Page Content (OCR)
229 directed his rays into the eyes of Horus-of-the-Horizon" (the Sphinx). The king offered the arriving god incense, sacrifices, and oblations, and led the god into the temple in a procession. As the god walked by the young prince, Thothmes reported, He really recognized me and he halted. I touched the ground; I bowed myself down in his presence. He stood me up, set me before the king. Then, as an indication that this prince was the divinely chosen one for the succession, the god "worked a marvel" over the prince. What ensued, Thothmes III wrote, as incredi- ble as it sounds, as mysterious these things are, really happened: He opened for me the doors of Heaven; He spread open for me the portals of its horizon. I flew up to the sky as a Divine Falcon, able to see his mysterious form which is in Heaven, that I might adore his majesty. [And] I saw the being-form of the Horizon God in his mysterious Ways of Heaven. On this heavenly flight, Thothmes III wrote in his annals, he "was made full with the Understanding of the gods." The experience, and its claims, surely bring to mind the heavenly ascents of Enmeduranki and Enoch, and the "Glory of Yah- weh" seen by the Prophet Ezekiel. The conviction that dreams were divine oracles, foretelling things to come, was a firmly held belief throughout the an- cient Near East. Ethiopian kings also believed in the power of dreams as guidelines for actions to be taken (or avoided) and of events about to happen. One instance, recorded on a stela by the Ethiopian king Tanutamun, relates that in the first year of his reign "his majesty saw a dream in the night." In the dream the king Royal Dreams, Fateful Oracles