Page:Queen Moo and the Egyptian Sphinx.djvu/251

Rh on the walls of the edifices at Babylon, similar to the human figures found on those of the tombs in Hindostan and Etruria. In Egypt, the god Atum, emblem of the setting sun, was painted red. The Egyptians regarded him as the creator of all things visible and invisible. Were we not told of it by the writers on Egyptian manners and customs, we would learn it from the meaning of the name in the Maya language—Ah-Tum; literally, "he of the new things." Here again red is symbolical of power—might.

According to Sir Gardner Wilkinson, Egyptologists are not positive as to the manner in which the name written with the initial letters A and T should be read. It is sometimes interpreted T-Mu. The paintings in the tombs where he is represented in a boat in company with Athor, Thoth, and Ma, the goddess of truth, show that he filled an important office in the regions of Amenti.

If we accept T-Mu as the correct reading of the hieroglyphs that form his name, then that god must have been the personification of that continent which disappeared under the waves of the ocean, mentioned by Plato and other Greek writers as Atlantis. The Mayas also called it Ti-Mu, the country of Mu, a name that the Greeks knew equally well, as we will see later on. Do we find here the explanation of why the Egyptians figured Atum in a boat, holding an office in the West, and painted him red, the color of the inhabitants of the countries with which they were most familiar, and of which they kept the most perfect remembrance?

The same motive may have influenced the Hindoo philoso-