ship which reached northwards, through Syria, to Nineveh, and extended eastwards to the frontiers of China. He was the sacred animal of Phtha Socharis Osiris, the god of Memphis. While, however, in the Hindhu religion,[1] the god rides on his sacred animal, and in the Assyrian and Phœnician creed stands upon it, and among the later Greeks it draws his chariot, in Egypt the animal was totally detached, and accompanied his processions or gave his oracles. The reason of this animal worship was very obscure to the Greeks, who were of course struck with it, and made certain inquiries into the causes. The popular legends informed them that the gods assumed the forms of animals to escape the wickedness of mankind; that they deified them from having used their images as standards, or from the benefits which they conferred upon mankind.[2] Others affirmed that it was a political institution to create discord among the inhabitants of the different nomes.[3] Similar reasons are given by the writer of the tract on Isis and Osiris,[4] and by Porphyry,[5] who propounds a truer hypothesis, that they represented the universal power of the divinity as displayed in animated nature.[6]
The true reason, concealed in the origin, has been probably obliterated in the growth of the system, in which are mixed up several notions: such as the incarnation of a part of the divine soul in the actual animal;[7] the idea represented by the animal in hieroglyphics, such as a sheep or goat having the same appellation as the soul—ba; the word for jackal sabu also signifying craft;[8] the animal's use for oracular purposes; and the physical power symbolised by it in the great system of nature; the selected animal representing Κατ' ἐξοχὴν, the predominant characteristic of his tribe. Traditions and considerations of a nature unintellegible to modern science, induced or justified the selection. The discovery of the mode of reading the hieroglyphics enables us to take a more certain ground in the inquiry.
The name of Apis, in hieroglyphics Hepi, is significant, being the past participle of the verb hep. On a tablet, formerly in Lord Belmore's Collection, now in the British
- ↑ Cory. Mythological Inquiry, 12mo, Lond. 1837, p. 1, and foll.
- ↑ Diod. i. 86; i. 12.
- ↑ Ibid. Cic. N. D. I. 26.
- ↑ The false Plutarch, de Is. s. 72, evidently a Syrian writer, connected with the introduction of the Isiac worship into Asia Minor.
- ↑ De Abst., c. ix.
- ↑ Wilk. M., c. iv. pp. 109, 110.
- ↑ champ. Not. Deser. du Musée Charles X, 16mo, Par. 1827, p. 38.
- ↑ Birch. Gallery of Antiquities, 4to, Lond., 1840, p. 49.
