the channel; in summer gliding close to the nearer bank. As to
the stars, they were similar lights, suspended from the vault of
the heaven; but just how their observed motion of translation
across the heavens was explained is not apparent. It is more than
probable that no one explanation was, universally accepted.

In explaining the origin of this mechanism of the heavens, the
Egyptian imagination ran riot. Each separate part of Egypt had
its own hierarchy of gods, and more or less its own explanations
of cosmogony. There does not appear to have been any one central
story of creation that found universal acceptance, any more than
there was one specific deity everywhere recognized as supreme
among the gods. Perhaps the most interesting of the cosmogonic
myths was that which conceived that Nuit, the goddess of night,
had been torn from the arms of her husband, Sibu the earth-god,
and elevated to the sky despite her protests and her husband's
struggles, there to remain supported by her four limbs, which
became metamorphosed into the pillars, or mountains, already
mentioned. The forcible elevation of Nuit had been effected on
the day of creation by a new god, Shu, who came forth from the
primeval waters. A painting on the mummy case of one Betuhamon,
now in the Turin Museum, illustrates, in the graphic manner so
characteristic of the Egyptians, this act of creation. As
Maspero[2] points out, the struggle of Sibu resulted in
contorted attitudes to which the irregularities of the earth's
surface are to be ascribed.

In contemplating such a scheme of celestial mechanics as that
just outlined, one cannot avoid raising the question as to just
the degree of literalness which the Egyptians themselves put upon