Name 10th Grade Reading Comprehension

The Dog-headed Ape

Egyptian Ideas of the Future Life by E. A. Wallis Budge

The gods of Egypt whose names are known to us do not

represent all those that have been conceived by the Egyptian
imagination, for with them as with much else, the law of the survival
of the fittest holds good. Of the gods of the prehistoric man we know
nothing, but it is more than probable that some of the gods who were worshipped in
dynastic times represent, in a modified form, the deities of the savage, or semi-
savage, Egyptian that held their influence on his mind the longest.
A typical example of such a god will suffice, namely Thoth, whose original
emblem was the dog-headed ape. In very early times great respect was paid to this
animal on account of his sagacity, intelligence, and cunning; and the simple-
minded Egyptian, when he heard him chattering just before the sunrise and sunset,
assumed that he was in some way holding converse or was intimately connected
with the sun. This idea clung to his mind, and we find in dynastic times, in the
vignette representing the rising sun, that the apes, who are said to be the
transformed openers of the portals of heaven, form a veritable company of the
gods, and at the same time one of the most striking features of the scene.
Thus an idea which came into being in the most remote times passed on from
generation to generation until it became crystallized in the best copies of the Book
of the Dead, at a period when Egypt was at its zenith of power and glory. The
peculiar species of the dog-headed ape which is represented in statues and on
papyri is famous for its cunning, and it was the words which it supplied to Thoth, who
in turn transmitted them to Osiris, that enabled Osiris to be "true of voice," or
triumphant, over his enemies. It is probably in this capacity, i.e. , as the friend of the
dead, that the dog-headed ape appears seated upon the top of the standard of
the Balance in which the heart of the deceased is being weighed against the
feather symbolic of Maat; for the commonest titles of the god are "lord of divine
books," "lord of divine words," i.e. , the formulae which make the deceased to be
obeyed by friend and foe alike in the next world. In later times, when Thoth came to
be represented by the ibis bird, his attributes were multiplied, and he became the
god of letters, science, mathematics, etc.; at the creation he seems to have played
a part not unlike that of "wisdom" which is so beautifully described by the writer of
Proverbs.

©www.EasyTeacherWorksheets.com