house, but was now the palace of Amasis. Amasis treated him with kindness, and kept him in the palace for a while; but, finding his conduct blamed by the Egyptians, who charged him with acting unjustly in preserving a man who had shown himself so bitter an enemy both to them and him, he gave Apries over into the hands of his former subjects, to deal with as they chose. Then the Egyptians took him and strangled him, but having so done they buried him in the sepulchre of his fathers. This tomb is in the temple of Minerva, very near the sanctuary, on the left hand as one enters. The Saïtes buried all the kings who belonged to their canton inside this temple; and thus it even contains the tomb of Amasis as well as that of Apries and his family. The latter is not so close to the sanctuary as the former, but still it is within the temple. It stands in the court, and is a spacious cloister, built of stone, and adorned with pillars carved so as to resemble palmtrees, and with other sumptuous ornaments. Within the cloister is a chamber with folding doors, behind which lies the sepulchre of the king. 170. Here too, in this same precinct of Minerva at Saïs, is the burial-place of one whom I think it not on a pass, or in some commanding posi- | (p. 373), introduced into Egypt in the tion. See a letter in the Transactions of the Society of Literature, vol. iv., new series, on the level of the Nile and Egyptian fortification.-G. W.] "It has been thought that Apries may have continued to be nominally king, until Amasis had sufficiently established his power and reconciled the Egyptians to his usurpation; and the latter years of his reign may have been included in "the 44 years of Amasis;" but the shortness of that period, and the Apis stela, disprove this.-G. W.] Hyksos period, being represented on the tombs about the Pyramids of the 4th dynasty, where rafters for rooms are shown to have been already made of it, as at the present day. The palmbranch was also the emblem of " years” in the oldest dates. Its not being indicated at periods of which no records remain is no proof of its not being known in Africa then, or long before; negative inferences are very doubtful; and the evidence of a plant, or an animal, being found in ancient Egypt is frequently derived from the accidental preservation of a single monument. See Dr. Pickering's valuable work, the Races of Man, p. 386, seq. W.] 7 They are common in Egyptian temples, particularly in the Delta, where they are often of granite, as at Bubastis, aud Tanis. The date-palm-[G. was not, as Dr. Pickering thinks CHAP. 170, 171. TEMPLE OF MINERVA AT SAIS. covers. 9 8 259 right to mention in such a connexion. It stands behind the temple, against the back-wall, which it entirely There are also some large stone obelisks in the enclosure, and there is a lake near them, adorned with an edging of stone. In form it is circular, and in size, as it seemed to me, about equal to the lake in Delos called "the Hoop."1 171. On this lake it is that the Egyptians represent by night his sufferings whose name I refrain from This was Osiris, in honour of whom many ceremonies were performed at Saïs, as in some other towns.-G. W. • This lake still remains at Saïs, the modern Sa-el-Hugar, "Sa of the stone;" the ancient name being Ssa. (See above, note on ch. 62.) The stone casing, which always lined the sides of these sacred lakes, (and which may be seen at Thebes, Hermonthes, and other places,) is entirely gone; but the extent of the main enclosure, which included within it the lake and temple, is very evident; and the massive crude brick walls are standing to a great height. They are about seventy feet thick, and have layers of reeds and rushes at intervals, to serve as binders. The lake is still supplied by a canal from the river. Some ruined houses stand on a ground within the enclosure (at B D) near the lake, perhaps on the site of the palace, but of a much later time than Amasis. Many have been burnt. Their lofty walls in one part have obtained the name of El Kala, "the Citadel." It is difficult to ascertain the position of the temple of Minerva, as no ruins remain above ground, and you come to water a very short way below the surface, the Nile being of higher level than in former times. It stood within a "temenos," or inner sacred enclosure near the lake, probably about E in the plan. At G may have been the royal tombs. Other tombs are in the mounds outside near the modern village, at P, and at Q beyond the canal to the westward, is another burial-place, of private individuals. The lake is no longer, if it ever was, round," but oblong, measuring nearly 2000 feet by 750. (See plan opposite.)-[G. W.] 1 The Delian lake was a famous feature of the great temple or sacred enclosure of Apollo, which was the chief glory of that island. It is celebrated by the ancient poet Theognis (B.C. 548) under the same appellation (Tpoxocions) assigned it by Herodotus (Theogn. 7); and is twice mentioned, once as Tрoxócoσa (Hymn. ad Del. 261), and once as Tepinyns (Hymn. ad Apoll. 59), by Callimachus. Apollo was supposed to have been born upon its banks. Larcher (note ad loc.) shows satisfactorily that it was situated within the sacred enclosure; and decides with good reason in favour of its identity with the oval basin discovered by Messrs. Spon and Wheeler in 1675, of which an account is given in their Travels (vol. i. p. 85, French Tr.). The dimensions, which do not seem to have been accurately measured, are reckoned at 300 paces (1500 feet) by 200 (1000 feet). It was thus an oval, like the lake at Saïs, and not very different in its dimensions. The Egyptians and the Syrians had each the myth of a dying God; but they selected a different phænomenon for its basis; the former the Nile, the Syrians, the aspect of nature, or, as Macrobius shows (Saturn. i. 26), the sun; which, during one part of the year manifesting its vivifying effects on the earth's surface, seemed to die on the approach of winter; and hence the notion of a God, who was both mortal and immortal. In the religion of Greece we trace this more ob 260 THE EGYPTIAN MYSTERIES. BOOK II. mentioning, and this representation they call their Mysteries. I know well the whole course of the pro 3 Κρῆτες ἀεὶ ψεῦσται, καὶ γὰρ τάφον, ὦ ἄνα, σεῖο Κρῆτες ἐτεκτήσαντο, σὺ δ ̓ οὐ θάνες, ἔσσι γὰρ αἰεί, -an epithet quoted by St. Paul from Epimenides. (Epistle to Titus i. 12.) This belief was perhaps borrowed from Egypt, or from Syria; for the Greeks derided the notion of a God dying; whence the remark of Xenophanes, and others, to the Egyptians, "If ye believe them to be Gods, why do ye weep for them; if they deserve your lamentations, why repute them to be Gods ?” (Plut. de Is. 71.) | They, on the other hand, committed the error of making men into Gods, and misunderstanding the allegorical views of the Egyptians and others, ran into the grossest errors respecting those deities they adopted. In Crete again, Apollo's grief for Atymnius was commemorated “ Απόλλων δακρυχέων épаTELvov 'ATúμvov," as that of Venus for Adonis in Syria, where the women sitting and weeping for Tammuz (Tamooz), and the Jews weeping in the high places, when they fell off to the idolatry of their neighbours (Ezek. viii. 6, 14; Jerem. iii. 21), show the general custom of the Syrians. The wailing of the orthodox Jews, though not unusual, was of a different kind (Numb. xxv. 6), and was permitted except on festivals. (Joseph. xi. 55.) No. I. | The lamentations of the Egyptians led to the remark of Apuleius: " Ægyptiorum numinum fana plena plangoribus, Græca plerumque choreis.”— [G. W.] The sufferings and death of Osiris were the great mystery of the Egyptian religion; and some traces of it are perceptible among other people of antiquity. His being the divine goodness, and the abstract idea of "good," his manifestation upon earth (like an Indian God), his death, and resurrection, and his office as judge of the dead in a future state, look like the early revelation of a future manifestation of the deity converted into a mythological fable; and are not less remarkable than that notion of the Egyptians mentioned by Plutarch (in Vit. Numa), that a woman might conceive by the approach of some divine spirit. As Osiris signified "good," Typhon (or rather Seth) was "evil;" and the remarkable notion of good and evil being brothers is abundantly illustrated in the early sculptures; nor was it till a change was made, apparently by foreigners from Asia, who held the doctrine of the two principles, that evil became confounded with sin, when the brother of Osiris no longer received divine honours. (See At. Eg. W., p. 124 to 127.) 'Ì'ill then sin, "the great serpent," or Aphophis "the giant," was distinct from Seth, who was a deity, and part of the divine system, which recalls those words of Isaiah (xlv. 7), "I form the light, and create darkness; I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do these things;" and in Amos (iii. 6)," shall there be evil in a city, and the Lord hath not done it ?" In like manner the mythology of India admitted the creator and destroyer as characters of the divine Being. Seth was even called |