Polytheistic belief system of ancient Egypt from the 4th
millennium bce to the first centuries ce, including both
folk traditions and the court religion.
Local deities that sprang up along the Nile Valley had
both human and animal form and were synthesized into
national deities and cults after political unification c.
2925 bce. The gods were not all-powerful or all-knowing, but
were immeasurably greater than humans. Their characters were
not neatly defined, and there was much overlap, especially
among the leading deities. One important deity was Horus,
the god-king who ruled the universe, who represented the
earthly Egyptian king. Other major divinities included Re,
the sun god; Ptah and Aton, creator gods; and Isis and
Osiris. The concept of maat (“order”) was fundamental: the
king maintained maat both on a societal and cosmic level.
Belief in and preoccupation with the afterlife permeated
Egyptian religion, as the surviving tombs and pyramids
attest. Burial near the king helped others gain passage to
the netherworld, as did spells and passwords from the Book
of the Dead.
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.
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.
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.
Ancient Egypt Human Gods
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
