The religions of ancient Egypt and BabyloniaSayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Religion
The religions of ancient Egypt and Babylonia
Sayce, A. H. (Archibald Henry)
Assyro-Babylonian religion; Egypt -- Religion
This false door, in front of which the offerings to the dead were
originally laid, must go back to a primitive period in Egyptian history.
Professor Flinders Petrie has shown that it is presupposed by the
so-called Banner name of the Egyptian Pharaohs.(20) Ever since the first
days of hieroglyphic decipherment, it has been known that besides the name
or names given to the Pharaoh at birth, and commonly borne by him in life,
he had another name not enclosed in a cartouche, but in something that
resembled a banner, and was surmounted by the hawk of the god Horus. It
actually represented, however, not a banner, but the panel above the false
door of a tomb, and the name written within it was the name of the Ka of
the Pharaoh rather than of the Pharaoh himself. It was accordingly the
name by which he was known after death, the name inscribed on the objects
buried in his tomb, and also the name under which he was worshipped
whether in this life or in the next. As the Horus or deified leader who
had subjugated the older inhabitants of Egypt and founded the Pharaonic
dynasties, it was right and fitting that he should be known by the name of
his Ka. It was not so much the Pharaoh that was adored by his subjects, as
the Ka of the Pharaoh, and the Pharaoh was god because the blood of Horus
flowed in his veins.
The earliest monuments of the Pharaohs yet discovered give almost
invariably only the Ka-name of the king. The fact is doubtless due in
great measure to their general character. With few exceptions they consist
of tombstones and other sepulchral furniture. But the objects found in the
foundations of the temple of Nekhen are also examples of the same fact.
The fusion was not yet complete, at all events in the south, between the
Pharaoh as man and the Pharaoh as god; it was his Ka that was divine,
rather than the bodily husk in which it sojourned for a time.
The Ka accordingly occupies a prominent place in the names of the Pharaohs
of the Old Empire, while the sacred art of the temples continued the
ancient tradition down to the latest times. Horus and the Nile-gods, for
instance, present the Ka of Amon-hotep III. along with the infant prince
to the god of Thebes; and at Soleb the same Pharaoh is represented as
making offerings to his own double.(21) Indeed, it is not unfrequent to
find the king and his Ka thus separated from one another and set side by
side; and at times the Ka becomes a mere symbol, planted like a standard
at the monarch’s back.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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