Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/45

Rh Numerous as the traces of animistic, local henotheism are, the exclusive worship of its local spirit by each settlement cannot have existed very long. In a country which never was favourable to individualism the family spirit could not compete with the patron of the community; and accordingly, when government on a larger scale was established, in innumerable places the local divinity soon had to yield to the god of a town which was greater in size or in political importance. We can frequently observe how a chief, making himself master of Egypt, or of a major part of it, advanced his city god above all similar divinities of the Egyptian pantheon, as when, for instance, the obscure town of Thebes, suddenly becoming the capital of all Egypt, gained for her local god, Amon, the chief position within the Egyptian pantheon, so that he was called master of the whole world. The respect due to the special patron of the king and his ancestors, the rich cult with which that patron was honoured by the new dynasty, and the officials proceeding from the king’s native place and court to other towns soon spread the worship of Pharaoh’s special god through the whole kingdom, so that he was not merely given worship at the side of the local deities, but often supplanted them, and was even able to take the place of ancient patrons of the nomes. Thus we find, for instance, Khnûm as god of the first and eleventh nomes; Hat-hôr, whose worship originally spread only in Middle Egypt (the sixth, seventh, and tenth nomes), also in the northernmost of the Upper Egyptian nomes (the twenty-second) and in one Lower Egyptian nome (the third); while Amon of Thebes, who, as we have just seen, had come into prominence only after 2000 B.c., reigned later in no less than four nomes of the Delta. This latter example is due to the exceptional duration of the position of Thebes as the capital, which was uninterrupted from 2000 to 1800 and from 1600 to 1100 B.C.; yet to the mind of the conservative Egyptians even this long predominance of the Theban gods could not effect a thorough codification of religious belief in favour of