Religion and Spirituality - Ancient Egyptian Religion | Introduction For Ancient Egypt History

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Religion and Spirituality - Ancient Egyptian Religion

Ancient Egyptian religion encompasses the known beliefs and rituals of Ancient Egyptians, followed for over three thousand years until the establishment of Coptic Christianity and Islam in Egypt.

Throughout the vast and complex history of Egypt, the dominant beliefs of the ancient Egyptians merged, changed, and developed as leaders of different groups gained power. This process continued even after the end of the ancient Egyptian civilization as we know it today. As an example, during the New Kingdom Ra and Amun became Amun-Ra. This "merging" into a single deity is typically referred to as syncretism.

Syncretism should be distinguished from mere groupings of deities, also referred to as "families" such as Amun, Mut, and Khonsu, where no "merging" takes place. Over time, deities took part in multiple syncretic relationships, for instance, the combination of Ra and Horus into Ra-Herakty. However, even when taking part in such a syncretic relationship, the original deities did not become completely "absorbed" into the combined deity, although the individuality of the one was often greatly weakened. Also, these syncretic relationships sometimes involved more than just two deities, for instance, Ptah, Seker, and Osiris, becoming Ptah-Seker-Osiris.

The goddesses followed a similar pattern. Also important to keep in mind is that sometimes the attributes of one deity became closely associated with another, without any "formal" syncretism taking place. For instance, the loose association of Hathor and Bat with Isis, who appeared in the pantheon only during the Fifth Dynasty as part of the emerging Osiris myth.

An example of multiple syncretic relationships among goddesses is evident in the introductory image for the article, above. This late image from the thirtieth dynasty displays Isis having discarded her own initial symbol of the throne, but with all of the symbols of Wadjet and Nekhbet, as well as those of Bat, and Hathor, maintaining a symbolic continuity from the oldest deities to the latest.

One aspect of ancient Egyptian religion is that deities sometimes played different, and at times conflicting, roles. As an example, the lioness Sekhmet, who had been an early warrior and sun goddess, perhaps older than Horus, was much later related as being sent out by Ra (who replaced Horus) to devour the humans for having rebelled against him. After that she was said to have become (again) a fierce protector of the kingdom, life in general, and the sick.

Early religious concepts are unclear without any written myths, but there is evidence of ritual sacrifice of humans as well as animals. [1] The sacrifice of animals endured throughout the history of Egypt and entire sanctuaries were dedicated to the burial of sacred animals such as cattle, mongooses, [2] shrew mice, [3] cats, hawks, and ibises—some of which were embalmed before burial.

Even more complex are the different roles of Set. Judging the mythology of Set from a modern perspective, especially the mythology surrounding Set's relationship with Osiris, it is easy to cast Set as the arch villain and source of evil. This is wrong, however, as Set was earlier playing the role of destroyer of Apep, in the service of Ra on his barge, and thus serving to uphold Ma'at (Truth, Justice, and Harmony).

Origin myths

A stele depicting two triads of deities - Khonsu, Mut, and Amun above Ra, Shu, and TefnutThe earliest ancient Egyptian myths are not recorded, but tantalizing fragments exist that seem to relate to fertility cults with a cow deity and a cobra deity. Others included a lioness deity and a vulture deity. Local variations existed and after unification some merged, some changed, and some new cults arose. One of the oldest connections to those myths may be Mut, meaning mother, which was originally a title of the primordial waters of the cosmos. She was considered the mother of all creation. [2] At times, she was depicted as each of these early animal images and at others as a woman holding an ankh, wearing the united crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, in a dress of bright red or blue, and with the feather of the goddess Ma'at at her feet. She was worshipped at temples in all regions of ancient Egypt. [4]

The later Egyptians believed that in the beginning, the universe was filled with the dark waters of chaos. Their first god, Re-Atum, appeared from the water as the land of Egypt appears every year out of the flood waters of the Nile. Re-Atum spat and out of the spittle came out the deities Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture). The world was created when Shu and Tefnut gave birth to two children: Nut (Sky) and Geb (the Earth). Humans were created when Shu and Tefnut went wandering in the dark wastes and got lost. Re-Atum sent his eye to find them. On reuniting, his tears of joy turned into people.

The myth continues in an even later version—perhaps when calendar changes needed to be integrated into the myths—that Geb and Nut copulated, and upon Shu's learning of his children's fornication, he separated the two, effectively becoming the air between the sky and ground. He also decreed that the pregnant Nut should not give birth any day of the year. Nut pleaded with Thoth, who on her behalf gambled with the moon-god Yah and won five more days to be added onto the then 360-day year. Nut had one child on each of these days: Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys, and Horus-the-Elder.

Osiris, by different accounts, was either the son of Re-Atum or Geb, and king of Egypt. His brother Set represented evil in the universe. He murdered Osiris and himself became the king. After killing Osiris, Set tore his body into pieces, but Isis rescued most of the pieces for burial beneath the temple. Set made himself king, but was challenged by Horus, who by that time had become identified as the son of Osiris. Set lost and was sent to the desert. He became the god of terrible storms. Osiris was mummified by Isis and became god of the dead. Horus became the king and from him descended the pharaohs.

Another version is related by Plutarch, [5] a first century A.D. Greek priest at the oracle of Delphi who wrote The Moralia and other works. This work consists of seventy-eight essays and speeches giving insight into the customs of Romans and Greeks. The Moralia includes On the Fortune or the Virtue of Alexander the Great — an important adjunct to his Life of the great general — and On the Worship of Isis and Osiris (a crucial source of information on Egyptian religious rites during the period of its occupancy by both Greece and Rome). Plutarch relates a version of a myth in which Set made a chest that only Osiris could fit into. He then invited Osiris to a feast. Set made a bet that no one could fit into the chest. Osiris was the last one to step into the chest, but before he did, Set asked if he could hold Osiris's crown. Osiris agreed and stepped into the chest. As he lay down, Set slammed the lid shut and put the crown on his own head. He then set the chest afloat on the Nile. Isis did not know of her husband's death until the Wind told her. She then placed her son in a safe place and cast a spell so no one could find him. When she searched for her husband, a child told her a chest had washed up on the bank and a tree had grown up. The tree was so straight the king had used it for the central pillar of his new palace. Isis went and asked for her husband's body and it was given to her. The god of the underworld told her that Osiris would be a king, but only in the underworld.

The Classical Greeks believed that their gods and goddesses were the origins of the Egyptian deities. According to the Greek myths during that period of time, when the titan Typhon was free to roam the earth, all of the Greek deities of the classical times—except for Hermes and Zeus—fled from Greece to Egypt. While in Egypt many of the gods took on the shape or form of animals as a means to hide themselves from the wrath of Typhon, the last child of Mother Earth. [6] Thus they related, the Egyptian deities were born. There is no parallel in the Archaic Greek myths.

This contrasts with another view that was expressed by Herodotus, a Greek historian and explorer from Ionia, who lived in the fifth century B.C. (c. 484–425 BC) and wrote a record of his 'inquiries' which he called, The Histories. [7] After his death these histories were divided into nine books. He includes a narrative account of his time, that would otherwise be poorly documented, and many long digressions concerning the various places, peoples, traditions, and sciences he encountered during his wide-ranging travels around the lands of the Mediterranean and Black Sea. His records were not always completely accurate, since he made judgments about the plausibility of items he did not witness.

He was correct regarding many details of Egypt, however, even stating that the source of the Nine was melting snow located far to the south—although it was counterintuitive. He discusses an ancient Egyptian Labyrinth in what is now called, Book II, and in his writings he also asserted that the first known oracle was in Egypt—dedicated to Wadjet in what the Greeks called, Buto, and the Egyptians called, Per-Wadjet. He recorded that it seemed to have been the source of the oracular tradition which spread to Crete, Greece, and other Mediterranean cultures.

Death

Egyptians came to have a highly developed view of the afterlife with elaborate rituals for preparing the body and soul for an eternal life after death. Beliefs about the soul and afterlife focused heavily on preservation of the body. This was because they believed that the vitality or double, the ka, was still associated with the body after death and it was necessary for the ka to be reunited with the ba, the spirit or soul, to support the akh, hoped to ascend to the heavens and take its place among the stars. [9] This meant that embalming and mummification were practised, in order to preserve the individual's identity in the afterlife. Originally the dead were buried in shallow pits in the searing hot sand, at times wrapped in reed mats, which caused the remains to dry quickly, preventing decomposition. Later, they started constructing subterranean tombs with wood or sun-baked bricks, and a new process of mummification was developed around the Fourth Dynasty, mostly for the benefit of the pharaohs and their relatives. Most inner organs were removed through an incision in the abdomen, while the brain was scooped out through a nostril after breaking the thin bone encasing it behind the nostrils. The cavities were washed and packed with natron, then the whole body was covered in natron and left to dry. Since it was a stone-able offense to harm the body of the Pharaoh, even after death, the person who made the incision in the abdomen with a rock knife was chased away ceremonially and in a mock stoning.

After removing the natron, the bodies were coated inside and out with resin to preserve them, then wrapped with linen bandages, embedded with religious amulets and talismans. In the case of royalty, the mummy was usually placed inside a series of nested coffins, the outermost of which was a stone sarcophagus. The intestines, lungs, liver, and the stomach were preserved separately and stored in canopic jars protected by the four sons of Horus. [10] The heart was left in place because it was thought to be the home of the soul and necessarily present for judgment. The standard length of the mummification process was seventy days. [11]

If during the Old Kingdom this embalming process was reserved for a selected few, it became available to wider sections of society as time went by. Animals also were mummified, sometimes thought to have been pets of Egyptian families, but more frequently or more likely, they were the representations of deities. The ibis, crocodile, cat, Nile perch, falcon, and baboon can be found in perfect mummified forms. During the Ptolemaic Period, animals were bred especially for the purpose.

The goddess Ma'at, showing her feather in her headdressThe Book of the Dead was a series of almost two hundred spells represented as sectional texts, songs, and pictures written on papyrus, individually customized for the deceased, which were buried along with the dead in order to ease their passage into the underworld. In some tombs, the Book of the Dead also has been found painted on the walls, although the practice of painting on the tomb walls appears to predate the formalization of the Book of the Dead as a bound text. One of the best examples of the Book of the Dead is The Papyrus of Ani, created around 1240 BC, which, in addition to the texts themselves, also contains many pictures of Ani and his wife on their journey through the land of the dead. After a person dies their soul is led into a hall of judgment in Duat by Anubis (god of mummification) and the deceased's heart, which was the record of the morality of the owner, is weighed against a single feather representing Ma'at (the concept of truth and order). If the outcome is favorable, the deceased is taken to Osiris, god of the afterlife, in Aaru, but the demon Ammit (Eater of Hearts)–part crocodile, part lioness, and part hippopotamus–destroys those hearts whom the verdict is against, leaving the owner to remain in Duat. A heart that weighed less than the feather was considered a pure heart, not weighed down by the guilt or sins of one's actions in life, resulting in a favorable verdict; a heart heavy with guilt and sin from one's life weighed more than the feather, and so the heart would be eaten by Ammit. An individual without a heart in the afterlife, in essence, did not exist as Egyptians believed the heart to be the center of reason and emotion, not having identified the functions of the brain, which was removed and discarded during mummification. Many times a person would be buried with a "surrogate" heart to replace their own for the weighing of the heart ceremony.

The monotheistic period

Pharaoh Akhenaten and his family praying to AtenA short interval of monotheism (Atenism) occurred under the reign of Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) during the Eighteenth Dynasty, focused on the Egyptian sun deity Aten. The Aten is typically shown as a sun disk with rays coming out of all sides. Akhenaten built a new capital at Amarna with temples for the Aten. This was a symbolic act as Akhenaten wanted a place of worship for the Aten that was not tainted by the visage of other deities. The religious change survived only until the death of Akhenaten, and the old religion was quickly restored during the reign of Tutankhamun, Akhenaten's son by his wife, Kiya. Tutankhamun and several other post-restoration pharaohs were erased from the history, because they were regarded as heretics.

According to John Tuthill, a professor at the University of Guam, During the Eighteenth Dynasty Akhenaten's reasons for his religious reform were political. By the time of Akhenaten's reign, the god Amun had risen to such a high status that the priests of Amun had become even more wealthy and powerful than the pharaohs. However, it may be that Akhenaten was influenced by his family members, particularly his wife or mother (Dunham, 1963, p. 4; Mertz, 1966, p. 269). There was a certain trend in Akhenaten's family toward sun-worship. Toward the end of the reign of Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep III, the Aten was depicted increasingly often. Some historians have suggested that the same religious revolution would have happened, even if Akhenaten had never become pharaoh at all. However, considering the violent reaction that followed shortly after Akhenaten's untimely death, this seems improbable. The reasons for Akhenaten's revolution still remain a mystery. After the death of Akhenaten, his son, the famous Tutankhamun reinstated the polytheistic (pantheon) religion that was in place before the time of the Aten.

After the fall of the Amarna dynasty, the prior Egyptian pantheon survived more or less as the dominant religion for the next twelve dynasties, until the establishment of Coptic Christianity and later Islam, even though the Egyptians continued to have relations with the other monotheistic cultures (e.g. Hebrews). Egyptian religious practices put up little resistance to the spread of Christianity, sometimes explained by claiming that Jesus was originally a syncretism based predominantly on Horus, with Isis and her worship becoming Mary and veneration (see Jesus as myth).

Temples

Mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri that is considered the closest to Classical architectureMany Ancient Egyptian temples are still standing today. Others are in ruins from wear and tear or deliberate reuse of materials, while others have been lost entirely. Pharaoh Ramses II was a particularly prolific builder of temples.

Some known temples include:

Abu Simbel – Complex of two massive rock temples in southern Egypt on the western bank of the Nile, built by Ramesses II during the New Kingdom, as a monument to his queen Nefertari

and himself, to commemorate a battle, and to intimidate enemies; the complex was moved in the 1960s to avoid the flooding created by the Aswan Dam

Abydos (Great Temple of Abydos) – Adoration of the early kings, whose cemetery, to which it forms a great funerary chapel, lies behind it; the site has tombs from the prehistoric and predynastic eras through the thirtieth dynasty with significant new temples added by Senusret III in the twelfth, Seti I in the nineteenth (including his king list) which was finished by Ramesses II, and Nectanebo I in the thirtieth (Hypogeum of Osiris)

Ain el-Muftella – many tombs, mummies, and other artifacts have been discovered at the Bahariya Oasis; it probably was built around the twenty-sixth dynasty; could have served as the city center of El Qasr

Karnak – Once part of the ancient capital of Egypt, Thebes, built and enhanced by many pharaohs over many dynasties, including the early temple to Mut, which was restored by Hatshepsut during the Eighteenth Dynasty

Bani Hasan al Shurruq – Tombs located to the north of the Temple of Pakhet in Middle Egypt near Al-Minya that survived the reconstruction of the New Kingdom, are famous for the quality of their paintings

Temple of Pakhet – a subterranean temple built by Hatshepsut near Al-Minya; called the Grotto of Artemis by the Greeks who identified Pakhet with Artemis

Edfu – contains a Ptolemaic temple that is located between Aswan and Luxor as well as Tell Edfu which contains significant archaeological evidence dating from the predynastic era

Temple of Kom Ombo – built during the Ptolemaic dynasty and controlled the trade routes from Nubia to the Nile Valley

Luxor – Built largely during the New Kingdom by Amenhotep III and Ramesses II, it was the centre of the Opet Festival

Medinet Habu (Memorial Temple of Ramesses III)– Temple and a complex of temples dating from the New Kingdom

Temple of Hatshepsut – Her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri complex with a colonnaded structure of perfect harmony, was built nearly one thousand years before the Parthenon, but is considered the closest to Classical architecture of any Egyptian temple

Philae – Island of Philae with Temple of Aset which was constructed in the thirtieth Dynasty

Ramesseum (Memorial Temple of Ramesses II) – The main building, dedicated to the funerary cult, comprised two stone pylons (gateways, some 60 m wide), one after the other, each leading into a courtyard. Beyond the second courtyard, at the centre of the complex, was a covered 48-column hypostyle hall, surrounding the inner sanctuary

Dendera Temple complex – Several temples, but the all-overshadowing building in the complex is the main temple, the Hathor temple

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