Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/29



HIS study can hope to give only a sketch of a vast theme which, because of its endless and difficult material, has thus far received but superficial investigation even from the best of scholars; its complete elaboration would require several volumes of space and a lifetime of preparation.

The principal difficulty is to make it clear to the modern mind that a religion can exist without any definite system of doctrine, being composed merely of countless speculations that are widely divergent and often conflicting. This doctrinal uncertainty is increased by the way in which the traditions have been transmitted. Only rarely is a piece of mythology complete. For the most part we have nothing but many scattered allusions which must be united for a hazardous restoration of one of these theories. In other respects, likewise, the enormous epigraphic material presents such difficulties and is so confusing in nature that everything hitherto done on the religion of Egypt is, as we have just implied, merely pioneer work. As yet an exhaustive description of this religion could scarcely be written.

A minor problem is the question of transliterating Egyptian words and names, most of which are written in so abbreviated a fashion that their pronunciation, especially in the case of the vowels, always remains dubious unless we have a good later tradition of their sound. It is quite as though the abbreviation "st." (= "street") were well known to persons having no acquaintance with English to mean something like "road," but without any indication as to its pronunciation. Foreigners would be compelled to guess whether the sound of the word