amed Pentaour,
celebrating the campaigns of Ramses II., the Sesostris of the Greeks, of
the nineteenth dynasty. This great king had been called into Syria to put
down a formidable revolt of the Kheta (the Hittites of the Old Testament).
The poem seems to have been a famous one, for it had the honor of being
carved in full on the walls at Karnak, a kind of immortality which no
other epic poet has ever attained. It particularly describes an incident
in the war, when, by a stratagem of the enemy, King Ramses found himself
separated from the main body of his army and attacked by the enemy in full
force. Pentaour describes him in this situation as calling on Amun, God of
Thebes, for help, recounting the sacrifices he had offered to him, and
asking whether he would let him die in this extremity by the ignoble hands
of these Syrian tribes. "Have I not erected to thee great temples? Have I
not sacrificed to thee thirty thousand oxen? I have brought from
Elephantina obelisks to set up to thy name. I invoke thee, O my father,
Amun. I am in the midst of a throng of unknown tribes, and alone. But Amun
is better to me than thousands of archers and millions of horsemen. Amun
will prevail over the enemy." And, after defeating his foes, in his song
of triumph, the king says, "Amun-Ra has been at my right and my left in
the battles; his mind has inspired my own, and has prepared the downfall
of my enemies. Amun-Ra, my father, has brought the whole world to my
feet."[167]

Thus universal and thus profound was the religious sentiment among the
Egyptians.

Sec. 3. Theology of Egypt. Sources of our Knowledge concerning it.

As regards the theology of the Egyptians and their system of ideas, we
meet with difficulty from the law of secrecy which was their habit of
mind. The Egyptian priesthood enveloped with mystery every opinion, just
as they swathed the mummies, fold above fold, in preparing them for the
tomb. The names and number of their gods we learn from the monuments.
Their legends concerning them come to us through Plutarch, Herodotus,
Diodorus, and other Greek writers. Their doctrine of a future life and
future judgment is apparent in their ceremonies, the pictures on the
tombs, and the papyrus Book of the Dead. But what these gods _mean_, what
are their offices, how they stand related to each other and to mankind,
what is the ethical bearing of the religion, it is not so easy to learn.

Nevertheless, we may find a clew to a