of their principal divinities to their conquerors, and the Libyan
Shehadidi was enthroned in the valley of the Nile, in the same way as
the Semitic Baalu and his retinue of Astartes, Anitis, Eeshephs, and
Kadshus. These divine colonists fared like all foreigners who
have sought to settle on the banks of the Nile: they were promptly
assimilated, wrought, moulded, and made into Egyptian deities scarcely
distinguishable from those of the old race. This mixed pantheon had
its grades of nobles, princes, kings, and each of its members was
representative of one of the elements constituting the world, or of one
of the forces which regulated its government.

[Illustration: 113.jpb SOME FABULOUS BEASTS OF THE EGYPTIAN DESERT 1]

1 Bisu, pp. 111-184. The tail-piece to the summary of this
chapter is a figure of Bisu, drawn by Faucher-Gudin from an
amulet in blue enamelled pottery.

The sky, the earth, the stars, the sun, the Nile, were so many breathing
and thinking beings whose lives were daily manifest in the life of the
universe.

They were worshipped from one end of the valley to the other, and the
whole nation agreed in proclaiming their sovereign power. But when the
people began to name them, to define their powers and attributes, to
particularize their forms, or the relationships that subsisted among
them, this unanimity was at an end. Each principality, each nome, each
city, almost every village, conceived and represented them differently.
Some said that the sky was the Great Horus, Haroeris, the sparrow-hawk
of mottled plumage which hovers in highest air, and whose gaze embraces
the whole field of creation. Owing to a punning assonance between his
name and the word _horu_, which designates the human countenance, the
two senses were combined, and to the idea of the sparrow-hawk there was
added that of a divine face, whose two eyes opened in turn, the right
eye being the sun, to give light by day, and the left eye the moon, to
illumine the night. The face shone also with a light of its own, the
zodiacal light, which appeared unexpectedly, morning or evening, a
little before sunrise, and a little after sunset. These luminous beams,
radiating from a common centre, hidden in the heights of the firmament,
spread into a wide pyramidal sheet of liquid blue, whose base rested
upon the earth, but whose apex was slightly inclined towards the zenith.
The divine face was symmetrically framed, and attached to earth by