tion he contemplated, and his son-in-law who succeeded him went back to Thebes and made his peace with Ammon Ra.
To the very end of the story the divinity of kings haunted the Egyptian mind, and infected the thoughts of intellectually healthier races. When Alexander the Great reached Babylon, the prestige of Bel-Marduk was already far gone in decay, but in Egypt, Ammon Ra was still god enough to make a snob of the conquering Grecian. The priests of Ammon Ra, about the time of the XVIIIth or XIXth Dynasty (circa 1400 b.c.), had set up in an oasis of the desert a temple and oracle. Here was an image of the god which could speak, move its head, and accept or reject scrolls of inquiry. This oracle was still flourishing in 332 b.c. The young master of the world, it is related, made a special journey to visit it; he came into the sanctuary, and the image advanced out of the darkness at the back to meet him. There was an impressive exchange of salutations. Some such formula as this must have been used (says Professor Maspero): "Come, son of my loins, who loves me so that I give thee the royalty of Ra and the royalty of Horus! I give thee valiance, I give thee to hold all countries and all religions under thy feet; I give thee to strike all the peoples united together with thy arm!"
So it was that the priests of Egypt conquered their conqueror, and an Aryan monarch first became a god....[1]
§ 8
The struggle of priest and king in China cannot be discussed here at any length. It was different again, as in Egypt it was different from Babylonia, but we find the same effort on the part of the ruler to break up tradition because it divides up the people. The Chinese Emperor, the "Son of Heaven," was himself a high-priest, and his chief duty was sacrificial; in the more disorderly phases of Chinese history he ceases to rule and continues only to sacrifice. The literary class was detached from the priestly class
- ↑ Many authorities regard Alexander as a man with the ideas of a pushful nineteenth-century (a.d.) monarch, and consider this visit to Jupiter Ammon as a master-stroke of policy. He was, we are asked to believe, deliberately and cynically acquiring divinity as a "unifying idea." The writer is totally unable to accept anything of the sort. For a discussion of the question, see Ferguson's Greek Imperialism.
