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Nun,* who is on the height of Am-susennu, who has brought 
to nought the rebels on the height of Am-susennu. I am 
the great god, existing of lvimself; that is to say, the water, 
the divine original water, the father of the gods. What 
does this mean ? The great god, existing of himself, is Ra, 
the father of the gods ; or also. This is Ra, the creator of his 
name, as Lord of all gods. What does this mean ? This 
Ra, the creator of his members, which are become gods like 
unto Ra.” 
If the assertion, “ I am the gi’eat god, existing of himself,” 
meant, unexplained, what it would seem to mean, it might be 
fairly inferred that the Egyptians did really entertain that con- 
ception of Godhead which prevails unchanged in all the books 
of Holy Scripture ; but it is not so explained, nor could ever 
be so understood. Now, if the name of this Egyptian god 
Turn be really the same as mnn, the deep, or the primeval 
ocean, and if this word was originally Egyptian, and fell into 
the Hebrew language, retaining that sense, it only confirms, 
once more, the belief that those ancients supposed all things 
to have originated in the waters ; and the paraphrase in the 
second rendering only shows that in the long interval between 
these two issues of the Booh of the Dead, the grand con- 
ception of an essential and undivided godhead had made no 
advance ; but we shall soon see that no such conception ever 
followed from it. Nay, though it certainly existed elsewhei’e, 
it was absolutely precluded from the mythology of Egypt, 
where an incipient pantheism, from the very first, had invested 
all gods, men, and consecrated things with a common attri- 
bution of divinity. The great god, the father of all gods, 
Turn, Osiris, Ra, is self-existent in a way peculiar to himself ; 
for the words in which men declared the dogma, pronounced 
that he was water, that he derived existence from the water, 
that he was exalted out of Nun, another name for the deep over 
which darkness hung. The same symbolic document said of 
him that he w r as ivater, the divine original water, the Father of 
the gods. He was also Osiris, he was also Horns, yet in 
relation to all these he was one, and this godhead we find 
immeasurably widened. At Thebes he was the local god, and 
there they called him Amen-Ra. A hymn to him, translated 
by Mr. Goodwin, has been much quoted, and by some is con- 
sidered to prove that the Egyptians believed in the True God, 
* Nun, the abyss, the immensity of the heavenly waters, on which floats 
the solar barge. It is also the deification of the primal waters (Pierret, s. v.). 
