The animal-worship reached its utmost pitch of grossness and absurdity when certain individual brute beasts were declared to be incarnate deities, and treated accordingly.  At Memphis, the ordinary capital, there was maintained, at any rate from the time of Aahmes I. (about B.C. 1650), a sacred bull, known as Hapi or Apis, which was believed to be an actual incarnation of the god Phthah, and was an object of the highest veneration.  The Apis bull dwelt in a temple of his own near the city, had his train of attendant priests, his harem of cows, his meals of the choicest food, his grooms and currycombers who kept his coat clean and beautiful, his chamberlains who made his bed, his cup-bearers who brought him water, &c., and on fixed days was led in a festive procession through the main streets of the town, so that the inhabitants might see him, and come forth from their dwellings and make obeisance.  When he died he was carefully embalmed, and deposited, together with magnificent jewels and statuettes and vases, in a polished granite sarcophagus, cut out of a single block, and weighing between sixty and seventy tons!  The cost of an Apis funeral amounted sometimes, as we are told, to as much as L20,000.  To contain the sarcophagi, several long galleries were cut in the solid rock near Memphis, from which arched lateral chambers went off on either side, each constructed to hold one sarcophagus.  The number of Apis bulls buried in the galleries was found to be sixty-four.

Nor was this the only incarnate god of which Egypt boasted.  Another bull, called Mnevis, was maintained in the great temple of the Sun at Heliopolis, and, being regarded as an incarnation of Ra or Tum, was as much reverenced by the Heliopolites as Apis by the Memphites, A third, called Bacis or Pacis, was kept at Hermonthis, which was also an incarnation of Ra.  And a white cow at Momemphis was reckoned an incarnation of Athor.  Who can wonder that foreign nations ridiculed a religion of this kind—­one that “turned the glory” of the Eternal Godhead “into the similitude of a calf that eateth hay”?

The Egyptians had also a further god incarnate, who was not shut up out of sight like the Apis and Mnevis and Bacis bulls and the Athor cow, but was continually before their eyes, the centre of the nation’s life, the prime object of attention.  This was the monarch, who for the time being occupied the throne.  Each king of Egypt claimed not only to be “son of the Sun,” but to be an actual incarnation of the sun—­“the living Horus.”  And this claim was, from an early date, received and allowed.  “Thy Majesty,” says a courtier under the twelfth dynasty, “is the good God ... the great God, the equal of the Sun-God. ...  I live from the breath which thou givest” Brought into the king’s presence, the courtier “falls on his belly,” amazed and confounded.  “I was as one brought out of the dark; my tongue was dumb; my lips failed me; my heart was no longer in my body to know whether I was alive or dead;”