Professor Maspero has attempted to show that the Egyptian doctrine of the Trinity was posterior to that of the Ennead.(184) Whether this were so or not, it makes its appearance at an early date in Egyptian theology, and was already recognised in the Pyramid texts. Originally the trinity was a triad like those we find in Babylonian mythology. Here and there the primitive triads survived into historical times, like that of Khnum and the two goddesses of the Cataract. But more frequently the trinity was an artificial creation, the formation of which can still be traced. Thus at Thebes the female element in it was found in Mut, “the mother” goddess, a title of the supreme goddess of Upper Egypt; while Khonsu, the moon-god, or Mentu, the old god of the nome, became the divine son, and so took a place subordinate to that of the local god Amon. Sometimes recourse was had to grammar, and the second person in the trinity was obtained by attaching the feminine suffix to the name of the chief god. In this way Amon-t was grammatically evolved from Amon, and even Ra-t from Ra. Elsewhere an epithet of the god was transformed into his son; at Memphis, for example, Imhotep, “he who comes in peace,” a title of Ptaḥ, became his son and the second person in the trinity. Other members of the trinity were fetched from neighbouring cities and nomes; Nit of Sais had Osiris as a husband, and Sekhet of Letopolis and Bast of Bubastis were successively regarded as the wives of Ptaḥ. The triad consisted of a divine father, wife, and son. It was thus a counterpart of the human family, and belonged to the same order of ideas as that which explained the creation of the world by a process of generation. This was the cosmology of Heliopolis, and it is probable that to Heliopolis also we must ascribe the doctrine of the Trinity. At any rate the doctrine seems to have been solar in its origin. As Tum, the god of sunset, was identical with Khepera, the sun of the morning, and Ra, the sun of the noonday,—all three being but one god under diverse forms,—so the divine father was believed to engender himself in the person of the divine son, and the divine mother to be one with the divine father and son. The divine essence remained necessarily the same, whatever might be the forms or names under which it displayed itself; and the name, it must be remembered, had for the Egyptian a separate and real existence. The father became the son and the son the father through all time, and of both alike the mother was but another form. It was eternal fatherhood, eternal motherhood, and eternal generation. The development of the doctrine was assisted by that identification of the Egyptian deities with the sun-god which ended in solar pantheism, as well as by the old theory of the ka, of a personality distinguishable from that to which it belonged, identical with that of which it was the double, and yet at the same time enjoying an independent existence of its own.