The next stage in
man's relationship with animals was the choice of an animal as the
sacred symbol of their group: what is loosely called totemism.
Hunting for their necessary food, and admiring to the point of
worship a life- endowment greater than their own, from the earliest
times there was established this dual relationship that has
persisted to the present day.
Totemism has
existed, perhaps spontaneously, all over the world. But it was
strongest and most complex in Africa; and, in so far as the early
Egyptians must have been in large part of African descent, it is in
Egypt that we first see totemism turning into what we may call
religion. So strong were the vestiges of totemism that in their art
the Egyptians continually attempted to integrate man and animal.
Men, whose bodies are models of human perfection, retain the heads
of birds and animals through animal heads, especially that of the
wolf Anubis, are an obstacle to our admiration of Egyptian art: the
reverse process of the Greeks, which produced the centaur and the
harpy, seems both biologically and aesthetically a more acceptable
form of integration. But at a very early date the Egyptians evolved
the idea of the sacred animal, the equal and protector of the
god-king; and sacred animals are the subject of the first pieces of
sculpture that can, in the highest sense of the word, be described
as works of art.
Of all sacred
animals Horus was the most absolutely a god; the Horus relief in
the Louvre has the air of finality, the commanding simplicity, of a
great religious image. The other sacred animals of Egyptian art
pass down a diminishing scale of sanctity. Hathor, the cow, was
particularly favoured by certain pharaohs like Hatshepsut; the ram
was sacred to Amun, as all visitors to Karnak will be painfully
aware. Toth, the ape, was sacred but, so to say, localized, without
the universal power of Horus; the same is true of the ibis, and of
a much later arrival in the animal pantheon, also an incarnation of
Toth, the cat.
We may easily feel
that there are too many sacred animals in Egyptian art. Yet all of
them produced images of great sculptural beauty which gain some of
their power from the sacrosanct uniformity of the original idea.
Small variations, which may have passed, unnoticed by the believer,
were due to the fact that these images were made by artists - the
Egyptian artist was far from being the self-effacing craftsman of
other early civilizations, and knew' how to give a prototype the
life-giving force of variety.
Apart from this
greater life-endowment, there was another reason why animals were
held sacred. Their inability to speak made them mysterious. All
gods should be inscrutable. 'I am that I am.' If the Horus could
have answered the questions addressed to him or Hathor commented on
the sudden rise in her status in the Middle Kingdom, they would
have lost some of their authority.
But beyond these
godlike attributes the quantity of semi-sacred animals in ancient
Egypt owes something to a state of mind that by no means always
accompanies religioloved animals. It is evident that the Egyptian
feeling for animals was far closer to our own than that of any
other ancient people. We can see this in the reliefs that decorate
tombs around Sakkara. High officials, like Ti and Mereruka, took so
seriously the care of their flocks and herds that they covered the
walls of their tombs with scenes of husbandry. These reliefs show
that the Egyptians tried to domesticate animals of all sorts, but
succeeded only with those which are our companions today, dogs and
cats, and those which still occupy our farmyards. What a strange
operation of nature that for five thousand years man has been able
to domesticate sheep and cattle, and not roe
deer?
Cats were pets a
thousand years before they were considered sacred, and the story in
Herodotus that when a house is on fire the first thought of an
Egyptian household is to save the cats- 'they pass them from one to
another, while the house burns down' -is as much a reflection of
love as of totemism. The reliefs of animal life in Old Kingdom
tombs are inexhaustibly informative and touching. One of the most
familiar shows a farmer carrying a calf on his back with the mother
cow following and licking it. Where in the Graeco-Roman or the
Semitic world could such an incident have been sympathetically
observed and recorded?
Such were the
feelings of harmony that could be developed in the secure,
continuous pastoral life on the banks of the Nile.
