I believe, therefore, that the apes of Thoth were at the outset the dwarf-like apes or ape-like dwarfs who danced in his honour in the temple of Hermopolis. Gradually they were taken hold of by that symbolism which was inseparable from a religion so intimately bound up with a pictorial system of writing; from dancers they became the followers of the god, who sang to the rising and setting sun the hymns which Thoth had composed. But this would have been when the worship of the sun-god of Heliopolis had already spread to Hermopolis, and the cult of Thoth was mingling with that of Ra. The mutual influence of the theories of creation taught by the priests of the two cities shows at what a comparatively early date this would have happened.
It is possible that there was actually a connection between the four baboons and the four elemental gods of Hermopolitan theology. But it was not in the way of development. It was rather that as the gods were four in number, the dancers in their temple were four also. To each god, as it were, an ape was assigned.
The influence of Hermopolis belongs to the pre-Menic age of Egypt; we can hardly any longer call it prehistoric. So, too, does the influence of Nekhen, once the capital of the kingdom of Upper Egypt. In a former lecture I have already spoken of its vulture-headed goddess Nekheb, the consort of the hawk Horus, whose temple at El-Kab guarded the outlet of the road from the Red Sea, and who was known as Mut, "the mother," at Thebes. She was, in fact, the goddess of all Upper Egypt, whose worship had spread over it in the days when Nekhen was its ruling city. The gods of the Pharaoh followed the extension of his power.
In the early inscriptions of the First Cataract the vulture-headed goddess sitting on her basket is identified with the local divinity Sati (more correctly Suti), "the Asiatic." From her the island of Sehêl received its name, and there her sanctuary stood before Isis of Philæ ousted her from her supremacy. She was symbolised by the arrow, the name of which was the same as that of the goddess, and which was, moreover, a fitting emblem of the hostile tribes of the desert. It already appears on the prehistoric pottery as a sacred fetish on the "flagstaff" or standard at the prow of the boat.