th its equal
filaments for _truth_, the lotus for Upper and the papyrus for Lower
Egypt. To these we may add the bird, which denotes a cycle of time (in
Coptic _phanech_), and about which such wild fables were received by the
credulity of Herodotus and by that of the Fathers. But the greater part
of the hieroglyphics are phonetic like our alphabet, and are being
slowly and precariously deciphered into the words of a language which is
identified with the ancient form of Coptic.

"The religion of the Egyptians must be gathered chiefly from the
sculptures and paintings. The religious inscriptions and funeral papyri
remain undeciphered. The account of Herodotus is rendered suspicious by
his solicitude to force the Pantheon of Egypt into a conformity with
that of Greece. The accounts of the later Greeks are tainted by their
philosophizing and mysticizing spirit. That the Egyptian theology
embodied no profound physical or metaphysical system is evident from the
fact that it was not formed at once, but by gradual addition and
development, and that it was to the last partly local. It appears to
have been, like the other religions of the Pagan world--of Greece and
Italy, of Phoenicia and India--a worship of the powers of nature
represented by great natural objects, such as the sun and moon, or by
forms bestial or human, which were selected as symbolical of their
attributes.

"On this groundwork imagination wrought, as among the Greeks, though to
a less extent and in a different way. We cannot tell how far the more
reflective minds may have advanced towards the conception of a single
God, either independent of or permeating the material world; but contact
with the philosophic Greeks in the age of the Ptolemies can hardly have
failed to lead to some speculations of this kind, and the accounts
derived from Greek sources of Egyptian mysticism, though false of early,
were no doubt, in part at least, true of later times. Amuna or Ammon
appears to have been nominally the chief of the gods. His attributes are
to some extent identified with those of the sun; but they are not easily
distinguished from the attributes of several subordinate deities. His
ram's head is still a mystery. Thoth was the god of intellect and
learning. His representatives were the ape and the ibis: the former, it
is supposed, because it approaches nearest in intellect to man; the
latter, because its black and white feather resemble, or may be imagined
to resemble