rently through the funeral cult that Osiris so early
took a firm hold on the imagination of the people; for at a very ancient
date he was identified with every dead king, and it needed but a slight
extension of this idea to make him into a king of the dead. In later
times the moral aspect of his tale was doubtless the main cause of its
continued popularity; Osiris was named Onnophris, "the good Being" _par
excellence_, and Seth was contrasted with him as the author and the root
of all evil. Still the Egyptians themselves seem to have been somewhat
at a loss to account for the great veneration that they paid to Osiris.
Successive theories interpreted him as the god of the earth, as the god
of the Nile, as a god of vegetation, as a moon-god and as a sun-god; and
nearly every one of these theories has been claimed to be the primitive
truth by some scholar or another.

Nowhere is the conservatism of the Egyptians more clearly displayed than
in the tenacity with which they clung to the old forms of the theology,
such as we have essayed to describe. Neither the influx of new deities
nor the diligence of the priestly authors and commentators availed to
break down the cast-iron traditions with which the compilers of the
Pyramid texts were already familiar. It is true that with the
displacement of the capital town certain local deities attained a degree
of power that, superficially regarded, seems to alter the entire
perspective of the religion. Thus Ammon, originally the obscure local
god of Thebes, was raised by the Theban monarchs of the XIIth and of the
XVIIIth to XXIst Dynasties to a predominant position never equalled by
any other divinity; and, by similar means, Suchos of the Fayum, Ubasti
of Bubastis, and Neith of Sais, each enjoyed for a short space of time a
consideration that no other cause would have secured to them. But
precisely the example of Ammon proves the hopelessness of any attempt to
change the time-honoured religious creed; his priests identified him
with the sun-god Re, whose cult-centre was thus merely transferred a few
hundred miles to the South. Nor could even the violent religious
revolution of Akhenaton (Amenophis IV.), of which we shall later have
occasion to speak, sweep away for ever beliefs that had persisted for so
many generations.

But if the facts of the religion, broadly viewed, never underwent a
change, the interpretation of those facts did so in no small degree. The
religious books were fo