CHAPTER XXII.

STAR-CULTS (CONTINUED)--AMEN-T AND KHONS.

When I had the privilege of discussing at Thebes the orientation hypothesis with M. Bouriant, the distinguished head of the French School of Archæology in Egypt, he suggested that I should accompany him one day to Medînet-Habû, at which place he was then superintending excavations, and where there are three temples dedicated to Amen.

M. Bouriant, from the first, saw that if there were anything in the new views, the cult must follow the star; and it was natural, therefore, that the three temples dedicated to the same divinity at the same place should be directed to the same star. The three temples to which I refer are the two well-known temples the lack of parallelism of which has been so often remarked, and a third much smaller one, built more recently, lying to the south-west. The amplitudes I found to be as follows:--

Amplitude S. of E. Ethiopian or Ptolemaic Temple 45° Great Temple 46½° Ancient Temple 51½°

On the orientation hypothesis we were dealing with a star the S.E. amplitude of which was decreasing like that of Sirius; _it was therefore in the same quarter of the heavens_.

But which star? To investigate this it was best to deal in the first instance with the orientation of the great temple, since its building date was supposed to be that most accurately known; and there is not much danger in doing this in the present case, because the king obviously had not expanded an old temple, for there it still is alongside.

The king was Rameses III., the date, according to Brugsch, 1200 B.C., and the hills to which the temples are directed may be taken as 1° high. With these data we get the declination appropriate to the amplitude of the temple 40° S. Now, this was nearly the declination of the star Phact or α Columbæ in the time of Rameses III.; the orientation date is 1250 B.C.

Taking this star, then, and correcting for heights of hills and refraction, we get approximately the following dates:--

B.C. Modern Temple 900 Great Temple 1250 Ancient Temple 2525

If the hills are taken as 1½° high, these dates will stand 750, 1150, and 2400.

The date 700 B.C. we have already found as the probable date of the undertaking of the restoration at Denderah. It is the time of the victorious march of the Theban priests northwards from their exile at Gebel Barkal.

The date 2400 B.C. lands us in the times of the great solstitial king, Usertsen I., about whom more in a subsequent chapter. Although the more ancient temple is generally ascribed to Thothmes III., traces of the work of Amen-hetep I. have been discovered. I think we have a case here where the eighteenth dynasty enlarged and embellished a shrine erected by the twelfth dynasty, precisely as the temple of Amen-Rā at Karnak has been traced back to the twelfth dynasty.

If I am right, then, it follows that temples erected to stars associated in any way with the chief cult, such as that of Amen-Rā, may either be dedicated to the god or goddess personified by the star or to the associated solar deity. Thus at Thebes we have the temple of Mut, so-called, though Mut was the wife of Amen-Rā; and the temples now under consideration, called temples of Amen, though they are dedicated to the goddess Amen-t, the wife of Amen. This may or may not be connected with the fact that the first of them was dedicated possibly before the cult of Amen alone had been intensified and expanded by the Theban priests--probably in the eighteenth dynasty--into the cult of the solstitial sun-god Amen-Rā.

There is evidence, indeed, that Amen-t replaced Mut in the Theban triad. With regard to these triads, a few words may be said here from the astronomical point of view, though the subject, I am told, is one on which a great diversity of opinion exists on the part of Egyptologists.

I have collected all the most definite statements I can find on this head, and it is certainly interesting to see that in many cases, though not in all, the triad seems to consist of a form of the sun-god, together with two stellar divinities, one of them certainly associated with the heliacal rising of the sun at some time of the year, and therefore a recognised form of Isis or Hathor. Thus we have:--

Place. Triad. Thebes Amen-Rā (Greater Triad) Mut χonsu (Lesser Triad) χem-Rā Tamen (? Amen-t) Harka Denderah Atmu Isis Hathor Memphis Atmu Sekhet Ptah Hermonthis Menθu-Rā Ra-Ta (= Hathor) Hor-Para

Not only may this table enable us to see how Amen-t was sunk at Medînet-Habû in the term Amen, but it enables us to consider a similar case presented by those temples at Thebes, some of them associated with Khons and another with Amen, referred to in Chapter XVII.

The temple of _Khons_ is among the best known at Karnak; the visitor passes it before the great temple of Amen-Rā is reached. M. Bouriant was able to prove, while we were together at Karnak, that the temple of Seti II., nearly parallel to it, was also dedicated to _Khons_; but the temple B of Lepsius, nearly parallel to both, is sacred to _Amen_. It is seen at once that the main cult is the same, although the amount of detail shown in the reference is different--we have the generic name of the triad in one case, the specific name of the member of the triad in the other.

As this is the first time a setting star has been in question, it is well to point out that in this case the ancient Egyptians no longer typified the star as a goddess but as a god--and, more than this, as a dying god; for Khons is always represented as a _mummy_--the Osiris form. Egyptologists state that both Thoth and Khons were moon-gods. Perhaps the lunar attributes were assigned prior to the establishment of sun-worship.

I shall show, subsequently, that the temples now being considered find their place in continuous series stretching back in the case of Amen-t to 3750 B.C., and in the case of Khons to possibly a long anterior date.

In the case of Amen-t and Khons, therefore, where we are free from the difficulties connected with the interchange of the titles of Isis and Hathor at Denderah, the star-cults stand out much more clearly, and we get a step further into the domain of mythology.

But what did the cults mean? What was the utility of them? What their probable origin? The cult of Sirius we already understand.

I will deal with Amen-t first. No doubt it will have been already asked how it came that such an unfamiliar star as Phact had been selected.

Here the answer is overwhelming. This star, although so little familiar to us northerners, is one of the most conspicuous of the stars in the southern portion of the heavens, _and its heliacal rising heralded the solstice and the rise of the Nile before the heliacal rising of Sirius was useful for that purpose_!

In Phact we have the star symbolised by the ancient Egyptians under the name of the goddess Amen-t or Teχi, whose figure in the month table at the Ramesseum leads the procession of the months.

Amen-t, the wife of the solstitial sun-god Rā, symbolised the star the rising of which heralded the solstice; and the complex title Amen-Rā signified in ancient times, to _those who knew_, that the solstitial sun-god Rā, so heralded, was meant.

The answer is clear, though not so simple in the case of Khons. The setting of Canopus marked the autumnal equinox about 5000 B.C. We have found that the first Khons temple at Karnak was possibly built as late as 2000 B.C., when the utility of the observations of Canopus from this point of view had therefore ceased; but it is also known that Khons was a late addition to the Theban triad, and I shall subsequently give evidence that the worship was introduced from the south, where it had been conducted when the condition of utility held. The time of introduction to Thebes was the beginning of the eighteenth dynasty, when the priests wished to increase their power by conciliating all worships; and we now see that with their local sun-god Amen-Rā and the goddess Amen-t, with the Northern Mut (Isis) and the Southern Khons, the Theban triad represented the worship of Central, Northern and Southern Egypt.

It is an important fact to bear in mind that in the North of Egypt in early times the stellar temples were more particularly directed to the north, while south of Thebes, so far as I know, there is only one temple so directed. It is suggested, therefore, that the Theban priests amalgamated the northern and southern cults, probably for political purposes. There is evidence that the priests were at heart more sympathetic with the southern cults, and a further investigation of this matter may eventually help us in several points of Egyptian history.

It will have been noticed also that so far as we have gone, whether discussing solar or stellar temples, we have had to associate the cults carried on in most of them with some particular season of the year. If I am right, in the worships at Denderah, Medînet-Habû, and Karnak, we have a strict reference to the year, and in Egypt the year was always, as it is now, associated with the rise of the river.

The sacred river must now occupy our attention for a while; we must become familiar with its phenomena, and the divisions of time and the calendar systems which were associated with them.