Egyptian

Egypt did not have one pantheon. It had several, each attached to a city, and it never felt obliged to reconcile them. Heliopolis derived the world from Atum and organised nine gods around him; Memphis had Ptah think and speak it into being; Hermopolis began with eight primordial powers in the dark water; Thebes made Amun the hidden source of all of it. These accounts contradict each other and were copied side by side for millennia.

What follows is a pantheon whose headship moves. Ra is supreme, then Amun rises with Thebes and is fused into Amun-Ra, then Aten is briefly imposed and then erased. Which god is greatest in Egypt is substantially a question about which city is greatest, and the theology tracks the politics without embarrassment.

Succession in the myth is not overthrow but retirement. Ra grows old, humanity rebels, and after the reprisal he withdraws to the sky on the back of the celestial cow, leaving the world to be governed by others. The struggle that matters afterwards is not a son displacing a father but Horus and Set contending for an office that a tribunal must adjudicate, over decades, with legal argument.

The king is the hinge between the human and the divine. He is Horus while alive and becomes Osiris at death, and by the New Kingdom the ordinary dead were making the same claim for themselves. A very few commoners, Imhotep foremost, were raised to godhood centuries after they died.

Egyptian religious material survives in enormous quantity and with a heavy bias: almost all of it is funerary, monumental or temple-based, which means it records what elites paid to have written on durable surfaces.

The oldest large body is the Pyramid Texts, carved inside royal pyramids at the end of the Old Kingdom, spells to secure the king's passage and standing after death. In the Middle Kingdom comparable material appears on the coffins of officials, and by the New Kingdom the tradition has become the collection of spells conventionally called the Book of Going Forth by Day, written on papyrus and available to anyone who could pay for a copy. Read in sequence these show a religion widening its access rather than changing its mind.

Temple inscriptions supply the other half. The very late temples at Edfu and Dendera carry long, systematic accounts of myth and ritual, and they are simultaneously the fullest and the latest evidence, written when Egypt was ruled from elsewhere and its priesthood was consolidating what it knew.

Two absences shape everything. There is little that records private belief as opposed to prescribed practice, though the workmen's village at Deir el-Medina is a partial exception. And the tradition ends within a documented span: the last dated hieroglyphic inscription is of the late fourth century of the common era, and the temple at Philae was closed in the sixth. After that the script was unreadable for over a thousand years, until the bilingual decree on the Rosetta Stone reopened it.