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
If Dr. Naville is right, Horus the hawk-god is again represented on the
same plaque, with the symbol of “follower,” above a boat which is engraved
over the bodies of the decapitated slain.(42) Countenance is given to this
view by a drawing on the rocks near El-Kab, in which the cartouches of two
kings of the Fourth Dynasty, Sharu and Khufu, are carried in boats on the
prows of which a hawk is perched, while above each name are two other
hawks, standing on the hieroglyph of “gold,” and with the crowns of Upper
and Lower Egypt on their heads. The title “follower of Horus” would take
us back to the earliest traditions of Egyptian history. The “followers of
Horus,” according to the later texts, were the predecessors of Menes and
the First Dynasty of united Egypt, the Pharaohs and princes of the
southern kingdom whose very names were forgotten in after days.
Nevertheless, it was remembered that they had founded the great
sanctuaries of the country; thus an inscription at Dendera declares that
in the reign of king Pepi of the Sixth Dynasty there was found in the wall
of the palace a parchment on which was a plan of the temple drawn upon it
in the time of “the followers of Horus.” The legends of Edfu told how
these followers of Horus had been smiths, armed with weapons of iron, and
how they had driven the enemies of their leader before them until they had
possessed themselves of the whole of Egypt.(43) But many hard-fought
battles were needed before this could be accomplished. Again and again had
the foe been crushed—at Zadmit near Thebes, at Neter-Khadu near Dendera,
at Minia, at Behnesa and Ahnas on the frontier of the Fayyûm, and finally
at Zaru on the Asiatic borders of the Delta. Even here, however, the
struggle was not over. Horus and his followers had to take ship and pursue
the enemy down the Red Sea, inflicting a final blow upon them near
Berenicê, from whence he returned across the desert in triumph to Edfu.
In this legend, which in its present form is not older than the Ptolemaic
period, echoes of the gradual conquest of Egypt by the first followers of
the Pharaohs have probably been preserved, though they have been combined
with a wholly different cycle of myths relating to the eternal struggle
between Horus the son of Isis and his twin brother Set. But the confusion
between the two Horuses must have arisen at an early time. Already a king
of the Third Dynasty, whose remains have been found in the ruins of
Nekhen, and who bore the title of him “who is glorified with the two
sceptres, in whom the two Horus gods are united,” has above his name the
crowned emblems of Horus and Set.(44) The titles of the queens of the
Memphite dynasties make it clear that by the two Horuses are meant the two
kingdoms of Upper and Lower Egypt, and we must therefore see in Horus and
Set the symbols of the South and North.(45)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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