161006236 GRIFFITHS 1955 the Orders of Gods in Greece and Egypt According to Herodotus

The Orders of Gods in Greece and Egypt (According to Herodotus) Author(s): J. Gwyn Griffiths Source: The Journal of Hellenic Studies, Vol. 75 (1955), pp. 21-23 Published by: The Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/629164 . Accessed: 15/08/2013 21:40 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

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THE ORDERS OF GODS IN GREECE AND EGYPT (ACCORDING TO HERODOTUS) has several references to the orders or companies of gods in Greece and Egypt, HERODOTUS and they involve a comparison and a contrast. They may be arranged, in translation, as follows: () II, 4, 2. ' They say that the Egyptians first used the names of the twelve gods, and that the Greeks adopted them from them.' (2) II, 7, 2 mentions ' the altar of the twelve gods at Athens '. (3) II, 43, 2. ' Concerning Heracles I heard this account, that he was one of the twelve gods.' ' But to the (4) II, 43, 4. Egyptians Heracles is an ancient god; and as they say themselves, there were seventeen thousand years to the reign of Amasis since the eight gods produced the twelve, of whom they consider Heracles to be one.' (5) II, 46, 2. ' The Mendesians hold Pan to be one of the eight gods, and they say that these eight gods came into existence before the twelve.' (6) II, 145, I. ' Among the Greeks Heracles and Dionysus and Pan are considered to be the youngest of the gods, but among the Egyptians Pan is considered very ancient and one of the eight gods said to be the earliest, while Heracles is one of the second group, and Dionysus one of the third group, who were produced by the twelve.' Following his frequent custom, Herodotus views the information he receives in the light of Greek tradition, and in so doing seeks resemblances and correlations. The Greek tradition known to him gave pre-eminence to twelve gods, and he refers to the Athenian altar of the twelve not only in II, 7, 2 but also in VI, Io8, 4. According to Thucydides, vi, 54, 6, it was Pisistratus the son of Hippias who erected this altar; and an inscription I shows that it was used as a starting-point for measuring distances. Other references 2 indicate that processions used to march round it. Pindar 3 alludes to the' twelve sovereign gods ' at Olympia. It is clear that the Greeks of the classical period regarded this group of gods as a ' kind of corporate body '.4 They were stated by Eudoxus, a pupil of Plato, and other later writers, to be Zeus, Hera, Poseidon, Demeter, Apollo, Artemis, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Athena, Hephaestus, and Hestia. In the group of twelve sculptured on the east frieze of the Parthenon Hestia is absent, her place being taken by Dionysus; and the list probably varied from place to place according to the local prominence of different deities. Why were they twelve in number ? Weinrich 5 thinks their number derives from the twelve Ionian cities on the coast of Asia Minor. Sch6mann 6 connected the number with the twelve months of the year, and this was an idea known at least to Plato.7 Herodotus finds a company of twelve gods in Egypt also, witness five of the passages quoted above. But in three of them-(4), (5), and (6)-he states that a group of eight gods existed before the twelve, and that the twelve were produced by the earlier group. There can be little doubt that the eight gods he has in mind are the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, a group well known in Egyptian religious literature, although commentators have not hitherto seen this.8 A. H. Sayce 9 compares the Manethonian account of a primary order of seven gods, followed by a dynasty of eight heroes, and he notes the discrepancy in Herodotus' statements: 'the first dynasty contained seven, not eight gods; and the demigods were not twelve, but eight, according to Manetho. The secondary deities were not sprung from the primary.' It is admittedly diffcult to find in the Egyptian sources a system which corresponds in all particulars to that described by Herodotus, but the Ogdoad of Hermopolis is represented as a primary order of gods. The doctrine concerning the Ogdoad probably arose in opposition to the doctrine of Heliopolis, which gave the sovereign place to the sun-god as the oldest of the gods and as a deity who had created himself. At Hermopolis, in Middle Egypt, a hare-goddess had been the original deity, but Thoth, the ibis-god whom the Greeks equated with Hermes (hence the name Hermopolis), became prominent there later. Before this a doctrine emanated from Hermopolis which taught that the sun originated not from its own power but as the result of the creative powers of four pairs of deities who had existed before the sun. 1 C.I.G. (ed. Boeckh) i. 525 (quoted W. G. Waddell, Herodotus 8 H. G. Woods, G. Rawlinson, A. H. Sayce, F. L1.Griffith, Book II (London, I939), 124). E. H. Blakeney, and W. G. Waddell either deny or do not [Cf. IG 12 761-Ed.] 2 Pindar, fr. 2

advises this 63; Xenophon, Hipparch., iii, route. 3 Olymp. X, 49. 4 W. K. C. Guthrie, The Greeksand theirGods (London, I950), II0.

5 In Roscher's Lexikonder Gr. a. Rim. Mythologies.v. Zwolfgotter. 6 Griechische Alterthiimer4, II (Berlin, 7 Laws 828. Cf. Phaedrus 246e.

i902),

i42, n. I (end).

mention the existence of an Egyptian group of eight. Wiedemann mentions cycles of eight or nine. How and Wells refer to Brugsch's explanation of the ' eight ' as corresponding to the eight original cosmogonic deities, but without further elucidation. Godley talks of ' eight (or nine) gods ' as forming the first order of the Egyptian pantheon. 9 The AncientEmpireof the East (London, 1883), 150, n. 6, and 151,

n. 9.

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22

J. GWYN GRIFFITHS

The oldest of the eight was Nun, god of the primeval waters, and his wife Naunet was named after him, she being the goddess of the subterranean heaven. The other gods were Huh, god of the inundation, Kuk, god of darkness, and Amfin, who was the creative wind moving over the primeval waters, and whose name signified ' the hidden one'. Just as Nun had Naunet for wife, Huh had HIauhet, Kuk, Kauket, and Amfin, Amaunet, the wives being feminine counterparts in name and meaning. It was Kurt Sethe, in 1929, who set forth the Hermopolite doctrine in his Amun und die von Hermopolis (Abh. Berl. Akad.).1o As Herodotus says that the Egyptians hold the acht Urg'tter eight gods to be the earliest, it is likely that this was the doctrine which he encountered.11 Further, an important point in the Hermopolite doctrine was that the sun-god was created by the Ogdoad. The sun-god, according to the teaching of Heliopolis, was himself the head of the Ennead, and so the Ennead could be represented as produced by the Ogdoad, just as Herodotus says that the twelve were produced by the eight. But how could the Ennead include twelve gods? Although originally a company of nine gods, it very early lost its numerical restriction to nine. The Pyramid Texts (I66oa) refer to the ' Great Ennead' as consisting of Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris in Abydos, Osiris among the Westerners (-Khentamenthes ?), SEth, Horus, RE', Khentyerty, and Wadjet. This makes up twelve, although Osiris, it should be noted, is included in two forms. Another reference (I655a) gives the names of nine only. But the allusion first cited shows that in this earliest body of Egyptian religious texts-they belong to the Vth and VIth dynasties-the term ' Ennead' is already a flexible one. The Enneads, unfortunately, have not been given detailed study by any Egyptologist, and an error of long standing has been the idea that there were three of them, an idea which has led some commentators 12on Herodotus to talk of the three Enneads as the source of the mention of three divine groups. But the early writing of three groups of nine in Egyptian is a way of indicating the plural, and it points to the undoubted fact that different nomes and towns had different versions of the divine groups, just as the 'Twelve' varied among the Greeks.13 Perhaps it is to one such local group that Herodotus refers in talking of a third order. How do the references to Pan, Dionysus, and Heracles fit into this scheme of Ogdoad, Ennead (expanded to twelve), and local group? In II, 46, 2, and II, 145, I, the Egyptian Pan is said by the Mendesians, and by the Egyptians in general, to be one of the eight gods. He is stated (II, 46, 2) to be represented with the head and legs of a goat, and to be called Mendes in Egyptian-that is, presumably, he bore the same name as the nome. Mendes as a god is previously mentioned in II, 42, I, where it is said that those who possess a temple of his or belong to the Mendesian nome will sacrifice sheep but not goats. A comparison of these statements with remarks by other Greek writers shows that Herodotus is at one with them in describing the Mendesian god as a goat-god, as Wiedemann 14 shows in a well-documented note. Here a strange puzzle confronts us: the Egyptian sources consistently show the animal as a ram. To explain the difference in tradition is not easy. Perhaps the goat was to the Greeks a more familiar symbol of fertility, and the Egyptian ' ram of Mendes ' was certainly thought of in this way, as the quotations given by Wiedemann 15 show. Mendes was in the East Delta, and according to Ball 16 was on the site of the modern Tell el-Rub'. Its Egyptian name was Djedet, and when Herodotus states that both the goat and the god are called Mendes in Egyptian, he implies that the place-name is also similar. Assuming that the ram is the animal really referred to, and that Greek tradition had already replaced it by the goat for the reason suggested above,17 we may then see a possible basis for the remarks about the names: the Egyptian for ' ram ' was ba, the god was called Ba-neb-Djedet (' the ram, the lord of Mendes), so that the two names began at any rate in the same way. Wiedemann 18 seeks an Egyptian origin for the word Mendes as it stands, and he mentions the name of the god Min as a possible source. The god Min was an ithyphallic god of fertility, but his cult is not represented at Mendes. His animal is not the goat or the ram, but the bull. In spite of this Herodotus may have confused Ba-neb-Djedet with him. That the Greeks identified Pan and Min is shown by the name they gave to Khemmis in Upper Egypt, which was a centre of the cult of Min; they called it Panopolis.19 10 Cf. also his Urgeschichteund alteste 17 Sourdille, Hirodote et la Religion de l'Tgypte (Paris, 19Io), Religion der Agypter (Leipzig, 1930), 133-4 and J. Vandier, La Religion gyvptienne2 166, following Meyer, makes the very unlikely suggestion that (Paris, I949), 33-4. H. and H. A. Frankfort in BeforePhilosophy the Egyptian monuments erroneously show a ram instead of a (Pelican Books, i949), i8, consider the Ogdoad an example of goat. Cf. How and Wells, I89, ' Perhaps the monuments are 'speculative thought in mythological guise'. wrong . . .' If this is so, how can we explain the fact that the 11 For a representation in Ptolemaic times (from Philae) of Egyptian texts invariably refer to the animal as a ram, as in the the Hermopolitan Ogdoad see G. Maspero, The Dawn of name Ba-neb-Djedet? A. W. Lawrence, by the way, The Civilization : Egypt and Chaldaea5 (London, I910), 148. History of Herodotus (London, I935), I69, wrongly gives the 12 E. H. Blakeney, The Egypt of Herodotus, II I; How and city-name as ' Banebtet '. He apparently takes over this error, on Herodotus,I, 239; W. G. Waddell, I21. Wells, A Commentary and others, from Sourdille. There is an Assyrian form Binteti See further the writer's forthcoming article on 'The 13 see Ranke, KeilschriftlichesMaterial (Berlin, 1910), 4918 Op. cit. 219. Enneads' in the Annales du Service des Antiquitdsde Egyptian 1' gypte. in Wilkinson 19 Rawlinson ad n. II, 7); Sayce, 42 76-7, (pp. 14 Herodots Zweites Buch (Leipzig, 1890), 216-19. op. cit. 153; E. J. Baumgartel, ' Herodotus on Min ', Antiquity 15 Op. cit. 218. Cf. the god's role in The Contendingsof Horus XXI 146. How and Wells, 189, wrongly state that (i947), and Seth. 'Min of Chemmis . . . is goat-headed'. So, too, Lawrence, 16 Egypt in the Classical Geographers(Cairo, 1942), 26. p. 169.

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THE ORDERS

OF GODS IN GREECE AND

EGYPT

23

Ba-neb-Djedet, the god of Mendes, was not a member of the Ogdoad, but the ram was prominently associated with Amfin, and Amfin was one of the Eight. Has Herodotus thought here of Amfin as the equivalent of Pan? In II, 42, however, he shows knowledge of the fact that Amfin (whom he calls Zeus) is depicted sometimes with a ram's head. It is more likely that Min, as elsewhere, is the equivalent of Pan, and that the reason for his location in Mendes is the strong Min, is should be noted, fertility motif which is common to his cult and that of Ba-neb-Djedet. although not a member of the Ogdoad, occupied an important position among the gods of the Old Kingdom. Heracles was variously equated with the moon-god Khonsu, with forms of Horus,20 and with Khnum and Shu.21 We cannot be sure what identification Herodotus had in mind, but it is worth noting that Shu is a deity who, with others, helps RF' to put down the rebels in the legend of The Destruction of Mankind ' 22; and in the legend of Onuris he is identified with Onuris himself, the warrior-god who champions the sun-god.23 Further, Shu is a member of the Ennead, and so fits the pattern here suggested. Dionysus is equated with Osiris in II, 42, and II, I44; and Osiris, together with Isis, is said, in II, 42, to be worshipped by the Egyptians generally. According to the Pyramid Texts, he is a member of the Ennead, and so one would expect Herodotus, on the view here suggested, to include him in the Twelve. At the same time, he would doubtless occur often in a local group of gods, and such an occurrence may explain his classification here in the third group. These correlations have at least the advantage of reconciling Herodotus' main statements with what is known of Egyptian religion from the earlier sources; and where there are discrepancies a likely explanation is at hand. UniversityCollege, Swansea.

J.

GWYN

GRIFFITHS

20 See J. G. Milne (in an essay on Graeco-Egyptian Religion) in (London, 1927), 47. Cf. Wilkinson, Mannersand Customsof the AncientEgyptians(2nd Series, London, 1841), II, Hastings' Encyclopaediaof Religion and Ethics, VI, 382b. 21 See 23 x6-18. Sourdille, op. cit. 173. Vandier, op. cit. 66. 22 The Literature the Ancient Erman-Blackman, of Egyptians

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