Enter the huge courts of an Egyptian temple, or temple-palace, and you will see portrayed upon its lofty walls row upon row of deities.  Here the king makes his offering to Ammon, Maut, Khons, Neith, Mentu, Shu, Seb, Nut, Osiris, Set, Horus; there he pours a libation to Phthah, Sekhet, Tum, Pasht, Anuka, Thoth, Anubis; elsewhere, it may be, he pays his court to Sati, Khem, Isis, Nephthys, Athor, Harmachis, Nausaas, and Nebhept.  One monarch erects an altar to Satemi, Tum, Khepra, Shu, Tefnut, Seb, Netpe, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, Horus, and Thoth, mentioning on the same monument Phthah, Num, Sabak, Athor, Pasht, Mentu, Neith, Anubis, Nishem, and Kartak.  Another represents himself on a similar object as offering adoration to Ammon, Khem, Phthah-Sokari, Seb, Nut, Thoth, Khons, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Athor, Uat (Buto), Neith, Sekhet, Anata, Nuneb, Nebhept, and Hapi.  All these deities are represented by distinct forms, and have distinct attributes.  Nor do they at all exhaust the Pantheon.  One modern writer enumerates seventy-three divinities, and gives their several names and forms.  Another has a list of sixty-three “principal deities,” and notes that there were “others which personified the elements, or presided over the operations of nature, the seasons, and events.”  The Egyptians themselves speak not unfrequently of “the thousand gods,” sometimes further qualifying them, as “the gods male, the gods female, those which belong to the land of Egypt.”  Practically, there were before the eyes of worshippers some scores, if not some hundreds, of deities, who invited their approach and challenged their affections.

Nor was this the whole, or the worst.  The Egyptian was taught to pay a religious regard to animals.  In one place goats, in another sheep, in a third hippopotami, in a fourth crocodiles, in a fifth vultures, in a sixth frogs, in a seventh shrew-mice, were sacred creatures, to be treated with respect and honour, and under no circumstances to be slain, under the penalty of death to the slayer.  And besides this local animal-cult, there was a cult which was general.  Cows, cats, dogs, ibises, hawks, and cynocephalous apes, were sacred throughout the whole of Egypt, and woe to the man who injured them!  A Roman who accidentally caused the death of a cat was immediately “lynched” by the populace.  Inhabitants of neighbouring villages would attack each other with the utmost fury if the native of one had killed or eaten an animal held sacred in the other.  In any house where a cat or a dog died, the inmates were expected to mourn for them as for a relation.  Both these and the other sacred animals were carefully embalmed after death, and their bodies were interred in sacred repositories.