34 



were the Egyptians ; which regulation, indeed, Cecrops 

 might have imported from Egypt, as it is not denied that 

 he visited Egypt; but it affords no proof that he led a 

 colony of Egyptians into Attica. 



Lastly, the Egyptians in the most ancient times held the sea 

 in abomination,* therefore they sent out no colonies by sea ; 

 they looked upon it as the emblem of Typhon, the enemy of 

 Osiris. It was a maxim among them never to sail from 

 their country.-j- Nay, until the reign of Psammitieus they 

 excluded all strangers from their harbours, Diodor. Lib. 1, 

 78, except the Phenicians, with whom, as being of their 

 kindred, they traded in the most ancient times, for at least. 

 1745 years B.C. lo, the daughter of Jasus,J was carried into 

 Eygpt by the Phenicians, as Herodotus relates, Lib. 1,§1, 

 who, he says, exported the commodities of Egypt into 

 different countries. Hence we see the impossibility of 

 deriving any part of the Greek religion from Egypt, either 

 immediately, as Herodotus has asserted, or even through the 

 medium of the Phenicians, as the Egyptian cosmogony was 

 atheistical, and their theology totally different. I know 

 but one fable which the Greeks seem to have borrowed 

 from the Egyptians, it is that of the Nine INIuses ; for the 

 Egyptians, in their fabulous history of Osiris, related that 



in 



* Plutarch, de Iside &, Oslride. f Porphyry, de Abstinentia, Lib. 4, S. 



JPausanias, 145. Herodotus says she was the daughter of Inachus, but 

 Wetseling proved the name Inachus to have been an interpolation. See 

 LWrchei's Note. 



