chieftain? Can we trace the origin of the Deity8 of Christendom till we find him at last in a forgotten Semitic ghost of the earliest period?
The chief Hebrew god Jahweh, when we first catch a passing glimpse of his primitive9 worship by his own people, was but one among a number of competing deities10, mostly, it would appear, embodied11 by their votaries12 in the visible form of stone or wooden pillars, and adored by a small group of loosely-connected tribes among the mountain region in the southwest of Syria. The confederacy among 155whom he dwelt knew themselves as the Sons of Israel; they regarded Jahweh as their principal god, much as the Greeks did Zeus, or the early Teutons their national hero Woden. But a universal tradition among them bore witness to the fact that they had once lived in a subject condition in Egypt, the house of bondage13, and that their god Jahweh had been instrumental in leading them thence into the rugged14 land they inhabited throughout the whole historical period, between the valley of Jordan and the Mediterranean15 coast. So consistent and so definite was this traditional belief that we can hardly regard it otherwise than as enclosing a kernel16 of truth; and not only do Kuenen and other Semitic scholars of the present day admit it as genuine, but the Egyptologists also seem generally to allow its substantial accuracy and full accord with hieroglyphic18 literature. This sojourn19 in Egypt cannot have failed to influence to some extent the Semitic strangers: therefore I shall begin my quest of the Hebrew god among the Egyptian monuments. Admitting that he was essentially20 in all respects a deity of the true Semitic pattern, I think it will do us good to learn a little beforehand about the people among whom his votaries dwelt so long, especially as the history of the Egyptian cults22 affords us perhaps the best historical example of the growth and development of a great national religion.
A peculiar24 interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind to the evolution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else in the world can we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism and philosophic25 theology. There are savage26 cults, it is true, which show us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds27 which show us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single supreme29 Ruler of the Cosmos30. But there is no other 156religious system known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break, the whole evolutionary31 movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually expanded and etherealised into the later. The origin of the other great historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable32: in Egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate goal of pure monotheism.
I would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history by saying, once for all, that while I make no pretensions34 to special Egyptological knowledge, I must nevertheless dissent35 on general anthropological36 grounds from the attitude taken up by Mr. Le Page Renouf in his Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt. That learned writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century behind its time. It is written as though the doctrine37 of evolution had never been promulgated38; and every page contains glaring contradictions of the most elementary principles of human development. Mr. Renouf still adheres to the discredited39 ideas that polytheism grew out of an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of adoration40 are “symbolical41” in origin; and that “the sublimer42 portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result of a process of development or elimination43 from the grosser.” Such theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which Mr. Renouf brings forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. A plain survey of the Egyptian monuments in the Nile valley, and of the known facts about Egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from the warping44 influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide anthropological enquiry, to precisely45 opposite and more probable conclusions. For it must be carefully borne in mind 157that on these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be implicitly47 and unhesitatingly accepted. The religion of Egypt, like the religion of Jud忙a or the religion of Hawaii, must be judged, not in isolation48, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been found so disastrous49 in the case of the Semitic and the Aryan cults, must be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless error. The key to the origin of the Egyptian faith is to be found, not in the late philosophising glosses51 quoted by M. de Roug茅 and his English disciple52, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of existing African savages53.
Looked at from this point of view, then—the evolutionary point of view—nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early Egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations, ancestor-worship and totemism.
I will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to consider by far the earliest, and infinitely54 the most important. And I may add that it is also, to judge by the Egyptian evidence alone, both the element which underlies55 the whole religious conceptions of the Nile valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon, including Osiris, Ptah, Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as many of their correlative goddesses. There is not, in fact, any great ethnical religion on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in which the basal importance of the Dead Man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient cult23 of Pharaohnic Egypt.
The Egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. It is impossible for a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty56 shade of the desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent the streets of Thebes and Memphis. The commonest object of worship on all the monuments of Nile is beyond doubt the Mummy: sometimes the private mummy of an ancestor 158or kinsman57, sometimes the greater deified mummies of immemorial antiquity58, blended in the later syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities, but represented to the very last in all ages of art—on the shattered Rameseum at Thebes or the Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken Denderah—as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. If ever there was a country where the Worship of the Dead was pushed to an extreme, that country was distinctly and decisively Egypt.
“The oldest sculptures show us no acts of adoration or of sacrifice,” says Mr. Loftie, “except those of worship at the shrine59 of a deceased ancestor or relative.” This is fully46 in keeping with what we know of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and with the immense importance always attached to the preservation60 of the mummy intact throughout the whole long course of Egyptian history. The Egyptian, in spite of his high civilisation61, remained always at the first or corpse62-preserving stage of custom as regards the dead. To him, therefore, the life after death was far more serious than the life on earth: he realised it so fully that he made endless preparations for it during his days above, and built himself a tomb as an eternal mansion63. The grave was a place of abode64, where the mummy was to pass the greater part of his existence; and even in the case of private persons (like that famous Tih whose painted sepulchre at Sakkarah every tourist to Cairo makes a point of visiting) it was sumptuously65 decorated with painting and sculpture. In the mortuary chambers66 or chapels68 attached to the tombs, the relations of the deceased and the priests of the cemetery70 celebrated71 on certain fixed72 dates various ceremonies in honour of the dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the mummy within. “The tables of offerings, which no doubt formed part of the furniture of the chambers, are depicted73 on the walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits, bread, and wine which had to be presented in kind.” These parentalia undoubtedly74 formed the main feature of the practical religion 159of early Egypt, as exhibited to us on all the monuments except the late tomb-caves of royal personages, devoted75 to the worship of the equally mummified great gods.
The Egyptian tomb was usually a survival of the cave artificially imitated. The outer chamber67, in which the ceremonies of the offertory took place, was the only part accessible, after the interment had been completed, to the feet of survivors76. The mummy itself, concealed77 in its sarcophagus, lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by the end of a corridor often containing statues or idols of the deceased. These idols, says M. Maspero, were indefinitely multiplied, in case the mummy itself should be accidentally destroyed, in order that the Ka (the ghost or double) might find a safe dwelling78-place. Compare the numerous little images placed upon the grave by the Coast Negroes. It was the outer chamber, however, that sheltered the stele79 or pillar which bore the epitaph, as well as the altar or table for offerings, the smoke from which was conveyed to the statues in the corridor through a small aperture80 in the wall of partition. Down the well beyond, the mummy in person reposed81, in its eternal dwelling-place, free from all chance of violation82 or outrage83. “The greatest importance,” says Mr. Renouf, “was attached to the permanence of the tomb, to the continuance of the religious ceremonies, and to the prayers of passers-by.” Again, “there is a very common formula stating that the person who raised the tablet ‘made it as a memorial to his fathers who are in the nether84 world, built up what he found was imperfect, and renewed what was found out of repair.’” In the inscription85 on one of the great tombs at Beni-H芒ssan the founder86 says: “I made to flourish the name of my father, and I built chapels for his ka [or ghost]. I caused statues to be conveyed to the holy dwelling, and distributed to them their offerings in pure gifts. I instituted the officiating priest, to whom I gave donations in land and presents. I ordered funeral offerings for all the feasts of the nether world [which are then enumerated87 160at considerable length]. If it happen that the priest or any other cease to do this, may he not exist, and may his son not sit in his seat.” All this is highly instructive from the point of view of the origin of priesthood.
How long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is shown by Mr. Renouf himself in one instructive passage. The kings who built the Pyramids in the Early Empire endowed a priestly office for the purpose of celebrating the periodical rites88 of offering to their ghosts or mummies. Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a certain person who lived under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before his time. We have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors89 who filled the same office immediately after Khufu’s death. So that in this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch90 continued for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “If in the case of private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we find no proof of so persistent91 a veneration92, that is because in ordinary tombs the ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children or descendants of the deceased person. Often, at the end of a few generations, either through negligence93, removals, ruin, or extinction94 of the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out altogether.”
For this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense importance was attached by the Egyptians to the begetting95 of a son who should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed by others after him. The duty of undertaking96 these rites is thoroughly97 insisted upon in all the maxims98 or moral texts; while on the other hand, the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the most terrible of all ancient Egyptian imprecations. “Many centuries after the construction of a tomb, Egyptian travellers have left a record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, 161of the abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the funeral formula.” In fact, the whole practical religion of the ordinary Egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of the ka—the genii, manes, or lares of the departed.
If even the common herd99 were thus carefully embalmed—if even the lesser100 functionaries101 of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs, daintily painted and exquisitely102 sculptured—it might readily be believed that the great kings of the mighty103 conquering dynasties themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special splendour and becoming magnificence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt, their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in Upper Egypt they are artificial caves. The dreary104 desert district west of the Nile and south of Cairo consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of Memphis—a vast and mouldering105 city of the dead—whose chief memorials are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the desecrated106 tombs piled up for the kings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. There, under stone tumuli of enormous size,—barrows or cairns more carefully constructed,—the Pharaohs of the Old Empire reposed, in peace in sepulchres unmarked by any emblems107 of the mystic gods or sacred beasts of later imagination. But still more significant and infinitely more beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, belonging to the great monarchs108 of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development. Those magnificent subterranean109 halls form in the truest and most literal sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion110 of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions111 for the officers 162of state, still destined112 to attend upon their sovereign in the nether world. Some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal palaces of Medinet-H芒bu or the corridors of Luxor.
M. Mariette has further shown that the huge Theban temples which skirt in long line the edge of the desert near the Valley of Tombs were really cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and worshipped. Thus the Rameseum was the mastabah or mortuary chapel69 for the tomb and ghost of Rameses II.; the temple of Medinet-H芒bu fulfilled the same purpose for Rameses III.; the temple of Kurneh for Rameses I.; and so forth113 throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins, with their correlated group of subterranean excavations114.
At any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial115 person to examine the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the Nile without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central object of worship—that the entire practical religion of the people was based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence116 and funereal117 offerings to the manes of ancestors. Everything in Egypt points to this one conclusion. Even the great sacred ritual is the Book of the Dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that they were really enjoying everlasting118 life. Mors janua vitae is the short summing-up of Egyptian religious notions. Death was the great beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship.
Moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of the religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship 163to God-Worship. Thus, in the tombs of Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire (Fifth Dynasty), all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. The quotations119 from (or anticipations120 of) the Book of the Dead are few and short. The great gods are rarely alluded121 to. Again, in the grottos122 of Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty) the paintings mostly represent scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities are still absent. The doctrine of rewards and punishments remains123 as yet comparatively in abeyance124. It is only at the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes (of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire chapters of the Book of the Dead are transcribed125 at length, and the walls are covered with “a whole army of grotesque126 and fantastic divinities.”
“But the Egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods, distinct from their ancestors—national, or local, or common gods—whose names and figures have come down to us inscribed127 upon all the monuments.” Quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors—gods whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. But it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various ruling families or dominant128 cities; and in one or two of the most important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.
I will take, to begin with, one typical example. There is no single god in the Egyptian pantheon more important or more universally diffused129 than Osiris. In later forms of the national religion, he is elevated into the judge of the departed and king of the nether world: to be “justified130 by Osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “a justified Osiris,” is the prayer of every corpse as set forth in his funeral 164inscription; and identification with Osiris is looked upon as the reward of all the happy and faithful dead. Now Osiris, in every one of his representations and modes, is simply—a Mummy. His myth, to be sure, assumed at last immense proportions; and his relations with Isis and Horus form the centre of an endless series of irreconcilable131 tales, repeated over and over again in art and literature. If we took mythology132 as our guide, instead of the monuments, we should be tempted133 to give him far other origins. He is identified often with other gods, especially with Amen; and the disentanglement of his personality in the monuments of the newer empire, when Ra, the sun-god, got mixed up inextricably with so many other deities, is particularly difficult. But if we neglect these later complications of a very ancient cult, and go back to the simplest origin of Egyptian history and religion, we shall, I think, see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental symbolism into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to be—a revered134 and worshipped Mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the town or little district of This by Abydos.
I do not deny that in later ages Osiris became much more than this. Nor do I deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and pious135 dead. Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was identified in the end with an annual slain136 Corn-God. I will even allow that there may have been more than one original Osiris—that the word may even at first have been generic137, not specific. But I still maintain that the evidence shows us the great and principal Osiris of all as a Dead Chief of Abydos.
We must remember that in Egypt alone history goes back to an immense antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced civilisation and a developed picture-writing. Therefore the very oldest known state of Egypt 165necessarily presupposes a vast anterior138 era of slow growth in concentration and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower Egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the bank of the Nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and each worshipping its own local deceased potentates139. The sheikh of the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless Pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses. Each tribe had also its special totem, about which I shall have a little more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later Egyptian Zoolatry and the animal-headed deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion bore marked traces of this original tribal140 form; the great multiplicity of Egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption141 of so many of them, after the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. The local gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially21 worshipped in their original sites. Thus the ithyphallic Amen-Khem was specially worshipped at Thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency upon every temple; Apis was peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at Bubastis; Anubis at Sekhem; Neith at Sais; Ra at Heliopolis; and Osiris himself at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.
Even Egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a state of things, for it asserts that before the time of Menes, the first king of the First Dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. In other words, it was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines which reigned142 in the various provinces of the Nile valley before the unification.
In the case of Osiris, the indications which lead us in this direction are almost irresistible143. It is all but certain that Osiris was originally a local god of This or Thinis, a 166village near Abydos, where a huge mound144 of rubbish still marks the site of the great deity’s resting-place. The latter town is described in the Harris papyrus145 as Abud, the hand of Osiris; and in the monuments which still remain at that site, Osiris is everywhere the chief deity represented, to whom kings and priests present appropriate offerings. But it is a significant fact that Menes, the founder of the united monarchy146, was born at the same place; and this suggests the probability that Osiris may have been the most sacred and most venerated147 of Menes’s ancestors. The suggestion derives148 further weight from the fact that Osiris is invariably represented as a mummy, and that he wears a peculiar head-dress or cap of office, the same as that which was used in historical times as the crown of Upper Egypt. He also holds in his hands the crook149 and scourge150 which are the marks of kingly office—the crook to lead his own people like a shepherd, the scourge to punish evil-doers and to ward33 off enemies. His image is therefore nothing more nor less than the image of a Mummied King. Sometimes, too, he wears in addition the regal ostrich151 plumes152. Surely, naught153 save the blind infatuation of mythologists could make them overlook the plain inference that Osiris was a mummified chief of Abydos in the days before the unification of Egypt under a single rule, and that he was worshipped by his successors in the petty principality exactly as we know other kingly mummies were worshipped by their family elsewhere—exactly, for example, as on the famous Tablet of Ancestors found at Abydos itself, Sethi I. and Rameses II. are seen offering homage154 to seventy-six historical kings, their predecessors on the throne of United Egypt.
Not only, however, is Osiris represented as a king and a mummy, but we are expressly told by Plutarch (or at least by the author of the tract155 De Osiride which bears his name) that the tomb of Osiris existed at Abydos, and that the richest and most powerful of the Egyptians were desirous of being buried in the adjacent cemetery, in order that 167they might lie, as it were, in the same grave with the great god of their country. All this is perfectly156 comprehensible and natural if we suppose that a Thinite dynasty first conquered the whole of Egypt; that it extended the worship of its own local ancestor-god over the entire country; and that in time, when this worship had assumed national importance, the local god became the chief figure in the common pantheon.
I had arrived at this opinion independently before I was aware that Mr. Loftie had anticipated me in it. But in his rare and interesting Essay on Scarabs I find he has reached the same conclusions.
“The divinity of Pharaoh,” says Mr. Loftie, “was the first article in the creed28 of the pyramid period, the earliest of which we know anything. As time went on, though the king was still called divine, we see him engaged in the worship of other gods. At last he appears as a priest himself; and when Herodotus and the later Greek historians visited Egypt, there was so little of this part of the old religion left that it is not even mentioned by them as a matter of importance.” This is quite natural, I may remark parenthetically, for as the antiquity and grandeur157 of the great gods increased, the gulf158 between them and mere159 men, even though those men were kings, their offspring, must always have grown ever wider and wider. “I have myself no doubt whatever,” Mr. Loftie goes on, “that the names of Osiris and of Horus are those of ancient rulers. I think that, long before authentic160 history begins, Asar and Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably in that wide valley of the Upper Nile which is now the site of Girgeh and Berb茅” (exactly where I place the principality of Osiris). “Their son was Hor, or Horus, the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt; and the ‘Hor seshoo.’ the successors of Horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers. I know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject, and much learning and ingenuity161 have been spent to prove that Asar, and Aset, and Hor, and 168Ptah, and Anep, are representations of the powers of nature; that they do not point to ancient princes, but to ancient principles; and that Horus and his successors are gods and were never men. But in the oldest inscriptions162 we find none of that mysticism which is shown in the sculptures from the time of the eighteenth dynasty down to the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors.” In short, Mr. Loftie goes on to set forth a theory of the origin of the great gods essentially similar to the one I am here defending.
Though a little out of place, I cannot help noting here the curious confirmatory fact that a number of ibis mummies have been found at Abvdos in close proximity163 to the mound where M. Mariette confidently expected to discover in the rock the actual tomb of Osiris himself. Hence we may conclude that the ibis was in all probability the totem of Abydos or This, as the bull was of Memphis, the crocodile of the Fayoum, the cat of Bubastis, and the baboon164 of Thebes. Now, the ibis-god of Abydos is Thoth; and it is noteworthy that Thoth, as recorder, always accompanies Osiris, in later legend, as judge of the dead: the local mummy-god, in other words, has as his assessor the local totem-god; and both are commonly to be seen on the monuments of Abydos, in company with Horus, Anubis, Isis, and other (probably) local divinities.
It is quite easy to see how, with this origin, Osiris would almost inevitably165 grow with time to be the King of the Dead, and supreme judge of the nether regions. For, as the most sacred of the ancestors of the regal line, he would naturally be the one whom the kings, in their turn, would most seek to propitiate166, and whom they would look forward to joining in their eternal home. As the myth extended, and as mystical interpretations167 began to creep in, identifications being made of the gods with the sun or other natural energies, the original meaning of Osiris-worship would grow gradually obscured. But to the last, Osiris himself, in spite of all corruptions169, is represented 169as a mummy: and even when identified with Amen, the later intrusive170 god, he still wears his mummy-bandages, and still bears the crook and scourge and sceptre of his primitive kingship.
It may be objected, however, that there were many forms of Orisis, and many local gods who bore the same name. He was buried at Abydos, but was also equally buried at Memphis, and at Phil忙 as well. The pretty little “Temple on the Roof” at Denderah is an exquisitely elaborate chapel to the local Osiris of that town, with chambers dedicated171 to the various other Osiris-gods of the forty-two nomes of ancient Egypt. Well, that fact runs exactly parallel with the local Madonnas and the local Apollos of other religions: and nobody has suggested doubts as to the human reality of the Blessed Virgin172 Mary because so many different Maries exist in different sacred sites or in different cathedrals. Our Lady of Loretto is the same as Our Lady of Lourdes. Jesus of Nazareth was nevertheless born at Bethlehem: he was the son of Joseph, but he was also the son of David, and the son of God. Perhaps Osiris was a common noun: perhaps a slightly different Osiris was worshipped in various towns of later Egypt; perhaps a local mummy-god, the ancestor of some extinct native line, often wrongly usurped173 the name and prerogatives174 of the great mummy-god of Abydos, especially under the influence of late priestly mysticism. Moreover, when we come to consider the subject of the manufacture of gods, we shall see that the body of an annual incarnation of Osiris may have been divided and distributed among all the nomes of Egypt. It is enough for my present purpose if I point out in brief that ancestor-worship amply explains the rise and prevalence of the cult of Osiris, the kingly mummy, with the associated cults of Horus, Isis, Thoth, and the other deities of the Osirian cycle.
I may add that a gradual growth of Osiris-worship is clearly marked on the monuments themselves. The simpler 170stel忙 and memorials of the earliest age seldom contain the names of any god, but display votaries making offerings at the shrine of ancestors. Similarly, the scenes represented on the walls of tombs of early date bear no reference to the great gods of later ages, but are merely domestic and agricultural in character, as may be observed at Sakkarah and even to some extent also at Beni-Hassan. Under the Sixth Dynasty, the monuments begin to make more and more frequent mention of Osiris, who now comes to be regarded as Judge of the Dead and Lord of the Lower World; and on a tablet of this age in the Boulak Museum occurs for the first time the expression afterwards so common, “justified by Osiris.” Under the Twelfth Dynasty, legend becomes more prominent; a solar and lunar character seems to be given by reflex to Osiris and Isis: and the name of Ra, the sun, is added to that of many previously175 distinct and independent deities. Khem, the ithyphallic god of the Thebaid, now also assumes greater importance, as is quite natural under a line of Theban princes: and Khem, a local mummy-god, is always represented in his swathing-clothes, and afterwards confounded, certainly with Amen, and probably also with the mummy-god of Abydos. But Osiris from this time forward rises distinctly into the front rank as a deity. “To him, rather than to the dead, the friends and family offer their sacrifices. A court is formed for him. Thoth, the recorder [totem-god of Abydos], Anubis the watcher, Ra the impersonation of truth, and others, assist in judgment176 on the soul.” The name of the deceased is henceforth constantly accompanied by the formula “justified by Osiris.” About the same time the Book of the Dead in its full form came into existence, with its developed conception of the lower world, and its complicated arrangement of planes of purgatorial177 progress.
Under the Eighteenth Dynasty, the legend thickens; the identifications of the gods become more and more intricate; Amen and Ra are sought and found under innumerable 171forms of other deities; and a foundation is laid for the esoteric Monotheism or pantheistic nature-worship of the later philosophising priesthood. It was under the Nineteenth Dynasty that the cult of local Triads or Trinities took fullest shape, and that the mystical interpretation168 of the religion of Egypt came well into the foreground. The great Osirian myth was then more and more minutely and mystically elaborated; and even the bull Apis, the totem-god of Memphis, was recognised as a special incarnation of Osiris, who thus becomes, with Amen, the mysterious summing-up of almost all the national pantheon. At last we find the myth going off into pure mysticism, Osiris being at once the father, brother, husband, and son of Isis, and also the son of his own child Horus. * Sentences with an almost Athanasian mixture of vagueness and definiteness inform us how “the son proceeds from the father, and the father proceeds from his son”; how “Ra is the soul of Osiris, and Osiris the soul of Ra and how Horus his child, awakened178 by magical rites from his dead body, is victorious179 over Set, the prince of darkness, and sits as Osiris upon the throne of the father whom he has revived and avenged180. Here as elsewhere the myth, instead of being the explanation of the god, does nothing more than darken counsel.”
* “Stories like the Osiris myth,” says Mr. Lang, “spring
from no pure religious source, but embody181 the delusions182 and
fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human
fancy and human speculation183.” This sentence enforces
precisely the same idea that I have previously expressed in
chapter ii. as to the real relations of religion and
mythology. The myth nowhere explains the cult; it casts no
light upon its origin or history; on the contrary, it only
obscures and overshadows the underlying184 kernel of genuine
fact.
In like manner, I believe, Ptah was originally a local mummy-god of Memphis, and Khem of Ap, afterwards known as Chemmis.
This gradual growth of a dead and mummified village chief, however, into a pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is not in any way more remarkable185 than the gradual growth 172of a Galilean peasant into the second person of an eternal and omnipotent186 Godhead. Nor does the myth of the death and resurrection of Osiris (to be considered hereafter in a later chapter) militate against the reality of his human existence any more than the history of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ militates against the human existence of Jesus of Nazareth. “Gross and crude euphemerism” may be bad; but airy and fantastic Max-mullerism appears to me just as unphilosophical.
The difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is not at all great, if we consider the further fact that even after the concept of godship had been fully developed, the king still remained of like nature with the gods, their son and descendant, a divine personage himself, differing from them only in not having yet received eternal life, the symbol of which they are often shown in sculpture as presenting with gracious expressions to their favoured scion188. “The ruling sovereign of Egypt,” says Mr. Le Page Renouf, “was the living image of and vicegerent of the sun-god. He was invested with the attributes of divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental evidence.” And quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled in Egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before Menes were significantly known as “the successors of Horus.” As late as the times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of Menes and other Pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings took the title of the Golden Horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from Chafra onward189 the reigning190 monarch was known as the Son of Ra and the Great God. Amenophis IL, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like Ra, the sacred seed of Amen, the son whom he begot191.” And on all the monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature192 as the gods themselves: he converses193 with them on equal terms; they lead him by the hand into their inmost sanctuaries194, or present him with the symbols of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family.
The 173former guerdon bestows195 upon him the same rank they themselves had held on earth; the latter advances him to share with them the glories of the other existence. In the temple of Kurneh, Rameses I. (then dead) receives the offerings and liturgies196 of his royal grandson. Hard by, Rameses II. offers to Amen-ra, Khonso, and Rameses I., without distinction of divinity. On the side wall, Sethi I. receives similar divine honours from the royal hands: while in the centre chamber Sethi himself officiates before the statue of his father placed in a shrine. The King is thus but the Living God: the God is thus but the Dead King.
I conclude, therefore, that a large part of the greater Egyptian gods—the national or local gods, as opposed to those worshipped by each family in its own necropolis—were early kings, whose myths were later expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and adorned197 by priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies. But down to the very latest age of independence, inscriptions of the god Euergetes, and the goddess Berenice, or representations like that at Phil忙, of the god Philadelphus suckled by Isis, show that to the Egyptian mind the gulf between humanity and divinity was very narrow, and that the original manhood of all the deities was an idea quite familiar to priests and people.
There was, however, another class of gods about which we can be somewhat less certain; these are the animal-gods and animal-headed gods which developed out of the totems of the various villages. Such bestial198 types, Professor Sayce remarks, “take us back to a remote prehistoric age, when the religious creed of Egypt,” say rather, the custom of Egypt, “was still totemism.” But in what precise relation totemism stood to the main line of the evolution of gods I do not feel quite so sure in my own mind as does Mr. Herbert Spencer. It seems to me possible that the totem may in its origin have been merely the lucky-beast or badge of a particular tribe (like the regimental 174goat or deer); and that from being at first petted, domesticated199, and to some extent respected on this account, it may have grown at last, through a confusion of ideas, to share the same sort of divine honours which were paid to the ghosts of ancestors and the gods evolved from them. But Mr. Frazer has suggested a better origin of totemism from the doctrine of the Separable Soul, which is, up to date, the best explanation yet offered of this obscure subject. Be that as it may, if the totems were only gradually elevated into divinities, we can easily understand Mr. Renouf’s remark that the long series of tombs of the Apis bulls at Sakkarah shows “how immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later times than in the former.”
May I add that the worship of totems, as distinct from the mere care implied by Mr. Frazer’s suggestion, very probably arose from the custom of carving200 the totem-animal of the deceased on the grave-stake or grave-board? This custom is still universal among the Indian tribes of Northwestern America.
Nevertheless, whatever be the true origin of the totem-gods, I do not think totemism militates in any way against the general principle of the evolution of the idea of a god from the ghost, the Dead Man, or the deified ancestor. For only after the concept of a god had been formed from ancestor-cult, and only after worship had been evolved from the customary offerings to the mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any other object by any possibility be elevated to the godhead. Nor, on the other hand, as I have before remarked, do I feel inclined wholly to agree with Mr. Spencer that every individual god was necessarily once a particular Dead Man. It seems to me indubitable that after the idea of godhead had become fully fixed in the human mind, some gods at least began to be recognised who were directly framed either from abstract conceptions, from natural objects, or from pure outbursts of the mythopoeic faculty201. I do not think, therefore, that the existence 175of a certain (relatively unimportant) class of totem-gods in Egypt or elsewhere is necessarily inconsistent in any way with our main theory of the origin of godhead.
Be this as it may, it is at any rate clear that totemism itself was a very ancient and widespread institution in early Egypt. Totems are defined by Mr. Frazer as “a class of material objects which a savage regards with superstitious202 respect, believing that there exists between him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special relation.” “Observation of existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia, and elsewhere,” says Sir Martin Conway, “shows us that one or more representatives of the totem are often fed or even kept alive in captivity203 by the tribe.” Mr. Frazer tells us that “amongst the Nar-rinyeri in South Australia, men of the snake clan204 sometimes catch snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up their mouths, and keep them as pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was carefully kept and fed. Amongst the Kalong in Java, whose totem is a red dog, each family as a rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on no account allow to be struck or ill-used by any one.” In the same way, no doubt, certain Egyptian clans205 kept sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks206, jackals, cobras, lizards207, ibises, asps, and beetles208. Mummies of most of these sacred animals, and little images of others, are common in the neighbourhood of certain places where they were specially worshipped.
Whether the animal-headed gods represent a later stage of the same totem-worship, or whether they stand merely for real ancestor-gods belonging to a particular totem-clan, and therefore represented by its totem, is not a question easily settled. But at any rate it is clear that many gods are the equivalents of such totem-animals, as is the case with the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the cow-headed Athor, the ram-headed Knum, the cat-headed Pasht, the lion-headed Sekhet, the ibis-headed 176Thoth, and the kestrel-headed Khons. These gods appear on the earlier monuments as beasts alone, not as human forms with bestial heads. Till the Twelfth Dynasty, when a totem-god is mentioned (which is not often), “he is represented,” says Mr. Flinders Petrie, “by his animal.” Anubis, for example, at this stage, is merely a jackal; and as M. Maspero puts it, “Whatever may have been the object of worship in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, not a hieroglyph17, that the earliest ibis-worshippers adored.” There were other totems, however, which were less fruitful in deities, but which entered largely in artistic209 forms into the later religious symbolism. Such were especially the asp and the sacred scarab忙us, which almost rival the sun-disk in the large part they play in the developed religious art-language of the great temple-building dynasties. I may add that among the other symbols of this curious emblematical210 picture-writing are the Tau or crux211 ansata, by origin apparently212 a combined linga and yoni; the lotus, the sceptre, the leek213, and the crescent.
There is, however, yet a third class of divine or quasidivine beings in the newer Egyptian Pantheon to which Mr. Andrew Lang, in his able introduction to the Euterpe of Herodotus, still allows that great importance may be attached. These are the elemental or seemingly elemental deities, the Nature-Gods who play so large a part in all rationalistic or mystical mythologies214. Such are no doubt Nut and Seb, the personal heaven and earth, named as early as the inscription on the coffin215 of Menkaoura of the Fourth Dynasty in the British Museum: such perhaps (though far less certainly) are Khons, identified with the rising sun, and Tum, regarded as the impersonation of his nightly setting. But none of the quite obviously elemental gods, except Ra, play any large part in the actual and practical worship of the people: to adopt the broad distinction I have ventured to draw in our second chapter, they are gods to talk about, not gods to adore—mythological216 conceptions rather than religious beings. Their names occur 177much in the sacred texts, but their images are rare and their temples unknown. It is not Nut or Seb whose figures we see carved abundantly in relief on the grey sandstone pillars of Karnak and Luxor, painted in endless file on the gesso-covered walls of the Tombs of the Kings, or represented by dozens in the great collection of little bronze idols that fill so many cabinets at the Boulak Museum. The actual objects of the highest worship are far other than these abstract elemental conceptions: they are Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis, Khem, Pasht, and Athor. The quaint217 or grotesque incised figures of Nut, represented as a female form with arms and legs extended like a living canopy218 over the earth, as at Denderah, belong, I believe, almost if not quite exclusively to the Ptolemaic period, when zodiacal and astrological conceptions had been freely borrowed by the Egyptians from Greece and Asia. Nut and Seb, as gods, not myths, are in short quite recent ideas in Egypt. Even sun-disk Ra, himself, important as he becomes in the later developed creed, is hardly so much in his origin a separate god as an adjunct or symbol of divinity united syncretically with the various other deities. To call a king the sun is a common piece of courtier flattery. It is as Amen-Ra or as Osiris that the sun receives most actual worship. His name is joined to the names of gods as to the names of kings: he is almost as much a symbol as the Tau or the Asp; he obtains little if any adoration in his simple form, but plenty when conjoined in a compound conception with some more practical deity of strictly219 human origin. Even at the great “Temple of the Sun” at Heliopolis, it was as the bull Men or Mnevis that the luminary220 was adored: and that cult, according to Manetho, went back as far as the totemistic times of the Second Dynasty.
To put it briefly, then, I hold that the element of nature-worship is a late gloss50 or superadded factor in the Egyptian religion; that it is always rather mythological or explanatory than religious in the strict sense; and that it does 178not in the least interfere221 with our general inference that the real Egyptian gods as a whole were either ancestral or totemistic in origin.
From the evidence before us, broadly considered, we may fairly conclude, then, that the earliest cult of Egypt consisted of pure ancestor-worship, complicated by a doubtfully religious element of totemism, which afterwards by one means or another interwove itself closely with the whole ghostly worship of the country. The later gods were probably deified ancestors of the early tribal kings, sometimes directly worshipped as mummies, and sometimes perhaps represented by their totem-animals or later still by human figures with animal heads. Almost every one of these great gods is localised to a particular place—“Lord of Abydos,” “Mistress of Senem,” “President of Thebes,” “Dweller at Hermopolis,” as would naturally be the case if they were locally-deified princes, admitted at last into a national pantheon. In the earliest period of which any monuments remain to us, the ancestor-worship was purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism or from the cult of the great gods than at any later time. With the gradual evolution of the creed and the pantheon, however, legends and myths increased, the syncretic tendency manifested itself everywhere, identifications multiplied, mysticism grew rife222, and an esoteric faith, with leanings towards a vague pantheistic monotheism, endeavoured to rationalise and to explain away the more gross and foolish portions of the original belief. It is the refinements223 and glosses of this final philosophical187 stage that pass current for the most part in systematic224 works as the true doctrines225 of Egyptian religion, and that so many modern enquirers have erroneously treated as equivalent to the earliest product of native thought. The ideas as to the unity226 of God, and the sun-myths of Horus, Isis, and Osiris, are clearly late developments or excrescences on the original creed, and betray throughout the esoteric spirit of priestly interpretation. To the very last, the Worship of the Dead, and the 179 crude polytheism based upon it, were the true religion of the ancient Egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the monuments.
Such was the religious world into which, if we may believe the oldest Semitic traditions, the Sons of Israel brought their God Jahweh and their other deities from beyond the Euphrates at a very remote period of their national history. And such, in its fuller and more mystical form, was the religion practised and taught in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, at the moment when the Christian227 faith was just beginning to evolve itself round the historical nucleus228 of the man Christ Jesus, and him crucified.
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1
majestic
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| adj.雄伟的，壮丽的，庄严的，威严的，崇高的 | |
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boulders
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| n.卵石( boulder的名词复数 )；巨砾；（受水或天气侵蚀而成的）巨石；漂砾 | |
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idols
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| 偶像( idol的名词复数 )； 受崇拜的人或物； 受到热爱和崇拜的人或物； 神像 | |
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stumps
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| （被砍下的树的）树桩( stump的名词复数 )； 残肢； （板球三柱门的）柱； 残余部分 | |
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briefly
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| adv.简单地，简短地 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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prehistoric
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| adj.（有记载的）历史以前的，史前的，古老的 | |
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deity
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| n.神，神性；被奉若神明的人(或物) | |
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primitive
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| adj.原始的；简单的；n.原(始)人，原始事物 | |
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deities
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| n.神，女神( deity的名词复数 )；神祗；神灵；神明 | |
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embodied
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| v.表现( embody的过去式和过去分词 )；象征；包括；包含 | |
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votaries
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| n.信徒( votary的名词复数 )；追随者；（天主教）修士；修女 | |
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bondage
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| n.奴役，束缚 | |
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rugged
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| adj.高低不平的，粗糙的，粗壮的，强健的 | |
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Mediterranean
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| adj.地中海的；地中海沿岸的 | |
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kernel
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| n.(果实的)核，仁；(问题)的中心，核心 | |
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hieroglyph
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| n.象形文字， 图画文字 | |
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hieroglyphic
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| n.象形文字 | |
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sojourn
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| v./n.旅居，寄居；逗留 | |
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essentially
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| adv.本质上，实质上，基本上 | |
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specially
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| adv.特定地；特殊地；明确地 | |
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cults
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| n.迷信( cult的名词复数 )；狂热的崇拜；（有极端宗教信仰的）异教团体 | |
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cult
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| n.异教，邪教；时尚，狂热的崇拜 | |
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peculiar
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| adj.古怪的，异常的；特殊的，特有的 | |
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philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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savage
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| adj.野蛮的；凶恶的，残暴的；n.未开化的人 | |
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creeds
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| （尤指宗教）信条，教条( creed的名词复数 ) | |
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creed
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| n.信条；信念，纲领 | |
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supreme
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| adj.极度的，最重要的；至高的，最高的 | |
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cosmos
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| n.宇宙；秩序，和谐 | |
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evolutionary
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| adj.进化的；演化的，演变的；[生]进化论的 | |
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fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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ward
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| n.守卫，监护，病房，行政区，由监护人或法院保护的人（尤指儿童）；vt.守护，躲开 | |
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pretensions
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| 自称( pretension的名词复数 )； 自命不凡； 要求； 权力 | |
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dissent
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| n./v.不同意，持异议 | |
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anthropological
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| adj.人类学的 | |
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doctrine
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| n.教义；主义；学说 | |
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promulgated
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| v.宣扬（某事物）( promulgate的过去式和过去分词 )；传播；公布；颁布（法令、新法律等） | |
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discredited
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| 不足信的，不名誉的 | |
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adoration
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| n.爱慕，崇拜 | |
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symbolical
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| a.象征性的 | |
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sublimer
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| 使高尚者，纯化器 | |
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elimination
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| n.排除，消除，消灭 | |
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warping
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| n.翘面，扭曲，变形v.弄弯，变歪( warp的现在分词 )；使（行为等）不合情理，使乖戾， | |
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45
precisely
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| adv.恰好，正好，精确地，细致地 | |
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fully
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| adv.完全地，全部地，彻底地；充分地 | |
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47
implicitly
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| adv. 含蓄地, 暗中地, 毫不保留地 | |
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isolation
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| n.隔离，孤立，分解，分离 | |
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49
disastrous
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| adj.灾难性的，造成灾害的；极坏的，很糟的 | |
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50
gloss
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| n.光泽，光滑；虚饰；注释；vt.加光泽于；掩饰 | |
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51
glosses
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| n.（页末或书后的）注释( gloss的名词复数 )；（表面的）光滑；虚假的外表；用以产生光泽的物质v.注解( gloss的第三人称单数 )；掩饰（错误）；粉饰；把…搪塞过去 | |
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52
disciple
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| n.信徒，门徒，追随者 | |
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savages
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| 未开化的人，野蛮人( savage的名词复数 ) | |
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54
infinitely
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| adv.无限地，无穷地 | |
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underlies
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| v.位于或存在于（某物）之下( underlie的第三人称单数 )；构成…的基础（或起因），引起 | |
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scanty
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| adj.缺乏的，仅有的，节省的，狭小的，不够的 | |
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kinsman
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| n.男亲属 | |
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antiquity
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| n.古老；高龄；古物，古迹 | |
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shrine
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| n.圣地，神龛，庙；v.将...置于神龛内，把...奉为神圣 | |
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preservation
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| n.保护，维护，保存，保留，保持 | |
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civilisation
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| n.文明，文化，开化，教化 | |
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corpse
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| n.尸体，死尸 | |
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mansion
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| n.大厦，大楼；宅第 | |
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abode
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| n.住处，住所 | |
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sumptuously
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| 奢侈地，豪华地 | |
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chambers
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| n.房间( chamber的名词复数 )；（议会的）议院；卧室；会议厅 | |
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chamber
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| n.房间，寝室；会议厅；议院；会所 | |
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chapels
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| n.小教堂， （医院、监狱等的）附属礼拜堂( chapel的名词复数 )；（在小教堂和附属礼拜堂举行的）礼拜仪式 | |
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chapel
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| n.小教堂，殡仪馆 | |
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cemetery
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| n.坟墓，墓地，坟场 | |
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celebrated
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| adj.有名的，声誉卓著的 | |
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72
fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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73
depicted
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| 描绘，描画( depict的过去式和过去分词 )； 描述 | |
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74
undoubtedly
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| adv.确实地，无疑地 | |
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75
devoted
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| adj.忠诚的，忠实的，热心的，献身于...的 | |
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76
survivors
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| 幸存者，残存者，生还者( survivor的名词复数 ) | |
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77
concealed
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| a.隐藏的，隐蔽的 | |
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78
dwelling
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| n.住宅，住所，寓所 | |
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79
stele
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| n.石碑，石柱 | |
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80
aperture
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| n.孔，隙，窄的缺口 | |
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81
reposed
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| v.将（手臂等）靠在某人（某物）上( repose的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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82
violation
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| n.违反(行为)，违背(行为)，侵犯 | |
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83
outrage
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| n.暴行，侮辱，愤怒；vt.凌辱，激怒 | |
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84
nether
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| adj.下部的，下面的；n.阴间；下层社会 | |
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85
inscription
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| n.（尤指石块上的）刻印文字，铭文，碑文 | |
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86
Founder
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| n.创始者，缔造者 | |
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87
enumerated
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| v.列举，枚举，数( enumerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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88
rites
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| 仪式，典礼( rite的名词复数 ) | |
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89
predecessors
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| n.前任( predecessor的名词复数 )；前辈；（被取代的）原有事物；前身 | |
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90
monarch
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| n.帝王，君主，最高统治者 | |
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91
persistent
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| adj.坚持不懈的，执意的；持续的 | |
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92
veneration
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| n.尊敬，崇拜 | |
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93
negligence
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| n.疏忽，玩忽，粗心大意 | |
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94
extinction
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| n.熄灭，消亡，消灭，灭绝，绝种 | |
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95
begetting
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| v.为…之生父( beget的现在分词 )；产生，引起 | |
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96
undertaking
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| n.保证，许诺，事业 | |
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97
thoroughly
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| adv.完全地，彻底地，十足地 | |
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98
maxims
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| n.格言，座右铭( maxim的名词复数 ) | |
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99
herd
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| n.兽群，牧群；vt.使集中，把…赶在一起 | |
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100
lesser
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| adj.次要的，较小的；adv.较小地，较少地 | |
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101
functionaries
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| n.公职人员，官员( functionary的名词复数 ) | |
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102
exquisitely
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| adv.精致地；强烈地；剧烈地；异常地 | |
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103
mighty
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| adj.强有力的；巨大的 | |
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104
dreary
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| adj.令人沮丧的，沉闷的，单调乏味的 | |
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105
mouldering
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| v.腐朽( moulder的现在分词 )；腐烂，崩塌 | |
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106
desecrated
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| 毁坏或亵渎( desecrate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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107
emblems
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| n.象征，标记( emblem的名词复数 ) | |
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108
monarchs
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| 君主，帝王( monarch的名词复数 ) | |
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109
subterranean
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| adj.地下的，地表下的 | |
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110
profusion
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| n.挥霍；丰富 | |
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111
mansions
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| n.宅第，公馆，大厦( mansion的名词复数 ) | |
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112
destined
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| adj.命中注定的；(for)以…为目的地的 | |
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113
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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114
excavations
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| n.挖掘( excavation的名词复数 )；开凿；开凿的洞穴（或山路等）；（发掘出来的）古迹 | |
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115
impartial
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| adj.(in,to)公正的，无偏见的 | |
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116
reverence
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| n.敬畏，尊敬，尊严；Reverence:对某些基督教神职人员的尊称；v.尊敬，敬畏，崇敬 | |
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117
funereal
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| adj.悲哀的；送葬的 | |
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118
everlasting
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| adj.永恒的，持久的，无止境的 | |
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119
quotations
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| n.引用( quotation的名词复数 )；[商业]行情（报告）；（货物或股票的）市价；时价 | |
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120
anticipations
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| 预期( anticipation的名词复数 )； 预测； （信托财产收益的）预支； 预期的事物 | |
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121
alluded
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| 提及，暗指( allude的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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122
grottos
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| n.（吸引人的）岩洞，洞穴，（人挖的）洞室( grotto的名词复数 ) | |
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123
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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124
abeyance
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| n.搁置，缓办，中止，产权未定 | |
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125
transcribed
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| （用不同的录音手段）转录( transcribe的过去式和过去分词 )； 改编（乐曲）（以适应他种乐器或声部）； 抄写； 用音标标出（声音） | |
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126
grotesque
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| adj.怪诞的，丑陋的；n.怪诞的图案，怪人（物） | |
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127
inscribed
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| v.写，刻( inscribe的过去式和过去分词 )；内接 | |
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128
dominant
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| adj.支配的，统治的；占优势的；显性的；n.主因，要素，主要的人(或物)；显性基因 | |
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129
diffused
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| 散布的，普及的，扩散的 | |
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130
justified
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| a.正当的，有理的 | |
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131
irreconcilable
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| adj.（指人）难和解的，势不两立的 | |
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132
mythology
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| n.神话，神话学，神话集 | |
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133
tempted
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| v.怂恿（某人）干不正当的事；冒…的险（tempt的过去分词） | |
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134
revered
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| v.崇敬，尊崇，敬畏( revere的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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135
pious
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| adj.虔诚的；道貌岸然的 | |
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136
slain
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| 杀死，宰杀，杀戮( slay的过去分词 )； (slay的过去分词) | |
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137
generic
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| adj.一般的，普通的，共有的 | |
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138
anterior
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| adj.较早的；在前的 | |
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139
potentates
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| n.君主，统治者( potentate的名词复数 )；有权势的人 | |
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140
tribal
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| adj.部族的，种族的 | |
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141
adoption
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| n.采用，采纳，通过；收养 | |
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142
reigned
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| vi.当政，统治（reign的过去式形式） | |
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143
irresistible
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| adj.非常诱人的，无法拒绝的，无法抗拒的 | |
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144
mound
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| n.土墩，堤，小山；v.筑堤，用土堆防卫 | |
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145
papyrus
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| n.古以纸草制成之纸 | |
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146
monarchy
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| n.君主，最高统治者；君主政体，君主国 | |
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147
venerated
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| 敬重（某人或某事物），崇敬( venerate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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148
derives
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| v.得到( derive的第三人称单数 )；（从…中）得到获得；源于；（从…中）提取 | |
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149
crook
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| v.使弯曲；n.小偷，骗子，贼；弯曲(处) | |
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150
scourge
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| n.灾难，祸害；v.蹂躏 | |
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151
ostrich
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| n.鸵鸟 | |
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152
plumes
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| 羽毛( plume的名词复数 )； 羽毛饰； 羽毛状物； 升上空中的羽状物 | |
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153
naught
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| n.无，零 [=nought] | |
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154
homage
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| n.尊敬，敬意，崇敬 | |
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155
tract
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| n.传单，小册子，大片(土地或森林) | |
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156
perfectly
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| adv.完美地，无可非议地，彻底地 | |
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157
grandeur
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| n.伟大，崇高，宏伟，庄严，豪华 | |
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158
gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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159
mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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160
authentic
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| a.真的，真正的；可靠的，可信的，有根据的 | |
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161
ingenuity
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| n.别出心裁；善于发明创造 | |
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162
inscriptions
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| （作者）题词( inscription的名词复数 )； 献词； 碑文； 证劵持有人的登记 | |
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163
proximity
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| n.接近，邻近 | |
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164
baboon
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| n.狒狒 | |
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165
inevitably
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| adv.不可避免地；必然发生地 | |
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166
propitiate
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| v.慰解，劝解 | |
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167
interpretations
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| n.解释( interpretation的名词复数 )；表演；演绎；理解 | |
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168
interpretation
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| n.解释，说明，描述；艺术处理 | |
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169
corruptions
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| n.堕落( corruption的名词复数 )；腐化；腐败；贿赂 | |
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170
intrusive
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| adj.打搅的；侵扰的 | |
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171
dedicated
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| adj.一心一意的；献身的；热诚的 | |
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172
virgin
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| n.处女，未婚女子；adj.未经使用的；未经开发的 | |
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173
usurped
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| 篡夺，霸占( usurp的过去式和过去分词 )； 盗用； 篡夺，篡权 | |
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174
prerogatives
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| n.权利( prerogative的名词复数 )；特权；大主教法庭；总督委任组成的法庭 | |
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175
previously
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| adv.以前，先前（地） | |
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176
judgment
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| n.审判；判断力，识别力，看法，意见 | |
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177
purgatorial
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| adj.炼狱的，涤罪的 | |
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178
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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179
victorious
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| adj.胜利的，得胜的 | |
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180
avenged
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| v.为…复仇，报…之仇( avenge的过去式和过去分词 )；为…报复 | |
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181
embody
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| vt.具体表达，使具体化；包含，收录 | |
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182
delusions
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| n.欺骗( delusion的名词复数 )；谬见；错觉；妄想 | |
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183
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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184
underlying
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| adj.在下面的，含蓄的，潜在的 | |
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185
remarkable
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| adj.显著的，异常的，非凡的，值得注意的 | |
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186
omnipotent
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| adj.全能的，万能的 | |
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187
philosophical
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| adj.哲学家的，哲学上的，达观的 | |
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188
scion
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| n.嫩芽，子孙 | |
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189
onward
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| adj.向前的，前进的；adv.向前，前进，在先 | |
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190
reigning
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| adj.统治的，起支配作用的 | |
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191
begot
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| v.为…之生父( beget的过去式 )；产生，引起 | |
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192
stature
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| n.（高度）水平，（高度）境界，身高，身材 | |
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193
converses
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| v.交谈，谈话( converse的第三人称单数 ) | |
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194
sanctuaries
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| n.避难所( sanctuary的名词复数 )；庇护；圣所；庇护所 | |
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195
bestows
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| 赠给，授予( bestow的第三人称单数 ) | |
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196
liturgies
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| n.礼拜仪式( liturgy的名词复数 )；（英国国教的）祈祷书 | |
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197
adorned
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| [计]被修饰的 | |
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198
bestial
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| adj.残忍的；野蛮的 | |
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199
domesticated
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| adj.喜欢家庭生活的；（指动物）被驯养了的v.驯化( domesticate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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carving
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| n.雕刻品，雕花 | |
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faculty
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| n.才能；学院，系；(学院或系的)全体教学人员 | |
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superstitious
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| adj.迷信的 | |
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captivity
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| n.囚禁；被俘；束缚 | |
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clan
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| n.氏族，部落，宗族，家族，宗派 | |
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clans
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| 宗族( clan的名词复数 )； 氏族； 庞大的家族； 宗派 | |
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hawks
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| 鹰( hawk的名词复数 )； 鹰派人物，主战派人物 | |
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lizards
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| n.蜥蜴( lizard的名词复数 ) | |
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beetles
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| n.甲虫( beetle的名词复数 ) | |
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artistic
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| adj.艺术(家)的，美术(家)的；善于艺术创作的 | |
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emblematical
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| adj.标志的，象征的，典型的 | |
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crux
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| adj.十字形；难事，关键，最重要点 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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leek
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| n.韭葱 | |
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mythologies
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| 神话学( mythology的名词复数 )； 神话（总称）； 虚构的事实； 错误的观点 | |
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coffin
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| n.棺材，灵柩 | |
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mythological
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| adj.神话的 | |
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quaint
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| adj.古雅的，离奇有趣的，奇怪的 | |
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canopy
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| n.天篷，遮篷 | |
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strictly
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| adv.严厉地，严格地；严密地 | |
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luminary
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| n.名人，天体 | |
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interfere
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| v.(in)干涉，干预；(with)妨碍，打扰 | |
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rife
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| adj.(指坏事情)充斥的，流行的，普遍的 | |
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refinements
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| n.（生活）风雅；精炼( refinement的名词复数 )；改良品；细微的改良；优雅或高贵的动作 | |
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systematic
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| adj.有系统的，有计划的，有方法的 | |
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doctrines
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| n.教条( doctrine的名词复数 )；教义；学说；（政府政策的）正式声明 | |
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unity
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| n.团结，联合，统一；和睦，协调 | |
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Christian
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| adj.基督教徒的；n.基督教徒 | |
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nucleus
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| n.核，核心，原子核 | |
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