Egyptian religious poetry

INTRODUCTION 4I

the Beginning of Existence.” And in the Book of the Dead (ch. cxxvia) the birth of God is stated with equal plainness : “ Behold, ye stars in Heliopolis, ye people of Kheri-aha, God is born.” Still more definite is the text, ““ God was born when I was born” (ch. clxxiv).

The King, then, was a dual personality, both God and man. Without any feeling of incongruity he could, as a man, give worship to himself as God. As God he was the Giver of all to his subjects ; as a man he was like other men, the creation of his own God. He was on an entirely different plane from the ordinary human being, and his God also was different from the gods of the people. To his subjects he was the living incarnation of the local god of any district he happened to be visiting ; he was the actual god in human form, whom they could see and speak to and adore. But the God whom the King himself worshipped was the Sun; to whom he alone offered worship and sacrifice. He alone was the begotten Son of the Sun-god, it was to him alone that the Sun-god gave love and blessing, and it was the Sun-god’s name that the Pharaoh incorporated in the official title that he took when he became Osiris, the Occupier of the Throne.

The deities to whom the greater number of prayers and hymns were addressed are Amon, Ré, and Osiris.

Amon, as the god of the capital city when Egypt was at the height of her power, never lost his importance in the eyes of Egypt and her former dependencies. The splendour of Egypt and of her greatest god lasted till the iron heel of Rome crushed the country into despair and misery, and made it a wreck. Amon therefore could count every class of the population among his worshippers. The Pharaoh, though officially and theologically, the son of the Sun-god Ré, was in his own estimation and in that of his people the physical son of Amon. The little