he deities of
the Nile. Herodotus says that Isis and Osiris were revered by every
inhabitant of the country, and their traditional holidays involved secret
ceremonies whose sacred meaning the Greek writer dared not reveal.[2]

Recognizing their Osiris in Serapis, the Egyptians readily accepted the new
cult. There was a tradition that a new dynasty should introduce a new god
or give a sort of preeminence to the god of its own district. From time
immemorial politics had changed the {75} government of heaven when changing
that of earth. Under the Ptolemies the Serapis of Alexandria naturally
became one of the principal divinities of the country, just as the Ammon of
Thebes had been the chief of the celestial hierarchy under the Pharaohs of
that city, or as, under the sovereigns from Sais, the local Neith had the
primacy. At the time of the Antonines there were forty-two Serapeums in
Egypt.[3]

But the purpose of the Ptolemies was not to add one more Egyptian god to
the countless number already worshiped by their subjects. They wanted this
god to unite in one common worship the two races inhabiting the kingdom,
and thus to further a complete fusion. The Greeks were obliged to worship
him side by side with the natives. It was a clever political idea to
institute a Hellenized Egyptian religion at Alexandria. A tradition
mentioned by Plutarch[4] has it that Manetho, a priest from Heliopolis, a
man of advanced ideas, together with Timotheus, a Eumolpid from Eleusis,
thought out the character that would best suit the newcomer. The result was
that the composite religion founded by the Lagides became a combination of
the old creed of the Pharaohs and the Greek mysteries.

First of all, the liturgic language was no longer the native idiom but
Greek. This was a radical change. The philosopher Demetrius of Phalerum,
who had been cured of blindness by Serapis, composed poems in honor of the
god that were still sung under the Caesars several centuries later.[5] We
can easily imagine that the poets, who lived on the bounty of the
Ptolemies, vied with each other in their efforts to celebrate their
benefactors' god, and the old rituals that were translated from the
Egyptian were also enriched with {76} edifying bits of original
inspiration. A hymn to Isis, found on a marble monument in the island of
Andros,[6] gives us some idea of these sacred compositions, although it is
of more recent date.

In the second place, the artists replaced