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cadence, the adoration, vocative and precative, of this latter 
reptile spread throughout the whole of the Egyptian mytho- 
logy, and the serpent lay enshrined in the temples of the 
oldest and most beneficent divinities. 
4. From the very earliest period to which our researches are 
enabled to extend, there is written and monumental evidence 
that out of three kinds of serpents, known in Egypt and 
represented on the monuments, two were the objects of a 
peculiar veneration and of an almost universal worship. Unlike 
the adoration of Seb (fig. 2), the crocodile deity of Ombos and 
Fig. 2. The deity Sebek wearing the Teshr or great plume of Osiris. (Bunsen.) 
Tentyra,* and the batrochocephalan deity, Pthah, the frog- 
headed fire-god of Memphis in the Delta, the reverence paid 
to the snake was not merely local or even limited to one 
period of history, but it prevailed alike in every district of the 
Pharian empire, and has left its indelible impress upon the archi- 
tecture and the archaeology of both Upper and Lower Egypt. 
5. The three serpents peculiar then to Egypt and North 
Africa appear to have been: 1. The Naja, or Cobra di Capello,the 
Fig. 3. The Sacred Urseus or Basilisk. (Sar. Oimen.) 
spectacle- snake of the Portuguese and the Uraeusfi (fig, 3) and 
basilisk of the Greeks; a venomous and magnificent reptile, with 
* Champollion (le Jeune), Pantheon PJgyptien. 
t Urseus, Gr = Ouro = arau, in hieroglyphics, the letters composing the 
determinative of king. ° 
