Egypt

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It is obvious that the state of mind resulting from these causes, which were as controlling thirty centuries ago as they are to-day, made of the great body of the Egyptian people a most ready and powerful instrument for the purposes of their rulers, since the whole force of the people could be directed to...
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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: It is obvious that the state of mind resulting from these causes, which were as controlling thirty centuries ago as they are to-day, made of the great body of the Egyptian people a most ready and powerful instrument for the purposes of their rulers, since the whole force of the people could be directed to any end, whether of peace or war. Thus Rameses II., who is accepted as the typical Pharaoh, could turn the whole male population into the army when he was bent upon schemes of conquest, or could employ it in erecting the vast buildings with which he celebrated his victories and which fill us with such amazement to-day. To understand the enormous power wielded by the ancient king, we have to remember that he was in his own person the head of the ruling castes, and, by virtue of his office, both the first soldier and the first priest of the nation. He seems to have been not merely the representative of the nation before the gods, but also the actual representative of the gods before the nation. It was the beginning of their traditions that the god Horus was the first king, and every king throughout their long history took the title of the golden or victorious Horus, and was believed to have inherited the virtue of his divinity. He was adored as a god, and the gods themselves are represented as adoring him and delighting in his feats. He was compared to the sun-god Ra, and was the sacred emanation of Ammon, who says to him, I give to thee the sky and what is in it. I lend the earth to thee and all that is upon it. The hearts of the goddesses rejoice when they see thy glorious form. He was the visible god upon earth. Fidelity to his service became not only a duty but an act of piety, upon which the people relied for blessedness in the next world. No virtue is more often d...