c\ Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2011 with funding from Brigham Young University http://www.archive.org/details/amentetaccountofOOknig AMENTET AN ACCOUNT OF THE GODS, AMULETS AND SCARABS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS A. E. Knight AN EGYPTIAN KING AS AN OSIRIAN ATTENDED BY MAAT. V ^v^^ /^^_ AMENTET AN ACCOUNT OF THE GODS, AMULETS & SCARABS OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS By ALFRED E., KNIGHT Author of "Lyra Christi," " Philistia and a Soul." etc. With a Coloured Frontispiece, 4 Plates, & 193 Illustrations in the Text 219779 LONGMANS, GREEN & CO. 39 PATERNOSTER ROW. LONDON. E.C. SPINK & SON, LD 6 KING STREET. ST. JAMES'S. LONDON, S.W. 1915 « «•. TO Dr. J. J. ACWOKTH A TOKEN OF AFFECTIONATE ESTEEM AND IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF MANY KINDNESSES PREFACE Though Amentet was not the Olympus of the Egyptian gods, nor in any sense identical with the Sekhet-hetepet or Elysian Fields of Egyptian mythology, the use of the name is justifiable in the present work, inasmuch as most of the gods resided in Amentet, and it was during the journey of the deceased through that region that he came in contact with the gods, and invoked the powers of the amulets with which they were so closely connected. It was in one of the Aats or divisions of Amentet, namely, Amentet Nefert—"Beautiful Amentet"—that the gods lived upon cakes and ale ; and the Book of the Dead, which treats of the journey of the deceased through Amentet, teems with information about the chief gods, or most of them, for the Theban deities are conspicuous by their absence. The object of this work is an entirely practical one, namely, to supply collectors of Egyptian antiquities, as well as such readers of Egyptian history and archaeology as may have little time for learned research, with a compendium of the known facts about the Gods and Amulets of Egypt, treated with sufficient fulness and picturesqueness to make the subject interesting and the viii PREFACE book serviceable. The author has not sought to establish or ventilate new theories, nor to challenge or champion old ones ; and the work is entirely free from occult speculations. The gods which have been dealt with are chiefly those of which actual specimens exist, though many deities whose only known representations are to be found in papyri or on the walls of tombs and temples are also described, either because of their importance, or because it is likely that their statues may at any moment turn up. The chief authorities which have been drawn upon for information are named where the references occur, but the author would express his special indebtedness to three eminent Egyptologists, viz. M. Georges Daressy, Dr. Wallis Budge, and Professor Flinders Petrie. Daressy's Statues de Divinites has been in constant requisition for the section on Gods ; and Budge's monumental work, The Gods of the Egyptians, has been under contribu- tion in every section. This sumptuously furnished treatise takes its place easily as the most important contribution to Egyptian mythology which the century has produced, and is a mine of erudition to which all future commentators must have recourse. Then there is Petrie. No serious student of Egyptian amulets can well dispense with his remarkable work, 1 in which two hundred and seventy different kinds of amulets are described, and some thousands of specimens illustrated. It covers the whole field with painstaking and characteristic thoroughness, 1 Amulets, Illustrated by the Egyptian Collection in University College. Constable & Co., 1914. PREFACE ix and for the first time offers a system of scientific classifi- cation which is simple, workable, and, in so far as modern knowledge goes, approximately complete. 1 We have devoted a large section to the subject of the Scarab, and trust that students and collectors of these precious and very human records of ancient Egyptian life and faith will find the matter of real value. The chrono- logical list of royal scarabs is, we believe, a fuller one, at least in respect of the number of collections drawn upon, than any yet published ; and it has the advantage of being well up to date. The drawings have been chosen to illustrate the text : not for merely decorative purposes. The greater number have been made by the author from specimens in the collection of Messrs. Spink ; and many of the amulets are, we believe, illustrated here for the first time. 1 " We say approximately," as we have noticed a few omissions ; e.g. the Aper, Maat, and Neter-het amulets, as well as the Almond and Olive, of which there are several amulet representations—some inscribed—in the Cairo Museum. CONTENTS PAGR GODS OF THE EGYPTIANS General Remarks _...-_.- 1 Descriptive List of Gods ------ 9 SACRED ANIMALS General Remarks - - - - - - - 135 Descriptive List of Animals - - - - 137 AMULETS General Remarks - - - - - - - 181 Descriptive List of Amulets ----- 184 SCARABS - 233 INDEX 266 ; GODS OF THE EGYPTIANS GENERAL REMARKS No ancient mythology—not even the mythology of the Hindus—is so involved as that of the Egyptians ; none offers so great difficulties to the student of comparative religions. The worship of the people was not a well co-ordinated system, but a worship of nature and of its leading manifestations, and its multifarious developments were governed by local rather than national considerations. In its earliest, i.e. predynastic form, it was doubtless little more than a low animism, each locality having its own haunting spirit or demon, whose embodiment in one place would be a jackal, as at Memphis ; in another a crocodile, as at Elephantine ; in another a snake, or hawk, or lion, as the case might be : but as time went on, the growing importance of certain places led to the absorption of the tutelary deities of contiguous villages in the god of the chief town ; or those deities came to be regarded as impersonations of the dominating god. Thus at No-Amon (Thebes), which was the city of the god Amen, the worship of the sun-crowned ram overshadowed and ab- sorbed that of the divinities revered in the places adjacent 2 AMENTET at Leontopolis, the cult of the lion-headed Sekhet super- seded or largely modified the worship of the gods of the surrounding country : while no less than seventy local deities were identified with Hathor, the great goddess of Dendera, even at a comparatively early period. In dynastic times—the period to which most of the models of gods and amulets, and all the scarabs, belong —these chief gods were identified with the more beneficial elements and natural features—the sun, moon, earth, water, and so forth ; but such nature-gods were not separated altogether from the conception of a supreme creator-god—whether Ptah, Seker, Ra, or some other, as the prevailing system might impose. They were his limbs, or attributes, and for this reason it has been sometimes affirmed that a form of monotheism underlies the apparent grossness of Egyptian pantheism. The Egyptian belief in a life after death never seems to have been reduced to a dogma ; but the general opinion of later times undoubtedly centralized in the conception of Amentet, with its magical formulae and succession of monster guardians ; its closed gates and other obstacles ; culminating in the judgment of the great Hall of Osiris, which, according to the teaching of mid-dynastic times, gave finality to the hopes and desires of the deceased. The ceremony of preparing the body and its double for their journey through Amentet has been graphically described by Maspero, and his account clearly indicates the part which the figurines and amulets play in the Egyptian ritual. After describing the process of impregnation of the deceased with natron, GODS OF THE EGYPTIANS 3 he speaks in detail of the ceremony of enswathing the body; in which work, as he explains, the embalmers required to be priests and expert magicians as well as skilful surgeons. ' They fulfil towards the corpse those duties which Anubis and the children of Horus accom- plished for Osiris in the fabrication of the first mummy, like incarnate forms of these divinities. The funeral swathe becomes in their hands a lacing of mystic bands, each with its own signification, destined to guard the body from all the dangers and all the enemies which threaten it gods and men as well as insects and decay — ; IN IT THEY PLACE AMULETS, FIGURINES, dry flowers, blades of grass, plates covered with hieroglyphics, which FORM A KIND OF MAGIC ARMOUR FOR THE DEAD. The master of the ceremonies fastens at the dead man's throat a scarabaeus of green jasper bearing an inscription, which forbids his heart, ' the heart which came to him from his mother, the heart which accompanied him upon the earth, to rise up and witness against him before the tribunal of Osiris.' Rings of gold and of blue or green enamel are placed upon his fingers as amulets, which give him a correct voice and enable him to recite prayers with the intonation which renders them irresistible. The head disappears beneath a lawn mask and a network of gummed bands, which almost double its size. The limbs and trunk are wrapped in a first layer of supple, soft stuff, warm to the touch. Pieces of half-pulverized natron are thrown here and there as relays of preservative materials. Pockets placed in the interstices of the legs, between the arms and hips, in the hollow of the stomach 4 AMENTET and round the neck, enclose the heart, spleen, dried fragments of the brain, the hair, and parings of the beard or nails. In magic the hair plays an important rdle : by burning it with certain incantations almost unlimited power is acquired over the person to whom it has belonged.