There is, however, yet a third class of divine or quasidivine beings in the newer Egyptian Pantheon to which Mr. Andrew Lang, in his able introduction to the _Euterpe_ of Herodotus, still allows that great importance may be attached. These are the elemental or seemingly elemental deities, the Nature-Gods who play so large a part in all rationalistic or mystical mythologies. Such are no doubt Nut and Seb, the personal heaven and earth, named as early as the inscription on the coffin of Menkaoura of the Fourth Dynasty in the British Museum: such perhaps (though far less certainly) are Khons, identified with the rising sun, and Tum, regarded as the impersonation of his nightly setting. But none of the quite obviously elemental gods, except Ra, play any large part in the actual and practical worship of the people: to adopt the broad distinction I have ventured to draw in our second chapter, they are gods to talk about, not gods to adore--mythological conceptions rather than religious beings. Their names occur {177}much in the sacred texts, but their images are rare and their temples unknown. It is not Nut or Seb whose figures we see carved abundantly in relief on the grey sandstone pillars of Karnak and Luxor, painted in endless file on the gesso-covered walls of the Tombs of the Kings, or represented by dozens in the great collection of little bronze idols that fill so many cabinets at the Boulak Museum. The actual objects of the highest worship are far other than these abstract elemental conceptions: they are Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis, Khem, Pasht, and Athor. The quaint or grotesque incised figures of Nut, represented as a female form with arms and legs extended like a living canopy over the earth, as at Denderah, belong, I believe, almost if not quite exclusively to the Ptolemaic period, when zodiacal and astrological conceptions had been freely borrowed by the Egyptians from Greece and Asia. Nut and Seb, as gods, not myths, are in short quite recent ideas in Egypt. Even sun-disk Ra, himself, important as he becomes in the later developed creed, is hardly so much in his origin a separate god as an adjunct or symbol of divinity united syncretically with the various other deities. To call a king the sun is a common piece of courtier flattery. It is as Amen-Ra or as Osiris that the sun receives most actual worship. His name is joined to the names of gods as to the names of kings: he is almost as much a symbol as the Tau or the Asp; he obtains little if any adoration in his simple form, but plenty when conjoined in a compound conception with some more practical deity of strictly human origin. Even at the great “Temple of the Sun” at Heliopolis, it was as the bull Men or Mnevis that the luminary was adored: and that cult, according to Manetho, went back as far as the totemistic times of the Second Dynasty.