DOI Page / Citation link:
https://doi.org/10.11588/diglit.61301#0047
PREDECESSORS OF GREEK ART.
23
We must go back and back, but we shall not get
further than that beginning of history which Herodotus
notes when he tells us that Egypt is the gift of the Nile.
When the first dwellers in the fruitful land took posses-
sion of this gift it would have been strange if they did
not recognize some power not themselves. It would
have been a people insensate indeed who did not deve-
lope some sort of religion in the face of the ever-recurring
miracle of the yearly rise of the Nile. That religion
was no doubt at first here as elsewhere some kind of
fetichism ; man gave to a stick or a stone powers he
possessed himself, only in supernatural degree, and he
worshipped the god he himself had made. In Egypt
animal life rises to special importance. The scavenger
birds—the hawk, the vulture, and others—who at the fall
of the Nile cleanse the land and preserve it from pesti-
lence, must have seemed to the dwellers beneath the
fierce southern sun as gods and deliverers worthy of all
worship. Hence arose a hierarchy of beast-gods—the
cat, the hawk, the beetle, vulture, ibis, crocodile. Of
some of these the whole tribe was sacred, as the cat; of
others only selected instances, eg., the bull ; others were
only locally sacred, e.g., the crocodile. In fact, this element
of locality brings into Egyptian religion great confusion
—one triad of deities is sacred at Memphis, another at
Thebes, a third at Sais.
At this purely animalistic stage the sacred animal or
23
We must go back and back, but we shall not get
further than that beginning of history which Herodotus
notes when he tells us that Egypt is the gift of the Nile.
When the first dwellers in the fruitful land took posses-
sion of this gift it would have been strange if they did
not recognize some power not themselves. It would
have been a people insensate indeed who did not deve-
lope some sort of religion in the face of the ever-recurring
miracle of the yearly rise of the Nile. That religion
was no doubt at first here as elsewhere some kind of
fetichism ; man gave to a stick or a stone powers he
possessed himself, only in supernatural degree, and he
worshipped the god he himself had made. In Egypt
animal life rises to special importance. The scavenger
birds—the hawk, the vulture, and others—who at the fall
of the Nile cleanse the land and preserve it from pesti-
lence, must have seemed to the dwellers beneath the
fierce southern sun as gods and deliverers worthy of all
worship. Hence arose a hierarchy of beast-gods—the
cat, the hawk, the beetle, vulture, ibis, crocodile. Of
some of these the whole tribe was sacred, as the cat; of
others only selected instances, eg., the bull ; others were
only locally sacred, e.g., the crocodile. In fact, this element
of locality brings into Egyptian religion great confusion
—one triad of deities is sacred at Memphis, another at
Thebes, a third at Sais.
At this purely animalistic stage the sacred animal or