chapter 18
, note 6. The Pyramid Texts (Pepi I, 684) speak of the ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂ “those of the Red Crown who are in Pu.”
2. _Thou of corpselike form in Chait and Ânpit._ The sign of the plural, here as elsewhere, is quite consistent with its application to a single person. ⁂⁂ _Chait_ is the name[95] of the 16th, or Mendesian, Nome of Northern Egypt, and Ânpit was its metropolis. The nome is mentioned in the inscription of Amten in the third dynasty. The god is Osiris. He is invoked in the “Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys,” and asked to come to Tattu, Ânpit and Chait, which are but different names of one Sanctuary, _Cf._ Brugsch, _Zeitschr._, 1871, p. 81, and his translation of the Mendesian Tablet, _Zeitschr._, 1875.
3. _Thou goddess of the Net_ ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂. This name corresponds to the Greek Diktynna. The reason why a goddess representing Heaven should be so called may be understood by the Homeric epithet πολυωπόν applied to a net.
If, however, the deity was _male_, according to the other reading, the reference is τὸν τῆς Ἴσιδος τρόφιμον Δίκτυν, who was drowned in the river. Plut., _de Iside and Os._, 8.
4. _Ye who preside_, etc. Brugsch (_Zeitschr._, 1876, p. 3) identifies the Egyptian ⁂⁂, ⁂⁂⁂⁂ with the ψιλοτόπος of the Demotic and Greek contracts. The remainder of this invocation is so corrupt that the sense cannot be safely guessed at.
5. See Herodotus, II, 47, without attaching too much importance to details. The pig was certainly not considered impure (μιαρός) in the days of the third or fourth dynasty, when Amten, who had risen to the highest dignities, enumerates swine among the domestic animals it is natural to possess. And impure animals were not offered in sacrifice. But long before the days of Herodotus a change had taken place in the Egyptian religion as to the nature of Sutu.
Plutarch and Aelian are to be read with the like caution. Some of their information is correct, but it is mixed up with much error.
6. The variants ⁂⁂⁂⁂ and ⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂⁂ are noteworthy.
7. _Sacrificial victims_ ⁂⁂⁂⁂. The substitution in Egypt of animal for human sacrifice is (I believe) _entirely_ without foundation. And the supposed evidence of human sacrifices drawn from certain pictures has (I believe) been misinterpreted..
8. The four _children_ of Horus were also his _brothers_. He asks for _two_ of them to be with him in each of his two cities, Pu and Nechen. The true sense of the passage is entirely lost in the later recensions and in translations made from them.
-----
Footnote 95:
Not _Ḥāmeḥit_, which is the name both of the _Uu_ of the nome and of the goddess worshipped in it, whose emblem is the fish ⁂.
------------------------------------
##