come to all intents and purposes a
dead god the next. But besides family and village gods there were
national gods, and gods of rivers and mountains, and gods of earth and
sky, all of which taken together made a formidable number of "divine"
beings whose good-will had to be secured, and whose ill-will must be
appeased. Besides these, a number of animals as being sacred to the gods
were also considered to be "divine," and fear as well as love made the
Egyptians add to their numerous classes of gods.

The gods of Egypt whose names are known to us do not represent all those
that have been conceived by the Egyptian imagination, for with them as
with much else, the law of the survival of the fittest holds good. Of
the gods of the prehistoric man we know nothing, but it is more than
probable that some of the gods who were worshipped in dynastic times
represent, in a modified form, the deities of the savage, or
semi-savage, Egyptian that held their influence on his mind the longest.
A typical example of such a god will suffice, namely Thoth, whose
original emblem was the dog-headed ape. In very early times great
respect was paid to this animal on account of his sagacity,
intelligence, and cunning; and the simple-minded Egyptian, when he heard
him chattering just before the sunrise and sunset, assumed that he was
in some way holding converse or was intimately connected with the sun.
This idea clung to his mind, and we find in dynastic times, in the
vignette representing the rising sun, that the apes, who are said to be
the transformed openers of the portals of heaven, form a veritable
company of the gods, and at the same time one of the most striking
features of the scene. Thus an idea which came into being in the most
remote times passed on from generation to generation until it became
crystallized in the best copies of the Book of the Dead, at a period
when Egypt was at its zenith of power and glory. The peculiar species of
the dog-headed ape which is represented in statues and on papyri is
famous for its cunning, and it was the words which it supplied to Thoth,
who in turn transmitted them to Osiris, that enabled Osiris to be "true
of voice," or triumphant, over his enemies. It is probably in this
capacity, _i.e._, as the friend of the dead, that the dog-headed ape
appears seated upon the top of the standard of the Balance in which the
heart of the deceased is being weighed against the feather symbolic of
Ma[=a]t; for the co