balance for measuring weights, the ancient Egyptian cubit of Techu. He is called "the measurer of this earth." He is said to have "calculated the heaven and counted the stars," to have "calculated the earth and counted the things which are in it." He is "the distributor of time," the inventor of letters and learning (particularly of geometry), and of the fine arts. Whatever is without him is as though it were not. All this is because the Moon is the measurer.

It is impossible, after this rapid, but, I trust, not deceptive glance at the myths of some of the chief Egyptian gods, to withstand the conviction that this mythology is very similar indeed to that of the IndoEuropean races. It is the very same drama which is being acted under different names and disguises. The god slays the dragon, or a monster blinds, maims or devours the god. What bright god is born from the embrace of Heaven and Earth, and who is his twin sister and spouse? Who are his two wives? Who is the "husband of his own mother"? Who is the

divine youth who emerges from the lotus-flower? And what is the lotus? Which is the god who, having performed his course from east to west, is worshipped as the king and judge of the departed?

Sanskrit

which it sometimes has. Dr. Duemichen has thoroughly illustrated the use of the word in his "Bauurkunde v. Dendera," and in the Zeitschrift, 1872, p. 39.

1 See Brugsch, Zeitschrift, 1872, p. 9.

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scholars who do not know a word of Egyptian, and Egyptologists who do not know a word of Sanskrit, But will give different names to these personages. the comparative mythologist will hardly hesitate about assigning his real name to each of them, whether Aryan or Egyptian. One of the most curious instances of the identification of myths is to be seen in a bas-relief at the Louvre, wherein the legend of our own St. George and the Dragon, which is at bottom the same as that of Indra and Vritra, is represented by Horus spearing a crocodile.1

The Lectures on the Science of Language delivered nearly twenty years ago by Professor Max Müller, have, I trust, made us fully understand how, among the Indo-European races, the names of the sun, of sunrise and sunset, and of other such phenomena, came to be talked of and considered as personages of whom wondrous legends are told. Egyptian mythology not merely admits, but imperatively demands, the same explanation. And this becomes the more evident when we consider the question how these mythical personages came to be invested with the attributes of divinity by men who, like the Egyptians, as we have seen, had so lively a sense of the divine. Here we are at once brought into contact with the notion of the Reign of Law.

1

"Horus et St. George d'après un bas-relief inédit du Louvre," by M. Clermont Ganneau, in the Rev. Arch. 1876, September and December.

The Reign of Law.

M. de Rougé, in the extract which I have read from his Lecture, quotes the Egyptian expression, “the Only Being, living in truth," "le seul Etre, vivant en vérité." But the original words, anx em maāt, mean very much more than "living in truth." A more grammatically exact translation would be, "who lives by truth," or "whose existence depends upon truth;" but "truth" is not the exact meaning of maut. When speaking of the moral code recognized by the Egyptians, I used the word "Right" as including both Truth and Justice. But it now becomes necessary to define the term more precisely.

Maat as a noun signifies a perfectly straight and inflexible rule. It is evidently, I believe, derived from the root ma, "to stretch out," or "hold out straight before one," "protendere," as in the act of presenting an offering, ma hotep.1 "I have stretched out (ma-na) my hand, as the master of the crown," crown," says the Osiris in the Book of the Dead.2 "Tehuti has extended to her (mā-nes) his hand," is said in one of the texts at Dendera. With this notion of stretching out are con

3

1 Sharpe and Bonomi, "Sarcophagus," pl. 8, lines 5 and 8.

2 Todt. 40, 2, comp. with 12, 2.

3 Other words connected with the same root are maāt, an offering, πρóƐεσι, mã signifying that part of the forehead from which the horns project in cattle, ma a fair wind, and mã an extent of water.

120.

nected, in the Egyptian as well as in the IndoEuropean and the Semitic languages, the notions of

straight, right, righteous, true, rule, row, order." Our own word rule, like the Latin regula and rectus, is derived from the Aryan root arg, from which we have in Sanskrit ringe, I stretch myself (like the Greek opéyopa), rigus straight, right, righteous; ragis, a line, a row; in Zend, erezu, straight, right, true, and, as a substantive, finger.1 In Gothic we have rak-ja (uf-rak-ja, stretch out), rach-ts, right, straight. The Egyptian maut is not only Truth and Justice, but Order and Law, in the physical as well as in the moral world. It is in allusion to the fixed and unalterable laws of nature (which of course were very imperfectly known to them) that the Egyptians used the expression anx em maūt, "living or existing by or upon rule," which, if not actually a term equivalent to divinity, is at least with them the attribute most constantly connected with it. It was in consequence of the persistent recurrence of the same physical phenomena in an order which never varied and was never violated, that the Sun and Moon and other powers,

1 A finger is sometimes in Egyptian found as a of mă.

2 Curtius,

"determinative"

"Gr. Et." p. 184. Compare Gesenius on the Hebrew "ordine s. ad lineam disposuit, struxit, nostr. reihen, richten, gr. ráσow, TáTTW (vic. 7 recta protendit, extendit, et in linguis indo-germ. Reihe [Reige, Riege] reihen intens. rechen; rego [non pro reugo ut nonnulli volunt] regula, rectus." "... ordo, strues."

even the days of the month and the twenty-four hours of day and night, became the great and everlasting gods.

There is another Egyptian expression extremely frequent in the religious texts, the accurate meaning of which has never been recognized. Em ser en maāt1 is now generally allowed to mean "rightly," "perfectly," but it does not literally signify "in calculo veritatis," as Brugsch says in his Lexicon. Ser is the measuring line used by builders, and em ser signifies "ad amussim," "nach der Schnur," "au cordeau," "according to the line;" hence, "with the strictest accuracy." The whole expression therefore means, "according to the strict accuracy of Law," to which is constantly added, hehu en sep, "millions of times." Maut is Law, not in the forensic sense of a command issued either by a human sovereign authority or by a divine legislator, like the Law of the Hebrews, but in the sense of that unerring order which governs the

1 P. 575. The sign which I read ser was formerly read hebs, which has the same ideograph. But "in calculo" implies the very different word hesh, and if blundering scribes sometimes misspelt these words, this is no reason for attributing the ideograph of hebs in the very best texts to a word which is only confounded with it by a clerical error. The connection of ideas between hesh and ser is however very intimate. See Todt. 100, 8, hesb su Tehuti em ser maat.

2 The opposite notion to Maat, considered as Law, is asfet, lawlessness, disorder, iniquity.