by Will Durant
His Gracious Majesty grants the permission, advising him, however, to “discourse without causing weariness”—advice not yet superfluous for philosophers. Whereupon Ptah-hotep instructs his son:
Be not proud because thou art learned; but discourse with the ignorant man as with the sage. For no limit can be set to skill, neither is there any craftsman that possesseth full advantages. Fair speech is more rare than the emerald that is found by slave-maidens among the pebbles. . . . Live, therefore, in the house of kindliness, and men shall come and give gifts of themselves. . . . Beware of making enmity by thy words. . . . Overstep not the truth, neither repeat that which any man, be he prince or peasant, saith in opening the heart; it is abhorrent to the soul. . . .
If thou wouldst be a wise man, beget a son for the pleasing of the god. If he make straight his course after thine example, if he arrange thine affairs in due order, do all unto him that is good. . . . If he be heedless and trespass thy rules of conduct, and is violent; if every speech that cometh from his mouth is a vile word; then beat thou him, that his talk may be fitting. . . . Precious to a man is the virtue of his son, and good character is a thing remembered. . . .
Wheresover thou goest, beware of consorting with women. . . . If thou wouldst be wise, provide for thine house, and love thy wife that is in thine arms. . . . Silence is more profitable to thee than abundance of speech. Consider how thou mayest be opposed by an expert that speaketh in council. It is a foolish thing to speak on every kind of work. . . .
If thou be powerful make thyself to be honored for knowledge and for gentleness. . . . Beware of interruption, and of answering words with heat; put it from thee; control thyself.
And Ptah-hotep concludes with Horatian pride:
Nor shall any word that hath here been set down cease out of this land forever, but shall be made a pattern whereby princes shall speak well. My words shall instruct a man how he shall speak; . . . yea, he shall become as one skilful in obeying, excellent in speaking. Good fortune shall befall him; . . . he shall be gracious until the end of his life; he shall be contented always.224
This note of good cheer does not persist in Egyptian thought; age comes upon it quickly, and sours it. Another sage, Ipuwer, bemoans the disorder, violence, famine and decay that attended the passing of the Old Kingdom; he tells of sceptics who “would make offerings if” they “knew where the god is”; he comments upon increasing suicide, and adds, like another Schopenhauer: “Would that there might be an end of men, that there might be no conception, no birth. If the land would but cease from noise, and strife be no more”—it is clear that Ipuwer was tired and old. In the end he dreams of a philosopher-king who will redeem men from chaos and injustice:
He brings cooling to the flame (of the social conflagration?). It is said he is the shepherd of all men. There is no evil in his heart. When his herds are few he passes the day to gather them together, their hearts being fevered. Would that he had discerned their character in the first generation. Then would he have smitten evil. He would have stretched forth his arm against it. He would have smitten the seed thereof and their inheritance. . . . Where is he today? Doth he sleep perchance? Behold, his might is not seen.225
This already is the voice of the prophets; the lines are cast into strophic form, like the prophetic writings of the Jews; and Breasted properly acclaims these “Admonitions” as “the earliest emergence of a social idealism which among the Hebrews we call ‘Messianism.’”226 Another scroll from the Middle Kingdom denounces the corruption of the age in words that almost every generation hears:
To whom do I speak today?
Brothers are evil,
Friends of today are not of love.
To whom do I speak today?
Hearts are thievish,
Every man seizes his neighbor’s goods.
To whom do I speak today?
The gentle man perishes,
The bold-faced goes everywhere. . . .
To whom do I speak today?
When a man should arouse wrath by his evil conduct
He stirs all men to mirth, although his iniquity is wicked. . . .
And then this Egyptian Swinburne pours out a lovely eulogy of death:
Death is before me today
Like the recovery of a sick man,
Like going forth into a garden after sickness.
Death is before me today
Like the odor of myrrh,
Like sitting under the sail on a windy day.
Death is before me today
Like the odor of lotus-flowers,
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
Death is before me today
Like the course of a freshet,
Like the return of a man from the war-galley to his house. . . .
Death is before me today
As a man longs to see his home
When he had spent years of captivity.227
Saddest of all is a poem engraved upon a slab now in the Leyden Museum, and dating back to 2200 B.C. Carpe diem, it sings—snatch the day!
I have heard the words of Imhotep and Hardedef,
Words greatly celebrated as their utterances.
Behold the places thereof!—
Their walls are dismantled,
Their places are no more,
As if they had never been.
None cometh from thence
That he may tell us how they fare; . . .
That he may content our hearts
Until we too depart
To the place whither they have gone.
Encourage thy heart to forget it,
Making it pleasant for thee to follow thy desire
While thou livest.
Put myrrh upon thy head,
And garments upon thee of fine linen,
Imbued with marvelous luxuries,
The genuine things of the gods.
Increase yet more thy delights,
And let not thy heart languish.
Follow thy desire and thy good,
Fashion thy affairs on earth
After the mandates of thine own heart,
Till that day of lamentation come to thee
When the silent-hearted (dead) hears not their lamentation,
Nor he that is in the tomb attends the mourning.
Celebrate the glad day;
Be not weary therein.
Lo, no man taketh his goods with him;
Yea, none returneth again that is gone thither.228
This pessimism and scepticism were the result, it may be, of the broken spirit of a nation humiliated and subjected by the Hyksos invaders; they bear the same relation to Egypt that Stoicism and Epicureanism bear to a defeated and enslaved Greece.* In part such literature represents one of those interludes, like our own moral interregnum, in which thought has for a time overcome belief, and men no longer know how or why they should live. Such periods do not endure; hope soon wins the victory over thought; the intellect is put down to its customary menial place, and religion is born again, giving to men the imaginative stimulus apparently indispensable to life and work. We need not suppose that such poems expressed the views of any large number of Egyptians; behind and around the small but vital minority that pondered the problems of life and death in secular and naturalistic terms were millions of simple men and women who remained faithful to the gods, and never doubted that right would triumph, that every earthly pain and grief would be atoned for bountifully in a haven of happiness and peace.
11. Religion
Sky gods—The sun god—Plant gods—Animal gods—Sex gods—Human gods—Osiris—Isis and Horus—Minor deities—The priests—Immortality—The “Book of the Dead”—The “Negative Confession”—Magic—Corruption
For beneath and above everything in Egypt was religion. We find it there in every stage and form from totemism to theology; we see its influence in literature, in government, in art, in everything except morality. And it is not only varied, it is tropically abundant; only i
n Rome and India shall we find so plentiful a pantheon. We cannot understand the Egyptian—or man—until we study his gods.
In the beginning, said the Egyptian, was the sky; and to the end this and the Nile remained his chief divinities. All these marvelous heavenly bodies were not mere bodies, they were the external forms of mighty spirits, gods whose wills—not always concordant—ordained their complex and varied movements.229 The sky itself was a vault, across whose vastness a great cow stood, who was the goddess Hathor; the earth lay beneath her feet, and her belly was clad in the beauty of ten thousand stars. Or (for the gods and myths differed from nome to nome) the sky was the god Sibu, lying tenderly upon the earth, which was the goddess Nuit; from their gigantic copulation all things had been born.230 Constellations and stars might be gods: for example, Sahu and Sopdit (Orion and Sirius) were tremendous deities; Sahu ate gods three times a day regularly. Occasionally some such monster ate the moon, but only for a moment; soon the prayers of men and the anger of the other gods forced the greedy sow to vomit it up again.231 In this manner the Egyptian populace explained an eclipse of the moon.
The moon was a god, perhaps the oldest of all that were worshiped in Egypt; but in the official theology the greatest of the gods was the sun. Sometimes it was worshiped as the supreme deity Ra or Re, the bright father who fertilized Mother Earth with rays of penetrating heat and light; sometimes it was a divine calf, born anew at every dawn, sailing the sky slowly in a celestial boat, and descending into the west, at evening, like an old man tottering to his grave. Or the sun was the god Horus, taking the graceful form of a falcon, flying majestically across the heavens day after day as if in supervision of his realm, and becoming one of the recurrent symbols of Egyptian religion and royalty. Always Ra, or the sun, was the Creator: at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare, he had flooded it with his energizing rays, and all living things—vegetable, animal and human—had sprung pell-mell from his eyes, and been scattered over the world. The earliest men and women, being direct children of Ra, had been perfect and happy; by degrees their descendants had taken to evil ways, and had forfeited this perfection and happiness; whereupon Ra, dissatisfied with his creatures, had destroyed a large part of the human race. Learned Egyptians questioned this popular belief, and asserted on the contrary (like certain Sumerian scholars), that the first men had been like brutes, without articulate speech or any of the arts of life.232 All in all it was an intelligent mythology, expressing piously man’s gratitude to earth and sun.
So exuberant was this piety that the Egyptians worshiped not merely the source, but almost every form, of life. Many plants were sacred to them: the palm-tree that shaded them amid the desert, the spring that gave them drink in the oasis, the grove where they could meet and rest, the sycamore flourishing miraculously in the sand; these were, with excellent reason, holy things, and to the end of his civilization the simple Egyptian brought them offerings of cucumbers, grapes and figs.233 Even the lowly vegetable found its devotees; and Taine amused himself by showing how the onion that so displeased Bossuet had been a divinity on the banks of the Nile.234
More popular were the animal gods; they were so numerous that they filled the Egyptian pantheon like a chattering menagerie. In one nome or another, in one period or another, Egyptians worshiped the bull, the crocodile, the hawk, the cow, the goose, the goat, the ram, the cat, the dog, the chicken, the swallow, the jackal, the serpent, and allowed some of these creatures to roam in the temples with the same freedom that is accorded to the sacred cow in India today.235 When the gods became human they still retained animal doubles and symbols: Amon was represented as a goose or a ram, Ra as a grasshopper or a bull, Osiris as a bull or a ram, Sebek as a crocodile, Horus as a hawk or falcon, Hathor as a cow, and Thoth, the god of wisdom, as a baboon.236 Sometimes women were offered to certain of these animals as sexual mates; the bull in particular, as the incarnation of Osiris, received this honor; and at Mendes, says Plutarch, the most beautiful women were offered in coitus to the divine goat.237 From beginning to end this totemism remained as an essential and native element in Egyptian religion; human gods came to Egypt much later, and probably as gifts from western Asia.238
The goat and the bull were especially sacred to the Egyptians as representing sexual creative power; they were not merely symbols of Osiris, but incarnations of him.239 Often Osiris was depicted with large and prominent organs, as a mark of his supreme power; and models of him in this form, or with a triple phallus, were borne in religious processions by the Egyptians; on certain occasions the women carried such phallic images, and operated them mechanically with strings.240* Signs of sex worship appear not only in the many cases in which figures are depicted, on temple reliefs, with erect organs, but in the frequent appearance, in Egyptian symbolism, of the crux ansata—a cross with a handle, as a sign of sexual union and vigorous life.241
At last the gods became human—or rather, men became gods. Like the deities of Greece, the personal gods of Egypt were merely superior men and women, made in heroic mould, but composed of bone and muscle, flesh and blood; they hungered and ate, thirsted and drank, loved and mated, hated and killed, grew old and died.242 There was Osiris, for example, god of the beneficent Nile, whose death and resurrection were celebrated yearly as symbolizing the fall and rise of the river, and perhaps the decay and growth of the soil. Every Egyptian of the later dynasties could tell the story of how Set (or Sit), the wicked god of desiccation, who shriveled up harvests with his burning breath, was angered at Osiris (the Nile) for extending (with his overflow) the fertility of the earth, slew him, and reigned in dry majesty over Osiris’ kingdom (i.e., the river once failed to rise), until Horus, brave son of Isis, overcame Set and banished him; whereafter Osiris, brought back to life by the warmth of Isis’ love, ruled benevolently over Egypt, suppressed cannibalism, established civilization, and then ascended to heaven to reign there endlessly as a god.243 It was a profound myth; for history, like Oriental religion, is dualistic—a record of the conflict between creation and destruction, fertility and desiccation, rejuvenation and exhaustion, good and evil, life and death.
Profound, too, was the myth of Isis, the Great Mother. She was not only the loyal sister and wife of Osiris; in a sense she was greater than he, for—like woman in general—she had conquered death through love. Nor was she merely the black soil of the Delta, fertilized by the touch of Osiris-Nile, and making all Egypt rich with her fecundity. She was, above all, the symbol of that mysterious creative power which had produced the earth and every living thing, and of that maternal tenderness whereby, at whatever cost to the mother, the young new life is nurtured to maturity. She represented in Egypt—as Kali, Ishtar and Cybele represented in Asia, Demeter in Greece, and Ceres in Rome—the original priority and independence of the female principle in creation and in inheritance, and the originative leadership of woman in tilling the earth; for it was Isis (said the myth) who had discovered wheat and barley growing wild in Egypt, and had revealed them to Osiris (man).244 The Egyptians worshiped her with especial fondness and piety, and raised up jeweled images to her as the Mother of God; her tonsured priests praised her in sonorous matins and vespers; and in midwinter of each year, coincident with the annual rebirth of the sun towards the end of our December, the temples of her divine child, Horus (god of the sun), showed her, in holy effigy, nursing in a stable the babe that she had miraculously conceived. These poetic-philosophic legends and symbols profoundly affected Christian ritual and theology. Early Christians sometimes worshiped before the statues of Isis suckling the infant Horus, seeing in them another form of the ancient and noble myth by which woman (i.e., the female principle), creating all things, becomes at last the Mother of God.245
These—Ra (or, as he was called in the South, Amon), Osiris, Isis and Horus—were the greater gods of Egypt. In later days Ra, Amon and another god, Ptah, were combined as three embodiments or aspects of one supreme and triune deity.246 There were countless lesser divinities: Anubis the ja
ckal, Shu, Tefnut, Nephthys, Ket, Nut; . . . but we must not make these pages a museum of dead gods. Even Pharaoh was a god, always the son of Amon-Ra, ruling not merely by divine right but by divine birth, as a deity transiently tolerating the earth as his home. On his head was the falcon, symbol of Horus and totem of the tribe; from his forehead rose the urœus or serpent, symbol of wisdom and life, and communicating magic virtues to the crown.247 The king was chief-priest of the faith, and led the great processions and ceremonies that celebrated the festivals of the gods. It was through this assumption of divine lineage and powers that he was able to rule so long with so little force.
Hence the priests of Egypt were the necessary props of the throne, and the secret police of the social order. Given a faith of such complexity, a class had to arise adept in magic and ritual, whose skill would make it indispensable in approaching the gods. In effect, though not in law, the office of priest passed down from father to son, and a class grew up which, through the piety of the people and the politic generosity of the kings, became in time richer and stronger than the feudal aristocracy or the royal family itself. The sacrifices offered to the gods supplied the priests with food and drink; the temple buildings gave them spacious homes; the revenues of temple lands and services furnished them with ample incomes; and their exemption from forced labor, military service, and ordinary taxation, left them in an enviable position of prestige and power. They deserved not a little of this power, for they accumulated and preserved the learning of Egypt, educated the youth, and disciplined themselves with rigor and zeal. Herodotus describes them almost with awe:
