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
