the names of the kings who, one after the other, had built a new portico to their great temple of Pthah; but as to the when, the why, or by whom the pyramids were built, they had as little to guide their guesses as we have. The temple of Pthah, and every other building of Memphis, is now gone, and within a few miles of the spot stands the great city of Caïro, whose mosques and minarets have been quarried out of its ruins. But the pyramids still stand unbroken and unchanged, and we still amuse ourselves with guessing by whom, and when, and why they were built. One part of their task they have well fulfilled; they have outlived any portion of time that their builders could have dreamed of. But in another they seem to have failed; their worn surface no longer declares to us their builders' names and history. Their sloping sides, formed to withstand attacks, have not saved the inscriptions which they once held; and the builders, in thus overlooking the reed which was growing in their marshes, the papyrus, to which the great minds of Greece afterwards trusted their undying names, have only taught us how much safer it would have been, in their wish to be thought of and talked of in after ages, to have leaned upon the poet and historian. (38) The temple at Ombos, which was begun by Philometor, was now finished by Auletes, having been not more than eighty years in raising, a time much shorter than had been spent upon many of the older temples. On the doorposts/ was his figure sculptured making his offerings to the old gods of the country. The beautiful temples of Dendera and Latopolis, which were built by the untiring industry of an equal number of years, and finished under the Roman emperors, were begun about this reign. Though some of the temples of Lower Egypt had fallen into decay, and though the throne was then tottering to its fall, the priests in Upper Egypt were still building for immortality. The religion of the Copts was still flourishing. (39) The Egyptian's opinion of the creation was the growth of his own river's bank. The thoughtful man, who saw the Nile every year lay a body of solid manure upon his field, was able to measure against the walls of the old temples that the ground was slowly but certainly rising. An increase of the earth was being brought about by the 2 Peter, ch. iii. 5. Proëm. Servius, river. Hence he readily believed that the world itself had of old been formed out of water, and by means of water. The philosophers were nearly of the same opinion. They held that matter was itself eternal, like the other gods, and that our world, in the beginning, before it took any shape upon itself, was like thin Diogenes mud, or a mass of water containing all things that Laertius, were afterwards to be brought forth out of it. When the water had by its divine will separated itself from the earth, then the great Ra, the sun, sent down his Ovid. quickening heat, and plants and animals came forth Metam. out of the wet land, as the insects are spawned lib. i. 415. out of the fields, before the eyes of the husbandman, every autumn after the Nile's overflow has retreated. The crafty priests of the Nile, who had lived in in Georgic. confinement as monks, declared that they had lib. iv. 363. themselves visited and dwelt in the caverns beneath the river, where these treasures, while yet unshaped, were kept in store and waiting to come into being. And on the days sacred to the Nile, boys, the children of priestly families, were every year dedicated to the blue river-god that they might spend their youth in monastic retirement, and, as it was said, in these caverns beneath his waves. That these were very early Egyptian opinions we learn from our finding traces of them in the oldest of the Hebrew Scriptures, though the writers there are not so far warped by them as to rob the Creator of the praise for His own works. The author of the book of Genesis tells us that the Almighty formed our earth and its inhabitants by dividing the land from the water, and then commanding them both to bring forth living creatures; and again one of the Psalmists says that his substance, while yet imperfect, was by the Creator curiously wrought in the lowest depths of the earth. The Hebrew writer, however, is never misled, so as to think that any part of the creation was its own creator. But in the Egyptian philosophy sunshine and the River Nile are themselves the divine agents; and Chæremon, ap. Eusehence fire and water received divine honours, as bium, Præp. Evang. the two purest of the elements; and every day when lib. iii. 4. the temple of Serapis in Alexandria was opened, the singer standing on the steps of the portico sprinkled Psalm cxxxix. water over the marble floor while he held forth the fire to the people (see Fig 14); and though he and most of his hearers were Greeks, he called upon the god in the Egyptian language. (40) The inner walls of the temples glittered with gold and silver and amber, and Clemens, Pædag. iii. sparkled with gems from 2. Ethiopia and India; and the recesses were veiled with rich curtains. The costliness was often in striking contrast with the chief inmate, much to the surprise of the Greek traveller, who having leave to examine a temple, had entered the sacred rooms, and asked to be shown the image of the god for whose sake it was built. One of the priests in waiting then approached with a solemn look, chanting a hymn, and pulling aside the veil, allowed him to peep in at a lib. i. 84. Fig. 14. snake, a crocodile, or a cat, or some other beast, fitter to inhabit a bog or cavern than to lie on a purple cushion in a stately palace. The funerals of the sacred Diod. Sic. animals were celebrated with great pomp, particularly that of the bull Apis; and at a cost, in one case, of one hundred talents, or seventeen thousand pounds; which was double what Ptolemy Soter, in his wish to please his new subjects, spent upon the Apis of his day. After the funeral the priests looked for a calf with the right spots, and when they had found one they fattened it for forty days, and brought it to Memphis in a boat under a golden awning, and lodged it safely in the temple. The religious feelings of the Egyptians were much warmer and stronger than those of the Greeks or Romans; they have often been accused of eating one another, but never of eating a sacred animal. Once a year the people of C. Julius, Memphis celebrated the birthday of Apis with Solinus. great pomp and expense, and one of the chief ceremonies on the occasion was the throwing a golden dish into the Nile. During the week that these rejoicings lasted, while the sacred river was appeased by gifts, the crocodile was thought to lose its fierceness, its teeth were harmless, and it never attempted to bite; and it was not till six o'clock on the eighth day that this animal again became an object of fear to those whose occu Pliny, lib. viii. 71. pations brought them to the banks of the Nile. Once a year also the statues of the gods were removed from their pedestals and placed in barges, and thus carried in solemn procession along the Nile, and Fig. 16. It Diod. Sic. lib. 1. 97. Iliad. i. 424. only brought back to the temples after British Museum. Plutarch. into a proverb with the Greeks, Proverbia when they spoke of any two things being unlike, to Alexandr. say that they were as much like one another as a cat was to Minerva. It is to Alexandria also that we trace the story of a cat turned into a lady to please a prince who had fallen in love with it. The lady, however, when dressed in her bridal robes, could not help scampering about the room after a mouse seen upon the floor; and when Plutarch was in Egypt it had already become a proverb, that any one in too much finery was as awkward as a cat in a crocus-coloured robe. (42) So deeply rooted in the minds of the Egyptians was the worship of these animals, that when a Roman Diod. Sic. soldier had killed a cat unawares, though the lib. i. 83. Romans were masters of the country, the people rose against him in a fury. In vain the king sent a message to quiet the mob, to let them know that the cat was killed by accident; and, though the fear of Rome would most likely have saved a Roman soldier unharmed whatever other crime he might have been guilty of, in this case nothing would quiet the people but his death, and he was killed before the eyes of Diodorus the historian. One nation rises above another not so much from its greater strength or skill in arms as from its higher aim and stronger wish for power. The Egyptians, we see, had not lost their courage, and when the occasion called them out they showed a fearlessness not unworthy of their Theban forefathers; on seeing a dead cat in the streets they rose against the king's orders and the power of Rome; had they thought their own freedom or their country's greatness as much worth fighting for, they could perhaps have gained them. But the Egyptians had no civil laws or rights that they cared about, they had nothing left that they valued but their religion, and this the Romans took good care not to meddle with. Had the Romans made war upon the priests and temples, as the Persians had done, they would perhaps in the same way have been driven out of Egypt; but they never shocked the religious feelings of the people, and even after Egypt had become a Roman province, when the beautiful temples of Esne, Dendera, and other cities, were dedicated in the names of the Roman emperors, they seldom copied the example of Philometor, and put Greek, much less Roman writing on the portico, but continued to let the walls be covered with hieroglyphical inscriptions. (43) The Egyptians, when rich enough to pay for it, still had the bodies of their friends embalmed at their death, and |