Page:The International Folk-Lore Congress of the World's Columbian Exposition, Chicago, July, 1893.djvu/560

 480 in its beings which it united to itself after thou didst take being in thy form of Tatunen, in thy taking being for the union of the lands, in thy begetting thyself. That which thy hands created thou did separate from the primordial waters, etc."

From this myth, also, a creation myth can be extracted, in which the hero is Ptah-Tatunen, a form of the god Ptah worshipped, among other places, at Memphis, whom the Greeks, for reasons that are not quite intelligible, compared to Hephaistos. But it is far removed from the clearness of the legend first treated in this paper. Above all, the identification of Ptah with many other forms, the sun-disk, the androgynous Chnum, with Nu, with the seas, etc., show that this form of it comes from a time when the priests could no longer confine themselves to the worship of their local divinities, but were obliged to extend their worship to the gods of other cities and districts. True, the thoughts of this hymn are more poetical and lofty than in the first legend, but the very materiality of conception in the latter, which corresponds thoroughly to the mode of thought of the Egyptians that was unfavorable to all abstraction, testifies its great antiquity.

The time of its origin will probably never be determined with certainty, as the beginnings of Egyptian religion, like those of the entire civilization of the people, are lost in the mists of antiquity. At the time of the pyramids, at which Egypt enters history, at the moment at which the oldest preserved texts of greater religious works were written down, it already formed part of the religious conceptions of the inhabitants of the Nile valley. From that time on it remained with them down to the time of the Ptolemys, when ancient Egyptianism began to die out. For nearly three thousand years it had then been believed in, and a myth of such vitality, so closely interwoven with popular life that all the storms of life did not sufi&ce to efface it, deserves better than other features of civilization that appear only at intervals, to be consulted when an attempt is made to make a sketch of the mode of thought and feeling of the ancient Egyptians, of the ethnography of the ancient tribe on the banks of the Nile.