Questions in Egyptology No. 4: Did the Ancient Egyptians Have a Religion?
Did the ancient Egyptians have a religion, or did they worship cults?
Whether the ancient Egyptians possessed a religion remains a hotly debated topic among Egyptologists. The complexity of their beliefs is a puzzle that scholars continue to explore. In this blog post, we will delve into the evidence and theories surrounding the spiritual practices of this fascinating civilization.
Defining Religion:
Before we embark on this journey, it’s crucial to understand what “religion” meant to the ancient Egyptians. Our modern interpretation may not entirely align with theirs.
The word religion has a Latin origin. The ancient Egyptians had no word for religion and so the argument goes, therefore, they had no concept of religion. They also had no word of cosmos or art but they believed they lived in a god-made cosmos and they practiced all manner of arts. So, the absence of a word for something does not mean it did not exist.
Egyptologists take their lead on religion from anthropologists. This makes religion into the study of people, not the study of belief or spiritual beings and relationships with them. (Tylor, 1871). Tylor’s definition is not the most up-to-date. But it works. It provides a good definition of what most of us think of when we think about religion.
The anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917) defined religion as belief in spiritual beings and stated that this belief originated as explanations of natural phenomena. … They used this by extension to explain life and death, and belief in the afterlife.
Book by Stephen Quirke https://www.amazon.co.uk/Cult-Ra-Sun-worship-Ancient-Egypt/dp/0500051070
What is a cult?
In Egyptology, the term cult means the daily tending and worship of an image of a deity. In ancient Egypt, the temples were the houses of the gods. The gods were thought to descend from the sky temporarily to live in their cult statues which were located in the temple’s inner sanctuaries.
The temples were also the stage for daily rituals that were ideally performed by the pharaoh, but in practice were performed by the resident priests. During religious festivals, cult statues could be brought out of the temple. For example at Dendera statues were brought out onto the cult terrace so that people could see them.
The Daily Cult Routine and Ceremonies
The shrine containing the god’s cult image was:
- opened at dawn,
- greeted and praised with prayers and hymns,
- purified with libations and the burning of incense,
- clothed in fresh linen, and
- fed with bread, cakes and water.
The Obsequies of an Egyptian Cat, John Reinhard Weguelin, 1886.
Every day at dawn the priests performed the ceremony of the creation of the cosmos. It began with a ritual called “Lighting the Fire.” This ritual was held in the most sacred room of the temple and was performed by the high ranking members of the priesthood in the name of the king. It was a reenactment of the first appearance,
and daily reappearance, of the sun.
Next, they performed a ritual known as “Drawing the Bolt.” During this rite, the priests opened the door to the shrine where the main cult statue stood. The statue’s clothing was removed; and underwent ritual purification, dressing, and feeding. The lower-ranking priests were responsible for preparing the ceremony and disposing of the food and water.
At midday, ceremonies of ritual purification for the lesser gods were performed and as the daylight faded the whole morning ceremony was reversed. The statues of the gods were closed again and left to sleep overnight ready for their morning awakening.
So, was there an ancient Egyptian religion, or was it a collection of cults?
When Jean François Champollion unlocked the secret code of Egypt’s most sacred language, hieroglyphs, in 1822 he unlocked many wonders of a long-hidden world. It was a world populated by strange and mysterious gods with human bodies and animal heads.
From the start, Egyptology committed itself to the study of Egypt’s ancient religion; particularly to its beliefs about life after death. But it has never been agreed that the ancient Egyptians had a comprehensive worldview or ‘metaphysical moral vision’ that was accepted as binding because it was held to be in itself basically true and just even if all dimensions of it could not be either fully confirmed or refuted.
And so, since the translation of the ‘divine words’ Egyptology has fallen short in one important respect: it has failed to produce a description of the ancient Egyptian gods and religion that is in any way commensurate with the scale and impressiveness of its sacred monuments.
Egyptologists focused on words, almost to the exclusion of everything else. Buildings and monuments are the domain of the archaeologists; the wonderful art of the tombs and precious funeral artefacts found in them were the domain of art historians, and the anthropologists are processing ancient Egyptian religion through a variety of pan-world theories that render religion down to observable social behaviours.
Worship of Deities:
Central to their spiritual framework were gods and goddesses who symbolized natural forces and concepts. These divine beings influenced daily life and the cosmos.
The Gods
Today the gods and religion of ancient Egyptians are portrayed as mundane and soulless; there is no sense that the gods were holy, divine, or transcendent and certainly no sense that once people believed they contained the ultimate mystery of life, death and, the cosmos.
In ancient times, the gods were kept from common view, they were kept or made pure and special. This kept them sacred and helped people to believe the gods were powerful enough to help them fulfill their deepest needs and longings. But the gods were not just there to help when times were bad they filled people with both reverence and terror. What was sacred was protected and adored. Sacred spaces and objects represented the intersection between the limits of temporal human effort and the unlimited possibilities of the metaphysical.
Egyptian religion was not an individual means for orienting or transforming oneself in the world as religion is in the West today. Instead, it was a complex and rich human phenomenon that formed the mental architecture of the whole of society.
The King
In Egyptology, sacredness is believed to lie primarily in the person of the king; in his tomb, his temples and in his cult statue, in his images and in the ritual objects he used in sacred performances.
In theory, it was the pharaoh’s duty to carry out temple rituals, as he was the human link to the gods – his dead father and mother were believed to be gods and he himself would become a god when he joined them in the afterlife.
For the Egyptians, the king was the pinnacle of Egyptian society. He was the head of the state, their supreme warlord, and the chief priest of every god in the kingdom.
The ancient Egyptian king was believed to be the son of a god, chief priest, and mediator between the gods in heaven and the people on earth. So, in reality, his ritual duties were almost always carried out by priests.
The picture above: Khafra (also read as Khafre, Khefren and Greek: Χεφρήν Chephren) was an ancient Egyptian king (pharaoh) of the 4th Dynasty during the Old Kingdom. He was the son of Khufu and the throne successor of Djedefre. According to the ancient historian Manetho, Khafra was followed by king Bikheris, but according to archaeological evidence, he was instead followed by king Menkaure. Khafra was the builder of the second-largest pyramid of Giza.
The Priests
The king’s priests were initiated into the sacred cults; they learned and maintained the sacred systems; its requirements, and its taboos; and they maintained the sacred order and the prevailing worldview among the non-literate. The concept of sacredness extended beyond the king to the natural world, to the river Nile, the sky, the sun, the moon, and the stars.
Once initiated, the priest led the community in connecting with the supernatural to access its divine benefits – health, good fortune, and life after death.
During the Old and Middle Kingdoms, government officials served as priests on a part-time basis. Full-time priests only appear in the New Kingdom.
The temple staff also included many people other than priests, such as musicians and chanters in temple ceremonies.
Outside the temple were artisans and other labourers who helped supply the temple’s needs, as well as farmers who worked on temple estates. All were paid with portions of the temple’s income. Large temples were therefore very important centres of economic activity, sometimes employing thousands of people.
There were many different types of priests:
- Male priests were known as hem-netjer, females as hemet-netjer or servants of the god. The top priest was the hem-netjer-tepi, or ‘first servant of god’.
- The wab priests, the lowest rank, did all the routine unskilled work in the temple.
- The hour-priests were astronomers.
- Sem priests presided over mortuary rituals and conducted funeral services.
- The Lector priest or hery-heb or cheriheb wrote the religious texts, instructed trainee clergy, and recited the prayers invoking the gods’ presence in the temple and at festivals. In ancient Egyptian literature, lector priests are often portrayed as the keepers of secret knowledge and the performers of amazing magical feats.
The Moral Vision
Evidence from the archaeological record shows that the ancient Egyptians believed they were responsible for their own moral behaviour. They believed, at least in some form, of what we would call ‘free will’. The gods, particularly Osiris, were the ultimate judges of people’s moral actions. Leading a moral life was the gateway to a second life beyond death and was called ma’at.
The average ancient Egyptian was a lover of life. He or she felt sure that right-doing brought success and happiness, whereas evil-doing was bound to bring failure. This social ethic covered all members of society. Family, friends, neighbours, village and town, the nation and foreigners too. Fair dealing and benevolence were viewed as the leading virtues; greed was deemed the most pernicious vice.
In sum, the ancient Egyptians recognized the brotherhood of mankind.
Conclusion
The question of whether ancient Egyptians practised religion is an enigma that eludes a definitive answer. But, by understanding what was sacred to the ancient Egyptians it is possible to get a new view of ancient Egypt and ancient Egyptian religion. What we see is rich religious symbolism and philosophy and the development of the world’s first great religion.
Whether we could recreate this religion with all its rituals, ceremonies and mysticism is unlikely. It would be difficult to fool an ancient Egyptian into believing he/she was in a real temple, following a real service because there is so much we don’t know and perhaps will never know. However, I am sure the ancient Egyptians had a religion and that it was deeply meaningful to them. After all, look at what their beliefs inspired.
Questions in Egyptology No 3. Did the Egyptians Influence the Greeks?
Questions in Egyptology No. 2: How Long Did it Take to Mummify a Pharaoh?
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