change, are half abandoned or newly threaded together; but some features once acquired are apt to be permanent, and an intelligible collection of these would be a boon.

The ritual of the temples has lately been the subject of a special memoir by a French Egyptologist, on the strength of texts from Thebes, Abydos, and other centres of religion. There is much sameness about them all; they consist of dreary formalities, and words to be spoken at the different acts of the priest when he daily opens the temple, approaches the shrine, offers incense to the deity and again withdraws. He coaxes or adjures the door of the shrine, the bolt, the lamp, the wick, and the flame, with almost as much formality as the deity himself. Some short hymns are interspersed, adding a touch of life and reason, but most of the language used is highly mystic. The mode of sacrifice in the temples is described with minuteness by Herodotus, who, among other things, says that the head of the victim was cut off, and all evil that might be about to fall on the sacrificer was laid upon it; the head was then cast into the river, unless it could be sold to some profane Greek; and Herodotus adds that no Egyptian would eat the head of any animal. This may be true of Herodotus's day, but there is every sign, in the sculptures of tombs and temples, that the head was a tit-bit for gods, ancestors, and men alike in earlier times. The victims, according to Herodotus, were burnt, and there are clear signs in the late texts of the prevalence of burnt offerings, while we have no evidence whatever of them from the Old and Middle Kingdoms beyond the offering of incense.

Several books have been devoted to the subject of the Egyptian religion. Professor Maspero has published some admirable though rapid studies of special groups of texts in reviews of publications. The material is immense, especially in the way of the traditional texts, which date from a remote age and have come down to us chiefly in very bad copies. The earliest known are contained in the pyramids. Discoveries of sarcophagi of the end of the Old Kingdom and of the Middle Kingdom are daily adding to the bulk; the Book of the Dead is derived in part from this series, largely supplemented in the eighteenth dynasty and later. Much is still quite untranslatable, and little has as yet been really interpreted. There is a

vast field here for investigation. Meanwhile there is plenty of detail known in certain directions as to the names and forms of the deities, and many texts have been published in such a way as to afford grounds for general views upon them. Hence we have works like Wiedemann's 'Religion of the Ancient Egyptians,' which has been translated into English; Professor Sayce's Gifford lectures; and Dr Budge's two large volumes about the Egyptian gods. Such an abundance of books of a popular kind is a sign of the interest which the public takes in Egyptology.

To Professor Sayce we look for views and suggestions rather than for collections of facts. Of his Gifford lectures, delivered in 1902, one half was devoted to the religion of Ancient Egypt, the other half to the religion of the Babylonians. They now form a most readable and interesting volume. The importance of these studies as illustrating the growth of religion and religious feeling, and the connexion of religion with morality, is well brought out. Professor Sayce warns us of the extreme difficulty of getting at the real beliefs which underlie the words and formulas of ritual, or exist in the minds of a people in spite of them; but he perhaps hardly realises the difficulties which present themselves to Egyptologists in translating the religious texts. These texts are full of obscurities and corruptions; and, even when they are straightforward and easy in the light of the latest grammatical discoveries or of special research, they are often entirely misrepresented in the current translations. Probably the same is the case in regard to Babylonian religious texts, which the author admits to have been little studied as yet. The consequence, however, is that, though a specialist may approve of the spirit of the book, and enjoy the picturesque presentment of the subject offered by Professor Sayce, there are few statements to which he can give his unqualified assent, and there are multitudes from which he would dissent entirely. The hymn to the Nile, of which a supposed rendering is given on p. 141, is practically untranslatable. Its subject is easily recognised, and the class of laudatory sentences of which it is composed is clear enough; but few of them yield a definite meaning owing to the corruption of the text.

The careless treatment of Egyptian words and names

by those who profess Egyptology has led the author into pitfalls. The goddess of the ancient capital of the south country was Nekhebt; in the book she is called Nekheb; but this is really the name of her city, now El Kab, on the east bank, from which the goddess's name, meaning 'she of Nekheb,' is derived. In his general discussion of the gods Professor Sayce fails to note instances in which their ancient names are taken from localities, although they must have an important bearing on their land of origin and primitive character. Besides the vulture-goddess of Nekheb, we know well enough the 'god of Behedt' (Edfu), the sun with vulture wings so often seen on the porticoes of temples; Thoth or Thôout means simply 'him of Thut,' the district round Hermopolis in the Delta. He is sometimes an ibis, less frequently, and perhaps later, an ape. The relationship of the two forms of Thoth still remains to be investigated, but double forms are constantly met with in Egyptian mythology. A less celebrated name, but even more important mythologically as belonging to a deity of human form, is the god of Anzet,' Anzet being the marshy district of Busiris in the Delta. He was figured as a king holding the emblems of earthly sovereignty and wearing a peculiar head-dress, which perhaps denotes fecundity; and he is almost certainly Osiris.

In discussing the Egyptian word and symbolism for 'god,' Professor Sayce mentions only one hieroglyph, the well-known sign which in outline resembles an axe, but in detail is a roll of cloth. Professor Sayce takes the view that it is an axe-fetish, sometimes (why sometimes?) wrapped in linen. It is easy to interpret the picture differently; and as yet we have no other indication of an axe being sacred in Egypt. Although this sign spelled the words' divine,'' god,' etc. (root NTR), from the remotest times, there is evidence that, whatever it represented pictorially, it obtained its power of symbolising divinity (apart from spelling the NTR group of words) only at a comparatively late date. Two signs which symbolise divinity, in the strict sense of the word, in the early part of the Old Kingdom are, (1) a hawk upon its perch, i.e. the tame sacred hawk of the temple, and (2) a man wrapped in a robe and with a peculiar pointed beard, possibly figuring an ancestor of the prehistoric times.

Neither of these remarkable signs is mentioned in the book. In these lectures we have the theories of the foreign derivation of many of the earliest known deities strongly reiterated. To identify Hathor, a goddess of beauty and love, with Istar is enticing, but it is by no means certain at present. Yet it seems the most probable identification yet brought forward.

In a chapter on the sacred books of Egypt, Professor Sayce supplies an analysis of the 'Book of the Dead,' in which he endeavours to give some indication of its composite character as containing elements from different schools, the predominating element being Osiris-worship combined with doctrines from Heliopolitan sun-worship, and others derived from the Hermopolite and Memphite schools. The 'popular religion' he illustrates chiefly from much-garbled myths, which would seem to have been made for the people rather than to have arisen from the people.

Each year brings fresh evidence on which new views and theories can be built. These are often interesting and may possess some elements of stability; but they remain only views and theories, held by some few bold spirits, venturous enough to theorise or to hold definite opinions. But to make any substantial advance requires painstaking special research and division of labour. If the copious texts of the Pyramids were retranslated and thoroughly discussed by one competent scholar-for instance, by Professor Sethe of Göttingen—and if another were to undertake those upon the coffins of the Middle Kingdom, which contain many chapters of the 'Book of the Dead,' it would then be possible to do serious work on the celebrated Book of the Dead' itself, with its Psychostasia, its Negative Confession, and other notable conceptions, tracing some of its origins in the earlier texts, its irregular growth in the New Kingdom, and the final selection and arrangement of the chapters in fixed order at or about the time of the twenty-sixth dynasty; finally, such parts of the book as are intelligible in the copies might be definitely translated. But years of hard work by good scholars are required for all this. The work hitherto done on the 'Book of the Dead,' from Champollion's day onward, though fruitful, has been only of the nature of preliminary skirmish

ing, Professor Naville's collection of the texts of the New Kingdom being by far the most substantial contribution to its study.

Dr Budge has recently published two large volumes on the Egyptian gods with the sub-title Studies in Egyptian Mythology.' The latter seems to promise an attempt to advance the subject for specialists. To Dr Budge, as keeper of the Department of Egyptian and Assyrian antiquities in the British Museum, we should be justified in looking for original studies of great value, based on the great national collections placed in his charge. But his enormous range of acquirements, it must be confessed, seems to leave him satisfied with a very moderate though wide acquaintance with Egyptian; and, while works from his pen succeed each other with astonishing rapidity, they show little sign of the patience and reserve that are required to make them permanently useful. They may be very serviceable for the moment to the general public, and useful to scholars as rough indexes of material; but they will be cast aside the moment the same subject is dealt with in a more serious vein. We fear that the Gods of the Egyptians' is no exception.

These volumes are large and handsome, but the contents are very disappointing, considering the high position of the author. They are, doubtless, far beyond the powers of an ordinary compiler. A vast mass of information is accumulated round the subject of Egyptian religious conceptions and the names of the individual deities; but a glance at the translations, which Dr Budge has the courage to set alongside the original hieroglyphics, is enough to show how little confidence can be placed in the present work in detail. The publisher's circular drew attention to the coloured illustrations-about one hundred plates, each of which is printed in eleven colours.' Here was an opportunity for valuable contributions to science; and the high price of the book might well have been justified. But the illustrations are evidently only for the use of those who had no previous knowledge of typical forms of Egyptian deities. Some few are good, and are easily recognised as taken from the splendid papyrus of Any, the only fault to find with them being that they are somewhat hackneyed; others are from rough outlines in Lanzone's dictionary, here decked to taste in a really