GOSHEN.
97
town was Pe-Supt, the Abode of the god Supt: this we
find in the Assyrian records in the form Pasupti, as the
capital of one of the little kingdoms under which Egypt
was divided from the middle of the eighth to the middle
of the seventh century before the Christian Era. The
local divinity Supt was a form of Horus, the sun of the
day, and his sacred animal was probably the hawk.
Supt was reverenced as the protector of the frontier,
the subduer of the Shepherds. This was the Egyptian
notion. Yet they had another view of this god as an
object of worship of the stranger population. We see
him represented as a Shemite divinity, with a foreign
type of face and a foreign dress. Thus he is connected
with the local religion of the Shepherds. We already
saw in the history of Zoan that the Shepherds adored a
divinity of their own whom the Egyptians identified
with Set or Typhon. We now learn of another of their
gods. Supt is connected with other foreign divinities
worshipped in eastern Egypt, and consequently those
of the Shepherds. They are alluded to in a curious
passage in Amos (v. 25, 26, comp. Acts vii. 42, 43).
Not a vestige of the local worship of Goshen appears
to have clung to the Hebrew nation after the conquest
H
97
town was Pe-Supt, the Abode of the god Supt: this we
find in the Assyrian records in the form Pasupti, as the
capital of one of the little kingdoms under which Egypt
was divided from the middle of the eighth to the middle
of the seventh century before the Christian Era. The
local divinity Supt was a form of Horus, the sun of the
day, and his sacred animal was probably the hawk.
Supt was reverenced as the protector of the frontier,
the subduer of the Shepherds. This was the Egyptian
notion. Yet they had another view of this god as an
object of worship of the stranger population. We see
him represented as a Shemite divinity, with a foreign
type of face and a foreign dress. Thus he is connected
with the local religion of the Shepherds. We already
saw in the history of Zoan that the Shepherds adored a
divinity of their own whom the Egyptians identified
with Set or Typhon. We now learn of another of their
gods. Supt is connected with other foreign divinities
worshipped in eastern Egypt, and consequently those
of the Shepherds. They are alluded to in a curious
passage in Amos (v. 25, 26, comp. Acts vii. 42, 43).
Not a vestige of the local worship of Goshen appears
to have clung to the Hebrew nation after the conquest
H