1.58 THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS. CHAP. XII. 



the altar or the table, in one part of the country, 

 was sacrificed, and eaten in another. Thus the 

 Mendesians, who offered up sheep, abstained from 

 goats, which they held in particular veneration; 

 and the Thebans, who permitted no sheep to be 

 slain, immolated goats on the altars of their Gods.* 

 On the fete of Jupiter, a ram was slain, and the 

 statue of the Deity being clad in the skin, the people 

 assembled about the temple to make a solemn la- 

 mentation, and inflict numerous stripes upon their 

 persons, in token of their regret for the death of 

 the sacred animal, whose corpse was afterwards de- 

 posited in a consecrated case. Plutarch affirms t, 

 that, " of all the Egyptians, none eat sheep except 

 the Lycopolites ; and that because the wolf does so, 

 which they revere as a Deity;" and thus it was 

 that, in one part of the country, certain rites were 

 performed, which differed totally from those of the 

 rest of Egypt. 



This, however, did not extend to the worship 

 of the great Gods of their religion, as Osiris t, 

 Amun, Ptliah, and others, who were universally 

 looked upon with becoming reverence, and treated, 

 not as arbitrary emblems, but as the mysterious 

 representations of some abstract qualities of the 

 Divinity itself; and if one or other of them was 

 more peculiarly worshipped in certain cities or pro- 

 vinces of Egypt, it was from his being considered 

 the immediate patron and presiding deity. But 



* Herodot. ii. 4-2, 46. f Pliit. de Is, s. 72. 



J If Osiris was not nominally one of the eight great Gocls,he in reality 

 lield a rank eqnal to any. 



