inite
monotheistic conception has been reached.

+958+. Egypt produced a couple of myths of great interest.[1749] The
story of Ra's anger with men, and his act of wholesale destruction,
belongs in the group of myths (in which flood stories and others are
included) the motif of which is antagonism between gods and men. The
conception of such antagonism seems to go back to the early opinion
that all misfortunes were caused by supernatural beings; in civilized
times some great calamity would be singled out as a special result of
divine anger, and imagination would construct a history of the event,
why the god was angry, and how he was appeased. What particular
occurrence this Egyptian story refers to is unknown.

The Osiris myth has better literary form and more cultic
significance.[1750] The slaying of Osiris by Set, Isis's search for the
body of her husband, and the role of the young Horus as avenger of his
father make a coherent history. Osiris had the singular fortune of being
the most widely popular god in Egypt, the hero of a romantic episode,
and the ethical judge of men in the Underworld. The motif of the myth is
the cosmic struggle between life and death; the actors are made real
persons, and the story is instinct with human interest. No great cultic
association like the Eleusinian mysteries was created in connection with
it, but the echo of the conception appears in the great role later
assigned to Isis.

+959+. All Semitic myths of which we have records are cosmogonic or
sociologic or, in some late forms, theological constructions. It is
Babylonia that has furnished the greater part of the material, perhaps
all of it.[1751] The stories preserved give little or no portraiture of
divine persons--it is always cosmic phenomena that are described, and
gods and heroes are introduced simply as actors. The purpose in the two
cosmogonic poems--to explain the reduction of the world to order and the
existing constitution of earth and sky--is one that is found everywhere
in ancient systems of thought. The Gilgamesh epic, a collection of
popular usages and tales without definite unity, is contaminated with
legend; Gilgamesh is now a god, now a national hero; at the end,
however, there is a bit of speculation concerning the future state of
men. Ishtar's descent to the Underworld is a pure nature myth; Ishtar
and the goddess of the Underworld are real persons, yet merely
attachments to the fact. The seizure of the tablets o