“the many-named,” “the thousand-named,” and in Greek inscriptions “the myriad-named,”[1] Tiele confesses candidly that "it is now impossible to tell precisely to what natural phenomena the character of Isis at first referred.”[2] Mr. Renouf states that Isis was the Dawn,[3] but without assigning any reason whatever for the identification. There are at least some grounds for seeing in her a goddess of corn. According to Diodorus, whose authority appears to have been the Egyptian historian Manetho, the discovery of wheat and barley was attributed to Isis, and at her festivals stalks of these grains were carried in procession to commemorate the boon she had conferred on men. Further, at harvest-time, when the Egyptian reapers had cut the first stalks, they laid them down and beat their breasts, lamenting and calling upon Isis.[4] Amongst the epithets by which she is designated on the inscriptions are “creatress of the green crop,” “the green one, whose greenness is like the greenness of the earth,” and “mistress of bread.”[5] According to Brugsch she is “not only the creatress of the fresh verdure of vegetation which covers the earth, but is actually the green corn-field itself, which is personified as a goddess.”[6] This is confirmed by her epithet Sochit or Sochet, meaning “a corn-field,” a sense which the word still retains in Coptic.[7] It is in this character of a corn-goddess that the Greeks conceived Isis, for they
- ↑ Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, p. 645.
- ↑ C. P. Tiele, History of Egyptian Religion, p. 57.
- ↑ Hibbert Lectures, 1879, p. 111.
- ↑ Diodorus, i. 14. Eusebius (Praeparat. Evang. iii. 3) quotes from Diodorus (i. 11-13) a long passage on the early religion of Egypt, prefacing the quotation (c. 2) with the remark γράφει δὲ καὶ τὰ περὶ τοὺτων πλατύτερον μὲν ὁ Μανέθως, ἐπετετμημένως δὲ ὁ Διόδωρος, which seems to imply that Diodorus epitomised Manetho.
- ↑ Brugsch, op. cit. p. 647.
- ↑ Brugsch, op. cit. p. 649.
- ↑ Brugsch, l.c.
