Page:The Pharaohs and their people; scenes of old Egyptian life and history (IA pharaohstheirpeo00berkiala).pdf/232

 symbol seems to the ignorant and superstitious to be endowed with power and divine attributes, and becomes itself a god. That which gave the Egyptian religion an especially strange and even absurd aspect, in the eyes of Greek and Roman travellers of a later day, was its use of living symbols, i.e. of the sacred animals, which was then so excessive as to have become its prominent feature on first sight, and which led to idolatry of the most base and degraded kind.

There are a few traces of the existence of animal worship under the early dynasties; they are but few, however, and, so far as I am aware, no notice of sacred animals occurs between the age of Khufu and the reign of Rameses Nor are the gods depicted in the memorial chambers of the departed before the times of the eighteenth dynasty. Under Thothmes , their figures are constantly met with, often with the head of the symbolic creature that was their emblem (see p. 119). The reason for the selection is often plain. The bull or the ram might denote undaunted strength and the protection of the weak, the hawk unerring sight,