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Egyptian religion| System of ancient Egyptian beliefs and practices, originating in the worship of totemic animals, representing the ancestors of the clan, and later superimposed with the abstract theology of a priestly caste, who retained suitable totems as the symbols or heads of gods with complex attributes. The main cult was that of Osiris, god of the underworld. Immortality, conferred by the magical rite of mummification, was originally the sole prerogative of the king, but was extended under the New Kingdom to all who could afford it; they were buried with the Book of the Dead. |
| The hawk was sacred to the sun gods Ra and Horus, the ibis to Thoth, personification of wisdom; the jackal to Anubis, god of the lower regions and patron of embalming; and the cat to Bastet, who represented the sun's heat. The story of Osiris, who was murdered, mourned by his sister and wife Isis, and then rose again, was enacted in a fertility ritual similar to that of Tammuz, a Sumerian vegetation god. |
| Under the 18th dynasty, Ammon, a local deity of Thebes, came to be regarded as supreme, a reflection of rediscovered national unity. The pharaoh Akhenaton unsuccessfully attempted to establish the monotheistic cult of Aton, the solar disc, as the one national god. |
Afterlife It was the wish of all to join Osiris in the Land of the West when they died. The Book of the Dead, known as the Book of Coming Forth by Day, dealt with funerary practices and was a guide to the soul after death through the Duat, the underworld. Survival in the afterlife was largely dependent on the preservation of the body, which required detailed methods of embalming and mummification. It was believed that the body and tomb contents were brought to life during a ceremony known as the Opening of the Mouth, and those who could afford it were buried with texts containing hymns and useful spells for their journey in the afterlife. The Book of Gates described the divisions of the underworld and the gates through which the sun had to travel at night, each guarded by a being with a knife. The Book of What-is-in-the-Underworld depicted the 12 regions corresponding to the 12 hours of the night through which the sun travelled. Both texts are inscribed on the walls of royal tombs from the New Kingdom. Magic shabti statuettes were also buried with the dead: they were believed to come alive in the afterlife and carry out all the hard work for the deceased. |
Amulets and symbols Amulets were popular throughout Egypt's history as they were believed to possess magical properties. Common designs included the scarab (often used as a seal as well as an amulet), the symbol of the creator god Kheperi; the ankh, the symbol of life; and the shen, a circle with tangent, symbolizing protection. |
Egyptian creation myths Various Egyptian religious traditions and cults had versions of the creation of the world. At Heliopolis it was taught that Atum first emerged on a mound from Nun, the primeval watery chaos, and created Shu, the air, and Tefnut, cloud, who together created Nut, the sky, and Geb, the earth. The earth was generally thought of as a flat disk floating on Nun and bounded by mountains which supported the sky. Memphis tradition evolved a complex variant of this Heliopolitan theory, with the potter Ptah as the creator. No detailed account of the creation of humans survives, but some fragments suggest that Khnum, a ram-headed god, fashioned the first human on a potter's wheel. |
The sun in Egyptian religion The sun is depicted in various forms, but it frequently appeared as a red disc held between the forelegs of a scarab beetle; the disc represented the seed of new life contained in the sunrise, like the ball of dung in which the scarab wraps its eggs. The sun appeared in the morning between two mountains and travelled across the sky in a boat until it reached the west, when it entered another boat and returned to the east beneath the earth. Another version held that the sun was a child which entered the mouth of the sky goddess, passing through her body to be born in the morning; traditions regarding the goddess as a heavenly cow, represented the sun as a calf. These variations were not mutually exclusive and could be combined, so that the sun god in human form is sometimes depicted in his boat sailing over the belly of the heavenly cow. Hathor, the heavenly cow and wife of Horus, was an early deity, later assimilated with Nut, the sky goddess. Nephthys, sister to Isis, may have also represented the sunset; after Osiris had been killed by her husband Set, god of darkness, she mourned for him in the form of a kite (bird of prey). |
Anthropomorphism In Egypt's prehistoric period, each area had its own separate deity, manifested in some animal or object: gods surviving from this time into later Egyptian civilization included Horus, Hathor, Anubis, and Thoueris, a household deity and protector in childbirth, who was represented as a pregnant hippopotamus. The increasing tendency to identify the pharaoh with the falcon-headed god Horus led to the anthropomorphism (attribution of human characteristics to animals, objects, or deities) which suffuses Egyptian religion. The gods were usually depicted with a human body and the head of their associated animal, although ancient deities such as Min, an early fertility god, and Ptah continued to maintain their human form of prehistoric times. The 5th-century Greek historian Herodotus recorded that apes and other animals kept in captivity by the Egyptian priests were in no way regarded as idols, but as typifying the various attributes of a deity. |
Development of Egyptian religion Unlike the Judaeo-Christian tradition, ancient Egypt did not have a fixed, organized system of religious beliefs or a central almighty deity. Instead a series of gods and cults reflected the various strands of Egyptian belief and ritual which had developed at different times and places, much as in Roman and Greek religion. Egypt was subdivided into nomes (administrative districts), each of which possessed its triad of gods. As the country coalesced politically, many local cults converged to gain widespread recognition. The triad of Osiris, Isis, and Horus originally presided over a nome, but later became national gods because of their popularity. Conservatism and compromise often led to the merging of old deities with those of rising importance, such as Ptah-Sokar and Amen-Ra. |
| Political developments had other impacts on the development of religion in Egypt; the rivalry between the gods Horus and Set probably reflected the differing factions in early civil wars. At Heliopolis near Memphis, Ra was worshipped as the sun itself, and by the 4th dynasty the pharaoh became known officially as ‘son of Ra’. The winged disc, usually placed over temple doorways, represents a fusion of Ra, Horus, and the pharaoh. The cult of Osiris started in the Nile delta during the 5th dynasty. Traditionally, he was killed by his brother Set in a struggle for power between the deities. Set was eventually defeated by Horus, the son of Osiris, who then became king and enabled Osiris to rise and become ruler of the dead. In the social revolution of the First Intermediate Period, the identification of a dead king with Osiris was extended to commoners, so that ‘Osiris’ became a standard prefix to Egyptian names to indicate the bearer was dead. |
| Mont, originally a Theban god, assumed national importance during the 11th dynasty, based around the nobles of Thebes. Ammon, king of the gods (equivalent to Greek Zeus and Roman Jupiter), was originally an obscure god of Thebes, who only began to gain prominence in the 12th dynasty. His cult expanded rapidly after the victory of the Theban 18th dynasty over the Hyksos, when Ammon merged with Ra to become Amen-Ra. In the Late Period, Amen-Ra was eclipsed by Osiris, who replaced him as ruler of the material world. Isis also gained ascendancy among the female goddesses, and the cult of their son Horus the Child (Harpocrates) became very popular. |
| Various foreign gods were introduced in the New Kingdom, including the Canaanite deities Reshef, a war god, and Astarte and Anat, goddesses of love and war. The arrival of the Greeks resulted in a further merging and blending of deities, as similarities were perceived between Greek and Egyptian gods. Serapis, a fusion of Osiris with the Apis bull of Memphis, was created by the Ptolemies to promote the unification of their Greek and Egyptian subjects. Ptolemy I built the Serapeum, the temple of Serapis, at Alexandria, and the cults of both Serapis and Isis spread to Greece and later to Rome. |
| A number of the kings of Egypt and a few of their subjects were also deified. Imhotep, the vizier of Zoser and builder of the Step Pyramid, was worshipped in the Graeco-Roman period and identified with Asclepius, the Greek god of healing. |
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