“The divinity of Pharaoh,” says Mr. Loftie, “was the first article in the creed of the pyramid period, the earliest of which we know anything. As time went on, though the king was still called divine, we see him engaged in the worship of other gods. At last he appears as a priest himself; and when Herodotus and the later Greek historians visited Egypt, there was so little of this part of the old religion left that it is not even mentioned by them as a matter of importance.” This is quite natural, I may remark parenthetically, for as the antiquity and grandeur of the great gods increased, the gulf between them and mere men, even though those men were kings, their offspring, must always have grown ever wider and wider. “I have myself no doubt whatever,” Mr. Loftie goes on, “that the names of Osiris and of Horus are those of ancient rulers. I think that, long before authentic history begins, Asar and Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably in that wide valley of the Upper Nile which is now the site of Girgeh and Berbé” (exactly where I place the principality of Osiris). “Their son was Hor, or Horus, the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt; and the ‘Hor seshoo.’ the successors of Horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers. I know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject, and much learning and ingenuity have been spent to prove that Asar, and Aset, and Hor, and {168}Ptah, and Anep, are representations of the powers of nature; that they do not point to ancient princes, but to ancient principles; and that Horus and his successors are gods and were never men. But in the oldest inscriptions we find none of that mysticism which is shown in the sculptures from the time of the eighteenth dynasty down to the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors.” In short, Mr. Loftie goes on to set forth a theory of the origin of the great gods essentially similar to the one I am here defending. Though a little out of place, I cannot help noting here the curious confirmatory fact that a number of ibis mummies have been found at Abvdos in close proximity to the mound where M. Mariette confidently expected to discover in the rock the actual tomb of Osiris himself. Hence we may conclude that the ibis was in all probability the totem of Abydos or This, as the bull was of Memphis, the crocodile of the Fayoum, the cat of Bubastis, and the baboon of Thebes. Now, the ibis-god of Abydos is Thoth; and it is noteworthy that Thoth, as recorder, always accompanies Osiris, in later legend, as judge of the dead: the local mummy-god, in other words, has as his assessor the local totem-god; and both are commonly to be seen on the monuments of Abydos, in company with Horus, Anubis, Isis, and other (probably) local divinities.