Читать книгу The Life and Times of Akhnaton, Pharaoh of Egypt онлайн

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The goddess Mut, “the Mother,” was the consort of Amon, who would sometimes come to earth to nurse the king’s son at her breast. By Amon she had a son, Khonsu, who formed the third member of the Theban trinity. He was the god of the Moon, and was very fair to look upon.

Such were the Theban deities, whose influence upon the court was necessarily great. The Heliopolitan worship of the sun had also a very considerable degree of power at the palace. The god Ra was believed to have reigned as Pharaoh upon earth in the dim ages of the past, and it was thought that the successive sovereigns of Egypt were his direct descendants, though this tradition actually did not date from a period earlier than the Fifth Dynasty. “Son of the Sun” was one of the proudest titles of the Pharaohs, and the personal name of each successive monarch was held by him in the official titulary as the representative of Ra. While on earth Ra had had the misfortune to be bitten by a snake, and had been cured by the goddess Isis, who had demanded in return the revealing of the god’s magical name. This was at last told her; but for fear that the secret would come to the ears of his subjects, Ra decided to bring about a general massacre of mankind. The slaughter was carried out by the goddess Hathor in her form of Sekhmet, a fierce lion-headed woman, who delighted to wade in streams of blood; but when only the half of mankind had been slain, Ra repented, and brought the massacre to an end by causing the goddess to become drunk, by means of a gruesome potion of blood and wine. Weary, however, with the cares of state, he decided to retire into the heavens, and there, as the sun, he daily sailed in his boat from horizon to horizon. At dawn he was called Khepera, and had the form of a beetle; at noon he was Ra; and at sunset he took the name of Atum, a word derived from the Syrian Adon, “Lord,” better known to us in its Greek translation “Adonis.” As the rising and the setting sun—that is to say, the sun near the horizon—he was called Ra-Horakhti, a name which the reader must bear in mind.