Nature and Art, May 1, 1867.] 
MOSAIC AND EGYPTIAN COSMOGONIES. 
131 
and Romans represented the gods in chariots ; but 
as in Egypt the Nile is the principal highway of 
the country, the Egyptians depicted them in a 
boat. This gigantic figure is a personification of 
the great ocean that was supposed to sustain the 
firmament and all things therein, and it is remark- 
able how closely it corresponds to a metaphorical 
sentence in Habakkuk : “ The deep uttered his 
voice, and lifted up his hands on high.” There is 
no representation in all Egypt, no sarcophagus in 
any museum of Europe, and no papyrus in the 
British Museum, as far as I am aware, that will 
bear the interpretation which you have just heard 
attributed to this diagram. 
And now, if it were required to reduce to lines, 
or, hi other words, to present to the mind through 
the medium of the eye, that remarkable statement 
in Genesis respecting the position of the firmament, 
namely, ‘ ‘ in the midst of the waters,” and to 
render pictorially in one and the same view that 
other statement in the Psalms respecting the earth 
as “ founded upon the seas and established upon 
the floods,” I am at a loss to conceive how it coidd 
be better done than it has been by the ancient 
Egyptian artist. To do this the more effectually, 
he has employed both plan and elevation in the 
same picture in a way common to Egyptian repre- 
sentations, and no doubt universally intelligible at 
the time and in the country, where this pictorial 
language is, as it were, the very root of the more 
ordinary written one. 
For instance, when it was required to explain to 
the spectator that the food offered to the dead Avas 
properly set out, according to custom, on tables 
spread with the fresh green leaves of a particular 
species of reed, it was done as represented in 
Eig. 3. The leaves are to be regarded as lying flat 
on the table, and on the top of them each particular 
article of food is shown by a means which could not 
have been accomplished, in one view, in a true 
optical representation. Again, if it were required 
to show that palm branches Avere strewn in the 
path of the mourners, it AA r as done in the way 
described in Fig. 4. So in the diagram (Eig. 1), 
to explain that the figure of Osiris is put for 
the earth, the goddess Netpe, or the heavens, is 
represented in elevation as standing on the head of 
Osiris, who is “in plan.” In other words, she is 
standing on the highest part of the earth, to sustain 
the sun ; and because it Avas necessary to place the 
sun in the firmament, and above • the .earth, it was 
of course essential to show that the picture must 
be viewed from another base; and hence the figures 
of Netpe and of Osiris are reversed, and the hiero- 
glyphics belonging to these figures are made to be 
read from the same point of YieAv. Again, for a 
like reason, because it was necessary to show that 
the firmament and all it contained was supported 
by the great ocean of space, the gigantic figure 
personifying this vast sea was necessarily placed at 
the proper base of the picture. It uoav remains to 
show in this same picture the firmament under 
another aspect. 
The Egyptian artist has chosen to do this by a 
band of dots, which in this form could be made 
to seiwe as the upper and loAver boundaries to the 
subjects treated of in this most interesting docu- 
ment, and, at the same time, to convey to the mind 
something solid and strong, such as granite, which 
is typified by the dots he has so industriously 
engraved in eveiy part of it. In other words, he 
would have you to understand that, although 
metaphorically or poetically speaking, it might be 
said that the sun was sustained in the firmament 
by the queen of heaven, as this Egyptian goddess 
is called in Jeremiah xliv. 25,* yet, in prosaic truth, 
it was fixed in something firm and hard, like the 
granite boundaries of his own country. The tAvo 
leading ideas present in the mind of the author of 
the Book of Job, when he compared the sky to a 
molten mirror, + are precisely those which are 
embodied in this diagram ; for the strength and 
solidity of the bronze are here expressed by the 
presence of a dotted granite border, that holds and 
binds all space together, and the absence of dots in 
the firmament (b) favours the idea of light and 
expansfreness conveyed by the polished and reflect- 
ing surface of the mirror. 
Just where this band of dots (the second aspect 
of the firmament) is joined to the former, in the 
midst of the waters, the artist has again placed the 
sun (m), represented as setting or sinking, below 
the surface of the waters, as signified by the hori- 
zontal line which joins it to the boat. If you will 
now travel in this “ path of the sun,” as it has been 
very happily designated by Mr. Sharpe, in the 
letterpress to the “ Sarcophagus of Oimenepthah,” 
you will arrive at a door or gate (o, p, q, r), which 
forms the left-hand boundary of this picture of the 
universe. 
At the upper pivot (x) of this gate is the figure of a 
cobra serpent, to personate Isis (as the hieroglyphics 
inform us). She presides over the upper pivot in 
the upper firmament, while at the loAver end of the 
gate is another cobra serpent, put for Nephthys, 
who presides over the lower pivot (z) inserted into 
the lower firmament. 
It may not be unworthy of remark, in proof of 
the intelligent thought displayed in even the 
smallest particular, and the painstaking execution 
of this remarkable work, that the upper pivots of 
all these gates are represented as cylindrical, while 
the loAver pivots are conical, as they Avere and are 
to this day in all the gates and doors of the city of 
Cairo. The lower pivot is conical, because of the 
pressure of the gate and consequent tendency to 
sink ; the upper pivot, having no such tendency, is 
cylindrical. 
This great door, then, whose pivots are fixed in 
the upper and lower firmaments, I venture to say 
is alluded to in the Book of Job (xxxviii. 8) as one 
of the mysteries of creation, and, as we may infer 
from this ancient document and from the form of 
qitestion in which the words are addressed to the 
# “We will surely perform our vows that we have vowed, 
to burn incense to the queen of heaven.” 
f Job xxxvii. : “ Hast thou with him spread out the sky, 
which is strong', and as a molten looking-glass ? ” 
