Nature and significance
Egyptian religious beliefs and practices were closely
integrated into Egyptian society of the historical period (from
c. 3000 bce). Although there were probably many survivals from
prehistory, these may be relatively unimportant for
understanding later times, because the transformation that
established the Egyptian state created a new context for
religion.
Religious phenomena were
pervasive, so much so that it is not meaningful to view religion
as a single entity that cohered as a system. Nevertheless,
religion must be seen against a background of potentially
nonreligious human activities and values. During its more than
3,000 years of development, Egyptian religion underwent
significant changes of emphasis and practice, but in all periods
religion had a clear consistency in character and style.
It is inappropriate to define
religion narrowly, as consisting only in the cult of the gods
and in human piety. Religious behaviour encompassed contact with
the dead, practices such as divination and oracles, and magic,
which mostly exploited divine instruments and associations.
There were two essential foci
of public religion: the king and the gods. Both are among the
most characteristic features of Egyptian civilization. The king
had a unique status between humanity and the gods, partook in
the world of the gods, and constructed great, religiously
motivated funerary monuments for his afterlife. Egyptian gods
are renowned for their wide variety of forms, including animal
forms and mixed forms with an animal head on a human body. The
most important deities were the sun god, who had several names
and aspects and was associated with many supernatural beings in
a solar cycle modeled on the alternation of night and day, and
Osiris, the god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. With
his consort, Isis, Osiris became dominant in many contexts
during the 1st millennium bce, when solar worship was in
relative decline.
The Egyptians conceived of the
cosmos as including the gods and the present world—whose centre
was, of course, Egypt—and as being surrounded by the realm of
disorder, from which order had arisen and to which it would
finally revert. Disorder had to be kept at bay. The task of the
king as the protagonist of human society was to retain the
benevolence of the gods in maintaining order against disorder.
This ultimately pessimistic view of the cosmos was associated
principally with the sun god and the solar cycle. It formed a
powerful legitimation of king and elite in their task of
preserving order.
Despite this pessimism, the
official presentation of the cosmos on the monuments was
positive and optimistic, showing the king and the gods in
perpetual reciprocity and harmony. This implied contrast
reaffirmed the fragile order. The restricted character of the
monuments was also fundamental to a system of decorum that
defined what could be shown, in what way it could be shown, and
in what context. Decorum and the affirmation of order reinforced
each other.
These beliefs are known from
monuments and documents created by and for the king and the
small elite. The beliefs and practices of the rest of the people
are poorly known. While there is no reason to believe that there
was a radical opposition between the beliefs of the elite and
those of others, this possibility cannot be ruled out.
Sources and limitations of ancient and modern knowledge
The only extensive contemporaneous descriptions of ancient
Egyptian culture from the outside were made by Classical Greek
and Roman writers. Their works include many important
observations about Egyptian religion, which particularly
interested the writers and which until late antiquity was not
fundamentally different in type from their own religions.
Herodotus (5th century bce) remarked that the Egyptians were the
most religious of people, and the comment is apt because popular
religious practices proliferated in the 1st millennium bce.
Other significant Classical sources include Plutarch’s essay on
Isis and Osiris (1st century ce), which gives the only known
connected narrative of their myth, and the writings of Apuleius
(2nd century ce) and others about the Isis cult as it spread in
the Greco-Roman world.
In other respects, ancient
Egypt has been recovered archaeologically. Excavation and the
recording of buildings have produced a great range of material,
from large monuments to small objects and texts on perishable
papyrus. Egyptian monuments are almost unique in the amount of
inscription they bear; vast numbers of texts and representations
with religious content are preserved, especially from the later
2nd and 1st millennia bce. Much of this material is religious or
has religious implications. This dominance may be misleading,
partly because many monuments were in the desert, where they are
well preserved, and partly because the lavishing of great
resources on religious monuments for the king and the gods need
not mean that people’s lives were dominated by religion.
In addition to favouring large
monuments and the elite, the archaeological record has other
important biases. The formal cults of major deities and the
realm of the dead are far better known than everyday religious
activities, particularly those occurring in towns and villages,
very few of which have been excavated. The absence of material
deriving from the religious practice of most people in itself
constitutes evidence suggesting both the inequality of society
and the possibility, confirmed by other strands of evidence,
that many people’s religious life did not focus on official cult
places and major temples.
Many official works of art
present standard conceptions of the divine world and of the
king’s role in this world and in caring for the gods. Much
religious evidence is at the same time artistic, and the
production of works of art was a vital prestige concern of king
and elite. Religious activities and rituals are less well known
than this formalized artistic presentation of religious
conceptions. The status of personal religion in the context of
official cults is poorly understood.
Official forms were idealizing,
and the untoward, which is everywhere an important focus of
religion, was excluded almost entirely from them. The world of
the monuments is that of Egypt alone, even though the Egyptians
had normal, sometimes reciprocal, relations with other peoples.
Decorum affected what was shown. Thus, the king was almost
always depicted as the person offering to the gods, although
temple rituals were performed by priests. Scenes of offering and
of the gods conferring benefits on the king may not depict
specific rituals, while the equal form in which king and gods
are depicted bears no direct relation to real cult actions,
which were performed on small cult images kept inside shrines.
An additional limitation is
that knowledge of many central concerns was restricted. The king
was stated to be alone in knowing aspects of the solar cycle.
Knowledge of some religious texts was reserved to initiates, who
would benefit from them both in this life and in the next. Magic
evoked the power of the exotic and esoteric. Evidence for some
restricted material is preserved, but it is not known who had
access to it, while in other cases the restricted knowledge is
only alluded to and is now inaccessible.
Death and the next world
dominate both the archaeological record and popular modern
conceptions of Egyptian religion. This dominance is determined
to a great extent by the landscape of the country, since tombs
were placed if possible in the desert. Vast resources were
expended on creating prestigious burial places for absolute
rulers or wealthy officials. Tombs contained elaborate grave
goods (mostly plundered soon after deposition), representations
of “daily life,” or less commonly of religious subjects, and
some texts that were intended to help the deceased attain the
next world and prosper there. The texts came increasingly to be
inscribed on coffins and stone sarcophagi or deposited in
burials on papyrus. Some royal tombs included long passages from
religious texts, many of them drawn from nonmortuary contexts
and hence more broadly valuable as source material.
One crucial area where religion
extended beyond narrow bounds was in the ethical instructions,
which became the principal genre of Egyptian literature. These
are known from the Middle Kingdom (c. 1900–1600 bce) to the
Roman period (1st century ce). As with other sources, the later
texts are more overtly religious, but all show inextricable
connections between proper conduct, the order of the world, and
the gods.
King, cosmos, and society
The king was the centre of human society, the guarantor of
order for the gods, the recipient of god-given benefits
including life itself, and the benevolent ruler of the world for
humanity. He was ultimately responsible for the cults of the
dead, both for his predecessors in office and for the dead in
general. His dominance in religion corresponded to his central
political role: from late predynastic times (c. 3100 bce), state
organization was based on kingship and on the service of
officials for the king. For humanity, the king had a superhuman
role, being a manifestation of a god or of various deities on
earth.
The king’s principal original
title, the Horus name, proclaimed that he was an aspect of the
chief god Horus, a sky god who was depicted as a falcon. Other
identifications were added to this one, notably “Son of Re” (the
sun god) and “Perfect God,” both introduced in the 4th dynasty
(c. 2575–2465 bce), when the great pyramids were constructed.
The epithet “Son of Re” placed the king in a close but dependent
relation with the leading figure in the pantheon. “Perfect God”
(often rendered “Good God”) indicated that the king had the
status of a minor deity, for which he was “perfected” through
accession to his office; it restricted the extent of his
divinity and separated him from full deities.
In his intermediate position
between humanity and the gods, the king could receive the most
extravagant divine adulation and was in some ways more prominent
than any single god. In death he aspired to full divinity but
could not escape the human context. Although royal funerary
monuments differed in type from other tombs and were vastly
larger, they too were pillaged and vandalized, and few royal
mortuary cults were long-lasting. Some kings, notably Amenhotep
III (1390–53 bce), Ramses II (1279–13 bce), and several of the
Ptolemies, sought deification during their own lifetime, while
others, such as Amenemhet III (1818–c. 1770 bce), became minor
gods after their death, but these developments show how
restricted royal divinity was. The divinized king coexisted with
his mortal self, and as many nonroyal individuals as kings
became deified after death.
The gods, the king, humanity,
and the dead existed together in the cosmos, which the creator
god had brought into being from the preexistent chaos. All
living beings, except perhaps the creator, would die at the end
of time. The sun god became aged and needed to be rejuvenated
and reborn daily. The ordered cosmos was surrounded by and shot
through with disorder, which had to be kept at bay. Disorder
menaced most strongly at such times of transition as the passage
from one year to the next or the death of a king. Thus, the
king’s role in maintaining order was cosmic and not merely
social. His exaction of service from people was necessary to the
cosmos.
The concept of maat (“order”)
was fundamental in Egyptian thought. The king’s role was to set
maat in place of isfet (“disorder”). Maat was crucial in human
life and embraced notions of reciprocity, justice, truth, and
moderation. Maat was personified as a goddess and the creator’s
daughter and received a cult of her own. In the cult of other
deities, the king’s offering of maat to a deity encapsulated the
relationship between humanity, the king, and the gods; as the
representative of humanity, he returned to the gods the order
that came from them and of which they were themselves part. Maat
extended into the world of the dead: in the weighing of the
heart after death, shown on papyri deposited in burials, the
person’s heart occupies one side of the scales and a
representation of maat the other. The meaning of this image is
deepened in the accompanying text, which asserts that the
deceased behaved correctly on earth and did not overstep the
boundaries of order, declaring that he or she did not “know that
which is not”—that is, things that were outside the created and
ordered world.
This role of maat in human life
created a continuity between religion, political action, and
elite morality. Over the centuries, private religion and
morality drew apart from state concerns, paralleling a gradual
separation of king and temple. It cannot be known whether
religion and morality were as closely integrated for the people
as they were for the elite, or even how fully the elite
subscribed to these beliefs. Nonetheless, the integration of
cosmos, king, and maat remained fundamental.
The Gods
Egyptian religion was polytheistic. The gods who inhabited
the bounded and ultimately perishable cosmos varied in nature
and capacity. The word netjer (“god”) described a much wider
range of beings than the deities of monotheistic religions,
including what might be termed demons. As is almost necessary in
polytheism, gods were neither all-powerful nor all-knowing.
Their power was immeasurably greater than that of human beings,
and they had the ability to live almost indefinitely, to survive
fatal wounds, to be in more than one place at once, to affect
people in visible and invisible ways, and so forth.
Most gods were generally
benevolent, but their favour could not be counted on, and they
had to be propitiated and encouraged to inhabit their cult
images so that they could receive the cult and further the
reciprocity of divine and human. Some deities, notably such
goddesses as Neith, Sekhmet, and Mut, had strongly ambivalent
characters. The god Seth embodied the disordered aspects of the
ordered world, and in the 1st millennium bce he came to be seen
as an enemy who had to be eliminated (but would remain present).
The characters of the gods were
not neatly defined. Most had a principal association, such as
that of Re with the sun or that of the goddess Hathor with
women, but there was much overlap, especially among the leading
deities. In general, the more closely circumscribed a deity’s
character, the less powerful that deity was. All the main gods
acquired the characteristics of creator gods. A single figure
could have many names; among those of the sun god, the most
important were Khepri (the morning form), Re-Harakhty (a form of
Re associated with Horus), and Atum (the old, evening form).
There were three principal “social” categories of deity: gods,
goddesses, and youthful deities, mostly male.
Gods had regional associations,
corresponding to their chief cult places. The sun god’s cult
place was Heliopolis, Ptah’s was Memphis, and Amon’s was Thebes.
These were not necessarily their original cult places. The
principal cult of Khnum, the creator god who formed people from
clay like a potter, was Elephantine, and he was the lord of the
nearby First Cataract. His cult is not attested there before the
New Kingdom, however, even though he was important from the 1st
dynasty (c. 2925–2775 bce). The main earlier sanctuary there
belonged to the goddess Satet, who became Khnum’s companion.
Similarly, Mut, the partner of Amon at Thebes, seems to have
originated elsewhere.
Deities had principal
manifestations, and most were associated with one or more
species of animal. For gods the most important forms were the
falcon and bull, and for goddesses the cow, cobra, vulture, and
lioness. Rams were widespread, while some manifestations were as
modest as the millipede of the god Sepa. Some gods were very
strongly linked to particular animals, as Sebek was with the
crocodile and Khepri with the scarab beetle. Thoth had two
animals, the ibis and the baboon. Some animal cults were only
partly integrated with specific gods, notably the Ram of Mendes
in the Delta and the Apis and Mnevis bulls at Memphis and
Heliopolis, respectively. Animals could express aspects of a
deity’s nature: some goddesses were lionesses in their fiercer
aspect but were cats when mild.
These variable forms relate to
aspects of the person that were common to gods and people. The
most significant of these were the ka, which was the vital
essence of a person that was transmitted from one generation to
the next, the ba, which granted freedom of movement and the
ability to take on different forms, principally in the next
world, and the akh, the transfigured spirit of a person in the
next world.
The chief form in which gods
were represented was human, and many deities had only human
form. Among these deities were very ancient figures such as the
fertility god Min and the creator and craftsman Ptah. The cosmic
gods Shu, of the air and sky, and Geb, of the earth, had human
form, as did Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys, deities who provided a
model of human society. In temple reliefs the gods were depicted
in human form, which was central to decorum. Gods having animal
manifestations were therefore shown with a human body and the
head of their animal. The opposite convention, a human head and
an animal body, was used for the king, who was shown as a sphinx
with a lion’s body. Sphinxes could receive other heads, notably
those of rams and falcons, associating the form with Amon and
Re-Harakhty. Demons were represented in more extravagant forms
and combinations; these became common in the 1st millennium bce.
Together with the cult of animals, they were mocked by Greek and
Roman writers.
Apart from major deities—gods
who received a cult or had a significant cosmic role—there were
important minor figures. Several of these marginal beings had
grotesque forms and variable names. The most prominent were Bes,
a helpful figure with dwarf form and a masklike face, associated
especially with women and children, and Taurt, a goddess with
similar associations whose physical form combined features of a
hippopotamus and a crocodile. Among demons, the most important
figure was Apopis, shown as a colossal snake, who was the enemy
of the sun god in his daily cycle through the cosmos. Apopis
existed outside the ordered realm; he had to be defeated daily,
but, since he did not belong to the sphere of existence, he
could not be destroyed.
The Gods » Groupings of deities
The number of deities was large and was not fixed. New ones
appeared, and some ceased to be worshipped. Deities were grouped
in various ways. The most ancient known grouping is the ennead,
which is probably attested from the 3rd dynasty (c. 2650–2575
bce). Enneads were groups of nine deities, nine being the
“plural” of three (in Egypt the number three symbolized
plurality in general); not all enneads consisted of nine gods.
The principal ennead was the
Great Ennead of Heliopolis. This was headed by the sun god and
creator Re or Re-Atum, followed by Shu and Tefnut, deities of
air and moisture; Geb and Nut, who represented earth and sky;
and Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys. This ordering incorporated
a myth of creation, to which was joined the myth of Osiris,
whose deeds and attributes ranged from the founding of
civilization to kinship, kingship, and succession to office. The
ennead excluded the successor figure, Horus, son of Osiris, who
is essential to the meaning of the myth. Thus, the ennead has
the appearance of a grouping that brought together existing
religious conceptions but was rather arbitrary and inflexible,
perhaps because of the significance of the number nine.
Other numerical ordering
schemas included the Ogdoad (group of eight gods) of Hermopolis,
which embodied the inchoate world before creation and consisted
of four pairs of male and female deities with abstract names
such as Darkness, Absence, and Endlessness. Here too the number
was significant in itself, because at least six different pairs
of names are known although eight deities are listed in any
occurrence. The major god Amon, whose name can mean “He who is
hidden,” was often one of the ogdoad with his female
counterpart, Amaunet.
The most common grouping,
principally in the New Kingdom and later, was the triad. The
archetypal triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus exhibits the normal
pattern of a god and a goddess with a youthful deity, usually
male. Most local centres came to have triads, the second and
third members of which might be devised for the sake of form.
Thus, one triad worshipped in the Greco-Roman-period temple at
Kawm Umbū (Kôm Ombo) consisted of Haroeris (the “elder Horus”),
the goddess Tsenetnofret (“the perfect companion”), and the
youthful god Pnebtawy (“the lord of the two lands”). The last
name, which is an epithet of kings, is revealing, because
youthful gods had many attributes of kings. As this case
indicates, triads resemble a minimal nuclear family, but deities
were rarely spouses. The notion of plurality and the bringing
together of the essential types of deity may have been as
important to the triads as the family analogy.
Another important ordering of
deities was syncretism, a term with a special meaning for
Egyptian religion. Two or more names of gods were often combined
to form a composite identity; many combinations included the
name of Re. Prominent examples are Amon-Re, a fusion of Amon and
Re, and Osiris-Apis, a fusion of Osiris with the Apis Bull.
Although composite forms such as Amon-Re became the principal
identities of some gods, the separate deities continued to exist
and sometimes, as in the case of Re, to receive a cult. In part,
these syncretisms expressed the idea of Amon in his aspect as
Re; they were thus analogous to the multiple manifestations of
individual deities. Through syncretism many major deities came
to resemble one another more closely.
The Gods » Myth
Myths are poorly known. Religious discourse was recorded in
hymns, rituals, temple scenes, and specialized texts but rarely
in narrative, which only slowly became a common written genre
and never had the highest literary prestige. In addition, much
religious activity focused on constant reiteration or repetition
rather than on development. A central example of this tendency
is the presentation of the cycle of the sun god through the sky
and the underworld, which was an analogy for the creation,
maturity, decay, and regeneration of an individual life and of
the cosmos. This is strikingly presented in the underworld
books. These pictorial and textual compositions, which probably
imparted secret knowledge, were inscribed in the tombs of New
Kingdom kings. They describe the solar cycle in great detail,
including hundreds of names of demons and of deities and other
beings who accompanied the sun god in his barque on his journey
through night and day. The texts are in the present tense and
form a description and a series of tableaux rather than a
narrative.
The fact that mythical
narratives are rare does not imply that myths or narratives did
not exist. There is reason to think that some myths underlay
features of enneads and therefore had originated by the Early
Dynastic period (c. 3000 bce). Mythical narratives preserved
from the New Kingdom and later include episodes of the rule of
the sun god on earth, tales of the childhood of Horus in the
delta marshes, and stories with themes similar to the Osiris
myth but with differently named protagonists. The rule of the
sun god was followed by his withdrawal into the sky, leaving
people on earth. The withdrawal was motivated by his age and by
the lack of tranquility in the world. One narrative recounts how
Isis obtained a magical substance from Re’s senile dribbling and
fashioned from it a snake that bit him; to make her still the
agony of the snakebite, he finally revealed to her the secret of
his “true” name. A myth with varied realizations recounts how Re
grew weary of humanity’s recalcitrance and dispatched his
daughter or “Eye” to destroy them. Regretting his action later,
he arranged to have the bloodthirsty goddess tricked into
drunkenness by spreading beer tinted the colour of blood over
the land. This myth provides an explanation for the world’s
imperfection and the inaccessibility of the gods. In Greco-Roman
times it was widespread in Lower Nubia, where it seems to have
been related to the winter retreat of the sun to the Southern
Hemisphere and its return in the spring.
The cult
Most cults centred on the daily tending and worship of an
image of a deity and were analogous to the pattern of human
life. The shrine containing the image was opened at dawn, and
then the deity was purified, greeted and praised, clothed, and
fed. There were several further services, and the image was
finally returned to its shrine for the night. Apart from this
activity, which took place within the temple and was performed
by a small group of priests, there were numerous festivals at
which the shrine and image were taken out from the sanctuary on
a portable barque, becoming visible to the people and often
visiting other temples. Thus, the daily cult was a state
concern, whose function was to maintain reciprocity between the
human and the divine, largely in isolation from the people. This
reciprocity was fundamental because deities and humanity
together sustained the cosmos. If the gods were not satisfied,
they might cease to inhabit their images and retreat to their
other abode, the sky. Temples were constructed as microcosms
whose purity and wholeness symbolized the proper order of the
larger world outside.
The priesthood became
increasingly important. In early periods there seem to have been
no full-time professional priests; people could hold part-time
high priestly offices, or they could have humbler positions on a
rotating basis, performing duties for one month in four. The
chief officiant may have been a professional. While performing
their duties, priests submitted to rules of purity and
abstinence. One result of this system was that more people were
involved in the cult and had access to the temple than would
have been the case if there had been a permanent staff. Although
most priestly positions were for men, women were involved in the
cult of the goddess Hathor, and in the New Kingdom and later
many women held the title of “chantress” of a deity (perhaps
often a courtesy title); they were principally involved in
musical cult performances.
Festivals allowed more-direct
interaction between people and the gods. Questions were often
asked of a deity, and a response might be given by a forward or
backward movement of the barque carried on the priests’
shoulders. Oracles, of which this was one form, were invoked by
the king to obtain sanction for his plans, including military
campaigns abroad and important appointments. Although evidence
is sparse, consultation with deities may have been part of
religious interaction in all periods and for all levels of
society.
Apart from this interaction
between deities and individual people or groups, festivals were
times of communal celebration, and often of the public
reenactment of myths such as the death and vindication of Osiris
at Abydos or the defeat of Seth by Horus at Idfū. They had both
a personal and a general social role in the spectrum of
religious practice.
Nonetheless, the main audience
for the most important festivals of the principal gods of state
held in capital cities may have been the ruling elite rather
than the people as a whole. In the New Kingdom these cities were
remodeled as vast cosmic stages for the enactment of
royal-divine relations and rituals.
Piety, practical religion, and magic
Despite the importance of temples and their architectural
dominance, the evidence for cult does not point to mass
participation in temple religion. The archaeological material
may be misleading, because in addition to major temples there
were many local sanctuaries that may have responded more
directly to the concerns and needs of those who lived around
them. From some periods numerous votive offerings are preserved
from a few temples. Among these are Early Dynastic and Old
Kingdom provincial temples, but the fullest evidence is from New
Kingdom temples of Hathor at Thebes and several frontier sites
and from the Late and Ptolemaic periods (664–30 bce).
Although votive offerings show
that significant numbers of people took gifts to temples, it is
difficult to gauge the social status of donors, whose intentions
are seldom indicated, probably in part for reasons of decorum.
Two likely motives are disinterested pious donation for the
deity and offering in the hope of obtaining a specific benefit.
Many New Kingdom offerings to Hathor relate to human fertility
and thus belong to the second of these categories. Late period
bronze statuettes are often inscribed with a formula requesting
that the deity represented should “give life” to the donor,
without stating a specific need. These may be more generally
pious donations, among which can also be counted nonroyal
dedications of small parcels of land to temples. These donations
are recorded on stelae from the New Kingdom onward. They
parallel the massive royal endowments to temples of land and
other resources, which resulted in their becoming very powerful
economic and political institutions.
Apart from the donation of
offerings to conventional cult temples, there was a vast Late
period expansion in animal cults. These might be more or less
closely related to major deities. They involved a variety of
practices centring on the mummification and burial of animals.
The principal bull cults, which gave important oracles, focused
on a single animal kept in a special shrine. The burial of an
Apis bull was a major occasion involving vast expenditure. Some
animals, such as the sacred ibis (connected with Thoth), were
kept, and buried, in millions. The dedication of a burial seems
to have counted as a pious act. The best-known area for these
cults and associated practices is the necropolis of northern
Ṣaqqārah, which served the city of Memphis. Numerous species
were buried there, and people visited the area to consult
oracles and to spend the night in a temple area and receive
healing dreams. A few people resided permanently in the animal
necropolis in a state akin to monastic seclusion.
There are two further important
groups of evidence for pious and reciprocal relations between
people and gods. One is proper names of all periods, the
majority of which are meaningful utterances with religious
content. For example, names state that deities “show favour” to
or “love” a child or its parents. From the end of the New
Kingdom (c. 1100 bce), names commonly refer to consultation of
oracles during pregnancy, alluding to a different mode of
human-divine relations. The second source is a group of late New
Kingdom inscriptions recounting episodes of affliction that led
to people’s perceiving that they had wronged a god. These texts,
which provide evidence of direct pious relations, are often
thought to show a transformation of religious attitudes in that
period, but allusions to similar relations in Middle Kingdom
texts suggest that the change was as much in what was written
down as in basic attitudes.
Piety was one of many modes of
religious action and relations. Much of religion concerned
attempts to comprehend and respond to the unpredictable and the
unfortunate. The activities involved often took place away from
temples and are little known. In later periods, there was an
increasing concentration of religious practice around temples;
for earlier times evidence is sparse. The essential questions
people asked, as in many religious traditions, were why
something had happened and why it had happened to them, what
would be an appropriate response, what agency they should turn
to, and what might happen in the future. To obtain answers to
these questions, people turned to oracles and to other forms of
divination, such as consulting seers or calendars of lucky and
unlucky days. From the New Kingdom and later, questions to
oracles are preserved, often on such mundane matters as whether
someone should cultivate a particular field in a given year.
These cannot have been presented only at festivals, and priests
must have addressed oracular questions to gods within their
sanctuaries. Oracles of gods also played an important part in
dispute settlement and litigation in some communities.
A vital focus of questioning
was the world of the dead. The recently deceased might exert
influence on the living for good or for bad. Offerings to the
dead, which were required by custom, were intended, among other
purposes, to make them well disposed. People occasionally
deposited with their offerings a letter telling the deceased of
their problems and asking for assistance. A few of these letters
are complaints to the deceased person, alleging that he or she
is afflicting the writer. This written communication with the
dead was confined to the very few literate members of the
population, but it was probably part of a more widespread oral
practice. Some tombs of prominent people acquired minor cults
that may have originated in frequent successful recourse to them
for assistance.
Offerings to the dead generally
did not continue long after burial, and most tombs were robbed
within a generation or so. Thus, relations with dead kin
probably focused on the recently deceased. Nonetheless, the dead
were respected and feared more widely. The attitudes attested
are almost uniformly negative. The dead were held accountable
for much misfortune, both on a local and domestic level and in
the broader context of the state. People were also concerned
that, when they died, those in the next world would oppose their
entry to it as newcomers who might oust the less recently dead.
These attitudes show that, among many possible modes of
existence after death, an important conception was one in which
the dead remained near the living and could return and disturb
them. Such beliefs are rare in the official mortuary literature.
A prominent aspect of practical
religion was magic. There is no meaningful distinction between
Egyptian religion and magic. Magic was a force present in the
world from the beginning of creation and was personified as the
god Heka, who received a cult in some regions. Magic could be
invoked by using appropriate means and was generally positive,
being valuable for counteracting misfortune and in seeking to
achieve ends for which unseen help was necessary. Magic also
formed part of the official cult. It could, however, be used for
antisocial purposes as well as benign ones. There is a vast
range of evidence for magical practice, from amulets to
elaborate texts. Much magic from the Greco-Roman period mixed
Egyptian and foreign materials and invoked new and exotic
beings. Preserved magical texts record elite magic rather than
general practice. Prominent among magical practitioners, both in
folklore and, probably, in real life, were “lector priests,” the
officiants in temple cults who had privileged access to written
texts. Most of the vast corpus of funerary texts was magical in
character.
The world of the dead
The majority of evidence from ancient Egypt comes from
funerary monuments and burials of royalty, of the elite, and,
for the Late period, of animals; relatively little is known of
the mortuary practices of the mass of the population. Reasons
for this dominance of the tomb include both the desert location
of burials and the use of mortuary structures for display among
the living. Alongside the fear of the dead, there was a moral
community between the living and the dead, so that the dead were
an essential part of society, especially in the 3rd and 2nd
millennia bce.
The basic purpose of mortuary
preparation was to ensure a safe and successful passage into the
hereafter. Belief in an afterlife and a passage to it is evident
in predynastic burials, which are oriented to the west, the
domain of the dead, and which include pottery grave goods as
well as personal possessions of the deceased. The most striking
development of later mortuary practice was mummification, which
was related to a belief that the body must continue intact for
the deceased to live in the next world. Mummification evolved
gradually from the Old Kingdom to the early 1st millennium bce,
after which it declined. It was too elaborate and costly ever to
be available to the majority.
This decline of mortuary
practice was part of the more general shift in the focus of
religious life toward the temples and toward more communal
forms. It has been suggested tentatively that belief in the
afterlife became less strong in the 1st millennium bce. Whether
or not this is true, it is clear that in various periods some
people voiced skepticism about the existence of a blessed
afterlife and the necessity for mortuary provision, but the
provision nevertheless continued to the end.
It was thought that the next
world might be located in the area around the tomb (and
consequently near the living); on the “perfect ways of the
West,” as it is expressed in Old Kingdom invocations; among the
stars or in the celestial regions with the sun god; or in the
underworld, the domain of Osiris. One prominent notion was that
of the “Elysian Fields,” where the deceased could enjoy an ideal
agricultural existence in a marshy land of plenty. The journey
to the next world was fraught with obstacles. It could be
imagined as a passage by ferry past a succession of portals, or
through an “Island of Fire.” One crucial test was the judgment
after death, a subject often depicted from the New Kingdom
onward. The date of origin of this belief is uncertain, but it
was probably no later than the late Old Kingdom. The related
text, Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, responded magically
to the dangers of the judgment, which assessed the deceased’s
conformity with maat. Those who failed the judgment would “die a
second time” and would be cast outside the ordered cosmos. In
the demotic story of Setna (3rd century bce), this notion of
moral retribution acquired overtones similar to those of the
Christian judgment after death.
Influence on other religions
Egyptian culture, of which religion was an integral part,
was influential in Nubia as early as predynastic times and in
Syria in the 3rd millennium bce. During the New Kingdom, Egypt
was very receptive to cults from the Middle East, while Egyptian
medical and magical expertise was highly regarded among the
Hittites, Assyrians, and Babylonians. The chief periods of
Egyptian influence were, however, the 1st millennium bce and the
Roman period. Egypt was an important centre of the Jewish
diaspora starting in the 6th century bce, and Egyptian
literature influenced the Hebrew Bible. With Greek rule there
was significant cultural interchange between Egyptians and
Greeks. Notable among Egyptian cults that spread abroad were
those of Isis, which reached much of the Roman world as a
mystery religion, and of Serapis, a god whose name probably
derives from Osiris-Apis, who was worshipped widely in a
non-Egyptian iconography and cultural milieu. With Isis went
Osiris and Horus the child, but Isis was the dominant figure.
Many Egyptian monuments were imported to Rome to provide a
setting for the principal Isis temple in the 1st century ce.
The cult of Isis was probably
influential on another level. The myth of Osiris shows some
analogies with the Gospel story and, in the figure of Isis, with
the role of the Virgin Mary. The iconography of the Virgin and
Child has evident affinities with that of Isis and the infant
Horus. Thus, one aspect of Egyptian religion may have
contributed to the background of early Christianity, probably
through the cultural centre of Alexandria. Egypt also was an
influential setting for other religious and philosophical
developments of late antiquity such as Gnosticism, Manichaeism,
Hermetism (see Hermetic writings), and Neoplatonism, some of
which show traces of traditional Egyptian beliefs. Some of these
religions became important in the intellectual culture of the
Renaissance. Finally, Christian monasticism seems to have
originated in Egypt and could look back to a range of native
practices, among which were seclusion in temple precincts and
the celibacy of certain priestesses. Within Egypt, there are
many survivals from earlier times in popular Christianity and
Islam.
John R. Baines
