Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/135

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's book is brimful of learning. But the author has obtained his facts at second or third hand. No critical judgment has been shown in the selection of his authorities; good, bad, and indifferent are quoted side by side as of equal weight. Gerald Massey and O'Neill are placed on the same footing as Maspero and Wiedemann; indeed Mr. St. Clair seems to have a preference for writers whose knowledge of Egyptology is at least equivocal. His own acquaintance with Egypt appears to be but slight; we twice meet with the statement that "nearly all the obelisks" were on the east bank of the Nile! Abydos is confounded with Thinis or This, and the tomb at Hû, in which Sir G. Wilkinson copied a picture of the phoenix or bennu, is not only spoken of as if it were still in existence but is further described as "the tomb of Hou."

All this makes us distrust Mr. St. Clair's claim to be the discoverer of a key to the interpretation of ancient Egyptian mythology which the acutest students of the monuments have hitherto failed to find. The key is neither more nor less than the regulation of the Calendar. The gods and the stories told about them owe their origin to the successive attempts made to determine the length of the year and its component parts and to the astro-religious system which such attempts presuppose. Egyptian myths are thus for the most part symbolic veils under which the "true story of astronomical progress, calendar correction, and theological changes" was hidden away by the priests and scribes.

We may concede at once that there is no country in the world where the regulation of the calendar was of more importance than in ancient Egypt. Not only the prosperity but the very existence of the people depended on the annual overflow of the Nile and the engineering and agricultural works undertaken to meet it. The coincidence of the overflow with the heliacal rising of Sirius must have been observed at a very early date, and served as a fixed point for the agricultural calendar. Then again the necessity of knowing when the festivals of the chief gods took place compelled, as in other countries, a revision of the calendar from time to time. Moreover, it may be allowed that some of the Egyptian myths were confessedly of an astronomical or calendrical nature; and the famous treatise of Plutarch on Isis and