! You are
all young in mind; there is no opinion or tradition of
knowledge among you which is white with age." Other nations
disputed their priority--the Phrygians, the Medes, or rather
the tribe of the Magi among the Medes, the Ethiopians, the
Scythians. A cycle of legends had gathered about this
subject, giving an account of the experiments instituted, by
Psamtik, or other sovereigns, to find out which were right,
Egyptians or foreigners.

** At Philae and at Denderah, Phtah is represented as piling
upon his potter's table the plastic clay from which he is
about to make a human body, and which is somewhat wrongly
called the egg of the world. It is really the lump of earth
from which man came forth at his creation.

*** At Philas, Khnumu calls himself "the potter who
fashions men, the modeller of the gods." He there moulds the
members of Osiris, the husband of the local Isis, as at
Erment he forms the body of Harsamtaui, or rather that of
Ptolemy Caesarion, the son of Julius Caesar and the celebrated
Cleopatra, identified with Harsamtaui.

Ra at his first rising, seeing the earth desert and bare, had flooded it
with his rays as with a flood of tears; all living things, vegetable and
animal, and man himself, had sprung pell-mell from his eyes, and were
scattered abroad with the light over the surface of the world.[*]
Sometimes the facts were presented under a less poetic aspect. The mud
of the Nile, heated to excess by the burning sun, fermented and brought
forth the various races of men and animals by spontaneous generation,
having moulded itself into a thousand living forms. Then its procreative
power became weakened to the verge of exhaustion. Yet on the banks of
the river, in the height of summer, smaller animals might still be found
whose condition showed what had once taken place in the case of the
larger kinds. Some appeared as already fully formed, and struggling
to free themselves from the oppressive mud; others, as yet imperfect,
feebly stirred their heads and fore feet, while their hind quarters
were completing their articulation and taking shape within the matrix of
earth.[**]

* With reference to the substances which proceeded from the
eye of Ra, see the remarks of Birch, _Sur un papyrus magique
du Musee Britannique_. By his tears (_romitu_) Horus, or his
eye as identified with the sun