scholars who do not know a word of Egyptian, and Egyptologists who do not know a word of Sanskrit, will give different names to these personages. But the comparative mythologist will hardly hesitate about assigning his real name to each of them, whether Aryan or Egyptian. One of the most curious instances of the identification of myths is to be seen in a bas-relief at the Louvre, wherein the legend of our own St. George and the Dragon, which is at bottom the same as that of Indra and Vritra, is represented by Horus spearing a crocodile.[1]
The Lectures on the Science of Language delivered nearly twenty years ago by Professor Max Müller, have, I trust, made us fully understand how, among the Indo-European races, the names of the sun, of sunrise and sunset, and of other such phenomena, came to be talked of and considered as personages of whom wondrous legends are told. Egyptian mythology not merely admits, but imperatively demands, the same explanation. And this becomes the more evident when we consider the question how these mythical personages came to be invested with the attributes of divinity by men who, like the Egyptians, as we have seen, had so lively a sense of the divine. Here we are at once brought into contact with the notion of the Reign of Law.
- ↑ "Horns et St. George d'après un bas-relief inédit du Louvre," by M. Clermont Ganneau, in the Rev. Arch. 1876, September and December.
