hawks, and crocodiles.  On the other hand, we have a sun and sky worship of a more elevated nature, which does not seem to have amalgamated with the earlier fetishism and corpse-worship until a comparatively late period.  The main seats of the sun-worship were at Heliopolis in the Delta and at Edfu in Upper Egypt.  Heliopolis seems always to have been a centre of light and leading in Egypt, and it is, as is well known, the On of the Bible, at whose university the Jewish lawgiver Moses is related to have been educated “in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.”  The philosophical theories of the priests of the Sun-gods, Ra-Harmachis and Turn, at Heliopolis seem to have been the source from which sprang the monotheistic heresy of the Disk-Worshippers (in the time of the XVIIIth Dynasty), who, under the guidance of the reforming King Akhunaten, worshipped only the disk of the sun as the source of all life, the door in heaven, so to speak, through which the hidden One Deity poured forth heat and light, the origin of life upon the earth.  Very early in Egyptian history the Heliopolitans gained the upper hand, and the Ra-worship (under the Vth Dynasty, the apogee of the Old Kingdom) came to the front, and for the first time the kings took the afterwards time-honoured royal title of “Son of the Sun.”  It appears then as a more or less foreign importation into the Nile valley, and bears most undoubtedly a Semitic impress.  Its two chief seats were situated, the one, Heliopolis, in the North on the eastern edge of the Delta,—­just where an early Semitic settlement from over the desert might be expected to be found,—­the other, Edfu, in the Upper Egyptian territory south of the Thebaid, Koptos, and the Wadi Ham-mamat, and close to the chief settlement of the earliest kings and the most ancient capital of Upper Egypt.

(4) The custom of burying at full length was evidently introduced into Egypt by the second, or x race.  The Neolithic Egyptians buried in the cramped position.  The early Babylonians buried at full length, as far as we know.  On the same “Stele of Vultures,” which has already been mentioned, we see the burying at full length of dead warriors. [* See illustration.] There is no trace of any early burial in Babylonia in the cramped position.  The tombs at Warka (Erech) with cramped bodies in pottery coffins are of very late date.  A further point arises with regard to embalming.  The Neolithic Egyptians did not embalm the dead.  Usually their cramped bodies are found as skeletons.  When they are mummified, it is merely owing to the preservative action of the salt in the soil, not to any process of embalming.  The second, or x race, however, evidently introduced the custom of embalming as well as that of burial at full length and the use of coffins.  The Neolithic Egyptian used no box or coffin, the nearest approach to this being a pot, which was inverted over the coiled up body.  Usually only a mat was put over the body.

[Illustration:  038.jpg Portion of the “Stele of Vultures” Found at Telloh]