elements which appear
at first sight to have nothing whatever in common, nay, to be quite
irreconcilable with each other. We shall do well not to attempt any
construction of Egyptian religion as a whole, but to content
ourselves with examining one after another the various elements,
almost amounting to different religions, which are found in it side
by side. We shall no doubt learn something of the relations in which
they stood to each other, but it may prove that we shall find
ourselves unable to adopt any of the theological theories by which
Egyptian priests or Greek philosophers sought to combine them in one
system.

History and Literature.--The principal thing to be remembered, in
order to understand the history of ancient Egypt, is that the country
was divided into a number of provinces or nomes, which, there is
every reason to think, were originally independent of each other. Of
these nomes there were about twenty in Upper Egypt--that is, in the
long gorge of the Nile from Elephantine in the south to Memphis in
the north; and about the same number in Lower Egypt--that is, in the
flatter country from Memphis to the sea. King Mena or Menes, founder
of the first dynasty, whose date, if he was a historical character at
all, and not a mythic founder like Minos of Crete, Manu of India, or
Mannus of Germany, cannot be later than 3200 B.C., is said to have
united for the first time the two crowns of Upper and Lower Egypt.
But though they became united under one ruler, the nomes never forgot
their independence, nor did they cease to maintain their separate
existence as states within the empire, each having its own army, its
own ruler, its own system of taxation, its own worship. The supreme
power resided now in one nome and now in another. The first two
dynasties belonged to that of Abydos; the succeeding dynasties, to
which the earliest monuments belong, so that Egypt here begins its
real history, had their seat at Memphis. The twelfth dynasty, which
is known to us, but is both preceded and followed by a gap of half a
millennium in Egyptian history, made Thebes the capital. Thebes was
also the seat of the eighteenth and nineteenth dynasties, which came
after the foreign domination of the shepherd kings, and under which
Egypt was at the summit of its power. Ramses II. and his successors,
the Pharaohs of the book of Genesis, belong to the nineteenth
dynasty.

How splendid the Imperial Court of Egypt was at various period