the famous "Stele of Vultures" now in
Paris. On this we see the enemies of Eannadu, one of the early rulers
of Shirpurla, cast out to be devoured by the vultures. On an Egyptian
relief of slate, evidently originally dedicated in a temple record of
some historical event, and dating from the beginning of the Ist Dynasty
(practically contemporary, according to our latest knowledge, with
Eannadu), we have an almost exactly similar scene of captives being cast
out into the desert, and devoured by lions and vultures. The two reliefs
are curiously alike in their clumsy, naive style of art. A further
point is that the official represented on the stele, who appears to be
thrusting one of the bound captives out to die, wears a long fringed
garment of Babylonish cut, quite different from the clothes of the later
Egyptians.

(3) There are evidently two distinct and different main strata in the
fabric of Egyptian religion. On the one hand we find a mass of myth and
religious belief of very primitive, almost savage, cast, combining
a worship of the actual dead in their tombs--which were supposed
to communicate and thus form a veritable "underworld," or, rather,
"under-Egypt"--with veneration of magic animals, such as jackals, cats,
hawks, and crocodiles. On the other hand, we have a sun and sky worship
of a more elevated nature, which does not seem to have amalgamated with
the earlier fetishism and corpse-worship until a comparatively late
period. The main seats of the sun-worship were at Heliopolis in the
Delta and at Edfu in Upper Egypt. Heliopolis seems always to have been
a centre of light and leading in Egypt, and it is, as is well known,
the On of the Bible, at whose university the Jewish lawgiver Moses is
related to have been educated "in all the wisdom of the Egyptians." The
philosophical theories of the priests of the Sun-gods, Ra-Harmachis and
Turn, at Heliopolis seem to have been the source from which sprang the
monotheistic heresy of the Disk-Worshippers (in the time of the XVIIIth
Dynasty), who, under the guidance of the reforming King Akhunaten,
worshipped only the disk of the sun as the source of all life, the door
in heaven, so to speak, through which the hidden One Deity poured
forth heat and light, the origin of life upon the earth. Very early
in Egyptian history the Heliopolitans gained the upper hand, and the
Ra-worship (under the Vth Dynasty, the apogee of the Old Kingdom) came
to the front, and for the first ti