The difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is not at all great, if we consider the further fact that even after the concept of godship had been fully developed, the king still remained of like nature with the gods, their son and descendant, a divine personage himself, differing from them only in not having yet received eternal life, the symbol of which they are often shown in sculpture as presenting with gracious expressions to their favoured scion. “The ruling sovereign of Egypt,” says Mr. Le Page Renouf, “was the living image of and vicegerent of the sun-god. He was invested with the attributes of divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental evidence.” And quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled in Egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before Menes were significantly known as “the successors of Horus.” As late as the times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of Menes and other Pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings took the title of the Golden Horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from Chafra onward the reigning monarch was known as the Son of Ra and the Great God. Amenophis IL, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like Ra, the sacred seed of Amen, the son whom he begot.” And on all the monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature as the gods themselves: he converses with them on equal terms; they lead him by the hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or present him with the symbols of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family. The {173}former guerdon bestows upon him the same rank they themselves had held on earth; the latter advances him to share with them the glories of the other existence. In the temple of Kurneh, Rameses I. (then dead) receives the offerings and liturgies of his royal grandson. Hard by, Rameses II. offers to Amen-ra, Khonso, and Rameses I., without distinction of divinity. On the side wall, Sethi I. receives similar divine honours from the royal hands: while in the centre chamber Sethi himself officiates before the statue of his father placed in a shrine. The King is thus but the Living God: the God is thus but the Dead King. I conclude, therefore, that a large part of the greater Egyptian gods--the national or local gods, as opposed to those worshipped by each family in its own necropolis--were early kings, whose myths were later expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and adorned by priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies. But down to the very latest age of independence, inscriptions of the god Euergetes, and the goddess Berenice, or representations like that at Philæ, of the god Philadelphus suckled by Isis, show that to the Egyptian mind the gulf between humanity and divinity was very narrow, and that the original manhood of all the deities was an idea quite familiar to priests and people.