, and conquest, which caused
them continually to pass into fresh hands, either entire or divided. The
Egyptians, whom we are accustomed to consider as a people respecting
the established order of things, and conservative of ancient tradition,
showed themselves as restless and as prone to modify or destroy the work
of the past, as the most inconstant of our modern nations. The distance
of time which separates them from us, and the almost complete absence
of documents, gives them an appearance of immobility, by which we are
liable to be unconsciously deceived; when the monuments still existing
shall have been unearthed, their history will present the same
complexity of incidents, the same agitations, the same instability,
which we suspect or know to have been characteristic of most other
Oriental nations. One thing alone remained stable among them in the
midst of so many revolutions, and which prevented them from losing their
individuality and from coalescing in a common unity. This was the belief
in and the worship of one particular deity. If the little capitals
of the petty states whose origin is lost in a remote past--Edfu and
Denderah, Nekhabit and Buto, Siufc, Thinis, Khmunu, Sais, Bubastis,
Athribis--had only possessed that importance which resulted from the
presence of an ambitious petty prince, or from the wealth of their
inhabitants, they would never have passed safe and sound through the
long centuries of existence which they enjoyed from the opening to the
close of Egyptian history. Fortune raised their chiefs, some even to the
rank of rulers of the world, and in turn abased them: side by side with
the earthly ruler, whose glory was but too often eclipsed, there was
enthroned in each nome a divine ruler, a deity, a god of the domain,
"nutir nuiti," whose greatness never perished. The princely families
might be exiled or become extinct, the extent of the territory might
diminish or increase, the town might be doubled in size and population
or fall in ruins: the god lived on through all these vicissitudes, and
his presence alone preserved intact the rights of the state over which
he reigned as sovereign. If any disaster befell his worshippers, his
temple was the spot where the survivors of the catastrophe rallied
around him, their religion preventing them from mixing with the
inhabitants of neighbouring towns and from becoming lost among them.
The survivors multiplied with that extraordinary rapidity which is the