"Successor and descendant of the deities who once reigned over the valley of the Nile, the king was the living manifestation and incarnation of God: child of the sun (Se Râ), as he took care to proclaim whenever he wrote his name, the blood of the gods flowed in his veins and assured to him the sovereign power."[1] He was the priest above all others. Such a form of worship as that of Egypt, required no doubt a large sacerdotal class, each member of which had his own special function in the complicated and gorgeous ceremonies in which he took part; but the king alone, at least in the principal temples, had the right to enter the sanctuary and to open the door of the kind of chapel in which the symbolical representation of the divinity was kept; he alone saw the god face to face, and spoke to him in the name of his people.[2] The pre-eminent dignity of this priestly office did not, however, prevent the king from taking his proper share in war or political affairs generally. The army of scribes and various functionaries, whose titles may still be read upon the most ancient monuments of the country, depended upon him for their orders from one end of the country to the other, and in war, it was he who led the serried battalions of the Egyptian army. The king was thus a supreme pontif, the immediate chief of all civil and military officers; and, as the people believed that his career was directed by the gods with whom he held converse, he became to them a visible deity and, in the words of an inscription, "the representative of Ra among the living." His divinity, begun on earth, was completed and rendered perpetual in another life. All the dead Pharaohs became gods, so that the Egyptian pantheon obtained a new deity at the death of each sovereign. The deceased Pharaohs thus constituted a series of gods to whom the reigning sovereign would of course address himself when he had anything to ask; hence the
- ↑ Maspero, Histoire ancienne, p. 58. This affiliation of the king to the god was more than a figure of speech. In an inscription which is reproduced both at Ipsamboul and at Medinet-Abou, Ptah is made to speak in the following terms of Rameses II. and Rameses III. respectively: "I am thy father, as a god I have begotten thee; all thy members are divine; when I approached thy royal mother I took upon me the form of the sacred ram of Mendes" (line 3rd). This curious text has lately been interpreted by E. Naville (Society of Biblical Archæology, vol. vii. pp. 119-138). The monarchy of the Incas was founded upon an almost identical belief.
- ↑ See the account of the visit to Heliopolis of the conquering Ethiopian, Piankhi-Mer-Amen; we shall quote the text of this famous inscription in our chapter upon the Egyptian temple.
