BOOKS.
THE RELIGIONS OF EGYPT AND BABYLON.* IT is not often that one finds Professor Sayce in so tentative a mood as he displays in these extremely interesting and scholarly lectures. As a rule one may say that the besetting sin of writers on Egyptian and Assyrian antiquity is over- confidence. The general public is deeply impressed by their positive assertions, which they are unable to check ; it is only those who can look behind the veil who know how exceedingly doubtful and "precarious" (to use Mr. Sayce's own word) much of the evidence remains after generations of assiduous interpretation. One difficulty is that we never know the last words on these subjects ; almost every year brings fresh discoveries, and no one can tell what may turn up at any moment to upset the most carefully laid theories. In the case of Babylonia we are still only on the threshold of knowledge. Thousands upon thousands of cuneiform tablets lie as yet un- deciphered in the Museums of Constantinople, Pennsylvania, Paris, and London. It is only quite recently that a catalogue has been finished even of the Kouyunjik collection, which has been lying in the British Museum for nearly half-a-century. It will take a generation of hard work by many willing minds to get through the vast amount of materials now brought above ground, and each season will doubtless bring important additions. 'Until a large part of these arrears is overtaken it is idle to talk of finality in an exposition of Babylonian thought, though each new decipherment may add a fresh definite fact to history. In the case of Egypt the matter stands upon a somewhat surer foundation as regards religion. There we have what is missing in Babylonia, an immense number of inscriptions and paintings and papyri in tombs, relating to the future state and forming positive documents for Egyptian eschatology. We have also that curious collection known as "the Book of the Dead," not indeed in its earliest form, but still in a recension which evidently preserves far earlier elements. But even here we are con- fronted with extreme difficulties of interpretation. Egyptolo- gists are by no means in accord upon many important points, and although in bare historical records they may arrive at tolerable precision, when it comes to terms of thought, of religious ideas, of philosophy, a wide opening for mis- interpretation remains. Even if we were sure that we had arrived at the correct rendering of each phrase in a hieroglyphic inscription, we can never be certain that its meaning to us is the same as what it meant to the writer ; nor, if we were sure of his meaning, would it follow that the Egyptian people understood it in the same sense, for the ancient Egyptian scribe was a man far above most of his contemporaries in intellectual rank, and the religious ideas which we fancy we can understand from his writings may no more have represented the religion of his age than those of Lucretius represented the average Roman beliefs of his time. Thus, even supposing that we have reached the point of literal accuracy in hieroglyphic decipherment, which few would admit, there is a great probability that our knowledge of ancient Egyptian religion, even if accurate, is one-sided.
Of all this Professor Sayce is perfectly aware, and he lays stress upon the tentative character of all attempts to define Egyptian, and still more Babylonian, ideas of religion. To endeavour to systematise them is yet more hopeless, since the most conspicuous fact about both religions is their diverse origins. Various races and various centres of cult went to make up the curiously mixed and heterogeneous collection of beliefs which were current in Egypt and Babylonia, and one of the best features in Mr. Sayce's exposition is the firm grip he takes of this essential point, and the clearness
• The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babytosia. The Gifford Lectures delivered in Aberdeen. By A. H. save, D.D., LL.D. London T. and T. Clark. Re. net:
with which he distinguishes between the different sources of individual cults. Even what appear to be fundamental elements of the religion in general may nevertheless be traced to separate influences. For example, the common notion that mummifying the dead was universal in Egypt from the earliest times is erroneous : it is questionable whether, except for the Court and priesthood, mummies were at all usual before the Eighteenth Dynasty. The aboriginal people originally identified conjecturally with the Libyan race, and so accepted by Mr. Sayce, in spite of later investi- gations, did not embalm their dead, but apparently exposed them till their bones were stripped,—as the Parsees still expose the dead on their " Towers of Silence " ; only jackals and hyaenas did the unpleasant work in Egypt which in India is done by vultures. It is thus, we are glad to see, and not by even ceremonial cannibalism, that Professor Sayce explains the gnawed bones. Now the people who exposed their dead and adopted what is called " secondary burial " cannot have believed in the resurrection of the body. They may have believed in a shadowy flitting spirit or ghost, anivtu/a vagu/a, if not blandula, but nothing more, and it was probably to them that the idea of the ba, or bird-like spirit, was due. On the other hand, the mummy of course stands for the doctrine
of bodily resurrection, and must have come into Egypt with a different race, probably the Asiatic Pharaohs. But the strange thing is that all the varied and conflicting beliefs which enter into Egyptian religion were accepted without any attempt to harmonise them :- " How the Ba and the mummy were to be united the official cult never endeavoured to explain; the task was probably beyond its powers. It was content to leave the two conceptions side by side, bidding the individual believer reconcile them as best he could. The fact illustrates another which must always be kept in mind in dealing with Egyptian religion. Up to the last it remained without a philosophic system. I here were, it is true, certain sides of it which were reduced to systems, certain parts of the official creed which became philosophic. But as a whole it was a loosely-connected agglomeration of beliefs and practices which had come down from the past, and one after the other had found a place in the religion of the State. No attempt was ever made to form them into a coherent and homogeneous whole, or to find a philosophic basis upon which they all might rest. Such an idea, indeed, never occurred to the Egyptian. He was quite content to take his religion as it had been handed down to him, or as it war prescribed by the State ; he had none of that inner retrospection which distinguishes the Hindu, none of that desire to know the causes of things which characterised the Greek. The contradictions which we find in his creed never troubled him; he never perceived them, or if he did they were ignored."
How does Professor Sayce know all this about the mind of the Egyptian ? It seems to us that he is forgetting his own caution, and dogmatising too much upon admittedly slender evidence. On the other band, it must be remembered that there are strange contradictions, or at least apparent contra- dictions, in other creeds which do not appear to trouble greatly the majority of believers. They reconcile them in their own minds, and probably the Egyptian had some way of harmonising his divergent articles of faith with which so far the inscriptions and papyri have not acquainted us. The worship of beasts must have been difficult to unite with a cult which conceived gods as men and admitted men to be incar- nate gods. Mr. Sayce is especially informing on the sources of these different ideas, and what will probably strike the reader most is his derivation of Egyptian beliefs from Baby- lonia. Such an origin could not have been suggested in the days when all we knew of Babylonian antiquity was far later than the earliest Egyptian records. But now all this is changed. We have evidence of Babylonian civilisation which goes back some eight thousand years, and it has become not only possible but natural to conclude that the conquering Pharaoh race came from the Euphrates Valley. It was apparently they who imposed the higher idea of a god-man and man-gods upon the brute-worshipping inhabitants of Egypt. To them perhaps was due the conception of the Ka or immortal, self-existing, and impeccable " double," the arche- type, like Plato's " ideas," of each created thing, the fore- runner of the more modern conception of the Thought of God which realises itself in concrete forms. It is curious how the Egyptians anticipated the distinctions of body, soul, and spirit, though their apparent inability to think in the abstract made the Ira and the Khu concrete objects. Another idea which may have come from Babylonia was that of a supreme god creating by generation of his own unaided power, an idea which was expanded into the Ennead of gods, and finally the Heliopolitan trinity in which the divine father of himself engendered himself in the divine son, the divine essence remaining the same in the divine mother and son :— "The Egyptian trinity had thus grown out of the triad under the influence of the solar theology and of the old conception of a personality which possessed a concrete form. Once introduced into the Osirian creed, it spread with it throughout Egypt and became a distinguishing feature of Egyptian theology. Along with the doctrines of the resurrection of the body and of a judgment to come, it passed into the schools of Alexandria, and was there thrown into the crucible of Greek philosophy. The Platonic doctrine of ideas was adapted to the Egyptian doctrine of per- sonality, and the three persons of the trinity became Unity, Mind, and Soul—absolute thought, absolute reason, and absolute energy."
The wonderful forecasts of some of the doctrines of Christianity to be found in the Egyptian religious beliefs is not limited to the Trinity and the resurrection of the body ; the incarnation of God in man was an idea with which the Egyptian was familiar, especially in the virgin-birth of the Pharaoh. An Egyptian poet in the reign of the third Thothmes wrote of a Messianic age :—" A King shall come from the south, Ameni, the truth-declaring, by name He shall unite the double crown The people of the age of the son of man shall rejoice and establish his name for all eternity. They shall be removed far from evil, and the wicked shall humble their mouths for fear of him." That such resemblances to Christian beliefs should be traced in Egypt should not, we think, disturb the minds of the most orthodox. One of the arguments against the Christian doctrine has been the apparent injustice of its late and local revelation. If some gleams of the divine light were given to Egypt in the teaching of the priests of Osiris, there is no cause for anything but rejoicing.
We have no space to dwell upon Professor Sayce's admirable lectures on the sacred books, the popular religion, and the other world in Egyptian belief; or to touch upon his account of Babylonian religion, necessarily less complete for lack of fuller material, yet still replete with interest, especially when dealing with Assur and monotheism, or with the cosmology. Btit Babylonian religion, so far as we know it, does not rise to the height's of its Egyptian offspring or cousin. Its poly- theism is often grotesque ; its magic and sorcery and sensual rites shut it out from the plane of the loftier creeds. Yet it had its influence upon Abraham and his seed for ever, and no one can rightly understand Judaism who has not studied the early cults of Babylonia. One can have no guide in these complex subjects more learned or more considerate to his readers' difficulties than Professor Sayce. He always writes from the amplest knowledge, and he always writes clearly.
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