After him, Binothris had conferred the right of succession upon all
women of the blood-royal. The accession of the III dynasty, a Memphite
one according to Manetho, did not at first change the miraculous
character of this history. The Libyans had revolted against Necherophes,
and the two armies were encamped before each other, when one night the
disk of the moon became immeasurably enlarged, to the great alarm of the
rebels, who recognized in this phenomenon a sign of the anger of heaven,
and yielded without fighting. Tosorthros, the successor of Necherophes,
brought the hieroglyphs and the art of stone-cutting to perfection. He
composed, as Teti did, books of medicine, a fact which caused him to be
identified with the healing god Imhotpu. The priests related these
things seriously, and the Greek writers took them down from their lips
with the respect which they offered to everything emanating from the
wise men of Egypt.
What they related of the human kings was not more detailed, as we see,
than their accounts of the gods. Whether the legends dealt with deities
or kings, all that we know took its origin, not in popular imagination,
but in sacerdotal dogma: they were invented long after the times they
dealt with, in the recesses of the temples, with an intention and a
method of which we are enabled to detect flagrant instances on the
monuments.
Toward the middle of the third century before our era the Greek troops
stationed on the southern frontier, in the forts at the first cataract,
developed a particular veneration for Isis of Philae. Their devotion
spread to the superior officers who came to inspect them, then to the
whole population of the Thebaid, and finally reached the court of the
Macedonian kings. The latter, carried away by force of example, gave
every encouragement to a movement which attracted worshippers to a
common sanctuary, and united in one cult two races over which they
ruled. They pulled down the meagre building of the Saite period, which
had hitherto sufficed for the worship of Isis, constructed at great cost
the temple which still remains almost intact, and assigned to it
considerable possessions in Nubia, which, in addition to gifts from
private individuals, made the goddess the richest land-owner in Southern
Egypt. Knumu and his two wives, Anukit and Satit, who, before Isis, had
been the undisputed suzerains of the cataract, perceived with jealousy
their neighbor's prosperity: the civil wars and invasions of the
centuries immediately preceding had ruined their temples, and their
poverty contrasted painfully with the riches of the new-comer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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