an ibis. Some goddesses are lioness-headed and cat-headed; others sometimes have the head of a cow. Osiris, despite his human character, was supposed to dwell in the sacred bull Apis; and each divinity had a living representative in a quadruped, bird, reptile, or fish, while sacred trees and mountains were held in reverence. How can so low a pedestal be reconciled with so high a superstructure? When it is remembered that the Egyptian worship is intensely local, that each town had its special divinity and sacred animal, we find the clue out of this labyrinthine question, in which some inquirers have lost themselves, while others, having reached, as they thought, the end, have given up the subject in despair, like the old visitor who entered a beautiful Egyptian temple, and after traversing its spacious chambers rich with painted sculptures, marvelled to find in the innermost shrine a cat or crocodile or serpent. The clue is that at each settlement that worship of a local fetish which is a characteristic of the negroes, was a tradition derived from the original population. Generally, when a race of superior belief has conquered one of inferior belief, it has endeavored to substitute its faith for the lower one, by connecting the two. Thus a taint has injured most religions, the higher never succeeding in effacing the lower. This theory accounts for much in Greek mythology. Why should the laurel have been sacred to Apollo, the tortoise to Aphrodite, save for this, reason, that in their adopted country the Greeks found certain trees and animals worshipped by the earlier population whom they sought to conciliate by connecting the lower object of worship with the higher ideal they themselves reverenced? Similarly the old agalmata of barbarous form which their predecessors had received from Egypt or copied on Egyptian models were gradually superseded by more fit representations. In literature we may trace the transition when Homer uses epithets that cannot be doubted to be taken from old animal-headed forms for the divinities he describes with human characteristics. In art the transition is seen in the story of Onatas the sculptor, who, when charged to execute a statue of the horse-headed Demeter, whose agalma had been destroyed by fire, being perplexed how to do so in an age of growing art, saw the goddess in a dream, and no doubt then represented her in accordance with the higher ideas of his time. Another striking instance is seen in the nome-coins of Egypt struck under Roman emperors, when Greek ideas were strong in the country, on which the divinity of the province, though in some cases animal-headed, in others has a human form, and carries in his hand the sacred animal of the nome.
We can therefore scarcely doubt whence arose the combination of animal-worship with sun-worship (of Shemite origin?), and the union of the animal's head with the human body in the representations of the local divinities of the mixed system thus formed. Rarely can we find anything appropriate in the union. It is true that the sun-gods have the head of the hawk, a bird of the noble family which gazes at the sun; the sun-goddesses that of the luminous-eyed feline tribe, usually of its highest member the lioness; but for the most part the associations seem to be the effect of mere chance. It may be asked why any should be appropriate if they were the result of the adoption of existing superstitions by new-comers into Egypt; but it should be remembered that we cannot suppose all the towns of Egypt to have been growths from older Nigritian settlements. Memphis we know was not, and we may infer the same of Hermopolis Magna. The prominence of the lower element in the Egyptian religion need not surprise us when we see the old sacred stone at Mekkeh (the Black Stone) still venerated by nearly all Muslims, and yet more remarkably see in Egypt itself a sacred snake reverenced at the tomb of the Sheykh el-Hareedee in Upper Egypt, which must be the representative of a long series of sacred snakes which have held their own from the overthrow of paganism through fourteen centuries to the present day.
Writing was as old in Egypt as architecture and sculpture. The papyrus reed, as already noticed, furnished the most ancient material for paper in the days of the oldest monuments. The dry climate has preserved a great number of ancient rolls, of which most are religious, and of these again the greater part copies of one book, the "Ritual," which French scholars call the "Funereal Ritual," and Germans the "Book of the Dead." It is a work evidently compiled from time to time, divided into sections, originally separate books, and chapters, each chapter being usually illustrated by a representation of its chief subject above the text. Part of this book has been found of the date of the eleventh dynasty (before b.c. 2000), and according to its own statement, which derives collateral support from a more general assertion of Manetho, one chapter was discovered
