332 
as far as to Heracleopolis ; the gathering-up of the fruits of the 
earth, together with the blood of the slain to a sufficient quan- 
tity to fill seven thousand pitchers ; the horrible liquid thus 
obtained being offered by the king of Upper and Lower Egypt* * * § 
to the god Ra, who> drinks it, and is refreshed and sated 
thereby ; the oath of the deity that from henceforth he would 
slay no more men ; the pouring out of the remainder of the 
liquid upon the plains of Egypt, which are fertilized thereby ; 
the rise of an inundation of water, restoring plenty to Egypt ; 
the satisfaction of the goddess Sechet, who drinks thereof; the 
apparent re-creation of mankind again ; and the institution of 
a festival to the goddess Hathor— all these circumstances are 
totally foreign to the spirit of Egyptian mythology, and seem 
to partake more of the nature of an Asiatic legend interwoven 
into the texture of the Hamitic solar myth than a legitimate 
outcome from its principles. The remainder of the text, which 
relates to the worship and duties of the god Thoth, considered 
as a lunar deity, is not less curious, f and seems to point to an 
identification of the god Ra with Thoth, as the god Aah,J who 
was also called the good Saviour, § on a statue in the museum at 
Boulaq. What renders the text of the destruction of mankind 
by Ra still more difficult to comprehend is the circumstance 
that a monarch of the XIXth dynasty, Seti, figures in it 
repeatedly ; and hence the conjecture it may possibly even be an 
inflated and allegorical account of a local massacre undertaken by 
the priests of Ra or Sechet, at his orders, under the guise of a 
religious war. Without these prefatory remarks, the sequence 
of the text itself, which must now in part be cited, would not 
be understood. 
24. 6 "When those gods came j| those gods in his place, they 
bowed down 
7. before His Majesty himself, who spake in the presence of his father, 
of the elder gods, of the creators of men, and of wise beings,** and 
they spake in his presence 
* Apparently Seti I. 
f Records of the Past, vol. vi. pp. 110-11. 
J Aah was the lunar deity properly so called. He was represented as 
a man kneeling on one knee and holding the lunar disk above his head. 
The ancient Egyptian royal names, Aah mes (born of Aah) and Aah hotep 
(peace of Aah) were derived from his. 
§ See Mariette, Catalogue du Muste de Boulaq. 
] | Lacunae. Seti I. _ ... 
** This almost implies the Persian doctrine of the oreafion of the 
