Reshpu, the Pheenician Reseph, carries a lance, exhibits Semitic features, and makes his appear- ance frequently upon steles belonging to the flourishing period of Egyptian history. '
Astarte was worshipped in several Egyptian
temples. The most frequently mentioned is her shrine at Memphis, which existed down to the Ptolemaic period, and must have stood not far from the Serapeum. In the treaty between Ramses It. and the Asiatic Kheta, she appears as goddess of the Kheta, but even Ramses 11. himself esteemed her so highly that he named one of his sons after her—Mer-A-(s)tro¢ (Wiedemann, Hero- dot’s Zweites Buch, 433; cf. Spiegelbere, PSBA sexav., 41 ff):
Anta likewise makes her appearance as goddess of the Kheta. She bears shield, lance, and battle- club, and is occasionally mounted on horseback. Ramses I. and II. worshipped her, and the first named of these monarchs called his favourite daughter and future wife after her—Bent-Anti, ‘daughter of Anta.’ But neither her cult nor that of her Semitic associates appears to have laid hold upon the mass of the people. It remained an official cult, quite in contrast with that of the Libyan and African divinities, who appear to Pah found their principal worshippers in popular circles.
(3) DEIFIED MEN.—In treating of the Egyptian religion, great importance has frequently been attached to the worship of the king of the land, and a whole pantheon of kings has been attributed to the Egyptians. But this way of putting it is not correct. The Pharaoh was, as we have seen already (p. 180°), the direct offspring of a god, and hence bore the title ‘beautiful god,’ and felt him- self to belong to the order of heavenly beings. Even during his lifetime hymns were composed which attributed to him all manner of divine attributes (for examples see Maspero, Genre épist. 76 ff.); he is portrayed with the insignia of the gods; his subjects approached him as a god, and no doubt offered adoration to him in the popular cult and elsewhere. But in the temple cult his worship had avery subordinate place. Amenophis Ill. indeed prays to his own ka, and obtains from the latter the promise of all kinds of heavenly gifts. Ramses I. admits himself into the number of his temple gods, ete. But, upon the whole, even these monarchs stand a long way behind the great gods. It may be noted also as a cireum- stance connected with this, that the cult ceases as a rule upon the death of the particular Pharaoh concerned. It is true indeed, that occasionally, even after their death, offerings continue for a con- siderable time to be presented to them in accordance with their own directions and from funds left by them for the purpose, until later generations apply these gifts to their own use, but it is seldom that the defunct Pharaohs continue to be invoked as actual heavenly powers. Only a few of them are mentioned after the lapse of centuries as deities (cf. e.g. for the kings of the first dynasties, Erman, Aegyp. Ztschr, xxxviii. 121 ft.), and even then only in company with others. The temples to the dead, which the Pharaohs erected to themselves, appear to have been nearly all very quickly alienated from their proper use.
Still less frequently than kings did ordinary mortals attain to Divine honours after death. One of these rare instances is found in the time of Amenophis Itt. in the person of Amenophis the son of Hapu, who is still regarded as a god as late as the Ptolemaic period (cf. Wiedemann in PSBA xiv. 334, Orquell, vii. 289 ff. ; Sethe, Agyp- tiaca, 107ff.). Another is the prince of Cush, Pa-ser, who for a length of time bears the title of ‘the god’ (Wiedemann, PSBA xiv. 332f.), and there are examples of the same in other two private persons under the 18th dynasty (Wiede- mann, Orient. Ltztg. iii. 361 ff). The Greeks assert, further (see the citations in Wiedemann,
188 RELIGION OF EGYPT
PSBA xiv. 335), that in the otherwise unknown city of Anabis a man was venerated as a god, and had gifts presented for him to eat. But such notices are isolated ; the veneration of such men being confined as a rule to the narrow circle of the clan to which they belonged, or the officials of the building erected by them.
Naturally, we must not confound Divine venera- tion of this kind with the proper cult of the dead, the object of which was to ensure a supply of food and drink to the deceased so as to prevent his wandering about as a ghost, but which did not necessarily imply the attributing to him of any Divine attributes in the stricter sense of the term.
(4) THE POPULAR GODS.—Partition of the great gods.—The older investigators of the history of Egyptian religion proceeded on the principle that the best way to arrive at a thorough knowledge of the character of the particular deities was to collect all the references to them in the monuments and to draw conclusions from these. But the progress of study showed that identity of name is in the Nile valley no necessary guarantee for identity of deity, that, for instance, Horus of Edfu is quite a different form from Horus of Letopolis or Horus the son of Isis. This circumstance it was sought in the first instance to explain by assuming that the original Egyptian gods were worshipped at different places, and that, under the influence of the varying local development of doctrine, the varying images, etc., there arose in course of time different conceptions of the gods, which found expression in the local by-names for the primeval divinities. This view is in general correct, but the phenomenon had a much fuller scope than was formerly supposed. It happened not infrequently that even in one and the same place the same god was worshipped under several forms, and that each of these forms was regcarded as an independent personality.