90 
Homer and Herodotus were quite children in comparison to this “ hoar 
antiquity,” which cannot be less than 4000 years before Christ. With regard 
to the 'Kpai cXjjt,- myth, nothing would be easier to prove than that the Greeks, 
after their contact with the Assyrians, borrowed it from the Assyrians, and 
probably the Assyrians themselves borrowed it from a still antecedent civili- 
zation; and recent research has shown us that the Phoebus of the classics is 
derived from the Reseph Mikal of the Syrians, as in later times the Egyptian 
Horus was equalled with the Apollo of the Greeks. But as to that other myth 
of the Greeks, the story of Prometheus and the theft of fire, it has recently 
been established by Mr. Smith,* that the Assyrians had a story relating 
to the god Zu, who was by the Babylonians regarded as a kind of re- 
generating deity, like the Egyptian Amen-Khem, and was driven out of 
heaven for the offence of stealing the sacred fire, and transformed into a 
bird or eel, which seems to bear some minute similarity to the punishment 
of Prometheus, who was preyed upon by a vulture ; while the studies of 
Max Muller and Cox have proved that all these Promethean myths arose from 
the deification of the Pramantha or fire-stick of the primitive Aryans, from 
which indeed the name of the demigod has been derived. We cannot push 
these points further ; and even if we could do so, it would not be wise, because 
teachers of different religions and philosophers of different minds, treat myths 
from different standpoints, and what to one man is a corroboration, to another 
is a refutation, whilst to others again it is a matter of no consequence at 
all. I had hoped that my paper would have been considerably vivisected 
to-night. I am sorry to say that it has not been treated in that way to the 
extent I should have wished. I have only brought before you, after all, one 
section of the Horus myth, for I have purposely avoided the subject of the 
legend of the Virgin and child, Isis and Horus, because I feel that at 
present we are not in a position to analogize it. Quite one-half of the 
texts by which I might illustrate and fortify my paper have been omitted. 
But, if I had brought them all forward, they would not have done much 
more than I have done already, for they would be simply corrobo- 
rations. The Egyptians seem to have considered every deity as maintaining 
an intimate relationship each with the other. They were all Fathers, Sons, 
Mothers, Sisters, and so forth. They were all eternal in their essence, inter- 
changeable in their attributes, and confused and indistinct in the phrases 
employed in the prayers and petitions addressed to them. In later times 
certain deities came more prominently forward, as the influence of the cults ol 
other nations induced the Egyptians to seek to conform their own mythology 
to theirs. In the early ages Osiris was the principal deity ; then 
Horus. About the Xlth Dynasty, Anubis became the principal. After 
the XVIth Dynasty, Amen Ra came prominently forward, and then Set. 
Again, in the XHth Dynasty, Kneph Ra, of Nubia, became a supreme 
deity. And so those changes went on from time to time. In the Litany oi 
# See Chaldean Genesis. 
