Ancient Egyptian Religion

Egyptian religion had no scripture, no creed, and no word that maps neatly onto "religion". What it had instead was maat (a term covering order, truth, justice and the correct arrangement of things), understood as established at the first moment of creation and under permanent pressure from isfet, disorder. Almost everything the state did in a religious register was framed as maintaining maat rather than as spreading a teaching.

The gods were numerous, local, and unstable in outline. They merged, split and absorbed one another: Ra of Heliopolis combined with Amun of Thebes as Amun-Ra without either ceasing to exist separately, and Osiris, Ptah and Sokar fused into a funerary composite. A god had a home city, a temple, a household and a cult image, and the daily service of that image was the core of temple religion. The statue was woken, washed, dressed, fed, and shut away again.

Ordinary Egyptians did not attend. Temples were staffed by rotating priesthoods and closed to the public, and lay contact with the great gods came mainly at festivals, when images were carried out in procession and could be put questions, with the answer read from the movement of the bearers.

The king appears in every temple relief as the officiant, whatever priest was actually doing the work. He was the point at which human action and divine order met, associated with Horus while living and with Osiris once dead. That is a statement about an office, and about how the state described itself. It is not evidence for what any individual Egyptian thought about the man holding it.

Nearly everything survives by accident of geography. Egyptian settlements lay on the floodplain, were rebuilt over, and now lie under cultivation, silt or water. Tombs and temples were placed on the desert margin, where mudbrick, papyrus, wood and painted plaster last. The result is a record dominated by the dead and by the monumental, and a corresponding risk of describing a religion of funerals when most Egyptians spent most of their lives doing something else.

The principal funerary sources form a rough sequence. The Pyramid Texts, carved in royal burial chambers from the late Old Kingdom, are the oldest substantial religious writings from Egypt. The Coffin Texts of the Middle Kingdom extend comparable material to officials and their families. From the New Kingdom the compilation conventionally called the Book of the Dead, whose Egyptian title means roughly going forth by day, was written on papyrus and bought in varying quality, sometimes with the buyer's name left to be filled in later.

None of these is a doctrinal statement. They are working texts meant to be effective for their owner, and they contradict one another freely on questions that a systematic theology would have had to settle.

Other evidence pulls against the funerary bias. The workmen's village at Deir el-Medina yielded letters, oracle questions, votive stelae and ostraca showing household gods, ancestor cult and personal appeals of a kind the temple record barely mentions. Greek and Roman writers described Egyptian practice from outside and are useful but unreliable. Almost all of the Egyptian material became readable only after 1822, when Champollion established the mixed phonetic and semantic working of the script, and readings of individual texts are still being revised.

Egyptians did not expect to survive death automatically. Continued existence was an achievement, dependent on the body remaining intact, on the name being spoken, on offerings continuing, and on the dead person knowing what to do.

A person was understood as several components rather than a body plus a soul. The ka was a vital double that needed sustenance and received the offerings. The ba, drawn as a bird with a human head, could leave the tomb and return to it. The akh was the effective, transfigured state the dead hoped to reach. Mummification preserved the physical anchor for these, and the elaborate technique visible in surviving bodies is a technical response to a specific requirement rather than a general reverence for corpses.

The best-known scene in the funerary papyri shows the heart weighed against the feather of maat, with Anubis at the balance, Thoth recording, and a composite creature waiting to consume anyone who fails. It is tempting to read this as moral judgement in the later sense, but the same manuscripts supply spells to stop the heart from testifying against its owner, which suggests a test to be passed by preparation as much as by conduct.

Cost governed all of it. Full mummification, a decorated tomb, a stocked burial and an endowment to keep the offerings coming were available to a small minority. The great majority of Egyptians were buried simply, in the sand, and what they expected is largely unrecorded. Any account of Egyptian ideas about death is in practice an account of what a wealthy minority could afford to have written down.