A NEW BEAST AND AN OLD DEITY

Otago Witness, Issue 2561, 6 May 1903, Page 70

A NEW BEAST AND AN OLD DEITY

jßy Dixornis.J

(See illustration elsewhere in this issue.)

Some few thousand years ago Egyptian sculptors carved on the walls of certain temples, etc., the figure of a 'god called Set, having the body- of a man and the head 'of an animal. In this there was nothing very singular, for many Egyptian gods were so pictured. The strange fancy of these early inhabitants of the Delta impelled them to believe that the gods, when they came to earth, assumed the forms of animals--hence most of the deities are depicted on the monuments as having animal heads and human bodies, and the

prototypes of all such were either venerated or propitiated as sacred beasts. The zoology of this peculiar religious phase is considerable, embracing forms as widelyseparated as bulls, rams, crocodiles, cats, and beetles. The mental procedure which led this early and most remarkable race to thus deify mere animals may be looked upon, as crude ; but at least it existed, along with a very high state of civilisation, and, moreover, is not as yet entirely dissociated from the dominant religions of our own times. By some authorities tho Egyptian practice of holding certain animals as sacred is believed to have been, a relic of prhn'tive fetichism and totemism, and it is not readily understandable as having any other origin.

Whatever the origin of their beliefs mayhave been, the ancient dwellers by the Nil© pictured one deity as having the head of a hawk, another that of a crocodile, and still another with the head of a cat. One of their cities — Bubastis — was sacred to cats, and very many defunct tabbies were mummified and interred within this city of Bast, the cat-headed god. A beetle, th» scarabaens, which is still found in numbers on the land after the annual subsidence of the Nile, was included in this menagerie of strange gods. It was associated with the seasonal inundations, which gave continued fertility of the soil, and hence earned reverential regard as the embodiment of that deity which controlled tho movements of the life-giving floods. Tho ibis, because it ate up noxious thingswinged serpents, Herodotus calls them (possibly locusts, destructive of crops), — wa.s also held in profound regard, as were many other animals for various reasons. Aa pictured on monuments, temples, and tombs, most of these strange gods are easily identifiable ; but the head of Set is, or was until lately, an exception. The fox of the desert, the giraffe, various rodents, even a fabulous cieature, half antelope and hall ass, have been suggested as prototype of the head of this god. But in each case for one point of resemblance there are several of marked dissimilarity. Egyptologists mostly allow that the head of Set does not resemble that of any known animal, and it would have been rash to suggest that in a quadruped new to modern zoology, but familiar to ancient Egypt, might, perchance, yet be discovered the prototype of this old world deity. The depths of ocean may, and almost for certain do, hold .'many great animafc quite unknown to man, but of the land the same cannot be said. The discovery of abundant deep-sea life is an achievement of our own day, but with the dry land it is different. That has been ransacked to an extent which leads most of us to believe, and reasonably, that there are very fewlarge beasts still unknown anywhere on it 3 surface. When Jeames Yellow-plush expressed his abhorrence of the eternal dietetic see-saw from mutton to beef, and beef to mutton, and sighed for "a new hanimal," he mast have felt his longing to be hopeless. Those who seek for "new hanimals" have mostly to be content with small fry, and may find consolation in the maxim, which says that "small fish are better than none."

Even in such matters, however, sometimes it is the unexpected that happens, and s>o it is in this instance. Some two years since the eminent administrator, explorer, and naturalist, Sir Harry Johnston, discovered in the forest regions of the Uganda Protectorate traces of new, large, and most peculiar animals, unlike anything hitherto known to science. The natives, from whom he first heard of it, called it Okapi, and described it as being like an ox, striped like a zebra, and only to be met with in the deepest recesses of the forest. Later, Sir Harry became the possessor of some fragments of skin, which keenly whetted liis desire to see more of what for certain must be a remarkable,and to the civilised world quite unknown,' mammal. Perhaps the fact that he is »s popular amon£ the coloured folk 08

the Protectorate as he is with the cultured folk of Europe accounts for his being able to send complete skins of the Okipi to London very shortly after first hearing of it. Since then a Belgian official has procured older and more perfect specimens, now in the museum at Brussels. These have been studied by specialists, who consider the .Okapi to be a connecting link between giraffes and horned cattle. At first, when only a few bits of its hide had been secured, the Okapi was thought to be a new kind of striped horse, the beautiful, zebralike marking of the limbs very strongly suggesting that idea. The picture in this" issue shows these clearly, and is a reproduction of Sir Harry Johnston's own water-colour drawing made in Africa. The Brussels specimens, being of adult age, show the Okapi to possess rudimentary horns, covered like those of the giraffe by fine velvety-haired skin. Ot\er bodily characters show it to be no lum*, but a form intermediate between girai'es and horned ruminants, Tmt full details •>£ its physical peculiarities will not be avvlable for some time yet. Already, Lowevei. a shrewd scholar — Professor Wiedemann — is to the fore with a thesis, in ■which he pretty conclusively demonstrates that the old deity Set ha 3* for thousands of years earned the unrecognised head of the Okapi on his shoulders. It has been a puzzle to all probing, poring students of Egyptology evev since such have existed.

HEAD OF THE GOD SI".T Alter a relief, probably of the time of Thothmes 111., about 1550 B.C.

!Now the puzzle may ba held as solved. The short horn stumps of the Okapi, its softly pendulous upper lip projecting beyond the lower, its far forward nosiril and ridged eyebrow coincide accurately with the pictures of Set as found on the monuments. The early Egyptians must have known the Okapi well, and drawn at least its head with accuracy. Long after having in all probability lost knowledge of it as a living animal they continued to incise its portrait on th« walls of their temples. In the later and classical times of antiquity the Okapi seems nevei to have come under notice. There is no allusion whatever to it in the literature of those times. For want of an animal better comparable, the Greeks describe the head of Set as being that of the wild ass, which it obviously is not.

As a deity Set had his ups and downs. There are different accounts of him, in one of which he is described as the brother and the murderer of the god-king Osiris, whose son Horus he also attempted to destroy. But Horns, aided by his mother Isis, escaped and lived to i.vcnge his father. "According to one version of the story, ths l*nd was eventually divided between uncle and nephew, Horus receiving Upper and Set Lower Egypt ; but the commoner version is that the murderer was driven out altogether." Though vanquished and expelled from Egypt, Set remained lord of the desert, and was ranked with other foreign gods by the Egyptians. He had his ups and downs, like other gods and men. At one time he waj in great disfavour, and some of his Images were destroyed, but at an. earlier p°riod he was (highly venerated, and the Pharaoh was regarded as the earthly representative of the two pods, Horus and Set. According to a tradition dating from the Greek period, Set, after his defeat by Horus, fled, mounted on an ass, which ran seven days before it stopped. Thereafter, says the legend. Set begat Judaios and Hierosolymus, from whom Jerusalem derives its name. And another late tradition asserted that in consequence of these things a golden ass's head was set up in the Temple at Jerusalem, and was "the chief object of Jewish worship. But this, of course, is obviously mere legend of a kind hardly worth discussing.