Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 1.djvu/149

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The Egyptian Religion and the Plastic Arts.
65

The worship of the hawk, the vulture, and the ibis, had, then, preceded by many centuries that of the gods who correspond to the personages of the Hellenic pantheon. Rooted by long custom in the minds of the people, it did not excite the ire of the wise

Fig. 44.—Horus; from a bronze in the Posno collection. (Height 38 inches.)

men of Heliopolis or Thebes. The doctrine of emanation and of successive incarnations of the deity, permitted their theology to

    and deafened by birds, why he patiently suffers the insolence of the crow perched upon the horn of the buffalo, on the hump of a camel, or fighting upon the date-trees and shaking down the fruit, he will say nothing. Birds are allowed to do anything. Older than the Pyramids, they are the ancients of the country. Man's existence depends upon them, upon the persevering labour of the ibis, the stork, the crow and the vulture."