e Greeks recognized him as corresponding to their
Zeus. He is styled King of the Gods, the Ruler, the Lord of Heaven, the
Lord of the Thrones, the Horus or God of the Two Egypts. Thebes was his
city. According to Manetho, his name means concealment; and the root "Amn"
also means to veil or conceal. His original name was Amn; thus it stands
in the rings of the twelfth dynasty. But after the eighteenth dynasty it
is Amn-Ra, meaning the Sun. "Incontestably," says Bunsen, "he stands in
Egypt as the head of the great cosmogonic development."

Next comes Kneph, or God as Spirit,--the Spirit of God, often confounded
with Amn, also called Cnubis and Num. Both Plutarch and Diodorus tell us
that his name signifies Spirit, the Num having an evident relation with
the Greek [Greek: pneuma], and the Coptic word "Nef," meaning also to
blow. So too the Arabic "Nef" means breath, the Hebrew "Nuf," to flow, and
the Greek [Greek: pneo], to breathe. At Esneh he is called the Breath of
those in the Firmament; at Elephantina, Lord of the Inundations. He wears
the ram's head with double horns (by mistake of the Greeks attributed to
Ammon), and his worship was universal in Ethiopia. The sheep are sacred to
him, of which there were large flocks in the Thebaid, kept for their wool.
And the serpent or asp, a sign of kingly dominion,--hence called
basilisk,--is sacred to Kneph. As Creator, he appears under the figure of
a potter with a wheel. In Philae he is so represented, forming on his wheel
a figure of Osiris, with the inscription, "Num, who forms on his wheel the
Divine Limbs of Osiris." He is also called the Sculptor of all men, also
the god who made the sun and moon to revolve. Porphyry says that Pthah
sprang from an egg which came from the mouth of Kneph, in which he is
supported by high monumental authority.

The result of this seems to be that Kneph represents the absolute Being as
Spirit, the Spirit of God moving on the face of the waters,--a moving
spirit pervading the formless chaos of matter.

Perhaps the next god in the series is Pthah, by the Greeks called
Hephaestus, or Vulcan, representing formation, creation by the truth,
stability; called in the inscriptions, Lord of Truth, Lord of the
Beautiful Face, Father of the Beginnings, moving the Egg of the Sun and
Moon. With Horapollo and Plutarch, we may consider the Scarabeus, or
Beetle, which is his sign, as an emblem of the world and its creation. An
inscription calls him Creator