Chapter 43 (part 84)

The seat of the god Khepera was in the boat of the sun, and the pictures which present us with this fact[1] only illustrate an idea which is as old, at least, as the pyramid of Unas, for in this monument it is said of the king:- ap-f em apt xenen-f em xeper em nest sut He flieth like a bird, he alighteth like a beetle upon the empty throne amt uaa-k Ra[2] in thy boat, O Ra. In the XVIIIth dynasty Queen Hatshepset declared herself to be "the creator of things which came into being like Khepera",[3] and in later times the scribes were exceedingly fond of playing upon the word used as a noun, adjective, verb and proper name.[4] Tum or Atemu i.e. , "the closer," was the great god of Annu, and the head of the great company of the gods of that place. It would seem that he usurped the position of Ra in Egyptian mythology, or at any rate that the priests of Annu succeeded in causing their local god, either separately or joined with Ra, to be accepted as the leader of the divine group. He represented the evening or night sun, and as such he is called in the XVth chapter of the Book of the Dead "divine god," "self-created," "maker of the gods," "creator of men," who stretched out the heavens," "the lightener of the tuat with his two eyes," etc.' [1. Lanzone, op. cit., tav. 330. 2. Recueil de Travaux , t. iv., p. 57 (1. 477). 3 Lepsius, Denkmäler , Abth. iii., BL 22. 4 Compare ###. Maspero, Mémoires de la Mission , t. i., p. 595; and in the account of the Creation found in B.M. papyrus No. 10,188, Col. xxvi., ###. 5. Naville, Todtenbuch , Bd. I., Bl. 19, 20.] {p. cxi} The "cool breezes of the north wind," for which every dead man prayed, were supposed to proceed from him. He is, as M. Lefébure has pointed out, always depicted in the form of a man; he wears the crowns and holds both the sceptre and emblem of life On a mummy case at Turin he is depicted in the boat of the Sun, in company with the god Khepera; between them are the beetle and sun's disk In later times the Egyptians called the feminine form of Tmu Temt.[2] Ra was the name given to the sun by the Egyptians in a remote antiquity, but the meaning of the word, or the attribute which they ascribed to the sun by it, is unknown. Ra was the invisible emblem of God, and was regarded as the god of this earth, to whom offerings and sacrifices were made daily; and when he appeared above the horizon at the creation, time began. In the pyramid texts the soul of the deceased makes its way to where Ra is in heaven, and Ra is entreated to give it a place in the "bark of millions of years" wherein he sails over the sky. The Egyptians attributed to the sun a morning and an evening boat, and in these the god sat accompanied by Khepera and Tmu, his own forms in the morning and evening respectively. In his daily course he vanquished night and darkness, and mist and cloud disappeared from before his rays; subsequently the Egyptians invented the moral conception of the sun, representing the victory of right over wrong and of truth over falsehood.