itself to the eyes of Herodotus? Unluckily we have no such eye-witnesses of the earlier Egyptian as Bernal Diaz was of the Aztec temples. The Bible says little that is definite about the theological "wisdom of the Egyptians." When confronted with the sacred beasts, Herodotus might have used with double truth the Greek saw, "A great ox has trod upon my tongue."[1] The bull Hapi (Apis) constrained his speech to cautious stammering, if not to silence. But what Herodotus hinted at or left unsaid is gathered from the evidence of tombs and temple walls and illuminated papyri.
One point is certain. Whatever else the religion of Egypt may at any time have been, it struck every foreign observer as polytheism.[2] Moreover, it was a polytheism like another. The Greeks had no difficulty, for example, in recognising amongst these beast-headed monsters gods analogous to their own. This is demonstrated by the fact that to almost every deity of Egypt they readily and unanimously assigned a Greek divine name. Seizing on a certain aspect of Osiris and of his mystery-play, they made him Dionysus; Hor became Apollo; Ptah, Hephæstus; Ammon Ra, Zeus; Thoth, Hermes, and so on with the rest. The Egyptian deities were recognised as divine beings, with certain (generally ill-defined) departments of Nature and of human activity under their care. Some of them, like Seb (earth) and Nut (heaven), were esteemed elemental
- ↑ Æschylus, Agamemnon, 37, βοῦς ἐπὶ γλώσσῃ μέγας βέβηκεν.
- ↑ Maspero, Musée de Boulaq, p. 150; Le Page Renouf, Hib Lect., pp. 85–86.
