352 
These examples, as Brugsch Bey tells us, suffice to prove the 
place of the god Ptah at the head of the divine dynasty. He is 
the Creator God, existing before the creation of the universe, his 
work * The god Ra, the sun, is described in many texts, con- 
taining religious hymns, as ff a creature of the god Ptah.”f 
The Divine Dynasty is perhaps the nearest expression of the 
original conception. M. Grebant, in his remarkable study of 
a hymn of Ammon, in the museum at Boulag, endeavours to 
prove that the gods of the Egyptian pantheon are only the 
manifestations {persona;) of one Divine Being. The whole 
Divinity is the Paout Nouterou, or Divine Substance, determined 
by the sign for bread, denoting essence , from Pa, to be.% 
If ever the worship of Ptah was at any period the worship 
of the Creator, such cannot have continued to be the case after 
the reign of Caeachos in the Ilnd Dynasty of the Old Empire, 
when Apis was appointed to be his visible representative. Thus 
“ they changed their glory into the similitude of an ox that 
eateth grass,” and the Israelites in their revolt against Jehovah, 
when “ they made a calf in Horeb and worshipped the golden 
image ” (Ps. cvi.), but followed the example set them by these 
early idolaters. 
The Army of Horns. 
If we fail to find any satisfactory trace of pure worship in our 
inquiries respecting the temple of Ptah at Memphis, still less 
shall we find any resting-place in our researches respecting Isis, 
Osiris, Seb, and Ilorus. Some grand mystical ideas were no 
doubt attached to the triumphs of Horus, when he led forth 
his army of Horschesu to establish the rights of his father Osiris. 
To whatever form of the great contest between the powers 
of light and darkness this alluded, the mythical account pre- 
served by Manetlio comprises a strange amalgamation of the 
evidently fabulous and the possibly true, and closes with the 
reign of the Manes or dead (antediluvian ?) persons, and the 
heroes, which he places immediately before Menes. It is 
difficult to avoid the conjecture of an analogy between this 
history and statements in Genesis in reference to antedi- 
luvian times ; but, setting aside conjecture, the certainty which 
we gather is this, that the Egyptians possessed no reliable 
history before the era of Menes. 
Nevertheless, some gleams of light penetrate the darkness of 
this (so to speak) antediluvian era. Mariette Bey has dis- 
covered § an inscription of the era of Thothmes III., which 
* Compare Proverbs viii. 22 — 32. + Brugsch, Hist., p. 21. 
J Pierret, Did., sub voce. § Chabas, Etudes, etc., Ant., p. 7. 
