The faith of the people dies hard. The gods and goddesses, the theology and speculations of the official religion of Egypt, have passed away, but the old beliefs and superstitions which were already in possession of the land when the Pharaonic Egyptians first entered it, have survived both Christianity and Mohammedanism. The theological systems of Heliopolis or Thebes are like the sacred trees, which, according to Dr. Schweinfurth,(175) were brought from Southern Arabia along with the deities with whose cult they were associated; when the deities themselves ceased to be worshipped, the trees also ceased to be cultivated, and so disappeared from a soil wherein they had been but exotics. But the religion of the great mass of the people remained rooted as it were in the soil, like the palm or the acacia. It flowed like a strong current under the surface of the theology of the State, contemptuously tolerated by the latter, and in its turn but little affected by it. The theology of the State might incorporate and adapt the beliefs of the multitude; to the multitude the State theology was a “tale of little meaning, though the words were strong.” If we would know what the bulk of the people thought of those deities whom the higher classes regarded as manifestations of a single ineffable and omnipotent divine power, we must turn to the folk-tales which were taken up and disfigured by the rationalising priests of a later period, when they combined together in a connected story all that had been said about the gods of the local sanctuaries. Each sanctuary came to possess its euhemerising legend of the chief divinity to whom it was consecrated; the divinity was transformed into an earthly king, and his history was concocted partly out of popular tales, associated for the most part with particular relics and charms, partly from forced etymologies of proper names. At how early a date these artificial legends first came into existence we do not know, but we already meet with examples of them in the time of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Dynasties. They belong, however, to the age when the rationalistic process of resolving the gods into human princes had already begun,—the counter side of the process that had turned the Pharaoh into a god,—and their artificial character is betrayed by the attempt to extract history from learned but unscientific explanations of the origin of local and other names. Here, for instance, is one which was compiled for the temple of the sun-god at Heliopolis, and is contained in a Turin papyrus of the age of the Twentieth Dynasty: “Account of the god who created himself, the creator of heaven, of earth, of the gods, of men, of wild beasts, of cattle, of reptiles, of fowls, and of fish; the king of men and gods, to whom centuries are but as years; who possesses numberless names which no man knoweth, no, not even the gods.