The hieroglyphic writing which preserved memories of a time that the Egyptians themselves had forgotten, represents the idea of a “god” by the picture of an axe. The axe seems originally to have consisted of a sharpened flint or blade of metal hafted in a wooden handle, which was occasionally wrapped in strips of red, white, and black cloth.(90) It takes us back to an age of fetishism, when inanimate objects were looked upon as divine, and perhaps reflects the impression made upon the natives of the country by the Pharaonic Egyptians with their weapons of metal. Horus of Edfu, it will be remembered, was served by smiths, and the shrines he founded to commemorate his conquest of Egypt were known as “the smithies.” The double-headed axe was a divine symbol in Asia Minor,(91) and both in the old world and in the new the fetish was wrapped in cloths. Even at Delphi a sacred stone was enveloped in wool on days of festival. In the sacred axe, therefore, which denoted a god, we may see a parallel to the standards on the prow of the prehistoric boat or to the symbols of the nomes. It would have represented the gods of those invaders of the valley of the Nile who brought with them weapons of copper, and have been the symbol of the conquering race and the deities it worshipped. As the Pharaonic Egyptians appropriated the fetishes of the older population in their sculptures and their picture-writing, so too would they have appropriated what had become to the neolithic people the sign and emblem of superior power. We have already dealt with an important class of gods, those which had a solar origin. There were other gods of an elemental character, whose worship does not seem to have been originally confined to one particular locality. Such were Seb, the earth, Nut, the sky, and Nu, the primeval deep. But they played only a small part in the religion of the country. Seb was known in later days chiefly as the father of Osiris; at an earlier epoch he had been the _rpâ_, or “hereditary prince, of the gods,” a title which takes us back to the feudal period of Egypt, when as yet there was no Pharaoh who ruled over the whole of the land. The animal sacred to him was the goose, perhaps on account of some similarity in its name; but he was never identified with it, and continued to the last to be depicted in human form. His symbol, however, gave rise to a cosmological myth. The goose became the mother of the egg out of which the universe was born.