of Upper Egypt in their ancient capital of Nekhen, it is now impossible to say.46 Later ages explained it as referring to the golden rays of the morning sun.
In the time of the Fourth Dynasty the title was attached indifferently to the Ka or death name given to the Pharaoh after his death, and to the living name given to him at his birth into this world. The Horus-hawk, without the symbol of “gold,” surmounted, so far as we know, only the Ka name. It was the double of the Pharaoh, rather than the Pharaoh himself, in whom the god had been incarnated. Horus brings the captive northerner to the king, and presides over his kingdom; but it is only over the royal Ka that he actually watches.
At Nekhen, the Horus-hawk, to whom the city was dedicated, was represented under the form of a mummy. It was here, perhaps, that the natron of El-Kab was first employed to preserve the dead body from decay, and that Horus was supposed to be entombed, like Osiris at Abydos. At any rate, there is clearly a connection between the dead and mummified Horus and the Horus who stands above the name of the Pharaoh's double. It is probable, therefore, that the identification of Horus with the kings of Upper Egypt originated at Nekhen. The Horus-hawk was the token under which they fought and ruled; it was Horus who had led them to victory, [pg 076] and in whose name the Pharaonic Egyptians, with their weapons of metal, overcame the neolithic population of the Nile.
That Horus, accordingly, in one shape or another, should have become the patron god of so many principalities in Southern Egypt, is in no way astonishing.47 He represented the Pharaonic Egyptians; and as they moved northward, subduing the older inhabitants of the country, they carried his worship with them. At Heliopolis he was adored as Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis, “Horus issuing from the two horizons,” and identified with Ra, the sun-god, the patron of the city. His image may still be seen in the sphinx of Giza, with its human head and lion's body. At Edfu, where the Pharaonic invaders appear to have first established themselves, he was worshipped as Hor-beḥudet under the form of a winged solar disc, a combination of the orb of the sun with the wings of the hawk.48 A legend inscribed on the walls of the temple, which is a curious mixture of folklore and false etymologising, worked up after the fashion of Lemprière by the priests of the Ptolemaic period, [pg 077] knows exactly when it was that this emblem of the god came into existence. It was in the three hundred and sixty-third year of the reign of Ra-Harmakhis on earth, when he fled from the rebels who had risen against him in Nubia and had landed at Edfu. Here Hor-beḥudet, the local deity, paid homage to his suzerain and undertook to destroy his enemies. But first, he flew up to the sun “as a great winged disc,” in order that he might discover where they were. Then in his new form he returned to the boat of Harmakhis, and there Thoth addressed Ra, saying: “O lord of the gods, the god of Edfu (Beḥudet) came in the shape of a great winged disc: from henceforth he shall be called Hor-beḥudet.” It was after this that Horus of Edfu and his followers, “the smiths,” smote the foe from the southern to the northern border of Egypt.
The legend, or rather the prosaic fiction in which it has been embodied, has been composed when the original character of Horus had long been forgotten, and when the sun-god of Heliopolis had become the dominant god of Egypt. It belongs to the age of theological syncretism, when the gods of Egypt were resolved one into the other like the colours in a kaleidoscope, and made intangible and ever-shifting forms of Ra. But it bears witness to one fact—the antiquity of the worship of Horus of Edfu and of the emblem which was associated with him. The winged solar disc forms part of his earliest history.
The fact is difficult to reconcile with the view of Professor Maspero, that Horus was originally the sky, and is in favour of the general belief of Egyptologists, that he was from the outset the sun-god. Such, at all events, was the opinion of the Egyptians themselves in the later period of their history. In the Pyramid texts Horus already appears as a solar deity, and it is only as the sun-god that his identification with the Pharaohs can [pg 078] be explained. It was not the sky but the sun who watched over the names of their doubles. It is true that the two eyes of Horus were said to be the sun and the moon, and that a punning etymology, which connected his name with the word her or “face,” caused him to be depicted as the face of the sky, the four locks of hair of which were the four cardinal points. But the etymology is late, and there is no more difficulty in understanding how the solar and lunar discs can be called the eyes of the sun-god, than there is in understanding how the winged disc was distinguished from him, or how even in modern phrase the “eye” may be used as a synonym of the whole man. When we speak of “the eye of God,” we mean God Himself.49
There is, however, one newly-discovered monument which may be claimed in support of Professor Maspero's theory. Above the Horus-hawk which surmounts the name of the Third Dynasty king found at Nekhen, is the hieroglyph of the sky. But the explanation of this is not difficult to find. On the one hand, the hieroglyph embraces the hawk as the sky does the sun; on the other hand, it gives the pronunciation of the name of Horus, the sky in Egyptian being her or hor, “the high” and uplifted. And the name of Hor-em-Khuti or Harmakhis, “the Horus who issues from the two horizons,” must be quite as old as the monument of Nekhen. What the two horizons were is shown us by the hieroglyph which depicts them. They were the twin mountains between which the sun came forth at dawn, and between which he again passes at sunset.
[pg 079]
The hieroglyph belongs to the very beginning of Pharaonic Egyptian history. It may have been brought by the Pharaonic immigrants from their old home in the East. It is at least noticeable that in the Sumerian language of primitive Babylonia the horizon was called kharra or khurra, a word which corresponds letter for letter with the name of Horus. The fact may, of course, be accidental, and the name of the Egyptian god may really be derived from the same root as that from which the word for “heaven” has come, and which means “to be high.” But the conception of the twin-mountains between which the sun-god comes forth every morning, and between which he passes again at nightfall, is of Babylonian origin. On early Babylonian seal-cylinders we see him stepping through the door, the two leaves of which have been flung back by its warders on either side of the mountains, while rays of glory shoot upward from his shoulders. The mountains were called Mas, “the twins,” in Sumerian; and the great Epic of Chaldæa narrated how the hero Gilgames made his way to them across the desert, to a land of darkness, where scorpion-men, whose heads rise to heaven while their breasts descend to hell, watched over the rising and the setting of the sun. It is difficult to believe that such a conception of the horizon could ever have arisen in Egypt. There the Delta is a flat plain with no hills even in sight, while in the valley of Upper Egypt there are neither high mountains nor twin peaks.
Horus himself is, I believe, to be found in the Babylonian inscriptions. Mention is occasionally made in them of a god Khar or Khur, and in contracts of the time of Khammurabi (b.c. 2200) we find the name of Abi-Khar, “my father is Khar.” But the age of Khammurabi was one of intercourse between Babylonia and Egypt, and the god Khar or Horus is therefore probably [pg 080] borrowed from Egypt, just as a seal-cylinder informs us was the case with Anupu or Anubis.50
But though the name of Khar or Khur is and must remain Egyptian, Horus has much in common with the Babylonian sun-god Nin-ip. They are both warrior-gods; and just as the followers of Horus were workers in iron, so Nin-ip also was the god of iron. One of his titles, moreover, is that of “the southern sun”; and on a boundary-stone the eagle standing on a perch is stated to be “the symbol of the southern sun.”51
The goddess with whom Horus of Nekhen was associated was Nekheb with the vulture's head. Her temple stood opposite Nekhen at El-Kab on the eastern bank of the Nile, and at the end of the long road which led across the desert from the Red Sea. It was at once a sanctuary and a fortress defending Nekhen on the east. But Nekheb was the goddess not only of Nekhen, but of all Southern Egypt. We find her in the earliest inscriptions on the sacred island of Sehêl in the Cataract, where she is identified with the local goddess Sati. We find her again at Thebes under the name of Mut, “the mother.” Her supremacy, in fact, went back to the days when Nekhen was the capital of the south, and its goddess accordingly shared with it the privileges of domination. When Nekhen fell back into the position of a small provincial town, Nekheb also participated in its decline. Under the Theban dynasties, it is true, the name of Mut of Karnak became honoured throughout Egypt, but her origin by that time had been forgotten. The Egyptian who brought his offering to Mut never [pg