not concern us, as of course they merely reflect the
procedure following a royal birth. But Khnum's part in the princess's
origin stands on a different plane, for it illustrates the Egyptian myth
of Creation by the divine Potter, who may take the form of either Khnum
or Ptah. Monsieur Naville points out the extraordinary resemblance in
detail which Hatshepsut's myth of divine paternity bears to the Greek
legend of Zeus and Alkmene, where the god takes the form of Amphitryon,
Alkmene's husband, exactly as Amen appears to the queen;(3) and it may
be added that the Egyptian origin of the Greek story was traditionally
recognized in the ancestry ascribed to the human couple.(4)

(1) This detail is not clearly preserved at Deir el-Bahari;
but it is quite clear in the scene on the west wall of the
"Birth-room" in the Temple at Luxor, which Amenophis III
evidently copied from that of Hatshepsut.

(2) In the similar scene at Luxor, where the future
Amenophis III is represented on the Creator's wheel, the
sculptor has distinguished the human child from its
spiritual "double" by the quaint device of putting its
finger in its mouth.

(3) See Naville, op. cit., p. 12.

(4) Cf., e.g., Herodotus, II, 43.

The only complete Egyptian Creation myth yet recovered is preserved in
a late papyrus in the British Museum, which was published some years ago
by Dr. Budge.(1) It occurs under two separate versions embedded in "The
Book of the Overthrowing of Apep, the Enemy of Ra". Here Ra, who utters
the myth under his late title of Neb-er-tcher, "Lord to the utmost
limit", is self-created as Khepera from Nu, the primaeval water; and
then follow successive generations of divine pairs, male and female,
such as we find at the beginning of the Semitic-Babylonian Creation
Series.(2) Though the papyrus was written as late as the year 311 B.C.,
the myth is undoubtedly early. For the first two divine pairs Shu and
Tefnut, Keb and Nut, and four of the latter pairs' five children, Osiris
and Isis, Set and Nephthys, form with the Sun-god himself the Greater
Ennead of Heliopolis, which exerted so wide an influence on Egyptian
religious speculation. The Ennead combined the older solar elements with
the cult of Osiris, and this is indicated in the myth by a break in the
successive generations, Nut bringing forth at a single birth the five
chief gods of the Osiris cycle, Osiris himself and his son Horu