HB-03-Egyptian

Nile valley Egypt

Predynastic 4000‑3200 B.C.

Protodynastic 3200‑2750 B.C.

Old Kingdom. 2750‑2270 B.C.

Intermediate 2270‑2160 B.C.

Middle Kingdom 2160‑1788 B.C.

2nd Intermediate  1788‑1680 B.C.

Hyksos Era 1680‑1580 B.C.

New Empire 1580‑1090 B.C.

Period of Decline 1090‑525 B.C.

Egyptian Religion

            Perhaps Egypt gives us the simplest case of the emergence of a more or less systematized polytheism and a state cult. Upper Egypt was comparatively self contained. It experienced very much less outside interference than Mesopotamia, and there were long periods of time when there was absolutely no interference at all. But in the Delta (lower Egypt) contacts with the outside world were constant. Not only did travelers and traders, initially from Mesopotamia, come in great numbers, bringing with them new ideas and customs from abroad (many of which the Egyptians adopted along the whole Nile), but there were also invasions that wrought forced changes. Nevertheless, taking Egypt as a whole, the internal cultural and religious changes went on in a kind of simpleness and singleness of logical development for longer periods than else­where near the Mediterranean.

The Physical and Social Background of Egyptian Religion

            The physical reasons for this comparative self sufficiency are almost too well known to rehearse. Cut off from the world by the Mediterranean on the north, and by vast expanses of barren desert rising in the east slowly toward rugged Abyssinia and stretching to the west in "lone and level sands" over more than a thousand miles of Sahara wasteland, fenced off on the south by wild equatorial mountains and the six cataracts falling northward through their gorges, Egypt lay for centuries quiet under the sun, her material needs as­sured by the annual overflow of the great stream that was veritably her river of life in that rainless land, and the thoughts of her people, perhaps from sheer need of something to do, devoted to their cult of the dead, with its hope of endless life.

The history of Egypt is one of the longest known to us. In the Old‑Stone Age scattered groups of hunters crept along the mud‑strips of the Nile (narrower and thinner even than now), leaving behind them their stone implements, flimsy huts, and buried dead. These wanderers gave way some time during the Neolithic period to the first permanent residents of the Nile valley, a dark‑skinned pastoral folk, who, as the centuries advanced, housed themselves in wood, brick, and then stone, organized themselves into communities, and latterly began to employ a distinctive picture‑writing (the first Egyptian hieroglyphics) to keep their records and send their messages. Though the wandering tribes of the Stone Age had now vanished, and rural clusters of villages had appeared, there was no nation of Egyptians as yet. Each community lived out its independent existence as a nome, that is, as a group of villages spread across a fertile tract of Nile mud around a larger town that was, in effect, their county seat. The people of one nome might look across the river at those of another, learn from their neighbors how to regulate and control the overflow of the Nile, but yet have separate customs and gods and be on terms of relative hostility. Then, as cultures grew more attractive, and intercommunica­tion increased, there came amalgamation, usually by way of conquest of one nome by another. For centuries this process went on, until there were but two king­doms, the upper kingdom of inner Egypt and the lower kingdom of the Delta, where Mesopotamian influences were felt. These two kingdoms were finally united into one by Menes (?), the founder of the first dynasty, About 3100 B.C.  {The first and second dynasties (3100‑2600 B.C.), which not only united Egypt but established an ascendancy over Palestine and the coast of Syria, were succeeded by the Old Kingdom (ca. 2600‑2200 B.C.), so famous for its pyramid builders (often called the Pyramid Age). After an intermediate period of breakdown of central authority (ca. 2200‑2000 B.C.), the Middle Kingdom was established (ca. 1989). The Middle Kingdom in turn gave way to the New Empire when the northern conquerors, the Hyksos, who in their formidable chariots had overrun Egypt (ca. 1800), were heroically expelled (ca. 1560), and Egypt surged on to the reconquest of Palestine and Syria‑a bold assertion of an imperialism that only after long centuries and many reverses was to be abandoned, because Egypt herself was to suffer total conquest at the hands successively of Persians, Greeks, and Romans. }   Thereafter the pharaohs established  themselves as divine priest‑kings along the entire Nile, and the royal household became the focal point of a far‑ranging political unification that embraced all the local temples and their priests, as well as the people of the land.

The Divine Kingship

            From about 3100 to 2600 B.C. ‑ a period of five hundred years ‑ the official religion of the first two dynasties stressed in its rituals, for any occasion, that the pharaoh was a person of sacral dignity, the son of the sun‑god, specifically an incarnation of Horus, the sun, without whom there would be no light nor life. As representing god among the people, he could mediate between them and the gods. After 2600 B.C. (in the Old Kingdom) the name of the pharaoh received an additional title; he became "the son of Re," the latter having become the chief sun‑god. Gradually thereafter the pharaohs, although retaining their godlike status, became human beings within whom dwelt the sun‑god and who manifested in their persons the divine will. Although the pharaoh was now more human, the situation had not greatly changed, for whatever the degree of his humanity when he played a symbolic role in religious ritual, the ordinary Egyptian, who in the early days did not actually see him perform the rituals because they were not open to the public, but who was later permitted to be a witness, "did not distinguish between symbolism and participation; if he said that the king was Horns, he did not mean that the king was playing the part of Horus; he meant that the king was Horus, that the god was effectively present in the king's body.”

It was by means of this doctrine of the divinity of the pharaohs that a central government was consolidated and Egypt unified.

Polytheism, Faith, and Symbolism

The pharaoh was not the sole divine being. The ancient Egyptian, when he faced the world around him, found his faith ‑ his reverence and hopefulness --  focused upon divine powers of many kinds. Living as he did on a fertile strip of soil near the Nile, he found himself in close relations not only with his fellow Egyptians, male and female, but with many birds, beasts, and reptiles‑frogs, for instance, and herons, gazelles, mice, hares, falcons, crocodiles, geese, lions, and other fellow creatures of many kinds. With all these he had a sense of community that tended to blur unlikenesses and incompatibilities. God, man, and beast dwelt together in a relatively confined space and shared a common lot. If the pharaoh was a god in human guise, there were many other divine powers appearing in other guises. We shall soon see that the ancient Egyptian was led to think of deities as being partly animal (theriomorphic), partly human (anthropomorphic), and partly heavenly (in some cases having the qualities of birds), and they were these all at, once. Whatever the analogies and metaphors he adopted in order to picture the gods, the Egyptian was a polytheist and was surrounded by gods.

Another way of putting it is to say that the Egyptian experienced the divine in many places, without feeling the need to bring his impressions together into any clear unity. The divine and the sacred met him any and everywhere.

Furthermore, although his prayers and those of his priests were addressed to long‑established gods that were complex in function and therefore in appearance, he and his priests were quite ready at any time to alter an image of deity when needful. There was a conscious (or better, a subconscious) recognition of the descriptive relevance of altering metaphors and symbols as a means of better understanding divine powers that could not be narrowly conceived because they had more than human or animal capabilities.  {It would be wise here to recognize the truth in Edward Conze's observation about polytheism in another religion (Buddhism), for the same observation can be made in this connection about the tendency toward polytheism, even in the modern period. He says in Buddism, its essence and Development   "The Christian teaching which has to some extent pervadec our education, has made us believe that Polytheism belongs to a past period of the human race.... We must first of all understand that polytheism is very much alive even among us. But where formerly  Athene, Baal, Astarte, Isis, Sarasvati, Kwan Yin, etc., excited the popular imagination, it is nowadays inflamed by such words as Democracy, Progress, Civilization, Equality, Liberty, Reason, Science, etc. A multitude of personal beings has given way to a multitude of abstract  nouns.... The reason for this is not far to seek. Personal deitie. grow on the soil of a rural culture in which the majority of the population are illiterate, while abstract nouns find favor with the literate populations of modern towns.... Another factor is our separation from Nature. Every tree, every well, lake or river, almost every type of animal, could once bring forth a deity. We are nom too remote from Nature to think that."}

Prehistoric Mythological Concepts

The ancient Egyptians also inherited from before the time of the first dynasty a set of prehistoric ideas that were never abandoned down through the centuries: (I) that there was a primeval sea from which, as if it were a rising sun, the earth emerged as a projecting hill on which the first living being appeared, a being conceived, in one story or another, as a serpent, a frog, a beetle, an egg, or a lotus flower; (2) that the sky could be conveniently regarded as Hathor, a heavenly cow held up from below by Shu, the air‑god, while she, touching earth with her four legs, gave birth each day to the sun, her calf, and was at the same time both a celestial stream of water (the waters above the earth and the space‑body in which the stars were lodged; (3) that, alternatively, the sky was the goddess Nut, the daughter of Shu, whom he lifted up from her husband (and brother) Geb, the earth below, so that she touched down only with her toes and fingertips, and in the position did all the things that Hathor did; and (4) that the sky might also be a vulture (later on a falcon whose wings formed the roof of the world. Of all these apparently contradictory descriptions and metaphors it has been very sensibly said: "As no symbol can encompass the whole essence of what it stands for, an increase in the number of symbols might well have appeared  enlightening rather than confusing," because "a multitude of mythological concepts may exist for any single entity."

Presupposed in all this abundance of imagery is the very old idea, which is at the heart of Egyptian religion that the disposition of the elements of earth and sky the creation itself, as well as the power in the sun, the power in the earth, and the power in the community of animals and men dwelling on earth together, all an are evidence of the existence of a many‑faceted cosmic order that men can scarcely understand. Its awesome actuality is represented by Maat, a term which as concept means world order and as goddess stands for the truth, reality, and justice prevailing behind the changing scenes of life, now and hereafter.

The Egyptians were not doctrinal; they seemed to be seeking and feeling after an underlying order of things through their myths and rituals, without demanding exactitude or finality either in their ritual or in their writings.

The Animal‑Headed Gods

Down through the years, the local Egyptian "gods" manifested themselves in, or even as, animals. Each community had its animal guardian‑a sort of urban animal‑cult. Thinis and Abydos, for example, worshiped the jackal, Fayum the crocodile. Thebes had its Amon, a ram, Memphis two guardians, Sekhmet a lioness and Apis (or Hapi) a bull. At Dendera they paid reverence to Hathor, a cow, at Edfu to the hawk Behudet (later called Horus), and Hierakonpolis honored the vulture Nekhebt. At other places like honors were bestowed on the baboon, hippopotamus, shrewmouse, ibis, cobra, cat, frog, eel, and other creatures.

But undoubtedly these beasts and birds were not worshiped for their animal qualities alone but also for the human (or superhuman) powers and characteristics they possessed, or represented. For, in evident recogni­tion of the belief that divine quality as such could manifest itself in either man or beast and so showed itself in both, they acquired human bodies under their animal heads, and vice versa. For the gods, as we have anticipated, seemed pictured best as composite beings. Thus Knummu had a man's body with a ram's head, and was in human fashion skillful in shaping men and beasts on the potter's wheel. Anubis, the guardian of the cemetery and guide of the dead, possessed a jackal's head. Thoth, the god of learning, bore the head of the ibis. The lioness head of Sekhmet and the cat head of Bast surmounted lithe feminine bodies. Most curious was the greyhound form of Seth, with an upright tail suggestive of the wart hog, though his legs were human. His great adversary Horus had a hawk's head, to signify he was the sun.

Divine Amalgamations

All these were early developments and reflect political as well as religious change. As we have seen, the original nomes of Egypt‑some forty‑two in number‑were gradually fused by conquest; but each was so closely identified with the animal‑like god who was its guardian that when one nome conquered another and an over‑all guardian deity was sought, the two gods were fused along with their territories, and often bore thereafter a hyphenated name made from their two names. At times a local deity would be identified with one of the great gods in order to elevate him to a greater and more important role. It was thus that Amon‑Re and Ptah‑Sokar‑Osiris came into being, their separate natures blended so far as possible into one, and their secondary characteristics, if resistant to such a process, separately embodied in accessory figures or symbols. Thus, on entering the Delta and merging with Ptah and Sokar at Memphis, where Apis the bull gave the shape of the godhead, Osiris retained his human form but adopted the bull as his associate. Thereafter he was sometimes called Osiris‑Apis (whence the Romans may have obtained the name Serapis, their term for the immortal bull‑spirit). And when Isis was identified in the Delta with the cowgoddess Hathor, she sprouted two huge horns curving high above her head, with a sun‑disc in between to show she was the mother of Horus.

Figure E-1  Lion‑Headed Goddess. The goddess Sekhmet, carved in diorite, sits on a throne gazing with inscrutable eyes at her worshipers. In her left hand she holds the Egyptian symbol for life triumphing over death, the ankh, which is also emblematic of generation, the union of male and female elements in nature.

But in some cases blending was not feasible. In this event two incompatible deities would be set against each other in the dualism of eternal eninity, or else a triad (or even a larger group) of associates would be formed, in which the special character of each god and goddess was preserved. So, when upper and lower Egypt were united under the first dynasty, Horus, tht chief god of the Delta, and Seth, dominant in upper Egypt, continued their bitter struggle, for whereas Horus was now conceived to be the life‑giving sun Seth became the power of evil (the lifeless desert?) After their enmity became a major theme in the dramatic myth of Isis and Osiris, they acquired separate aims, Horus as the son ‑ avenger (he was now the son of Isis by Osiris) and Seth, the brother of Osiris, a! the fratricidal uncle and rival for the throne, although. after the issue was resolved he subsided. Triads and enneads (or groups of nine) were formed also for other and quite natural reasons. It was, for example, natural to think that the gods were grouped in families. Thus at Memphis during the Pyramid Age, Ptah, the creator, Sekhmet, the lion‑headed war‑goddess and sender of plagues, and Imhotep, the physician who became the god of medicine, were united as father, mother and son. During the same period at Heliopolis a family of nine in four generations was worshiped, namely, Atum. (the oldest, originally the hill of earth that emerged from the primordial sea, later associated with the evening sun), his children Shu (the air that holds up the sky) and Tefnut (the latter's moist female complement) Shu and Tefitut's children Geb (the earth) and Nut (the sky), and the children in turn of Geb and Nut: two sons, Osiris and Seth, and two daughters, Isis and Nephthys. (We shall see that Osiris and Isis were husband and wife, and that Nephthys, their loving sister and ally, was also an attendant of Seth.) In other place! Osiris and Isis formed a separate triad with Horus, their son. At Thebes during the Middle and New Kingdoms the same relationship bound together Amon‑Re, father sun, Mut, mother Nile, and Khoinsu, the moon, their son.

The Isis‑Osiris‑Horus Complex

            The Isis‑Osiris family group was relatively late in appearing,, but its members stimulated the popular imagination as no other Egyptian gods did.

Osiris may have had a prehistoric origin. According to one view, he was initially brought in from Libya, where he, was the fructifying water that produces vegetation even in the desert. But this is by no means certain, for there is perhaps better reason to think, because he always seems to have been in human form, that he came from Syria and was originally an agricultural deity. But after he was established in Egypt and became the son of Geb and Nut, he was more or less identified with the life‑giving water of the Nile. His sister Isis, who was also his wife, is perhaps less ancient a figure, but from about 1500 B.C. (during the New Empire) she grew more popular, certainly more adorable, than he. Her appeal was increased by the pathos of her story. According to the Pyramid Texts,   {The so‑called Pyramid Texts have been assembled from fragments of funerary hymns and rituals found incised on the walls of royal tombs of the Old Kingdom; they were designed to secure the well­being and happiness of the pharaohs and their families in the afterworld to which they alone were entitled. These texts were succeeded in the Middle Kingdom by the so‑called, Coffin Texts, written or inscribed on the coffins of Egyptian nobles and wealthy commoners, During the New Kingdom the tombs contained texts written on papyrus rolls that were versions of the so‑called Book of the Dead, designed for all those who could afford to be buried with due cere­mony. The most complete texts to come down to us are from the Greco‑Roman era, the Wisdom Literature, full of stories, proverbs, and guidance for life in this world (a source, by the way, of much that is to be found in the Biblical Book of Proverbs). One brief work of a theological nature comes from as far‑off a time as the Old Kingdom; a version of it is inscribed on the Shabaka Stone dating from the eighth century B.c. Other important sources of our knowl­edge of Egyptian religion are the pictures on walls and columns of tombs and temples, with their explanatory inscriptions.}   which are our earliest sources, Osiris, the good and beneficent king, was killed by his brother Seth. (Was Seth the demon of desert heat, and did he overpower and shrink the Nile and kill the vegetation on its banks that was Osiris too?) Taking Osiris' third eye with him, Seth fled the scene. After he was gone, Isis and Nephthys found the slain god's body and wept over it. While Isis was embracing the corpse, it revived for awhile and impregnated her. She later secretly gave birth tc Horus and brought him up in a place in the Delta without discovery. When the child was old enough, she sent him forth to avenge his father. Horus found the corpse of his father still preserved. Before the courl of the gods presided over by his grandfather Geb he refuted Seth's denial that he had murdered Osiris anc won the acclaint. of the court as Osiris' successor and king in his place. Seth had stolen the third eye of Osiris fixed in his forehead and betokening his kingship, sc Horus now fought Seth for it and recovered it, thus becoming king in actuality as well as in name. Horu., immediately took the eye to the corpse of his father and his father awoke, stood up, and recovered the control of his limbs. (So might the eye of the kingly sun bring life and resurrection to the grain lying moist in the soil.) But Osiris did not remain above ground; he went to the underworld to become the judge and god of the dead, while Horus, retaining the eye and wearing it, became the lord of the upper world, both as the ruler of Egypt (by identification with its kings) and its glittering sun.  {This seems to be the earliest version of the story that can be recovered. It should be said that the myth of Osiris and Isis was never written down in a connected fashion by the Egyptians themselves. By the time of Plutarch (first Century A.D.),who attempted to tell the story comprehensively, the myth finally had assumed this form: Osiris, the good and beneficent king, was tricked by Seth and a group of fellow‑conspirators into entering a cedar coffin, which was then quickly nailed shut and committed to the Nile, on whose current it floated out to sea. In great anguish Isis began a far‑flung search, which was finally successful on the Phoenician coast. On return to Egypt, she concealed the coffin and set about to rear her son by Osiris, Horns. Seth, while hunting by the light of the moon, came upon the coffin and angrily dismembered the body of Osiris, scattering its fourteen pieces in as many parts of Egypt. Isis renewed her anguished search, recovering and burying each piece of the corpse where she found it. Osiris returned from the netherworld and encouraged Horns to fight Seth. Horns fought and defeated Seth in several battles, the gods having affirmed his legitimacy as the son and heir of Osiris.}

Sun‑Worship

            But Horus was not the only sun deity. There were others, one of whom (Re) came to eclipse him. From one end of their land to the other, the Egyptians knew how much their crops depended on the light and warmth that sped out of the sun into the ground where the seed lay waiting. They were aware of this from the beginning. As has been said:

The all‑enveloping power and glory of the Egyptian sun is the most insistent fact in the Nile valley.... The Egyptian saw him in different, doubtless originally local forms.

Probably the oldest notion of him goes back to the days when the prehistoric Egyptians were still leading a hunting life in the Nile marshes, when they pictured the Sun‑god as a hunter poling or paddling himself across the reed‑grown marshes in a boat made by lashing together two bundles of reeds like a catamaran. Glimpses of this archaic notion are still preserved in the oldest passages of the Pyramid Texts, which often picture the Sun‑god ferrying across the celestial marshes in the "double reed‑boat". . . .

            [Later] the "double reed‑boat" was succeeded by a gorgeous royal barge like that of the earthly Pharaoh. In this luminous sun‑barque, one for the morning and the other for the evening, it was believed that the Sun‑god majestically crossed the celestial ocean as the Pharaoh sailed the Nile.

            This was Re (or Ra), the sun conceived in human form, and especially the noontide sun. The rising sun was Kheprer, who, after a brush with Apophis, the cloud‑dragon, appeared in the mandet boat ascending the morning sky; and the declining sun, going down in the mesektet boat to the horizon, was Atum. These were two sun‑gods older even than Re.

But the sun was also a bird and, again, a beetle. As bird he was Horus, the high‑flying falcon swiftly spanning the sky. (Indeed, the symbol most often used in all Egypt was simply the widespread wings of the mounting falcon, clearest sign of the rising sun.) More unusual was the identification of the sun‑god with the scarab or sacred dung‑beetle. Here the Egyptian peasant with nimble imagination transferred to the sky his observation of the diligent scarab rolling along the ground the ball of dung in which it was placing its eggs; he thought of the sun as a huge ball rolled along by a mighty sky‑beetle, whose name was Kheprer (or Khopri). It was common in later days for the figure of the scarab to be incised on seals, shown in amulets, or placed on the foreheads of the statues of kings; there was life and protection in it, and by it the power of death and darkness was held at bay.

At Heliopolis in lower Egypt during the Old Empire the priests of the sun‑god Atum combined him with Re. This was but the first step. Next, he was coordinated and fused with the various Horuses, from the "Horus of the horizon" (Harakhte) on through the other Horuses of the daylight hours. The winged beetle Kheprer was part of hian. And not only was he the sun as a natural force; he was also the power in kings that enabled them to overspread and protect their realms, as with wings. It is for this reason that the pharaohs, after having been called Horus in the early years of the Pyramid Age. assumed  ‑ by 2500 B.C. the title of "Son of Re." Their obelisks were ‑  built most likely as slender symbols of the sun's ray, and when they were lying in their long sleep within the mighty pyramids, symbols in their turn of the unquenchable sun rising in the east like the hill of creation from the primeval sea, they were one with the sun in death as in life. The sun, their father in life, was now in death their immortal life.

In the time of the empire a thousand years later, the queen had become the high priestess of the sun, and through the pharaohs who impersonated him the sun was the father of her children, who were gods from birth.

Meanwhile the sun had acquired still another dimension by becoming Amon‑Re. Amon was originally the local god of Thebes, in upper Egypt, and of the temple of Karnak close by, often enlarged and embellished that it might be a thing of utmost magnificence and splendor. When mighty Thebes became by conquest the ruling city of all Egypt (about 2000 B.C.), Amon grew into a god of national stature, and was combined with powerful Re as the greatest of the gods. A divine family was placed around him. Mut, the goddess of Thebes, with vulture headdress, was his wife, and the moon‑god, Khonsu, was their son. The ram was his representative among the animals. Before him stood the cobra, to signify that he was king of the gods, and above him hung the sun's winged disc.

The Other Gods

There were other gods. In Memphis, for example, the citizens worshiped an abstractly conceived god called Ptah, considering him to be the creator who conceived the world in his heart and by an utterance of his tongue ordered it to rise from primordial mud. He was, strangely enough, clad from head to foot like a mummy, as though to suggest that he came from a far past, his special history no longer known. We have several times mentioned Maat, the goddess of world law and truth, who usually appears in the Egyptian wall‑paintings of the judgment, standing at the doorway of the great hall where the heart of the dead is weighed against a feather. Safekht was the goddess of writing, Hu. the god of taste, Anubis the jackal guardian of the cemetery, Neit the goddess of hunting, holding bow and arrows. There were many others. There was Sokaris, governing the realm of the underworld traversed by the sun in the fourth and fifth hours of the night journey; he was pictured as falcon‑headed but with a human body. There was Min, wrapped like a mummy, but with his right arm raised and his phallus in erection, the protector of those who passed through the and regions between Egypt and the Red Sea. To extend the list would serve little purpose here. Suffice it to say that the names remaining only increase the feeling that the ancient Egyptians were enthusiastic polytheists, to say the least. Not only did they honor the many deities to whom Egypt gave birth, but also many foreign importations, like Anaitis, the Anahita of the Zoroastrians, and Qedesh or Ashtarth, the Ishtar or Consecrated Lover of Babylonia and Palestine.   {A later reaction from this (especially in the Delta) was to identify the foreign with the native gods‑a process of amalgamation tending finally toward monotheism.}

Doctrines of the Future Life

            However much the Egyptians enjoyed life‑and they did‑and however devoutly they honored the sun and     the Nile that helped them to prolong it, they dwelt in thought more than any other people known to us on something which at first sight seems the opposite of life‑the disposal of the dead and the after‑life of kings and commoners. At first they thought it was only their kings who were happy in the hereafter. But then, during the breakdown of pharaonic authority (2000-2000) the belief began to grow that others could hope for as much – that, either in the west or in the Field of Rushes, there was a chance of blessedness for everyone.   

It was not that there had ever been scepticism about an after‑life. There was plenty of evidence that the dead did not perish.    {Breasted suggests (in Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt) what some of this evidence was. "Experience in the land of Egypt has led me," he wrote, "to believe that [the insistent faith in the hereafter] was greatly favored and influenced by the fact that the conditions of soil and climate resulted in such a remarkable preservation of the human body as may be found under natural conditions nowhere else in the world. In going up to the daily task on some neighboring temple in Nubia, I was not infrequently obliged to pass through the corner of a cemetery, where the feet of a dead man, buried in a shallow grave, were now uncovered and extended directly across my path. They were precisely like the rough and calloused feet of the workmen in our excavations. How old the grave was I do not know, but anyone familiar with the cemeteries of Egypt, ancient and modem, has found numerous bodies or portions of bodies indefinitely old which seemed about as well preserved as those of the living. This must have been a frequent experience of the ancient  Egyptian, and like Hamlet with the skull of Yorick in his hands, he must often have pondered deeply as he contemplated these silent witnesses.  The surprisingly perfect  state of preservation in which he found his ancestors whenever the digging of a new grave disclosed them, must have greatly stimulated his belief in their continued existence, and often aroused his imagination to more detailed pictures of the realm and the life of the mysteriously departed." .} The Egyptians were therefore very naturally anxious to secure their immortal satisfactions.

            Their beliefs are hard to arrange logically. The .souls" we are about to discuss are not to be distinguished too sharply from the body, for the body and its spiritual elements were but various aspects of the total corporeal being of man as the Egyptians viewed it. Their thinking about this was far from systematic, and so our summary is something of a simplification.

An early notion convinced them of the existence of the ba or animating soul‑depicted as a human‑headed bird whose seat was the "heart" or "abdomen," but which flew from the body with the last breath. It loved its body, and returned to it after death with longing and hunger, its physical desire for food and drink undiminished. Hence its return was not wholly satisfactory unless the body were somehow preserved, food and drink provided, and its passage into and from the tomb made easy by an opening, such as a tiny chimney or air duct. But there was another soul. This was the ka, or the mental aspects of personality, the source of motivation and intuition. It was this soul that after death took up its residence in the life‑like statue of the deceased placed in the tomb, and saw and enjoyed the pictures and the models that portrayed its former life. Apparently the ka had its higher and lower coun­terparts, quite aside from the ba. It was sometimes pictured as two outstretched arms with a bird mounting between them. This bird was the ikhu or "spirit" (the highest intelligence), which flew off to heaven at death in the form of a bird. A lower counterpart was the "shadow" that everywhere accompanies a man walking in the sunlight, his khaibit. (Evidently here as elsewhere the Egyptians had some ower of analysis but little of the ability to reassemble or synthesize!)

That a happy hereafter was dependent on the preservation of the body seemed obvious. The Egyptians early set about securing, such preservation.  {When the idea arose that after three thousand years in thc Kingdom of 'Osiris the good soul returned to earth to re‑enter its old body, this motivation became still stronger.}  Eventually they learned the secret of mummification, entrusted to skilled professionals.  {Herodotus tells us how in his time (relatively late, of course) the best embalming was done. The internal organs and the brain having been removed through incisions, the embalmers, he says, would proceed thus: "They fill the belly with pure myrrh pounded up with cassia and other spices, except frankincense, and sew it together again. Having so done they keep it for embalming covered up in natron for seventy days, but for a longer time than this it is not permitted to embalm it; and when the seventy days are past, they wash the corpse and roll its whole body up in fine linen cut into bands, smearing these beneath with gum, which the Egyptians use generally instead of glue. Then the kinsfolk receive it from them and have a wooden figure made in the shape of a man, and when they have had this made they enclose the corpse, and having shut it up within, they store it in a sepulchral chamber, setting it upright against the wall."} 

Not only was the body thus preserved for the ba, and a statue besides provided as an abiding place for the ka, but the tomb was filled with all manner of furniture and provisions. The needs of the ba were met by jars of water, wine, grain, dates, cakes, and other foods, such as portions of beef and fowl that had been dehydrated or reduced to ashes. The ka was provided with chairs, beds, and even with chariots, of the usual size, and with hundreds of small models of womenfolk, servants, kitchen utensils and dishes, and many simu­lated foodstuffs, down to little wooden loaves and fishes. Combs, hairpins, and ointments were provided for primping, and carriages, boats, and various games for pleasure and pastime. Great treasures were in some cases included. The rich were surrounded in their long sleep with gilded and silver objects of art. Nothing was forgotten.

As to the models of womenfolk and servants, a whole chapter of the Book of the Dead was devoted to spells for vivifying them into action. They were expected to go to work for the dead in the underworld, and were called ushebtis or "answerers." The statuette of a man bearing a bag and a hoe might have a charm written upon his chest: "0 statuette, counted for X (name of deceased).... thou shalt count thyself for me at all times, to cultivate the fields, water the shores, transport sand of the east to the west, and say 'Here am L"'El This was a spell thought sufficient to effect the desired result.

And what of the history of the soul in the other world? There was no unanimity about that. Many different ideas were current at one time or another. It was early thought that the sky‑goddess Nut admitted favored souls (those of kings) to the region of the stars revolving around the Pole, a place high above all change and decay. The worshipers of Re had other expectations. In their tombs fully outfitted boats were placed so that they might sail across the eastern sea and join the barque of the sun‑god. In the mythological development of this idea, all sorts of difficulties were imagined, disagreeably hampering the soul in its initial journey to meet the sun. The eastern sea became Water Lily Lake, and the only way across it was on a ferry operated by a reluctant boatman who had to be coaxed to take a passenger. Sometimes the ferryman could not be persuaded, in which case the soul would have to get itself floated over the lake in a, cloud of incense, or take to wing in the form of a bird. On its way it would find everything alive and speaking, nothing inert or dead; even the boat oars, the boat itself, the objects it would have to pass after landing, had voices. Beyond the lake there would be further perils and delays, locked gates, encounters with hostile animals and serpents, strange wildernesses. When at length the soul would win its way to the sun, it might rest at last, or perhaps it might follow on with the sun to the west and under the earth into the twelve "caverns" of the night, each enclosed by the great gates that mark the hours.

Figure E2  Egyptian boat model for a tomb.  A dozen rowers guided by a pilot, who holds a weight for sounding, are rowing a master and mistress across the waters to the afterworld After arrival there, both boat and servants are at the disposal of the one whose death has made thejourney necessary.

            It is an interesting aspect of these conceptions that the dead were often thought to become stars or to be merged into the sun‑god himself, by a kind of multiple incarnation in him.

The Kingdom of Osiris

One of the oldest, perhaps the oldest conception of the after‑life, and one destined to come into great popularity after the Pyramid Age, was that of the kingdom of Osiris. How one got to it differed with period and place. According to one view:

            The transit of the soul to the blessed west of Osiris began at Abydos, up the long valley which leads to the Oasis road. The soul is represented setting out sturdily, staff in hand, to begin its long march. The Oasis was the frontier of the unknown. Beyond that lay the end of the world, at the mountains where the sun left the visible world to enter the underworld of stars, the Duat. There the fertile isles would be reached, where the corn grew higher than any on earth.

But some views were that the Osirian fields were in the north (the Delta) or beyond the sea in Syria, or, more remotely, in the Milky Way, the great white Nile of the sky.

Wherever it was, it was a pleasant region. There, upon the fertile land, lush with vegetation, and with grain twelve feet high, the fortunate soul could sit at ease under the shade trees, watching his slaves (the ushebtis) plough the black earth with oxen o enormous ears of grain or maize, while he played a leisurely game of checkers with his smiling wife or conversed with his friends.

 

Figure E3  Painting of the Judgment. Found in the tomb of Queen Meryet‑Amun and dating from about 1025 B.C., this painting on papyrus shows the Princess Entuiny appearing before Osiris, god of the dead, to justify herself and be admitted to his underworld realm. In this simplified conception, Maat or Truth, crowned by an ostrich feather, stands behind the princess, prompting her.

But because not everyone deserved so blissful a lot, judgment had to be passed before the soul‑ could gain entrance to these enchanted fields. As pictured in the Book of the Dead, the examination of the soul is made in the presence of Osiris himself and concerns goodness or wickedness. The soul is brought ‑ as we often see in the scenes pictured in the funeral papyri‑into the Hall of Truth by the jackal‑headed Anubis, guard of the cemetery, and is made to stand before Osir who is enthroned under a canopy and attended ( either side by Isis and their sister Nephthys. When the soul beholds the lord of the dead, it immediately begin to justify itself, and does so not by confessing and repenting any sins but by telling of the evil it has not done:

"Hail to thee, great god, lord of Truth .... Behold come to thee, I bring to thee righteousness .... I knew: wrong. I did no evil thing.... I did not do that which the god aborninates.... I allowed no one to hunger. I caused no one to weep. I did not murder. I did not command to murder. I caused no man misery. I did not diminish food in the temples .... I did not take away the food‑offerings of the dead ... I did not commit adultery.... I did not diminish the grain measure.... I did not load the weights of the balances. I did not deflect the index of the scales. I did not take milk from the mouth of the child. I did n drive away the cattle from their pasturage.... I did not dam the running water [and thus divert from others the waters of the irrigation canals at the time of the inundation].... I did not interfere with the god in his payments. I am purified four times, I am pure. . . .

            After a similar "negative confession‑ to each of the forty‑two judges sitting in a gallery as representatives of the nomes; of Egypt, the dead man's heart is balanced by Anubis in the judgment scales against an ostri feather (representing Maat or world law). If it is a he made light by goodness, and does not overweight the scale, the ibis‑headed Thoth, who is umpire and scribe reports the fact to Osiris, and the soul is then allowed to enter the blessed fields of Osiris' realm. But if the scales prove the soul to be evil, retribution overtakes it. According to some conceptions, it is destroyed by a strange creature, "The Devouress," with the head a jaws of a crocodile, the forequarters of a lion, and the hindquarters of a hippopotamus, waiting hungrily nearby, who springs forward and eats it. According to other conceptions it is thrown into a fiery hell, where it is punished severely. But there is always hope for a better issue.

Akhenaton's Venture in Monotheism

So far, all the conceptions we have examined a polytheistic, but the history of Egyptian religion pr, vides us at one point with a determined endeavor institute a monotheistic reform.

It sprang from the conviction enkindled in a your pharaoh, Amenhotep IV, in whose court monotheism had already found voice. Undoubtedly he must have heard the Theban sun‑hymn composed by two architects employed by his father Amenhotep III, which celebrated the sun under the appellation Aton (Solar Globe), in such words as these:

0 creator of what the earth brings forth....

... good creator who takes the greatest pains with his innumerable creatures

He who reaches the ends of the lands every day and beholds those who walk there

Every land adores him at his rising every day, in order to praise him.

By such words, and probably in sympathetic response to the urging of monotheistic enthusiasts, he was led to change the name of the national god from Amon to Aton and his own name from Amenhotep ("Amon is satisfied") to Akhenaton ("Pious to Aton"), and to order Aton to be worshiped as the one and only god the creator of all things and the sustainer of all creatures. In the temples of Egypt now, the priests who bowed before the exalted lord of creation chanted:

Thou dawnest beautifully in the horizon of the sky,

0 living Aton who wast the Beginning of life!

When thou didst rise in the eastern horizon,

Thou didst fill every land with thy beauty.

Thou art beautiful, great, glittering, high over eve land,

Thy rays, they encompass the lands, even to the end all that thou hast made.

In some of the noblest phrases in the literature of  Egyptian religion, they proclaimed the excellencies of Aton:

How manifold are thy works!

They are hidden before men,

0 sole God, beside whom there is no other.

Thou didst create the earth according to thy heart.

 

Thou didst make the distant sky in order to rise therein,

In order to behold all that thou hast made ...

The world subsists in thy hand,

Even as thou hast made them,

 

When thou hast risen they live,

When thou settest they die;

For thou art length of life of thyself,

Men live through thee

            The determined young monarch ordered the names and figures of Amon and the other gods expunged from all monuments, temples, and public records. Even Osiris was set aside as one to be forgotten. In order to create an entirely new and helpful atmosphere for his court, Akhenaton built a splendid new capital fur­ther down the Nile from Thebes and called it Akhetaton ("Horizon of Aton"). Similar cities, meant to serve as centers of the new cult, were projected in Nubia and Syria, then still within the Egyptian empire.

But the reform of Akhenaton was not destined to outlive him. His son‑in‑law, who succeeded him, yielded to the priests of the old Amon party and changed his name from Tutankhaton to Tutankhamon, the name by which he has become so well known today. In the restoration of the older forms of worship it was Aton's name that was now expunged in every public place.

            Amon‑Re, Osiris, Isis, and Horus resumed their former reign, not to yield ground again until Christianity, a more formidable foe, overthrew them beyond hope of restoration.