About 3000 in Egypt and Babylon two great religions began their life-courses. In Egypt the “reformation” period at the end of the Old Kingdom saw solar monotheism firmly founded as the religion of priests and educated persons. All other gods and goddesses--whom the peasantry and the humble people continued to worship in their former meaning--are now only incarnations or servants of the one Re. Even the particular religion of Hermopolis, with its cosmology, was adapted to the grand system, and a theological negotiation brought even the Ptah of Memphis into harmony with dogma as an abstract prime-principle of creation.[483] Exactly as in the times of Justinian and Charles V, the city-spirit asserted mastery over the soul of the land; the formative power of the Springtime had come to an end; the dogma was essentially complete, and its subsequent treatment by rational processes took down more of the structure than it improved. Philosophy began. In respect of dogma, the Middle Kingdom was as unimportant as the Baroque. From 1500 three new religious histories begin--first the Vedic in the Punjab, then the Early Chinese in the Hwang-ho, and lastly the Classical on the north of the Ægean Sea. Distinctly as the Classical man’s world-picture and his prime symbol of the unit body is presented to us, it is difficult even to guess the details of the great Early Classical religion. For this lacuna we have to thank the Homeric poems, which hinder rather than help us in comprehending it. The new notion of godhead that was the special ideal of this Culture is the human-formed body in the light, the hero as mediator between man and god--so much, at any rate, the Iliad evidences. This body might be light-transfigured by Apollo or disjected to the winds by Dionysus, but in every case it was the basic form of Being. The σῶμα as ideal of the extended, the cosmos as sum of these unit bodies, “Being” and “the one” as the extended-in-itself and “Logos”[484] as the order thereof in the light--all this came up before the eyes of priest-men, grandly visible and having the full force of a new religion.