91 
Amen Ra, in the XIXth Dynasty, everything is ascribed to Ra, from 
whom everything proceeds,* to whom everything shall come, as to father, 
mother, brother, sister, creator, destroyer of all, who is in himself infinitely 
greater, and infinite nothing. One point must not be lost sight of, and that 
is, that almost all these religious doctrines are to be found, as it were, in two 
parts — one at the close of the Xllth Dynasty, when all the religious books 
were collected together and edited, and another in the XVIIIth and XIXth 
Dynasties, when all the same important books were more or less re-edited and 
annotated, and possibly explained by means of new rubrics, which embodied 
the ideas of the Syrian and Asiatic nations who had been brought into 
immediate contact with Egyptian theology by the Asiatic conquests of 
Thothmes III., or Men-Kheper-Ra, and Rameses II. f and III., the original 
Hero of the glorious Sesostris of Greco-Egyptian tradition. 
The Meeting was then adjourned. 
Mr. W. R. Cooper sends the following additional reply : — 
Grateful for the discussion which my paper has produced, and the more 
grateful because I cannot agree with much that has been said on either side 
of the subject, — I now beg leave to present in a very brief form what I 
consider to be the true solution of the problem which you have done me 
the honour of listening to. 
1. The idea of a personal deity, who assumed a human form for the ac- 
complishment of the destruction of a personal evil being, was questionless 
one of the very earliest dogmas of the Egyptian faith, and was the direct 
result of a primitive revelation to some member of the pre-patriarchal church, 
by whose descendants Egypt was first colonized. 
2. That this revelation of a semi-human deity in his connection with 
mankind was far more clearly made known to the early church than it was 
subsequently to the Jewish nation, after their residence in Egypt. 
3. That the reason of this reticence was, that the Egyptian clergy had so 
far overlaid the dogma of a personal deity with a variety of fanciful and 
dangerous theories, that it would have been impossible for the Jewish Church 
to have differentiated between the Egyptian TIorus and the predicted Messiah, 
if the office of our Lord had been at that time strongly dwelt upon. 
4. That the original dogma of the Horus myth was that of a Divine 
antagonist against the evil being, as an adversary of the Supreme Being ; 
to whom, however, the Evil Being was infinitely inferior, and that this contest 
of the powers of Good and Evil had no necessary connection with mankind. 
* See The Myth of Ra and the texts in Records of the Past , vol. viii. 
pp. 103 and 137 et seq. 
+ M. Bonomi mentions that the Egyptian obelisk at S. Giov. in Laterano 
(Rome) contains hieroglyphics of Thothmes III. and I\ . and Rameses II., 
showing the same skilfully executed alterations that were made in all Egyptian 
monuments, in consequence of changes in the religious opinions of the ancient 
Egyptians in the interval between Thothmes III. and Rameses II. — Ed. 
