Gods of Ancient Egypt

Barbara Watterson

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2003
• Print ISBN: 9780750932622
• eBook ISBN: 9780752495026
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ancient History

Illustrated in colour, this is an introduction for the general reader to Egyptian mythology and its mysteries. It includes a concise introduction to general aspects of Egyptian religion, followed by specific sections devoted to the most important of the gods. With sections on personal religion and temple ceremony, there are also accounts of mythological stories associated with the gods, and a map of the principle cult centres.

PART ONE

INTRODUCTION

Religion can be thought of as the recognition by human beings of a superhuman power that controls the universe and everything that is, was or shall be in it. Each individual human being can consider that the superhuman controlling power is a deity worthy of being loved; or capable of inspiring awe, obedience, and even fear. The effect of these feelings on individuals can lead to the setting-up of a system of worship of the deity, and to a drawing-up of a code of beliefs and conduct inspired by their religious faith. Three of the major religions of the modern world, Judaism, Islam and Christianity, recognize a single god. Each is a revelation of one basic truth; its message, which in the case of Christianity and Islam, must be preached to the unconverted, is contained in a holy book, and the Torah, the Koran and the Gospels can all be used to teach the dogma of their faith. In ancient Egypt, religion was not like this. The Egyptians recognized many gods; they did not have one universal system of religious belief. They had no sacred books analogous to the Bible or the Koran, there were no theological commentaries or treatises, neither was there any dogma.

The polytheism of the ancient Egyptians led to tolerance. Apart from two brief periods in their history when there was an attempt to promote a solar monotheism, the Egyptians never suffered from persecutions carried out in the name of religion: there were no Egyptian saints, no martyrs. The Egyptians were a gentle people for whom the family was important. Hence, their religion was based on family life. The gods were given wives, goddesses given husbands; both had children.

Temples continued the domestic theme, being called ‘mansions’ of the gods (

wt n

r), and architecturally they were based on the house form, with rooms in them for eating and sleeping. The innermost sanctuary was regarded as the bedroom of the god; and it was surrounded by ‘guest bedrooms’ for visiting deities. The daily ritual of the temple was domestic in form: the morning ritual gave the god his breakfast; the evening ritual gave him his dinner. Egyptian religion did not indulge in bloodbaths with animal or human sacrifices. Instead, each god lived in peace in his home, the temple, very often as part of a trinity of deities, a holy family consisting of father, mother and child.

For much of their history, the Egyptians were accommodating of other people’s gods and always ready to receive additions to their own pantheon. They received but they did not feel any great need to give: hence there was no real attempt to persuade non-Egyptians to worship Egyptian gods. In ancient Egypt the basis of religion was not belief but cult, particularly the local cult which meant more to the individual. Thus, many deities flourished simultaneously and the Egyptians were seemingly ever-ready to adopt a new god or to change their views about the old.

The predominant characteristics of much of Egyptian religion were animism, fetishism and magic. There was also the belief that certain animals possessed divine powers – the cow, for example, represented fertility, the bull virility – which led to the cult of sacred animals, birds and reptiles, each of which was considered to be the manifestation on earth of a divine being. It was this aspect of Egyptian religion more than any other that the Greeks found curious and the Romans horrifying. Both Greeks and Romans were happy about the polytheism, being polytheistic themselves. However, their own gods, although they were celestial, immortal beings, were nevertheless recognizably human: they had human shapes, and were possessed of human emotions and frailties. But the Egyptian gods! The most cursory look at reliefs carved on temple walls showing representations of gods revealed one with the body of a man and the head of a hawk; another with the body of a man and the head of a jackal. Yet another man seemed to have a beetle in place of a head, while the woman standing next to him had the head of a lioness. They were all gods; and so were the vultures and cobras hovering in attendance on them.

Inside the temples, the Egyptians kept real live cats, bulls, ibises or hawks, and worshipped them as gods; and when they died, mummified and buried them as they did their kings. The Roman satirist, Juvenal, exclaimed:

Who does not know, Volusius, what monsters are revered by demented Egyptians? One lot worships the crocodile; another goes in awe of the ibis that feeds on serpents. Elsewhere there shines the golden effigy of the sacred long-tailed monkey.¹

Juvenal would perhaps have been even more scornful had he realized the number and diversity of the gods worshipped by Egyptians, who had created hundreds of deities, probably more than any people before or since.

If the Greeks and Romans found Egyptian religion difficult to comprehend, many modern Europeans have found it impossible. In the nineteenth century, several Egyptologists, themselves brought up in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, sought to prove that although the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians were complex, their religion was essentially monotheistic. Two great French Egyptologists, Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832) and Emmanuel de Rougé (1811–72), without whose work we would not know as much as we do, insufficient as that is, about Egyptian religion, subscribed to that belief. Champollion, the founder of Egyptology who deciphered the hieroglyphic script, and de Rougé, the founder of Egyptian Philology, the first man to lay down the correct rules for reading and translating hieroglyphic texts, were lauded by another great French Egyptologist, Gaston Maspero (1846–1916), who declared that Champollion had deciphered the texts, and de Rougé given the method which allowed them to be utilized, thus bringing to perfection Champollion’s discovery. The two men, however, read Egyptian texts and came to the conclusion that the Egyptians were monotheists. Champollion maintained that Egyptian religion was a pure monotheism which ‘manifested itself externally by a symbolic polytheism’. And de Rougé, in the introduction to his edition of a hieratic text of the Book of the Dead, seemed to indicate that, in his opinion, the Egyptians believed in one supreme, eternal, almighty God, who had much in common with the God of both Hebrews and Christians.

A few years later, Wallis Budge, the doyen of British Egyptology, enlarged on the theories of the two Frenchmen, explaining that the Egyptians were monotheists, but different from Christian monotheists. The Egyptians had one god – the Sun God – and all other gods were but forms of the Sun God. Thus it can be seen that in modern times there has been reluctance to accept that the Egyptians, regarded as being advanced, intelligent and much to be admired in many ways, could yet be primitive enough to worship so many gods let alone so many peculiar gods.

Yet the desire to imagine the object of worship in tangible form is common to most people: god tends to be visualized in mankind’s image. The Christian God, as depicted, for example, by Michelangelo, is a venerable old man with a beard; and Christian iconography reflects the conventions of the time in which a work was painted or sculpted. One supposes that the ancient Egyptians looked to their own surroundings for manifestations of divinity, as did other peoples in the early stages of development in their societies. Seen objectively, the Egyptians’ worship of a falcon god, for example, is surely no more strange a manifestation of religious belief than was the image of the Angel Gabriel with his halo and enormous wings. And the Egyptians could daily watch the sweep of a falcon across the sky, whereas the number of people who have beheld the Angel Gabriel is not large!

ONE

THE LAND OF EGYPT AND ITS INFLUENCE UPON THE RELIGION OF THE ANCIENT EGYPTIANS

It is a truism to say that the activities of people everywhere are influenced by the conditions under which they live, and religious thought is no exception to this. Before the days of mass communication, an Eskimo, living in a cold climate, had no experience of any great heat generated by the sun. His idea of hell, therefore, was of a place of extreme cold. Conversely, a man who had lived all his life in a hot climate could only visualize hell as an even hotter place than any with which he had ever had acquaintance.

Most ancient Egyptians lived in a river valley, 1,250 km long from ancient Egypt’s southern border at Aswan to its northern boundary on the Mediterranean coast. For much of its length the Nile valley is hemmed in by ancient river terraces. The only naturally verdant land was that watered by the great river which flowed through the valley, the Nile; the rest was desert. In some places, the green strip of land was just over 1 km wide; in others, its width stretched up to 21 km. For the final 160 km or so, the Nile fanned out into the Delta, a triangular, flat area of tributaries, marshes and fields measuring some 240 km across at its widest point.

The land in which the Egyptians lived was ‘the gift of the River’,¹ according to the Greek traveller Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the middle of the fifth century BC. Every year, the Nile, swollen by the torrential rain that fell in Uganda and Ethiopia, where the river had its twin sources, and by melting snow from the Ethiopian mountains, flooded its banks. Herodotus noted that when the Nile inundated the land, ‘the whole country is converted into a sea and the towns, which alone remain above water, look like the islands in the Aegean’.² The Inundation which came annually to Egypt was only halted at the end of the nineteenth century AD with the building of a dam at Aswan. After completion of this, the Old Aswan Dam, in 1902, the flood waters which had caused the Inundation were held back in a great 230 km long reservoir behind the dam and only allowed through its 180 sluices in a regulated flow.

The annual flood not only irrigated the narrow river valley of Egypt: it had another inestimable benefit. When the flood waters receded, they left behind them a rich alluvial silt, scoured from the soil of Uganda and Ethiopia as the White and Blue Niles flowed through their respective countries before joining together at Khartoum in the Sudan. This silt enabled the Egyptians to become a settled agricultural society rather than desert-dwelling nomads. The Nile brought prosperity to Egypt: the desert that bounded the area covered by the Inundation gave her security, for it was an effective barrier against attack from other countries.

The desert also isolated Egypt against outside influences. This and the narrowness of the land in which they lived, meant that the Egyptians had limited horizons both physically and metaphorically. They were an intensely inward-looking people, distrustful of foreigners. Indeed, they looked upon non-Egyptians as less than human: their word for mankind, remeth, was the same as that for Egyptians. Whenever they spoke of the inhabitants of other countries, they usually appended a derogatory epithet – ‘that vile Kushite’ or ‘the wretched Beduin’. The phenomenon is not unknown to other peoples isolated from outside contacts: the Eskimos call themselves Inuit, ‘the men’, meaning human beings; to the Chinese, the term for ‘foreign’ and ‘non-human’ is the same.

The regularity of the Inundation and the security afforded by the desert not only moulded the mental attitudes of the Egyptians, they also determined the way in which they lived. Life in Egypt depended upon the vagaries of the Nile. If the annual flood was too high, havoc ensued. If the flood was too low, a smaller area of land was rendered fit for the sowing of crops and less food could be grown. If a low flood was repeated over several consecutive years, shortage of food was the inevitable outcome, sometimes reaching famine proportions.

The early Egyptians soon learned how important the Nile was to them. Over 5,000 years ago, the many separate tribes which then inhabited Egypt began to cooperate with each other. They banded together to make the best use of the Nile by harnessing and conserving the water, by building dykes, irrigation ditches and canals. In so doing, they became a unified society ruled by a central authority which was responsible for directing the control of the water, building and maintaining dykes and canals and storing the agricultural produce of the nation. They became, in fact, one of the earliest civilizations; and their conservatism, allied with their isolation behind natural barriers, ensured that they were to enjoy that civilization for over 3,000 years.

Many aspects of life in ancient Egypt were influenced by the Nile. The seasons of the year were determined by the behaviour of the River; there were three of them: Inundation (akhet, which means ‘flooded’), the four months (July–October, provided the lunar and solar calendars were in step: see page 29) during which the land was covered by the flood waters of the Nile; Winter (peret, which means ‘coming forth’), the four months (November–February) during which the fields emerged from the water and seed was sown; and Summer (shomu, which perhaps means ‘deficiency of water’), the four months (March–June) during which the harvest was gathered.

The Nile determined property values. Land in Egypt was divided into three categories: first, that which always received the benefit of the Inundation, second, that which sometimes did, and third, that which never did; and taxes were assessed accordingly. Even Justice was influenced by the Nile. There were incessant wrangles over rights to use water, or over boundaries that had been blurred during the Inundation, and many of these cases came to court. The importance of the Nile and its water was reflected in the accounts men gave of themselves in the Afterlife; or left as their records for posterity. The declaration that a man had not ‘held up the water in its season’ or ‘built a dam against running water’ or ‘diverted his neighbour’s water for his own use’ was held to be of equal importance with the avowal of never having committed murder or robbery.

The Nile, which the Egyptians called the River (åtrw), came, or so they thought, from the place where the world began. Accordingly, they oriented themselves southwards towards the cavern at Aswan where the Nile had its mythological source (see page 63). The mythological cause of the Inundation was the goddess Isis, weeping copious tears into the Nile in commemoration of her dear, dead husband, Osiris; and every year the Egyptians celebrated the event on the Night of Clouds (Gerekh-en-Haty), the great festival that marked the beginning of the Inundation, an event that modern Egyptians celebrated before the building of the Aswan Dam as the Night of the Tear Drop (Leilet el-Nuktah: 18 June).

Considering that the Nile was so vital to the Egyptians, it is surprising to discover that this great river was not elevated to the position of most important god in the land. In fact, the Nile as such was not deified at all. Instead, it was represented by Hapy, the Spirit or Essence of the Nile. Many are the figures of Hapy that can be seen in temples, carved on the dadoes that run along the bases of walls within the temple; he is depicted as a man with a pendulous belly (always a sign of a prosperous and well-fed man to the ancient Egyptians, a man to be respected) and the breasts of a woman, wearing on his head clusters of Nile plants.

Thus, the characteristics peculiar to the land of Egypt – a long, narrow valley surrounded and protected by desert, a river which ensured a plentiful supply of water and fertile soil, a climate which had little rainfall and no snow or fog, a land on which the sun shone constantly but which was prevented from turning into an arid waste by that plentiful supply of water – made the ancient Egyptians into a highly conservative, parochial, even complacent, society. They lived in a land that was productive but nevertheless demanded constant hard work, and forced its inhabitants to be practical. The Egyptians, therefore, tended to be people of little imagination, who did not indulge in any great flights of fancy. They were parochial: their eyes were turned on their own neighb...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Note on Transliteration
• Chronological Table
• Egyptian Place-names
• Map
• Principal Cult-centres
• Part One
• Part Two The Major Gods of Egypt
• Part Three
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography and Further Reading