ehead.

It is not without special significance that in the ancient legend (see
Sethe, _op. cit._) the lioness-goddess Tefnut was reputed to have come
from Elephantine (or at any rate the region of Sehel and Biga, which has
the same significance), which serves to demonstrate her connexion with
the story of the Destruction of Mankind and to corroborate the inference
as to its remote antiquity. She was identified with Hathor, Sekhet,
Bast, and other goddesses.

But the uraeus was not merely the goddess who destroyed the king's
enemies and the emblem of his kingship: in course of time the cobra
became identified with the ruler himself and the dead king, who was the
god Osiris. When this happened the snake acquired the god's reputation
of being the controller of water.

The fashionable speculation of modern scholars that the movements of the
snake naturally suggest rippling water[448] and provide "the obvious
reason" which led many people quite independently the one of the other
to associate the snake with water, is thus shown to have no foundation
in fact.

One would have imagined that, if any natural association between snakes
and water was the reason for this association, a water-snake would have
been chosen to express the symbolism; or, if it was the mere rippling
motion of the reptile, that all snakes or any snake would have been
drawn into the analogy. But primarily only one kind of snake, a cobra,
was selected[449]; and it is not a water snake, and cannot live in or
under water. It was selected _because it was venomous_ and the
appropriate symbol of man-slaying.

The circumstances which led to the identification of this particular
serpent with water were the result of a process of legend-making of so
arbitrary and eccentric a nature as to make it impossible seriously to
pretend that so tortuous a ratiocination should have been exactly
followed to the same unexpected destination also in Crete and Western
Europe, in Babylonia and India, in Eastern Asia, and in America, without
prompting the one of the other. No serious investigator who is capable
of estimating the value of evidence can honestly deny that the belief in
the serpent's control over water was diffused abroad from one centre
where a concatenation of peculiar circumstances and beliefs led to the
identification of the ruler with the cobra and the control of water.

We are surely on safe ground in assuming the improbability of such a
wholly fortuitous set