Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review Volumes 32 and 33.djvu/469

 Colour Symbolism. i6i

found in early tombs. Traces of malachite and haematite remain on palettes placed in graves for the use of the dead. Powdered malachite may have also been used as an anti- septic m Ancient Egypt. Livingstone in his Journal tells that the Central African natives found malachite ointment efficacious against obstinate sores and also used it as an eye paint.

Even the gods were painted by the ancient Egyptians. The priest each morning painted the idol " with green and black paint." ^ There can be no doubt as to why the gods and the dead were painted especially with malachite paste.

" In Egypt, the daily ritual of the divine cult and also the funerary rituals refer to the bringing of a vessel of green paint with which the god, or the deceased person may ' make himself healthy with all that is in him.' " ^

Prolonged good health was immortality. Green paint was a life-giver, a renewer of youth. The virtue of the life-conferring paint was in the colour and the ingredients of the colour, in the green malachite combined with fat or oil. Our " Green Osiris " was therefore, in a sense, a personification of malachite. The " Green Nile " flowed from the pools of heaven to replenish and vitalize the " Low Nile." That the inundation was caused by Osiris is made evident in the Pyramid Texts relating to Unis, who sup- plants Osiris :

" Unis (as Osiris) comes hither up-stream when the flood inundates. . . . L^nis comes to his pools that are in the region of the flood at the great inundation, to the place of peace, with green fields, that is in the horizon. Unis makes the verdure to flourish in the two regions of the horizon. . . . It is Unis (as Osiris) who inundates the land." ^

1 Erman, A Handbook of Egyptian Religion, London 1907, p. 46.

Annates du Musee Giiimet, Bihliotheque d' etudes, xiv. pp. 71, 109, 199.
 * Moret, " Le ritual du culte divin journalier en figypte " in the


 * Breasted, op. cit. pp. 18-19.