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The Egyptians' Ideas Of God.
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THE EGYPTIANS' IDEAS OF GOD.
The word neter and its meaning.
To the great and supreme power which made the earth, the heavens, the sea, the sky, men and women,
animals, birds, and creeping things, all that is and all that shall be, the Egyptians gave the name neter.
This word survives in the Coptic ###, but both in the ancient language and in its younger relative the
exact meaning of the word is lost. M. Pierret,[2] following de Rougé, connects it with the word ### and
says that it means "renovation" (renouvellement), but Brugsch[3] renders it by "göttlich," "heilig,"
"divin," "sacré," and by three Arabic words which mean "divine," "sacred or set apart," and "holy"
respectively. By a quotation from the stele of Canopus he shows that in Ptolemaic times it meant "holy"
or "sacred" when applied to the animals of the gods. Mr. Renouf[4] says that "the notion expressed by
nutar as a noun, and nutra as an adjective or verb, must be sought in the Coptic ###, which in the
translation of the Bible corresponds to the Greek words {Greek du'namis, i?sxu's, i?sxuro's, i?sxupo'w}
'power,' 'force,' 'strong,' 'fortify,' 'protect,'"[5] and he goes on to show that the word neter means "strong"
or "mighty." M. Maspero, however, thinks that the Coptic nomti has nothing in common with meter, the
Egyptian word for God, and that the passages quoted by Mr. Renouf in support of his theory can be
otherwise explained.[6] His own opinion is that the signification "strong," if it ever existed, is a derived
and not an original meaning, and he believes that the word is
[1. Several examples of the different ways in which the word is spelt are given by Maspero, Notes sur différent point de
Grammaire (in Mélanges d'Archéologie, t. ii., Paris, 1873, p. 140).
2. Pierret, Essai sur la Mythologie Égyptienne, Paris, 1879, p. 8.
3. Wörterbuch, p. 825.
4. Hibbert Lectures, p. 95.
5. A number of examples are given in Tatham, Lexicon, Oxford, 1835, pp. 310 806.
6 La Mythologie Égyptienne, t. ii., p. 215.]
{p. lxxxiii}
so old that its first sense is unknown to us. The fact that the Coptic translators of the Bible used the word
nouti to express the name of the Supreme Being shows that no other word conveyed to their minds their
conception of Him, and supports M. Maspero's views on this point. Another definition of the word given
by Brugsch makes it to mean "the active power which produces and creates things in regular recurrence;
which bestows new life upon them, and gives back to them their youthful vigour,"[1] and he adds that the
innate conception of the word completely covers the original meaning of the Greek {Greek fu'sis} and
the Latin natura.
Neteru, the gods.
But side by side with neter, whatever it may mean, we have mentioned in texts of all ages a number of
beings called neteru which Egyptologists universally translate by the word "gods." Among these must be
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