Egyptian religious poetry

42 EGYPTIAN RELIGIOUS POETRY

tombstones of the poor show that Amon was the god upon whom they called when in trouble.

Ré, as the god of the Pharaoh, was worshipped in Court circles, for it was politic to follow the King’s lead. The most marked example of this subservience is at Tell el Amarna where Akhenaten’s courtiers gained the royal favour by a slavish adoration of the royal god. Ré was never a god of the people until a late date, and seems to have been regarded as a protector of the gods (including the Pharaoh) rather than as the protector of the poor like Amon. The worshippers of Ré were drawn entirely from the educated classes, who could afford to have copies of prayers and hymns to that god engraved on the walls of their tombs or written on papyrus to be buried with them. And as all the surviving temples were built by the Pharaohs, who naturally honoured their own private god above his fellows, Ré has an importance in the religious poetry of ancient Egypt which was probably out of proportion to the actual facts.

Osiris is in a unique position, for he was the Pharaoh himself, whether alive or dead, and could be worshipped in both aspects. Because he was a living man he knew the troubles and trials of poor humanity, and could sympathize, help, and comfort ; because he was dead, he was the ruler of the Other World, that blessed land where poverty and famine, sickness and death, could not enter. His cult made a universal appeal, for he was the living Pharaoh who could be seen and adored in person, and he was also the King and Judge of the Dead to whom all mankind must go. It is this dual aspect of Osiris, as being both living and dead, that causes part of the confusion in the presentation of the Egyptian religion.

But though he is a god of so many aspects that his worship is often confusing, actually all those aspects become unified when his true character as the God of Fertility, in other words, the