Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Egypt gathers three cities that each served, in turn, as a religious capital of a different age, from the pharaonic cult of Amun to the modern seat of two living patriarchates.

Thebes, known to the Egyptians as Waset, was the cult center of Amun and effectively Egypt's religious capital through the New Kingdom, its temples at Karnak and Luxor on the east bank facing the royal tombs of the west; the priesthood of Amun grew wealthy and politically powerful enough to rival the throne, and the fusion of Amun with the sun god Ra produced Amun Ra as a national deity. Alexandria, founded on the coast by Alexander the Great in 331 BCE, grew within a century into the largest city of the Hellenistic world, a deliberately cosmopolitan capital where Greek, Egyptian and Jewish religious life mixed; its Ptolemaic rulers promoted the syncretic cult of Serapis, and its later Christian community, home to Origen's catechetical school and the presbyter Arius, made it a central battleground of fourth century Christological debate. It remains the seat of the Coptic Orthodox Patriarchate of Alexandria.

Cairo was founded in 969 as the Fatimid capital, and the mosque and teaching institution of al-Azhar, begun at the same time, has become one of the most influential centers of Sunni learning anywhere. Older settlements it absorbed carry their own histories: Coptic Cairo holds churches of the Egyptian Orthodox tradition and the Ben Ezra synagogue, whose storeroom yielded the Cairo Geniza, several hundred thousand medieval Jewish documents. Cairo remains the seat of both the Coptic Orthodox papacy and Egypt's Sunni religious establishment.

Three different gods, three different centuries, and in Cairo two of the resulting authorities still governing side by side.