The confusion of religions in Egypt is particularly great, very likely because different tribes brought in different beliefs and gods, and they grew confused with the beliefs and gods already there. Where they believed that there was such a great number of gods, it was almost necessary that the power of each god must be supposed to be restricted to a certain place. Otherwise the fighting between them for mastery would be endless. We have seen, however, how, as time went on, the idea grew of Osiris as a god universal throughout Egypt. That was a long step forward in the direction of belief in a single god, ruler and maker of all the universe. And yet then a further confusion arose, which led a step farther again in the same right direction, when Osiris began to be identified with--that is to say, to be considered the same as--the Sun-god, whom they called Re or Ra. They had very many and various stories and fancies about this great god Re, the Sun--that at dawn he began to sail across the sky in a boat called the boat of the dawn, and again, at night, that he got into another boat, the boat of the dark, and sailed along underneath the earth all night to catch his morning boat again. Another story was that he was born a baby in the dawn, {34} grew to his full manly strength at midday, and then declined again into an old man, dying at night. Stories of the same sort were invented to account for the apparent movements of the moon and stars and other planets. Of course they had no knowledge of the earth turning on its own axis, or travelling round the sun. It seems curious enough that Osiris should be at one time identified with the sun, the god of the heavens, and yet be the ruler of the under-world, where the souls of dead men and women went after death. Perhaps it seems less curious when we remember that the sun himself was supposed to sail nightly underneath the earth. But it is quite impossible for us to have any clear idea of how they reasoned about these things, partly because the accounts we have of it are all very vague and given to us only by the records of the inscriptions which survive, and by travellers, like the Greek Herodotus, to whom the priests would not tell a great deal, and partly because the ideas of the people even who held those beliefs must have been very far from clear.