'.unive/^sity) THE EISENLOHR COLLECTION IN EGYPTOLOGY AND ASSYRIOLOGY PRESENTED TO CORNEI,I< UNIVERSITY BY ^, Abraham X902 Asm?. //.^/f^A... 3947 Cornell University Library PJ 1095.H31 Hierogiyphica! standards representing pi 3 1924 026 852 743 Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924026852743 HIEKOGLTPHICAL STANDARDS REPRESENTING PLACES EGYPT SUPPOSED TO BE NOMES AND TOPARCHIES. COLLECTED BY A. C. HARRIS OF ALEXANDRIA, M.R.S.L. LONDON : PRINTED BY GEORGE BARCLAY, CASTLE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE. H , I U 1+ vv a HIEROGLYPHICAL STANDARDS. To those who may have apphed themselves to the study of Egyptian monuments I offer the accompanying plates, exhibiting the ancient geogra- phical divisions of the country, as expressed in hieroglyphical signs. These signs occur in the temples, the tombs, and in many writings of the old Egyptians. In the temples, they are almost always found at the lowest part of the wall, inside or outside of the buildings ; and this is the appearance and order of them : — The King or Emperor is represented to be carrying an offering in his hands, which the writing annexed to the figure states is pre- sented to the Deity of the temple. He is followed by a line of figures, which, in like manner, carry offerings ; sometimes they are men, sometimes they are women, sometimes they are alternately male and female — the sex seems to be matter of indifference : but, in aU cases, they are represented with large breasts, which has led to their having been taken for figures of the Nile. They are not so. They personify districts or places, indicated by certain standards which they bear upon their heads. As specimens, two are given in plate F, 1 and 2^. This last standard will be found in Cham- poUion's Grammar, page 534, and is interpreted to mean " the white wall," " name of a quarter in Memphis." Salvolini (Ros. Stone, p. 56) calls it, " the citadel of Memphis ; " and it is evident that it was a fortified place from Diod. Sic. xi. 21. The largest and most finished tombs in all the mountains are those of the Governors of Districts, and here the standards occur, and inform us of the district in which we are standing. The districts I have thus found I will •^^•l .f^,'\ enumerate, and travellers who may visit Egypt, and who value such infor- mation, can extend the Mst by their researches. The standards occur on the oldest monuments, and Diodorus makes allusion to them in book i. 7. LIST A. Yi„ J-^ M"" A^'r'*^' This Hst is from the temple of Dendera, and is copied from outside the walls of the adytum. The sculptures are of the Roman period ; and on the western wall the Emperor wearing the crown, which designates the Upper Country, heads the figures (1 to 20) which face to the left ; and in another 7- ■ / r representation of him on the eastern wall, dressed in the crown of Lower Egypt, he heads the figures (21 to 40) which face to the right. \.tiUv All the standards on the heads of the figures are placed upon the sign like a ladder, which denotes " country" (Champ. " Diet." No. 24), as in standard 3.mW UU**r^') No I Where I have omitted this sign, it has been to spare myself trouble. To the lists which follow the same remark may be applied. Here, then, we have forty names of provinces, of which the first, the unbent bow, represents Nubia ; " at the source of waters ?" (See the legend of list E 1.) LIST B. This list is from the temple of Kalabsche : the sculptures are Roman also. There are twenty-six figures with their respective standards, all marching in one direction, and it enables us to understand the order of lists A and D ; for we learn by it, that in plate A we are to read on from 20 to 21, and in plate D from 88 to 89, as I have numbered them. The first standard of this list (B 1) may, perhaps, be interpreted " Innumerable offerings of innumerable countries." The last standard (26) is, in all probability, another way of writing the standard 24 of list A. LIST C is from the temple of Philse : the sculptures are Ptolemaic. It contains a standard (the crocodile, No. 5) which is not to be found in the preceding lists. It must be borne in mind, that those who formed these Usts had no immediate intention of communicating geographical information to us. They framed them to be subscription-lists of the places that contributed to the temples where they are found ; and this I prove by remarking, that there are not less than three lists, of different lengths, upon different parts of the temple of Philse. Now, as the crocodile may have been esteemed in the province which took this animal for its symbol, so we can scarcely expect to find that district contributing to the temples of Apollonopolis and Tentyris, places where the crocodile was made war upon. (Strabo, 815 and 817.) LIST Cx is to be found in a side-chamber at Dendera -. the sculptures are Roman. It contains twenty standards, of a different character from those we have had before. As I consider those in lists A, B, and C, to be the signs for certain provinces or governments, so do I believe the standards of this list (Cx) to be each of them one of the subdivisions of such provinces : for example, a Toparchy. LIST D is from the portico of the temple of Edfou : the sculptures are Ptolemaic. It consists of four plates, whereof two (I. II.) are on the eastern wall, and the standards face to the left : two (III. IV.) are on the western wall, having the standards facing to the right. This last series is complete, but the first series is not so ; because, having had to dig a trench along both walls, in order to expose the figures for the purpose of copying them, I could not reach to the end on the eastern side, owing to the very great accumulation of rubbish in that part. But as the length is the same of both walls, and as the figures are arranged in equal spaces, we may be pretty sure there are as many on one wall as there are upon the other. Therefore I have numbered 176 standards as the contents of this list, if completed. Here we have the standards of the lists A, B, and C, intermingled with the standards of Cx ; and if, for the convenience of explaining, I may be allowed to call the former standards of Nomes, and the latter standards of Toparchies, as I think they 6 are, then it is especially to be remarked that the standard of a Nome is invariably followed by the standards of three Toparchies. Strabo speaks thus : — " These Nomes again were parcelled into other divisions ; the greater part of them were divided into Toparchies " and again, " The population of each Nome formed three classes ;" — " and the territory was divided into three equal parts." It strains the meaning of Strabo to make him say that a Nome was divided into three Toparchies ; but the reader will judge of the probability of the case with this list before him. In the legend or description which accompanies each figure the standard is repeated, often with consider- able variation, by equivalent signs. These repetitions I have given in many cases ; sometimes they help us where blanks occur. There are also sHght differences between one list and another in the manner of writing particular standards, but there is a conformity in all the lists which forbids our finding new places in these differences -. thus, — D 5 differs from B 3 ; D 13 from A 4 or C 3 ; D 25 from B 8 or C 6 ; D 37 from A 10, or B 11, or C 9 ; D 41 from B 12, unless there is an erasure ; D 57 from A14orB16; D61 from A 15 ; and so on : yet they represent the same places respectively. The division of the country is, according to these lists^ into Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt; and this is the order of the Nomes : — D 1, 5, 9, 13, 17 (A 6) ; D 21 (B 7), (C 5) ; D 25, 29 ( B 9) ; D 33, 37, 41, 45, 49, 53, 57, 61, 65, 69, 73, 77, 81, '85— in aU, 26 Nomes for Upper Egypt; and for Lower Egypt, D 89, 93, 97, 101, 105, 109, 113, 117, 121, 125, 129, 133, 137, 141, 145, 149, 153, 157, 161, 165, 169, 173— in all, 22 Nomes, or, for both regions, 48 Nomes ; and there can be no reason to conclude that we have the whole of them. LIST E is, unfortunately, much worn and defaced, ' still it is a very important docu- ment ; for it gives us the standards of Nomes, and also the character of the principal divinity worshipped in each of them. I found it on the southern outer-wall of a temple at Karnak, adjacent to the temple of Pehor. Consult Wilkinson's " Modern Egypt and Thebes," vol. ii. p. 247. '"'"'""^ I have made a new an'd obscure subject as plain as I can ; and now I am to verify the positions of Nomes — some with certainty, some plausibly, and some I merely name upon conjecture ; or I mention circumstances I have noticed, which may lead to the whole truth, and future researches must find it out. I have already stated that there are to be found in the mountains the tombs of the governors of districts, or Nomes, and I consider these to furnish positive proof of a locaUty, especially if there be more than one tomb with the same characteristics in the same place. LIST A Standard 15. The Oryx. This standard appears in every tomb at Beni-hassan, where any paintings are preserved ; and the persons who are buried in them were governors of the Nome, which tliis standard represents. The title is expressed by hierogly- phical characters, which I give in plate F 2, from the tomb of Amen-hem-he (time of Osortasen I.), written differently in the tomb of Nefotph, plate F 3. Consult ChampoUion's "Diet,," page 58, at d, p. 326 and 121. These people, if I read the inscriptions aright, were also over the quarries, and the mountain was sacred to the goddess Pasht, or Diana. Now the question may be raised, whether the standard of list A, and that of lists B 17, D 61, and E 16, are the same. I think they must be identical; for in each case the preceding standard is that of the hare, and the one which follows is that of the dog. The god Horus presided over the district, and the hawk may have been placed over Oryx to symbolise at once the Nome and its God. This god is very conspicuously represented on the outer-wall of the temple of Dendera, where he is seated on a throne, at the base of which fourteen prisoners are picketed. He is hawk-headed, and wears the crown called the Pschent. The Emperor immolates an oryx upon an altar before him, encouraged by words some^vhat to this effect : — " Put forth the sword, and make sacrifice of the impure — cut off the heads of the impious — see thou his faults with thine own eyes " and the Emperor replies, " The enemy of (the symbolic eye) is prostrate before thee — the accursed beast expiates his crimes — his horns are grasped — his neck is severed." 8 LIST A.— Standard 14. The Ears. The tombs along the range of mountain called Gebel Sheik Sayd belonged to the governors of this district. Thothotp, who lived in the time of Amon-hem, he and Osortasen II., his successor, and in whose tomb there is the representation of a statue upon a sledge, was one of them. See an extract from this tomb in plate F 4. He was also over the quarries. There is an inscription of thirteen lines, relating to the picture of the Colossus, which says that it represents " the transportance of a statue of thirteen cubits." There are other tombs at the corner of the mountain, at a place called Sebayda, where governors of the same district were buried : one, Imotph, hved in the time of King Pepi. The God of this Nome appears to have been Thoth ; but under what form cannot now be determined, as the figure in list E is defaced. LIST A.— Standard 12. The instrument called Fat, crossed hy the Asp, with a sign denoting position. This standard occurs in the tombs of Siout (Lycopolis), of which two are without date, but undoubtedly very ancient. It is found in the tomb of the Great Shields ; the governor is Roti, and the king, Rakami ; and I quote from it in plate P 5. Although list E is defective in this part, I am able to tell the deities of the Nome from a tablet on the south wall of the temple of Dendera, which I have sketched in plate E 6. Here we have the name of Siout pronounced nearly as at the present day. Compare it with the more ancient form, as in plate F 7, taken from one of the tombs. Jackals were buried at this place, for I have found them. The wolf and the dog were figured by one common type : the jackal. The sceptre Pat, which, from signs which interchange with it, I take to be a sacrificial instrument, is proper to the wolf. The she-wolf was sacred to Diana (Pasht), whose symbol is also the Pat. The two animals are janitors of time, according to Macrobius : time past was figured by the head of the wolf, and time future by the head of the dog. It was in the form of a wolf that Osiris came up from the Shades below. — Diod. Sic. i. vi. t,J-^''^.ii(i pl-=l Uj^i LIST A.— Standard 11. The Sign for Mountain and the Asp. This standard is found in tombs of the mountain called Gebel Marag, on the eastern shore of the Nile, between Manfaloot and Siout ; but as on the list it precedes Lycopolis, the district it represents must have extended much to the south of the place where these tombs are. Two governors of the district are here buried. The painting in one of the tombs is too much worn to be useful to us, but the other, which date as far back as the reign of Nefru-ka-ra, furnishes the legend which I give in plate P 8. The god of the district is lost from list E, and I possess no information on the subject. The foregoing four standards I claim to have fixed with certainty in their respective localities ; and now I have to pass in review those which I cannot place with equal confidence, but I have little doubt about them. LIST A.— Standard 9. A Bolt, with an Ostrich Feather surmounting it. The bolt is the well-known symbol of the god Khem (Pan) ; and from its a / >» , ^ ^■ position on the list, I submit that this standard must represent the Nome of / ' the Panopolites ; for if it mean anything, it means the country of Khem ; and \/frn^ « •-/ Khem is the god of Ekmirir (Chemmis), as we know by the remains there ; ~ and Khem and Pan were the same, as we are informed by the inscription which belonged to the temple. Let me remark that the ostrich feather cannot be essential to the standards, which sometimes have it and are sometimes without it. LIST B.— Standard 7. A Box, or Lid of a Box, with a Pgramidal Object, signifying a gift, or, to give. Dendera is personified upon its temple by a figure which bears this standard upon its head, and will be found in Wilkinson's plate 58, " Ancient Egypt." But I find it also personified there, and the standard written as in 10 plate F 9, which is one variation ; and I have a suspicion that standard 21 of list D is another. According to Strabo, Venus (Athor) was adored at this place, and the representations existing on the temple, as well as the dedicatory in- scription made by those of " the MetropoUs and Nome," who erected the portico, attest this sufficiently. LIST A.— Standard 5. Two HawJcs. (Note a.') I will endeavour to prove that this is the standard of the district of Coptos. It is the only standard I met with at that place in the ruins, and in the neighbouring temple ; this was suggestive : but there is a fragment of granite amongst the ruins of the town, on which there is part of a figure of the god Khem, and over his head are the hieroglyphics given by Wilkinson in his " Modern Egypt," vol. ii. p. 129, except that the bird is not a chicken, but a hawk, and the semicircle is left out. The god Khem, vdth these distinctive characters, and attributed to the standard of the two hawks, is upon our list E 5. I observe also, that upon one of the columns in the portico of the temple of Pehor at Karnak, the same god (Khem), with the inscription in plate F 10, associates with the goddess Athor, with the legend plate F 11. The god of this province,- therefore, was Khem, or Pan, Re.S., yQeSt, X^^ ? — enveloped or shrouded. There certainly is identity of meaning in all the bandaged forms of the gods, whether of Ammon, Khem, Pthah, or Khonso ; and Diodorus says, " They term Osiris sometimes Serapis, sometimes Dionysius, and sometimes Pluto : then again Ammon ; sometimes Jupiter, and often Pan." Thus it may be concluded that the accidents which happened to him " whom I dare not nam6," were also told of these provincial deities — for such I consider them to be — and that obscured traditions and entangled doctrine had been rendered into one consistent story in the myth of Isis and Osiris for the guidance of aU Egypt. " The same deities receive in Egypt dififerent forms of worship; the ceremonies of Isis and Osiris, who, they say, is no other than the Grecian Bacchus, are alone unvaried." — Herodotus, ii. xlii. 11 The following from a Greek tablet, built into the bridge at Coptos, gives us a surname for the Goddess : — Trsg KVTOfcgarogog Kuiffugog Ns^oua Tgociavov 2sSa(rrou Tsgiiavizov Aaxixou zai rov -Travrog OiKOV avTOv Iffihi r^fx/u^arog ^ea ^iyKsrrj BaXQi[/jog HgaxKiilov avikxiv zitccya.&ui LH Xlayjov Kf . It was at this place that the Goddess first heard of the disaster that had befallen the god Osiris by the hands of Typhon. She has been called lo of the Greeks. Thus far I have gone upon pretty sure grounds ; the rest is for the most part hesitation and conjecture, which are always more prolix than positive knowledge. LIST A.— Standard 16. The Jackal or Bog. LIST A.— Standard 17. The Hawk with Outspread Wings. I am entirely at a loss to know which of these standards represents the Nome of Cynopolis ; it must be the one, or it must be the other of them. List E tells us that the dog was sacred in the places of both standards, and in respect of standard 17 there is sufficient proof in a representation on the south outside-wall of the temple of Dendera. Vide plate F 13. LIST A.— Standard 4. Tlie KuJcufa Sceptre. I am also at a loss to decide whether this standard belongs to Thebes or to Hermonthis. I will give both sides of the question. This standard is frequently personified in the temples of Thebes, under the form of a female armed with bow and arrows, as in Wilkinson's plate 53, "Anc. Eg3rpt." She 12 drags after her the fettered prisoners of Sheshonk. The divinities pictured in Thebes are more commonly named in connexion with this standard than with any other. Apt, Oph, Toph or Tape, which Champollion calls " The mystic name of Thebes and of its territory," also appears upon its temples, but not often, and then it is connected with Ammon-ra and Amunta. The hawk was worshipped at Thebes, and an image of this bird cut in granite was, in my time, in the sanctuary of Karnak. In favour of the claim of Hermonthis to this standard I appeal to list E 4, where it vdll be seen that the deity ascribed to it is not Ammon-ra in his usual form; but although the figure is almost entirely defaced, sufficient of it remains to attest that it is a hawk-headed god with the globe and two feathers, as in Wilkinson's plate 49 ; and this is the form of Montho as I find it upon an exceedingly ancient block of stone, taken recently from the foundations of the great temple at Erment ; and there also the God is called " Montho, lord of the country of the Kukupha sceptre." The reasons are weighty enough to decide the case in favour of Hermonthis, could we identify Thebes, by any other standard upon the Hsts, which we cannot ; therefore I incline to the opinion, that Thebes and Hermonthis were strictly connected, if they were not in the same district under the same standard, and that Apt or Tape {vide Wilkinson's plate 58) was a quarter of the city of Thebes as the " white wall " was of Memphis. If the Kukufa sceptre signify purity, as M. Cham- pollion supposes, then the head of the Kukufa being found at the temple of Erment, placed upon bodies of sinister and fantastic shape, it excites my surprise ; but if we follow Mr. Birch, and connect it with the idea of power and conquest, the head is not misplaced. There is a double theocracy at Hermonthis, which, by having recourse to the plates of Wilkinson's Pantheon, "Ancient Egypt," I can describe with little trouble, and it is very curious. Strabo acquaints us, that " at Hermonthis they worshipped Apollo and Jupiter, and maintained a Bull." Apollo is evidently the god Montho. He is represented with the hawk's head surmounted by globe and feathers (as in plate 49). He is called " Lord of the country of the Kukufa sceptre" on the more ancient monu- ments; and on the more recent temple, "Lord of the southern Pn or Pone," which is assuming for Hermonthis the title of " Heliopolis" (" of the south"). 13 But I have supposed Hermonthis and Thebes to be united in one district, hence a passage in Diodorus becomes intelligible : " That great city which the Egyptians call Heliopolis, the Greeks Thebes" (i. iv.)- The Goddess that consorts with Montho is Athor, under the name of Rato of plate 68. Jupiter is the ram-headed god, the Neph, Kneph, or Chnouphis of plate 21. He consorts with a goddess who bears on her head the standard of our list D 151. She personates, therefore, a place, and that place is in Lower Egypt. In a legend which I shall produce, she is said to reside in the district or nome of the fish of hst D 149. This fish has been usually called the Oxyrynchus, but it may be the Latus {vide Champ. "Diet." 447), or, as Plutarch denounces the Phagrus, the Lepidotus, and the Oxyrynchus, as being involved in the same misconduct, it may be a type common to all the theophagi, which I think the most probable. The goddess assists at the mystic sacrifice of the bull, of which I shall speak hereafter, and from this representation I have taken her legend, and give it in plate F 13. Again, at Dendera she is to be found in an inauspicious assembly of eight female divinities, the last of whom is Maut of Ashr (Wilk. plate 27), a goddess brought from a place in Lower Egypt (list D 158) to consort with Ammon-ra of Thebes. Take from standard, list D 151, the characters which express North, there will remain the fore part of a lion ; this consti- tutes a special name for Hermonthis, and Montho is constantly named from it, as in plate P 14. The kings, therefore, who have been called Ammon- mai-thor, had better be named Ammon-hem-he, or "Ammon in Hermonthis." At the temple of Esne (Latapolis) I have not found any representation to identify the fish after which the place was named, but in Wilkinson's "Ancient Egypt," 2d series, vol. ii. c. xiv. page 250, there is the drawing of a fish taken from the temple of the Great Oasis, and the inscription about it reads thus : " Athor, ruling goddess of Sen," which was the ancient name of the town of Esne. The fish is the same as at Hermonthis. At the outside of the temple of Esne, on the northern wall, there is the figure of a goddess like Neith of the Pantheon, fig. 1, plate 28 ; the legend which accompanies her is in plate P 15, and may be read, "The great mother, of the country of Sen, or Esne." This goddess I take for the Minerva of Strabo. 14 LIST A.— Standard 3. Two Ostrich Feathers united, behind a Globe. The place which this standard represents was ruled by the Vulture- headed goddess (vide list E 3), who may safely be recognised for Lucina, or Eilethya of the Pantheon, plate 52 ; but I do not find any standard of ours in all the tombs at El Kab : there the name of the place is that of the goddess, " Seneb." I notice, however, in list D, a subordinate standard (11), which reads very clearly, "The Valley of Natron;" and certainly there is in the vicinity of El Kab a plane from which natron is extracted for com- mercial purposes. The consort of the Goddess is the god of Hieraconpolis. She had the disposal of the white crown, or crown of Upper Egypt ; and Sate of the red cap, or crown of Lower Egypt : together they place the Pschent, or double crown, on the head of the King, as may be seen at Edfou. She is also called Athor {b). LIST A Standard 2. The Throne and the Hawk. Seeing that Hor-Hat is given as the God of this standard, and he is the God of ApoUonopolis (Edfou), it is not, perhaps, a very hazardous conjecture if we attribute this standard to the Nome of the Apollonites : but the tombs, which might have informed us, are all of them ruined, and the temple gives nothing expKcit. On the eastern wall outside the temple there is the figure of Athor, with a standard on her head, as in plate F 16, and in the fosse north of the temple the standard of Hst D 6 is personified. Hat is the name constantly given to the winged globe (an emblem most difficult to understand); it is the name of a place. Our standard, 153 of list D, has the name of this place united to the symbol vrhich characterises the King at Edfou (initial of the word " Som," power ; vide farther on). The God is said, in the sculptures, to rule over the places indicated by standards 156, 169, and 170 of Hst D. To Athor, who is the Goddess of the temple, is attributed the standard A 6. 15 LIST A.— Standard 8. A Staff crossed by a Serpent and surmounted hy Two Feathers of the Hawk. I am persuaded that this standard represents the district of Abydus, one of the places which possessed the body of Osiris, and in this respect next in importance to the place called Tattou of hst D, standard 176, and which I take to be Busiris. I have done with Upper Egypt. Lower Egypt I have never examined with a view to this inquiry. Two standards, D 91 and 93, are mentioned on tablets in the quarries of Toora; vide Vyse's " Operations," tablets 4 and 9. I shall speak of the Bulls of Egypt, sacred and divine, and then conclude. "At Momemphis they adore Venus, and they support there a sacred cow ; as at Memphis, the bull Apis ; at HehopoHs, the bull Mnevis ; these animals passing for gods : but in aU other places (and they are many in number) where they cherish these animals, male or female, whether in or out of the Delta, they are regarded simply as being sacred." — Strabo, xvii. Standard 32 of list A is, I think, much too low upon the list to represent Momemphis. Perhaps the calf is the prominent object, for I find the characters in plate F 17 take the place of the standard. With respect to the three bulls of list A, standards 26, 30, and 31, they also are much below Memphis, and cannot claim the places of Apis or Mnevis ; they may, therefore, be looked upon as being sacred, but not divine. We see upon the temples four calves, or bulls, driven by the King to Ammon-ra, and these are marked respectively by characters which denote their colour, black, white, red, and spotted, as in plate F 18. I have mentioned already the mystic sacrifice of the bull, which is represented in the chamber of the temple of Dendera. The priest who immolates and cuts up the animal is named Menho, and as there is a form of Pasht called by that name (vide Pantheon, plate 27), the character of the Goddess is thus betrayed to us. This picture is the only approach I have ever seen to what Plutarch calls " the harsh and shocking parts" of the story of Osiris. It is possible that it may figure the sacrifice of the bull at Busiris ; vide Herodotus, ii. 61 and 40. Isis and Nepthys bewail the fate of the sufierer, as they do upon the coffins of the dead ; but, with frightful inconsistency, they hold fast the cords which 16 bind the victim to the altar. In the same chamber the god Osiris is exhi- bited in three stages of repose, and there are about one hundred and sixty explanatory lines of hieroglyphics, which, with the aid of the standards, may, without much hesitation, be said to relate to rites performed during the month Choiak at the places claiming the members of Osiris. All the parts of the bull when dismembered are symbols of power and pre-eminence (c). On the opposite side of the temple there is a similar chamber, which con- tains other scenes of the same drama, but it needs to be cleared out in order to be well seen and studied. Passing on to the divine bulls I must remark, that the fullest repre- sentation of them I have anywhere seen is at the temple of Dendera, on the staircases leading to the upper part of the temple. No. 19 of plate F is the legend which accompanies the bull Mnevis. In this mention is made of two other places (72 and 98 ? of list D). The Hehopolitan district may possibly be indicated by the standard D 97. The symbol of the bull Mnevis has been called " The Meander of the Labyrinth." It is used on the Rosetta stone to denote the land of Egypt {d). The colour of Mnevis is said to have been black. The legend of the bull Apis, also from Dendera, I give in plate F 20 (e). It is told of this bull, that it was coloured, and had certain sacred marks. The sign found on the forehead of the mummied bulls brought from Saccara is the inverted triangle, an emblem peculiarly feminine. These bulls have the human figure except the head, and they carry offerings to the goddess Athor of the temple. There are four bulls represented in the temple of Derr el Medeeneh at Gornou, viz. Apis, Mnevis, Basis, and one, the phonetic characters of whose name spell sm, according to Mr. Birch (in Bunsen's work, page 567). In Coptic we have soM, virtus, poteniia, vis, rohur. There can be no doubt that this bull symboUses a royal attribute ; whether it had a distinct indivi- duality, and in that light was an object of worship, it is impossible to say {J). The inscriptions which accompany the four bulls are given in plate F 21, abed. Basis was a white bull, and, at Hermonthis, is drawn with an altar before him. His name reads Bx, as in plate F 22 (compare Bunsen's Phonetics, page 572), whilst in 21 c it may be spelt Abk, or Abs, or Bak, or 17 Bas, or Bsa (Basis or Besa). The hump upon the shoulder of this bull I judge, from the drawing, to have been furnished with long and curhng hair, and suppose it to have been coloured by art, so as to be made to assume, during the day, various colours. This dissertation will be read by a few persons only intimate with the study to which it appHes. The information it conveys will be found useful to the deciphering of Egyptian monuments, and may, hereafter, by better hands, be extended, and prove more useful to the Egyptian student than I can make it. The plates have been sketched with my own hand on lithographic paper, and sent to England to be transferred to the stone. The text is prepared at a great distance from the press ; and by this explanation I hope to disarm criticism. Anything I have advanced upon opinion only I shaU be sorry to find admitted as conclusive without fuller proof ; but I am conveying some positive knowledge which must not be overlooked. I have gathered from the temples, and lay before the reader, the hieroglyphical standards of a great many places in Egypt, in an unvaried order ; and, by personal research, I have located four of them with sufficient and undoubted certainty. A number of Nubian standards, with particulars respecting them, I find in my sketch-book, but am unable to publish them at present. Alexandria, Egypt, 20th May, 1851. NOTES. (a) Instead of being two hawks, they may be two eagles ; but I do not think they can be the two crows of iEhan, vii. 18 ; nor the crow of Ovid, Metamorph. ix. v. 685, nor the two crows of Hor. Apollo, i. 8 and 9 : but these writers may have mistaken one bird for the other. (6) The great sculptures on the temple of Dendera declare that the goddess Isis " is Athor in all countries," and this explains what we might not otherwise understand. At Philse, Erment, Dendera, and elsewhere, homage is paid to the goddess of the temple by seven provincial Athors, who carry globes in their hands. The number seven is affected in all instances. (c) It may be new to the hieroglyphist to be informed, that the ribs of the bull stand in the place of the arm and the sieve found at the end of the names of the Eoman emperors, and can have the sense only of " command " or " govern." (d) Notwithstanding that this may seem to justify the hieroglyphics of Chseremon {vide " Transactions of the Royal Society of Literature," vol. iii. part 3, second series), it is probable that he and Macrobius (Sat. i. xix.) mean the same thing. " The Egyptians represented the earth in their hieroglyphical characters under the form of a cow." (e) The name reads very nearly " Epaphus." (/) Horus Apollo attaches to the unmutUated bull the meaning of fortitude com- bined with prudence (i. xlvi.), and this is confirmed in the translation of the obelisk of Hermapion, where it may be read, and with the arm (the formative sign denoting verbs of action) x^aregog, " A title given to the god Horus, and to the sovereigns of Egypt, who were assimilated to this God." — Champollion, Diet, page 119. Compare this with what I have said of standard D 153. (under the head of list A, standard 3). LONDON : PRINTED BY G. 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