dity
when certain individual brute beasts were declared to be incarnate
deities, and treated accordingly. At Memphis, the ordinary capital,
there was maintained, at any rate from the time of Aahmes I. (about B.C.
1650), a sacred bull, known as Hapi or Apis, which was believed to be an
actual incarnation of the god Phthah, and was an object of the highest
veneration. The Apis bull dwelt in a temple of his own near the city,
had his train of attendant priests, his harem of cows, his meals of the
choicest food, his grooms and currycombers who kept his coat clean and
beautiful, his chamberlains who made his bed, his cup-bearers who
brought him water, &c., and on fixed days was led in a festive
procession through the main streets of the town, so that the inhabitants
might see him, and come forth from their dwellings and make obeisance.
When he died he was carefully embalmed, and deposited, together with
magnificent jewels and statuettes and vases, in a polished granite
sarcophagus, cut out of a single block, and weighing between sixty and
seventy tons! The cost of an Apis funeral amounted sometimes, as we are
told, to as much as L20,000. To contain the sarcophagi, several long
galleries were cut in the solid rock near Memphis, from which arched
lateral chambers went off on either side, each constructed to hold one
sarcophagus. The number of Apis bulls buried in the galleries was found
to be sixty-four.

Nor was this the only incarnate god of which Egypt boasted. Another
bull, called Mnevis, was maintained in the great temple of the Sun at
Heliopolis, and, being regarded as an incarnation of Ra or Tum, was as
much reverenced by the Heliopolites as Apis by the Memphites, A third,
called Bacis or Pacis, was kept at Hermonthis, which was also an
incarnation of Ra. And a white cow at Momemphis was reckoned an
incarnation of Athor. Who can wonder that foreign nations ridiculed a
religion of this kind--one that "turned the glory" of the Eternal
Godhead "into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay"?

The Egyptians had also a further god incarnate, who was not shut up out
of sight like the Apis and Mnevis and Bacis bulls and the Athor cow, but
was continually before their eyes, the centre of the nation's life, the
prime object of attention. This was the monarch, who for the time being
occupied the throne. Each king of Egypt claimed not only to be "son of
the Sun," but to be an actual incarnation of the sun--"the living
Horus." An