June 1, 1896.] 



KNOWLEDGE, 



127 



This, indeed, is one of the curious and seemingly con- 

 tradictory facts with which nature abounds, and we cannot 

 attempt a reason for it. 



SUN-SYMBOLS IN ANCIENT EGYPT. 



By F. W. Eeap. 



AMONG all the objects worshipped by the Egyptians 

 the sun was the most honoured. It was he who 

 furnished the type of the immortality of the 

 human soul : as he sank daily behind the Libyan 

 Kills and rose again daily over the Arabian 

 Desert, so man, his creature, did not come to an end when 

 he too passed westward to his grave in those same hills, 

 but would rise again with the sun, his lord. To come 

 forth by day, to triumph with the sun, is the object, again 

 and again set forth, of the wonderful collection of reUgious 

 writings called " The Book of the Dead." But the daily 

 journey of the sun also gave rise to another kind of 

 symbolism. Passing in triumph over the earth, he is its 

 Mng ; and to the pious Egyptian the Pharaoh was his 

 representative, bearing all lus titles, clothed with all his 

 attributes, wielding all his powers. One of the titles of 

 the Pharaoh was " Son of the Sun " ; another was 

 " Horus," and Horus was before all things a sun-god. On 

 the beautiful statue of Khafra, the pyramid builder (about 

 B.C. 3700), one of the oldest works of Egyptian art, the 

 Hawk of Horus stands behind the king's head, spreading 

 its protecting wings. 



Although, in common with the moderns, the Egyptians 

 sang the golden glories of the sun, the one thing that 

 impressed them above aU others was the fact that, wherever 

 he went, he divided that over and through which he passed 

 into two parts — the north and the south. When viewed 

 in this light, heaven is " the two heavens," earth is " the 

 two earths," and the space beneath the earth is " the 

 double divine under- world,' or " the double hall of Maat." 

 The explanation of these phrases is to be found only in 

 the fact of the sun's daily passage over all countries. As 

 he passes over them he divides each into two, and there- 

 fore every country and every nome could be spoken of as 

 " the two earths." Of course, Egypt among the rest 

 might be described in this way, and it is possible that the 

 expression sometimes has a double significance ; but there 

 is evidence that, down to the time of the Ptolemies at any 

 rate, the distinction between " the two Pjgypts " and " the 

 two earths " was well recognized by the learned class. 



The pyramid texts, of which the first was discovered in 

 1880, and only recently published by Maspero, throw much 

 light on this question, as they do upon nearly the whole 

 of Egyptian mythology. In the pyramid built for King 

 Teta (about b.c. 3300) we read: " Teta comes to the two 

 heavens, Teta arrives at the two earths ; Teta treads upon 

 the herbage growing under the feet of Seb, he traverses 

 the roads of Nut." The first part of this passage ought of 

 itself to be sufficient to settle the meaning of the phrase 

 " the two earths,'' since it occurs in connection with '' the 

 two heavens," and, obviously, "tlie two heavens of Egypt" 

 would be absurd. But the second part takes us farther 

 still ; from it we see that the two heavens are equivalent 

 to the goddess Nut (the sky), and the two earths to the god 

 Seb (the earth). 



This doctrine of duality, which has been briefly indicated, 

 found expression in many ways, but chielly in the titles 

 of the king. The word " king " itself is expressed in 

 Egyptian by ai'tcti nat, which, fully translated, means 

 " king of tlic south and king of the north." Another 

 common title, parallel with wicn nat, is " lord of the two 



earths." The paraUeUsm, indeed, is curiously exact, for, 

 just as one could use " two earths" and " earth" inter- 

 changeably, so one could express the idea of king by either 

 seten or tiat — preferably the former, which from various 

 causes acquired a pre-eminence. 



A consideration of the other symbols of the same doctrine 

 will take us a little deeper into the regions of mythology. 

 Those who only know Horus and Set from the writings of 

 Plutarch and his copyists will be surprised to learn that 

 one of the most ancient titles of the Egyptian king is "the 

 Horus and the Set." Accordint? to Plutarch, Typhon (Set) 

 slays his brother Osiris, and Horus, the son of Osiris 

 and Isis, defeats Set and reigns in his father's place. That 

 some such story as this was told in Egypt during the 

 Ptolemaic and Eoman periods is highly probable, and 

 some parts of it are demonstrably very ancient. At an 

 early period we hear of a desperate fight between Horus 

 and Set, but it does not seem to have had oritjinally 

 any connection with Osiris ; and the combatants are at 

 other times spoken of as friends and colleagues, and 

 not at all as the deadly enemies described by Plutarch 

 The king, as we have said, is called " the Horns and the 

 Set," and sometimes the " Golden Horus and the Golden 

 Set " ; he is depicted standing between the two gods, who 

 sometimes purify him with water, sometimes pour the 

 symbols of life and power over him, sometimes instruct 

 him in the use of arms. The two gods are spoken of as 

 brothers having sovereignty over the two divisions of the 

 earth ; and that they are identical in character is proved 

 by the use of the expression " the two Horus gods " as the 

 equivalent of Horus and Set. The famous queen 

 Hatshepsu (about b.c. IGOO) says on her great obehsk at 

 Karnak : " I bear the white crown (of the south), I am 

 diademed with the red crown (of the north) ; the two 

 Horus gods have united for me their divisions ; I rule this 

 earth like the son of Isis {i.e., Horus), I am victorious like 

 the son of Nut {i.e., Set)." It will be seen that there are 

 here three phrases in parallelism : first, the white and 

 the red crowns ; second, the two Horus gods ; and, third, 

 Horus and Set. The inscriptions known as " The Book of 

 Hades," relating to the progress of the sun through the 

 under- world during the night, contain two representations 

 of a god with two heads, those of Horus and Set, who is 

 called "the double-headed." In one case he stands on 

 two bows (evidently another of the many symbols of north 

 and south), and the text says : " The two bows bear the 

 double-headed in his mystery ; they direct Ea to the 

 eastern horizon of heaven and they advance on high with 

 him. " Here we find Horus and Set not only conjoined in 

 one person but actually identified with Ea (the sun-god), 

 proceeding towards the eastern horizon of heaven and 

 advancing on high. These and other tests point to the 

 true interpretation of our pair of gods : they symbolize the 

 northern and southern aspects of the sim and his dual 

 sovereignty. 



A much-damaged inscription which came from the 

 ancient temple of Memphis, and which purports to have 

 been copied from an older original by order of Shabaka, 

 an Ethiopian king of Egypt (about n.c. 700), tells us of a 

 fight between Horus and Set, which was brought to an end 

 through the mediation of Seb, chief of the gods. Seb 

 declared that there should bo an arbitration between the 

 belligerents, and summoned thoni to a mountain in the 

 desert to the cast of Memphis ; each stood upon a hillock 

 and there made peace, declaring the nome of .Vn in which 

 they stood to be the boundary of their territories. Seb 

 then ratified the arrangement, and appointed Horus king 

 of the north and Set king of the south. In this there is 

 no allusion to the cause of the combat — no suggestion 



