A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



the Nile, the ibis, the cat, the ram, and apis the bull; 

 but, so far as we can judge, his imagination did not 

 reach to the idea of an absolutely incorporeal deity. 

 Similarly his conception of the mechanism of the 

 heavens must be a tangibly mechanical one. He must 

 think of the starry firmament as a substantial entity 

 which could not defy the law of gravitation, and which, 

 therefore, must have the same manner of support as is 

 required by the roof of a house or temple. We know 

 that this idea of the materiality of the firmament 

 found elaborate expression in those later cosmological 

 guesses which were to dominate the thought of Eu- 

 rope until the time of Newton. We need not doubt, 

 therefore, that for the Egyptian this solid vault of the 

 heavens had a very real existence. If now and then 

 some dreamer conceived the great bodies of the firma- 

 ment as floating in a less material plenum and such 

 iconoclastic dreamers there are in all ages no record 

 of his musings has come down to us, and we must freely 

 admit that if such thoughts existed they were alien to 

 the character of the Egyptian mind as a whole. 



While the Egyptians conceived the heavenly bodies 

 as the abiding-place of various of their deities, it does 

 not appear that they practised astrology in the later 

 acceptance of that word. This is the more remarkable 

 since the conception of lucky and unlucky days was 

 carried by the Egyptians to the extremes of absurdity. 

 "One day was lucky or unlucky," says Erman, 3 "ac- 

 cording as a good or bad mythological incident took 

 place on that day. For instance, the ist of Mechir, on 

 which day the sky was raised, and the 27th of Athyr, 

 when Horus and Set concluded peace together and 



44 



