In fact, the death of the god was a necessary accompaniment of an anthropomorphic form of religion. In Babylonia the temples of the gods were also their tombs, and even among the Greeks the sepulchre of Zeus was pointed out in Krete. The same cult was paid to the dead Naram-Sin or the dead Gudea in Chaldæa that was paid to the dead Khufu in Egypt. We have no need to seek in any peculiarly Egyptian beliefs an explanation of the ancestor worship which, along with the deification of the king, it shared with Babylonia.
The euhemerism of the Egyptian priesthood sounded the knell of the old faith. As the centuries passed, purer and higher ideas of the Godhead had grown up, and between the "formless" and eternal Creator of the world and the man who had become a god, the distance was too great to be spanned. On the one side, the gods of the national creed had been resolved one into another, till no distinctive shape or character was left to any one of them; on the other side, they had been transformed into mere human kings who had ruled over Egypt long ago. The pantheistic Creator and the deified Egyptians of vulgar and prosaic history could not be harmonised together. The multitude might be content with its sacred animals and its amulets, but the thinking portion of the nation turned to Greek metaphysics or a despairing scepticism. Already, in the time of the Eleventh Dynasty, the poet who composed the dirge of king Antef gives pathetic expression to his doubts(86)--
"What is fortune? say the wise. Vanished are the hearths and homes, What he does or thinks, who dies, None to tell us comes.
"Have thy heart's desire, be glad, Use the ointment while you live; Be in gold and linen clad, Take what gods may give.
"For the day shall come to each When earth's voices sound no more; Dead men hear no mourners' speech, Tears can not restore.
"Eat and drink in peace to-day, When you go, your goods remain; He who fares the last long way Comes not back again."
Still more hopeless are the words put into the mouth of the wife of the high priest of Memphis at the close of the first century before our era--
"O my brother, my spouse, and my friend, High priest of Memphis! Cease not to drink and to eat, To fill thyself with wine, and to make sweet love; Enjoy each festive day and follow thy desire, Let not care enter thy heart All the years that on earth thou remainest. The underworld is a land of thick darkness, A sorrowful place for the dead. They sleep, after their guise, never to awaken And behold their comrades. Their father and their mother they know not, No yearning for their wives and their children do they feel."(87)