(4) Cf., e.g., Herodotus, II, 43.

The only complete Egyptian Creation myth yet recovered is preserved in a late papyrus in the British Museum, which was published some years ago by Dr. Budge.(1) It occurs under two separate versions embedded in “The Book of the Overthrowing of Apep, the Enemy of Ra”.  Here Ra, who utters the myth under his late title of Neb-er-tcher, “Lord to the utmost limit”, is self-created as Khepera from Nu, the primaeval water; and then follow successive generations of divine pairs, male and female, such as we find at the beginning of the Semitic-Babylonian Creation Series.(2) Though the papyrus was written as late as the year 311 B.C., the myth is undoubtedly early.  For the first two divine pairs Shu and Tefnut, Keb and Nut, and four of the latter pairs’ five children, Osiris and Isis, Set and Nephthys, form with the Sun-god himself the Greater Ennead of Heliopolis, which exerted so wide an influence on Egyptian religious speculation.  The Ennead combined the older solar elements with the cult of Osiris, and this is indicated in the myth by a break in the successive generations, Nut bringing forth at a single birth the five chief gods of the Osiris cycle, Osiris himself and his son Horus, with Set, Isis, and Nephthys.  Thus we may see in the myth an early example of that religious syncretism which is so characteristic of later Egyptian belief.

(1) See Archaeologia, Vol.  LII (1891).  Dr. Budge published a new edition of the whole papyrus in Egyptian Hieratic Papyri in the British Museum (1910), and the two versions of the Creation myth are given together in his Gods of the Egyptians, Vol.  I (1904), Chap.  VIII, pp. 308 ff., and more recently in his Egyptian Literature, Vol.  I, “Legends of the Gods” (1912), pp. 2 ff.  An account of the papyrus is included in the Introduction to “Legends of the Gods”, pp. xiii ff.

(2) In Gods of the Egyptians, Vol.  I, Chap.  VII, pp. 288 ff., Dr. Budge gives a detailed comparison of the Egyptian pairs of primaeval deities with the very similar couples of the Babylonian myth.

The only parallel this Egyptian myth of Creation presents to the Hebrew cosmogony is in its picture of the primaeval water, corresponding to the watery chaos of Genesis i.  But the resemblance is of a very general character, and includes no etymological equivalence such as we find when we compare the Hebrew account with the principal Semitic-Babylonian Creation narrative.(1) The application of the Ankh, the Egyptian sign for Life, to the nostrils of a newly-created being is no true parallel to the breathing into man’s nostrils of the breath of life in the earlier Hebrew Version,(2) except in the sense that each process was suggested by our common human anatomy.  We should naturally expect to find some Hebrew parallel to the Egyptian idea of Creation as the work of a potter with his clay, for that figure