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INTRODUCTION
gradually grew less and less. "Cleopatra’s Needle” may be regarded as marking the "halfway house” of Egyp- tian civilization. It was erected at the beginning of the Age of Empire. The chief periods before that are known as the Pre-Dynastic, the Archaic Age, the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and the Hyksos Age; after the fall of empire, in the Twentieth Dynasty, we have the periods of Libyan, Ethiopian, and Assyrian supremacy. Then came “The Restoration”, or Saite period, which ended with the Persian Conquest. Sub- sequently the Greeks possessed the kingdom, which was afterwards seized by the Romans. Arabs and Turks fol- lowed, and to-day we witness a second Restoration under British rule. But not since the day when Ezekiel de- clared, In the Saite period: "There shall be no more a prince of the land of Egypt” (Ezek., xxx, 13) has a ruler of the old Egyptian race sat upon the throne of the Pharaohs.
The mythology of Egypt was formulated prior to the erection of the "Needle”. Indeed, in tracing its begin- nings we must go back to the pre-Dynastic times, when the beliefs of the various peoples who mingled in the ancient land were fused and developed under Egyptian influences.
We are confronted by a vast multitude of gods and goddesses. Attempts to enumerate them result, as a rule, in compilations resembling census returns. One of the Pharaohs, who lived about 4000 years ago, undertook the formidable task of accommodating them all under one roof, and caused to be erected for that purpose a great building which Greek writers called "The Labyrinth”; he had separate apartments dedicated to the various deities, and of these it was found necessary to construct no fewer than 3000. The ancient Egyptians lived in a world
