y Mont (Ment), the god of the ancient metropolis Hermonthis. With the advance of Thebes and the growing importance of its temple of Amon, the latter became from the 12th dynasty onwards the principal deity. But as the power of Thebes waned more and more during the Saitic period, the prestige of its god also sank in the nome, and the significance of Mont once more revived.
In other instances nome gods were able to extend their worship beyond the limits of their own pro- vince. Thus shrines were occasionally built to their own gods by men who had migrated from one nome to another. If these shrines were richly endowed, other Egyptians might be led to attach themselves to the newly introduced cult. As far as we can trace the matter back, in such cases the gods who from of old had been in possession were always tolerant, and took no umbrage at the intro- duction of the new divinities so long as these made no claim to supremacy over themselves. But cults of this kind, whose introduction was due to private persons, had no importance outside a limited sphere. The authority of a nome god increased in far greater measure when the princes of his province raised themselves to the rank of Pharaohs. The god had procured for his prince the supreme power in Egypt, and thereby showed that he was mightier than the other nome gods. The maintenance of his cult was consequently the primary duty of the royal house and of all the courtiers and officials connected with it, not indeed in the sense that an officially prescribed State cult was introduced, but one that had the force of consuetudinary propriety in view of the religious notions which had been cherished from olden times by the now reigning Pharaonic house. But similar considerations would gain over other Egyptians also to the new cult, and move the various priestly colleges to grant it admittance into their temples. This advance in the honours paid to some particular god, followed by a decline when the power of the dynasty from that nome decayed, may still be traced, by aid of the inscriptions, in the case of Amon, Bast, and other Divine figures. With other gods the change of prestige has taken place prior to the commence- ment of the literary tradition accessible tous. In primitive times, for instance, great significance was possessed by the jackal-headed god Ap-uat, who was ultimately regarded as the nome god of Sint. His image was borne upon a standard before the king, and the jackal’s tail, in allusion to his cult, was, down to the latest times, worn by the Pharaohs, attached to their girdle behind, as a symbol of rule. In the course of Egyptian history, however, Ap-uat receded quite into the background in the cult. In the Old Empire he still held the place of one of the chief gods of the dead, in the Middle Empire even this prestige begins to decay,
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and under the New Empire in almost every necro- polis his place is taken by another jackal-god, Anubis, who, in the train of Osiris, the god of the dead, obtains growing significance in the concep- tions of the under world.
(3) In all these instances a political development of Egypt, originally quite apart from religious con- siderations, had brought with it as a logical conse- quence a change of faith, without the co-operation of any external compulsion on the part of the State. Once only was it otherwise, namely, when Amenophis Iv. sought at one bound forcibly to raise to the chief place the cult of Aten, the solar disc, worshipped as one of the natural bodies—a cult which under his predecessors had been slowly growing in importance. The rest of the gods were ~ to take only a secondary place, if indeed the attempt was not made, as in the case of Amon, to prevent their worship altogether, and to damage the god by destroying his name in inscriptions, etc. This violent revolution had no success. After the death of the innovator, even his own family speedily lost interest in his god. The temples consecrated to Aten were deserted and destroyed, his worship survived in only a few places, and even there to only an insignificant extent.
(4) In order that the heavenly figures should en- joy Divine authority, it was not necessary for them to be the chief gods in one of the nomes of Egypt ; the enormous number of Egyptian divinities is itself sufficient to exclude such a supposition. Some of them even enjoyed widespread regard throughout Egypt, without ever having possessed any such local authority. Some even of the chief deities of the whole country have no place among the nome gods, as for instance the goddess of Truth Maat, the god Nefer-Tum, the Nile god Hapi, and, above all, the principal god of his- torical Egypt, Ra. This sun-god was indeed specially worshipped at Heliopolis, a city which was called after him by the sacred name Pa-Ra, ‘house of Ra,’ but the nome god here was originally not Ra but Atum (Tum). The latter is likewise a sun-god, who even in later times always enjoyed veneration side by side with Ra, an attempt being frequently made to represent him as a partial form of Ra, namely, the god of the evening sun. For his veneration over the whole of Egypt, Ra is in- debted, accordingly, not to any local authority possessed by him,—as a city Heliopolis never had any very great importance,—but to the doctrine concerning him and to the development of religious conceptions in the Nile valley.