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Reign of the gods—Osiris, Isis, and Horus Myth—Ancient cities and early kings.

The first royal name that meets us on the monuments of Egypt, which was inscribed there during the lifetime of the king who bore it, is that of Senefru (predecessor of Khufu who built the Great Pyramid), and belongs to a remote antiquity.[1] And yet we must look back through the dimness of many more centuries still before we come to the name of Mena, first King of Egypt—a name that seems to twinkle faintly from beyond the abyss of long past ages like a far-off star on the horizon from beyond the wide waste of waters.

Mena, founder of Memphis, and his successors, we know, at least, by name; but of the ‘old time before them’ the traditions of Egypt only said that the gods governed the land. According to one ancient record, Ptah, the ‘Hidden Being,’ the ‘Former of all,’ ruled in the beginning; Ra, the bright Sun-god, Seb, the ancient Earth-god, followed; and later still Osiris reigned, the ‘Good Being’ and ‘Lord of life.’ After having conferred manifold blessings and benefits on the land, he was slain by his brother and rival Set. Set concealed the body, but Isis, the ‘great divine Mother,’ sister and wife of Osiris, sought after it. An ancient hymn says, ‘No word of hers fails; good is she, and kind in will and speech. It is Isis, the exalted one, the avenger of her brother: she went up and down the world lamenting him.’

Vincent Brooks-Day & Son, Lith.

WINGED FIGURE, ISIS OR NEPHTHYS.

The Lamentations of Isis was one of the most revered of the sacred writings:—‘My heart is full of bitterness for thee,’ she cries; ‘how long will it be ere I see thee whom to behold is bliss! Come to her that loveth thee—none hath loved thee more than I.... Heaven and earth are mourning after thee. O mighty one, our lord,[2] speak, and dispel the anguish of our souls! To behold thy face is life, and the joy of our spirits is to gaze on thee!’

Nevertheless in bodily form Osiris appeared not on earth again; but Isis ceased not from her search until she had found the remains, all torn and mangled as they were by the malice of Set. ‘She made light with her feathers,’ says the old hymn, ‘and wind with her wings; at his burial she poured forth her prayers.’

‘She gave birth to a child; secretly and alone she nursed the infant—no man knows where that was done.

‘Now has the arm of that child become strong within the ancient dwelling of Seb.’[3]

The child of Isis, the beautiful and radiant Horus, was the avenger of Osiris; he cast down the terrible Set, and destroyed his power; then, on appearing resplendent from his triumph, he was hailed with acclamation by gods and men, and reigned over the land, Osiris, new-born—the Morning Sun which, having conquered night and darkness, ascends the sky and rules from heaven; the Sun of to-day, which, if another, is yet the same as that which sank down yesterday into the bosom of the night.

Isis suckling Horus.—From a statuette in the British Museum.

The reign of Horus was welcomed with rapture and with song. ‘He receives the title of his father and rules the world; he governs both the men of Egypt and the northern barbarians. Every one glorifies his goodness; mild is his love towards us; his tenderness embraceth every heart; great is his love in all our bosoms. His foe falls under his fury; the end of the evil-doer is at hand. The son of Isis, the avenger of his father, appears. The worlds are at rest; evil flies, and earth brings forth abundantly, and is at peace beneath her lord.’

But Osiris was not dead. In the unseen world he lived anew, and there he ruled in righteousness, as Horus ruled on earth. Osiris, the divine being who had died, was judge of the dead. Before him each departed spirit must appear in the judgment-hall of Truth. There the heart is weighed and the life is judged unerringly. He who passes that ordeal becomes himself Osiris, and is henceforth called by his name. The new Osiris lives again, and passes victoriously through every peril, until he is at length admitted amongst the bright and blessed spirits who accompany Ra for ever, and who ‘live, as he liveth, in Truth.’

Horus was the last of the divine race of kings. After him, some traditions said that dynasties of demigods and of manes ruled before King Mena ascended the throne, but the name by which the Egyptians always distinguished the inhabitants of the land in prehistoric times was Horshesu—followers of Horus.

There were certain cities also in Egypt whose foundation was assigned to those prehistoric times. The twin cities Thinis-Abydos were, so far as we know, the most ancient in the land. Thinis was the cradle of the Egyptian monarchy: the first Egyptian dynasties were Thinite, and Mena went from thence to found his new capital. But Abydos was revered as the burial-place and shrine of Osiris himself, and many devout Egyptians in following ages directed their own tombs to be prepared and their bodies laid in this consecrated spot.

The origin of Pa-Ra,[4] the City of the Sun, is also lost in remote antiquity. It stood not far from Memphis, and is better known to us by the name of On. It was the centre of the worship of Ra, as Abydos was of the worship of Osiris, but there was no jealousy or rivalry between the two. They were, in fact, essentially one, and the same individual might be priest or priestess of both sanctuaries.

On was famous from time immemorial as a seat of learning, and its priesthood was held in high repute. The city itself was of small dimensions. ‘The walls may yet be traced,’ says Mr. Reginald Stuart Poole, ‘enclosing an irregular square of about half a mile in the measure of each of its sides.’ And of this limited space the great temple of Ra must have occupied about half. The population, one would think, must have been mainly composed of scholars, as the priests’ dwellings would be within the temple precincts. Hither came the young men of Egypt—who shall say how many thousand years ago!—to learn all that the priests could teach at this, the most ancient university of the world. Nor were the priests, who carefully cultivated and taught the various branches of learning, by any means an exclusive caste. They had family ties, mixed in social life, and could hold other than priestly dignities. A royal prince was often priest of a temple, and a priest might be a warrior, an architect, or a court official. So far as we can gather, the teaching at an Egyptian university would comprise a knowledge of the sacred books, besides general teaching in morality. The study of the language itself must have been a somewhat arduous undertaking even for a native-born Egyptian, and to write the hieroglyphic characters, required considerable skill, and even art.[5] Many branches of science must have been pursued—medicine, law, geometry, astronomy, and chemistry, whilst in mechanics a quite marvellous proficiency was attained. Music too was highly prized and carefully taught, and it is not unlikely that architects and sculptors also received their training in these schools.

Long ages afterwards, when Greek and Roman travellers visited Egypt, and sought to learn her wisdom, they heard an ancient tale concerning the mysterious Phœnix, that came once in five hundred years from the far-off land of spices and perfume to the sacred City of the Sun, where he constructed for himself a funeral pile and perished in the flames, but only to rise again in renewed life and splendour; then, spreading his radiant wings, he took his flight to the distant land from whence he came. What special truth this allegory veiled in the minds of those who told it we can only guess; at the same time it may serve us well as a type of the old ‘wisdom’ itself,[6] which did not perish with its primeval seat, but sprang into renewed and glorious existence in what, to us, is ‘ancient’ Greece—then, lost again when Greece was lost, revived once more in our latter days.

But Pa-Ra had a special claim to the veneration of the Egyptians as the birthplace of their sacred literature. Here were written, or, as the priests called it, ‘found,’ the original chapters of the most sacred of the sacred writings, the ‘Book of the coming forth into the Day,’[7] which tells of the conflicts and triumphs of the life after death.

To secure that triumph, a knowledge of the holy book was required. Portions of it are found written on coffin lids and on the walls of tombs; every Egyptian desired to have it buried with him, and whilst the rich would often have an entire copy laid in his tomb, the poor man coveted at least a fragment.

Memphis was founded by the first King of Egypt, but Abydos and On were linked by tradition to the gods.

One beautiful obelisk of red granite stands solitary among the green fields to mark where stood the City of the Sun, and the wild bees store their honey in its deep-cut hieroglyphs.

If any remains at all exist of Abydos, they have long since been buried deep beneath the piled up heaps of sand and mud amongst which has been built a little Arab village named ‘Arabat the Buried.’ Whilst exploring these mounds the famous discoverer Mariette found two temples erected by well-known kings of far later date, Seti i. and Rameses the Great, and dedicated by them to Osiris. Not far off there arises amid the desolation a conical hillock sixty feet high, which is called by the Arabs Kom-es-Sultan, the ‘Mound of the King.’ It is just made up of tombs ‘packed together as closely as they can be wedged,’ above a rock which was believed to have been the sepulchre of Osiris. Here it was that so many during many generations desired to be laid; through the excavations of explorers may be seen countless numbers of the tombs where they hoped to rest in peace. But the mummy cases have been rudely dragged to light, despoiled, and rifled of aught they might have contained of commercial value, while the poor mummies themselves are left, often broken into fragments, exposed to the careless gaze of every passer-by and to the ‘full glare of the noon-day sun.’ Pits sunk in the neighbourhood disclose nothing but tombs, ‘arches upon arches of brick, each an Egyptian grave.’[8]

Mena founded his new capital 360 miles north of Thinis. The Nahsi or Negroes, in the south, were troublesome rather than dangerous neighbours, and the whole length of the Nile valley was protected by the natural defences of the Libyan hills on the west and the Arabian on the east, but the Delta had no such shelter, and through its plains the way to the rich luxuriant valley lay open to an invading force, whether of the fair-haired Libyans from the west or the warlike tribes of the Amu and the Herusha from the east. Memphis was built some miles south of the point where the narrow valley of the Nile opens out into the broad plains of the Delta.[9] Here the river ran near the Libyan hills; so, by Mena’s orders, its course was turned aside to gain a wider space for the new city—Mennefer, he called it—the ‘secure and beautiful.’ He first of all erected a magnificent temple, which he dedicated to Ptah, ‘Father of the beginning’ and ‘Creator of the world,’ of whose worship Memphis continued to be the centre. It was well fortified and guarded against inroads from the north, and protected the entrance to the Nile valley, of which its rulers held the key. And it was fair to look upon, lying along the banks of the great river—with artificial lakes glittering in the cloudless sunshine, and stately temples and palaces embosomed amongst groves of palm, sycamore, and date trees. Thousands of years passed by, and in later days the ruthless tide of war ebbed and flowed around its walls; siege, storm, and havoc did their work—but in spite of all, so late as the 13th century a.d., an Arabian physician who visited the ruins of Memphis tells us that they extended a half-day’s journey every way, and he declares that the wonders he beheld were sufficient to confound the mind; no eloquence could describe them. Every new glance, he says, was a new cause of delight. But the work of ruin was not ended in his day—Mahometan fanaticism spares nothing, however time-honoured or beautiful; besides which, the ruins of Memphis proved a convenient quarry for the building of modern Cairo. Thus the ‘secure and beautiful’ city of King Mena has disappeared at length as utterly as Babylon has done. A few insignificant fragments and blocks are strewn confusedly about, and serve to mark the site. One mighty statue lies prostrate—a colossal figure of Rameses ii., erected by himself in front of the temple of Ptah. It is lying on its face in a broad ditch, deserted and alone, save when some wandering Arab passes by, or cattle come to drink of the water which, for most part of the year, fills the trench and submerges the gigantic figure—

Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Of historic details relating to the earliest dynasties next to nothing has been preserved; the kings appear to have been able and enlightened rulers, and encouragers of art and learning. In their days the system of hieroglyphic writing existed, and we are told of works on the healing arts, some of which were composed by the successor of Mena himself, for ‘he was a physician.’ The earliest chapters of the sacred books were extant, and the art of embalming was already practised, though in a comparatively rude fashion. We are also informed that by a decree of King Bai-en-neter of the second dynasty, women were declared capable of succeeding to the crown—a statement which is only in harmony with all that we know of the position of women in ancient Egypt.[10]

One remarkable monument of these early dynasties remains.

The Libyan hills, running from north to south, form the western boundary of the Nile valley. Along their base there is a rocky platform of considerable breadth, at a height of some 90 or 100 feet above the plain. This vast platform was used as the necropolis of Memphis—Ank-ta, ‘Land of life,’ they called it. For the space of twenty miles in the neighbourhood of the city, it was covered with groups of pyramids and tombs. In the centre of the most ancient of these stands the pyramid of Sakkara, known as the ‘stepped pyramid,’ or ‘pyramid of degrees,’ which is considered as the burial-place of Ata, fourth King of Egypt. In that case, it is the oldest known sepulchre in the world. It is of grand and rugged aspect, about 200 feet in height, and flattened at the summit. The exterior is formed of six rough gigantic steps composed of stones, and nine or ten feet in thickness.

The forms of King Mena and his successors may well appear dreamlike in the dim light by which we discern them; but we seem to perceive that Mena was, at any rate, the first who wore the ‘double crown,’ which bespoke sovereignty over the whole land; the white upper crown representing dominion over Upper, the red lower one dominion over Lower Egypt. His successors were strong enough to repel invaders, to maintain intact the power they inherited, and thus to transmit to following dynasties the double crown they had received from Mena, the ‘Firm’ or ‘Constant.’