In the time of the early dynasties, whose power was concentrated in Upper Egypt, and which, it would appear, succeeded only gradually in con- quering the Delta, Ra plays no considerable réle. Even under the 4th dynasty, which had its resi- dence at Memphis, not far from Heliopolis, he is still quite in the background. With the accession of the 5th dynasty these conditions are changed. A fabulous story, dating from c. 2000 B.c., makes the first three kings of this dynasty to have been the offspring of the god Ra by the wife of a priest of Ra in an otherwise unknown place of the name of Sachebu. How old this legend is we cannot tell, but it is certain that from the 5th dynasty onwards all the Pharaohs give themselves out to be sons of Ra. Nevertheless, the god does not at first appear very frequently in the inscriptions, although king Ra-en-user of the 5th dynasty already caused a great sanctuary to be erected to him at Abusir (cf. Aegyp. Ztschr. xxxvil. 1ff., xxxvill. 94 ff., xxxix. 91ff.). Itis not till the time of the Middle Empire that Ra is mentioned with ever- increasing frequency, and that the conception of the specially close relation between deity and sun begins at the same time to influence the conception
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formed of other gods. This leads, for instance, in the case of the Theban Amon, to a complete amal- gamation of the old god of Thebes with the sun- god—a, result which finds outward expression in the usual name for this deity under the New Empire, namely Amon-Ra. But, even when this new namie is not employed, the simple name Amon is always during this period to be understood of the deity who had become a solar one. The same happened with other Divine figures. Sometimes the amalgamation is indicated by the name (Sebek- Ra, and the like), at other times the old name is retained, and it is merely the conception of the god that is influenced by solar notions. In the first millennium B.C. practically the whole of the more important Egyptian gods became more or less clearly defined sun-gods, and processes of thought derived from the solar faith were allowed to influ- ence even the conceptions of the gods of the under world who were connected with the Osirian doc- trine of immortality (see below, p. 195°).
But, although the nature of the Egyptian deities was in later times prevailingly solar, we must be careful not to carry inferences from this back to earlier periods. We can trace the progress of the
rocess by aid of the monuments, and are not at iberty ofthand to place the result at the beginning of the development of Egyptian religion.
(5) In consequence of the independence of the various nome gods, the doublets already referred to were bound to arise in the circle of the higher powers. In his own district each nome god is at once creator, preserver, ruler of the world, quite untram- melled by similar pretensions on the part of his Divine neighbour. The Egyptians never attempted to remove the logical contradiction that thus arose. Quite the reverse! In taking over a foreign god to anew nome, they calmly took over also his titles and his myths, quite unconcerned that in this way a Doppelganger to the old nome god found entrance into the nome. The only concession occasionally made in favour of more systematized thought was that deities of this kind were declared to be essen- tially identical or emanations of the same Divine notion, without, however, the further step being taken of abandoning the assumption of an inde- pendent individuality for each particular form. Especially in later texts it is often asserted that the nome or temple god bears in other places the names of the local deities, but one must not infer from this, as has frequently been done, e.g. even by Brugsch, that the forms in question are actually identical. Such statements are merely intended to characterize the particular god as the possessor of all Divine power—a position which in other places might quite well be attributed to any other who was the ruling deity there.
(6) In principle, then, the nome gods have equal importance, they may all of them, if the occasion demands it, have omnipotence attributed to them ; but we have already noted that this relation might assume a different form in practice, according to the power of their particular nome. The material at our disposal does not indeed always give us a trustworthy picture of the actual conditions. We have an exact knowledge only of those deities whose places of worship and temples survive and have been already excavated. Our views are thus subject to constant shifting when new texts and monuments emerge from places that had not been previously examined. Chance plays so great a part in the matter that it is quite possible that gods at present scarcely known to us had great importance in antiquity, and, conversely, that the forms which are frequently named in our sources once possessed only slight significance. Here, as little as elsewhere in Egyptological questions, are we at liberty to forget that, in spite of the wealth
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wes ee a ee a See
of monuments that have survived, their number is relatively small considering the thousands of years of Egyptian history, and hence their data must be used with caution in drawing inferences as to ancient conditions in general. ‘This must be kept in view in judging of the following list of the most important Egyptian deities. These are the forms of which the extant texts principally speak ; and, above all, they are those which possessed the greatest interest for the nations of antiquity out- side Egypt.