"The religion of the Egyptians must be gathered chiefly from the sculptures and paintings. The religious inscriptions and funeral papyri remain undeciphered. The account of Herodotus is rendered suspicious by his solicitude to force the Pantheon of Egypt into a conformity with that of Greece. The accounts of the later Greeks are tainted by their philosophizing and mysticizing spirit. That the Egyptian theology embodied no profound physical or metaphysical system is evident from the fact that it was not formed at once, but by gradual addition and development, and that it was to the last partly local. It appears to have been, like the other religions of the Pagan world--of Greece and Italy, of Phoenicia and India--a worship of the powers of nature represented by great natural objects, such as the sun and moon, or by forms bestial or human, which were selected as symbolical of their attributes. "On this groundwork imagination wrought, as among the Greeks, though to a less extent and in a different way. We cannot tell how far the more reflective minds may have advanced towards the conception of a single God, either independent of or permeating the material world; but contact with the philosophic Greeks in the age of the Ptolemies can hardly have failed to lead to some speculations of this kind, and the accounts derived from Greek sources of Egyptian mysticism, though false of early, were no doubt, in part at least, true of later times. Amuna or Ammon appears to have been nominally the chief of the gods. His attributes are to some extent identified with those of the sun; but they are not easily distinguished from the attributes of several subordinate deities. His ram's head is still a mystery. Thoth was the god of intellect and learning. His representatives were the ape and the ibis: the former, it is supposed, because it approaches nearest in intellect to man; the latter, because its black and white feather resemble, or may be imagined to resemble, writing. The _popular_ divinity was Osiris, the god at once of the Nile and the realms below. Typhon, the scorching wind of the desert which dries up the waters of the Nile, was the antagonist and the murderer of Osiris; and at a more advanced stage of religious speculation the two may have represented the conflicting powers of Good and Evil. Sacrifices were offered for the ordinary purposes--to conciliate the favor of the gods, to requite their benefits, and to avert their wrath. Typhonian, that is, red-haired men, were immolated when they fell into the hands of the natives in honor of Osiris, whose name is concealed in that of the fabled Busiris. That the practice of offering human sacrifices is compatible with a high degree of civilization we know from the examples of Greece, of Rome, and Mexico. There were great gatherings in honor of the gods, in the nature of pilgrimages or holy fairs, which were celebrated with festivity, with noisy music, with illuminations, and with license.