Page:The Religion of Ancient Egypt.djvu/261

 The worship of oxen, as symbols of a Divine power, is not peculiar to Egypt, but is met with in all the ancient religions. The chariot and horses of the sun which the kings of Judah had set up "at the entering in of the house of the Lord," and which Joash burnt with fire, show that the Israelites had an independent mythology of their own.

The existence of Egyptian elements in Hellenic Religion and philosophy has long since been disproved. The supposed travels of Pythagoras and other ancient philosophers to Eastern climes, Chaldaea, Persia, India and Egypt, are fabulous inventions, the historical evidence of which does not begin till at least two centuries after the death of the philosopher, but continues increasing after this time. Internal evidence tells the same tale as the external. Every step in the history of Greek philosophy can be accounted for and explained from native sources, and it is not merely unnecessary, but impossible (to the historian of philosophy, ridiculously impossible), to imagine a foreign teacher whom the Greeks would never have listened, as being the author of doctrines which without his help the Greeks would themselves certainly have discovered, and at the very time that they did so.

The importance of Alexandria as a medium of interchange of ideas between the Eastern and Western worlds must also be considered as exploded. Nothing was more common, about forty or fifty years ago, than