Egyptian Mythology and Egyptian Christianity: The Religion Under the Persian Conquerors
THE Persians, on their conquest of Egypt, in the year B.C. 523, began with insulting the Egyptians in their religious feelings, by killing the bull Apis, and by breaking to pieces the statues of the gods. They afterwards made an earnest attempt to bring about some changes in the religion, and the chief was to abolish the worship of all statues and figures of the gods, and to introduce the more simple worship of the sun. Of this we see traces in the sculptures, made by a native Satrap, who governed the country under Artaxerxes Longimanus (see Fig. 83). We there see Thaomra, the son of the late king Adon-Ra Bakan, or Thannyras, the son of Inarus, as Herodotus calls him, worshipping the sun, Adon-Ra, which is distinguished from the sun of the Egyptians by the absence of wings or asps, and by its It was in the fourth century before the Christian era that Plato, the Athenian, visited Egypt to study at Heliopolis, where was then a celebrated school of philosophy. The country was at the time independent, and under the rule of a native sovereign, but it had been for a century oppressed by the Persian conquerors. Heliopolis was on the Phenician side of the Delta, in the neighbourhood of the district inhabited by the Jews, who by this time had very much acquired the use of the Greek language, from the colonists on the other side of the Delta. Hence Greek, Hebrew, Phenician, Persian, and Egyptian opinions had been there freely, brought into comparison, and the consequence was a burst of free thought which made Heliopolis for a time an important centre of learning.
