es or
nomes. Many of these refer to what were purely secular occupations in
later times, and we thus learn that the priestly character was attached
to the principal person, be he king, or leader in other ways. In one
city it was the King and His Loved Son who were the priests, in another
it was the General, in another the Warrior who became the priest;
elsewhere it was the Great Constructor, in another city the Great
Commander of Workmen; one city raised the Manager of the Inundation to
the priesthood, and very naturally the Great Physician or medicine man
became priest in another place. The Eldest Son was the title of
another priesthood, much as the later kings made their eldest son high
priest. A very curious view of the priestess preceding the
establishment of a priest is given by some cities; one where she was
called the Nurse, and the priest was the Youth, and another city names
the priestess the 'Appeaser of the Spirit' and the priest the
'Favourite Child.'

Purely religious functions are only a minority {75} of the priestly
titles in the Delta, such as the Seer, the Great Seer, the Chief of the
Feast, and the Opener of the Mouth, referring to enabling the statue of
the god to speak, or opening the mouth of the mummy to enable it to
live. A full analysis of the priestly titles would give a picture of
the society in which priesthood arose, but it is a subject which has
not been systematically studied.

{76}

CHAPTER XII

THE SACRED BOOKS

In the latest age of ancient Egypt the religious writings were largely
translated into Greek, at a time when they were studied and collected
as embodying the ideas of a world which was already fading away. This
venerated past kept its hold on the imagination as containing mystic
powers of compelling the unseen, and strange travesties of ancient
formulae, the efficacy of which could not be rivalled by any later
writings which were baldly intelligible. There were four main classes
of writings, on theology, ritual, science, and medicine. Though the
late compilations have almost entirely perished, yet we can gather
their nature from the portions of the original documents which are
preserved from earlier times.

The most popular work in the later dynasties was that which has been
called the _Book of the Dead_ by modern writers. We must not conceive
{77} of it as a bound up whole, like our Bible; but rather as an
incongruous accumulation of charms and formulae, p