Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/176

 laws, the fitting time; it is also used in the sense of the spring or prime of life; is the season of corn and fruit-ripening. The name Renenet is surely well chosen for a goddess presiding over birth. But she is also represented as suckling the infant Horus. And in whose lap can the Sun be nursed more fitly than in that of the Dawn?

The King's Divinity.

I must not quit this part of my subject without a reference to the belief that the ruling sovereign of Egypt was the living image and vicegerent of the sun-god. He was invested with the attributes of divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental evidence. We have no means of ascertaining the steps by which the belief came to be established as an official dogma. It was believed in later times that the gods formerly ruled in Egypt; the mortal kings before Mena were called the "successors