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GODS AND MEN Ili EGYPT

300o BCE To 395 CE

FRANÇOISE DUNAND AND CHRISTIANE ZNIE-COCHE

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY DAVID LORTON
GODS AND MEN IN EGYPT
GODS AND MEN
IN EGYPT
3000 BCE To 395 CE

FRANÇOISE DUNAND AND

CHRISTIANE ZIVIE-COCHE

TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY

DAVID LORTON

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London
This translation was prepared with the generous assistance of the French
Ministry of Culture—Centre national du livre/Ouvrage publié avec le
concours du Ministère français chargé de la culture—Centre National du
Livre

Originally published by © Armand Colin, 2002, © VUEF/Armand Colin

2002.

Copyright © 2004 by Cornell University

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parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission
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First published 2004 by Cornell University Press

First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 2004

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunand, Françoise.
[Dieux et hommes en Egypte. English]
Gods and men in Egypt : 3,000 BCE to 395 CE / by Françoise Dunand
and Christiane Zivie-Coche ; translated from the French by David Lorton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN o-8014-4165-X (alk. paper)
1. Egypt—Religion. 2. Mythology, Egyptian I. Zivie-Coche,
Christiane. II. Title.
BL2441.3.D8613 2004
299 ' .31 —dc22
2004001927
ISBN 0-8014-8853-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

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CONTENTS

Preface, by Christiane Zivie-Coche ix

Translator's Note xvii

BOOK I. PHARAONIC EGYPT

Christiane Zivie-Coche
PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS
1. What Is a God? 5
The Gods Exist 5
Netjer, God 7
Figures of the Divine 13
Name, Person, and Function 24
The Organization of the Divine 29
Stories About the Gods 36
What Transcendence? 40

2. Cosmogonies, Creation, and Time 42

Egyptian Ontology 42
Before Creation, Nun 45
The Emergence of Being 47
The Place of the Emergence of Being 5o
The Time of the Emergence of Being 52
The Techniques of Creation 55
Creation and Its Categories 58
Time and Creation 64

3. The Gods on Earth 71

The Chronological Evolution of Temples and the Problem of Sources 71
The Dwelling of the God 83
The Cult: Rituals and Liturgies 89
The Grammar of the Temple 96
The Officiants 99
Vi CONTENTS

PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

4. Of Men and Gods 107
Personal Piety: Attempt at Definition 107
Personal Piety and Institutions 111
Magic 122
Personal Piety in the Course of a Lifetime 128
Modes of Human-Divine Relationship 136
The Conduct of Life 143

5. "Death Will Come" 153

Knowing Death 154
What to Do? 166
Terra Incognita and Its Paths 183

BOOK II. PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT

Françoise Dunand
PART I. RELIGION AND POWER
1. From the Lagides to the Roman Emperors: The New Pharaohs
and Their Politico-Religious Ideology 197
The Sacralization of Power 198
Themes and Instruments of Royal Propaganda 202

2. The Reactions of the Priests 206

The Ptolemaic Period: An Ambiguous Game of
Opposition/Collaboration 206
The Roman Period: A Muzzled and Resigned Clergy 210

3. A New God: The "Creation" of Sarapis 214

The Greek Contribution and the Egyptian Contribution 214
Who Was Sarapis? 216
Sarapis: Dynastic God, God of the Polis, God "for the Greeks"? 218

PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

4. The Vitality of the Traditional Religion 225
The Sanctuaries 225
Upsurge in Theological Activity 233
"All the Egyptians Render a Cult to Them": Isis and Osiris 235

5. New Gods and Cults 240

Greek Gods and Cults 240
Royal Cult and Imperial Cult 247
Judaism in Egypt 253
Birth and Spread of Christianity in Egypt 259
CONTENTS V ii

6. Problems and Controversies 267

Changes in the Image of the Gods 267
Polytheisms and Monotheisms: From Coexistence to Conflict 276
PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS
7. Official Liturgies: The World of the Temples and Its Activities 285
A Greek Festival: The Ptolemaia of Alexandria 285
An Egyptian Festival: The "Festival of the Uplifting of the Sky
and the Creation of the Potter's Wheel" at Esna 289
In the World of the Temples: The Daily Life of an Egyptian Temple 294

8. From "Learned" Religion to "Popular" Religion 299

Outside the World of the Temples: Private Religious Practice 299
A Form of Consecration: Reclusion in the Temples 306
From Everyday Cares to Anguish Before the Unknown:
Oracles and Magic 311

9. Funerary Beliefs and Rituals 319

Images of the Hereafter: Egyptian Vision and Greek Vision 319
The Persistence of Traditional Practices 325
From "Pagan" Funerary Rituals to Christian Customs:
A Manifest Continuity 333
Conclusion 339

Glossary of Gods and Goddesses 343

Maps 351
Chronology 353
Bibliography 357
Index 369
PREFACE

POLYTHEISM AND MONOTHEISM

What is religion, or a religion? At first glance, the answer might seem obvious.
People know, or think they know, what religion means, especially their own. But
things are not so simple. A single word covers different realities far removed from
one another, according to whether we are considering an ancient polytheistic re-
ligion, a revealed monotheism, or an African animism. Still, these realities un-
doubtedly have something in common, for it is always a question of the attitude
of humankind in the face of the invisible, of modalities of humankind's rela-
tionship to the imaginary realm of religion that we must try to understand from
the inside, following the approach proper to each culture. There is a great risk
and temptation to analyze, and often to judge, a religion by our own criteria, of
our Western system of thought, and to pursue an enterprise authorized by many
centuries of usage, namely, that of mental ethnocentrism.
Egypt has not escaped this process. From the outset of Egyptology, and even
long before it, in the time of the Greek historiographers and that of more mod-
ern Egyptomaniacs, manifestations of the religious in the pharaonic era have
aroused a curiosity that has been attentive but often mixed with misunder-
standing or sarcasm. If we wish to indulge in paradox, we would stress that in
the language of that land, whose inhabitants Herodotus said were the most reli-
gious of peoples, there was no equivalent of our word religion. The Egyptians
undoubtedly had no need to forge such a concept, for the domain of the reli-
gious was in no way delimited and assigned to a precise place in their life; rather,
it had some of the characteristics of what we call philosophy, morality, and pol-
X PREFACE

itics. More than any other, the study and analysis of the phenomenon of religion,
which in human affairs touches on the invisible, are subject to two factors of
evaluation that often remain implicit or unacknowledged. The subjectivity of
the author, his or her personal convictions, which play more of a determining
role than is commonly admitted, is one of these factors. Paul Veyne has well
demonstrated that in history objectivity is an illusion. What, then, are we to say
about an ancient religion, when we are approaching one of the most sensitive ar-
eas in the functioning of the human mind? The second factor resides, in a rather
obvious manner, in the currents of thought that prevail at any given moment.
Clearly, scholars have renounced the positivism of the nineteenth century, and
the adherents of the school of Frazer are now held in little regard. Contempo-
rary understanding of religious phenomena has been highly influenced by an-
thropology and structuralism (more so than by psychoanalysis), but in twenty
years some new approach undoubtedly will shed fresh light on our perception
of homo religiosus. Scholars of Egyptian religion have often been preoccupied
with its origins, which remain obscure. Theories about fetishism or primitive an-
imism have been invalidated by a better understanding of the archaic docu-
mentation, and it is scarcely useful to return to them, any more than to the
notion of a progressive transition from a zoomorphism to an anthropomor-
phism of the gods and goddesses, which is categorically contradicted by the phe-
nomenon of animal cults in the later stages of Egyptian history.
The heart of the problem has always been the opposition between monothe-
ism and polytheism and the desire, whether explicit or surreptitiously dissimu-
lated, to catch sight of the traces of a monotheism, even a bastard one, beneath
the excrescences of polytheism. There have been various theories about either a
monotheism present in the original substrate of Egyptian religion before being
eventually corrupted or a monotheism emerging from the dross of divine pro-
fusion so as to approach a unity. These different theses have been thoroughly
studied by Erik Hornung in his work Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The
One and the Many.
Western thought has difficulty abandoning a scale of values that places mono-
theism and the uniqueness of God on a higher level than divine plurality while
at the same time allowing for the postulation, if only tacitly, of a solid link be-
tween Egypt and the religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. "Egypt, cra-
dle of monotheism," proclaim the publicity posters conceived by the official
tourism bureaus. To speak of a religion, even a dead one, is never a neutral thing,
never without emotional or even political implications for the present. We might
believe that this somewhat scholastic quarreling is a thing of the past, at least in
the sphere of the history of religions, but it is not. "Encore le monothéisme"
(monotheism once again) is the title of an article by Philippe Derchain, for to
the multiplicity of the divine described by Hornung there is now opposed the
primacy of the transcendence discovered by Jan Assmann in Egyptian religion
at the end of the New Kingdom, the ancestor of all gnostic doctrines.
PREFACE xi

If we set aside this divergence in points of view, whose roots lie less in reli-
gious reality than in the eye scholars cast on it, we must nevertheless remain at-
tentive to our attitudes in the face of the imaginary realm of people far removed
from ourselves. To carry on about ethnocentrism and lend credence to a certain
relativism should in no way obviate a form of sympathy with regard to people
different from us. We must try to penetrate into their way of living and think-
ing, while in the process abstracting ourselves from our own, but also knowing
that across time and space the human community has always faced some of the
same questions and fears in a way that has not radically differed and that can still
be easily apprehended: the anguish of death and anxious questioning about what
lies beyond it, the search for an explanation of the forces that govern the world,
the need for succor in the face of the precariousness of life.

TEXTUALITY AND ORALITY

The sources at our disposal do not make it easy to penetrate into Egyptian reli-
gion. Thanks to the death of pharaonic civilization, they are fragmentary, and
some have been lost in their entirety. Those that remain are sometimes difficult
to interpret. They are not messages that the Egyptians sought to leave to us in
order to be understood, and they can be inscrutable. Unlike ethnographers and
anthropologists, we shall never be able to confront an ancient Egyptian and ask
him questions ... though that exercise can be deceptive, as fieldworkers have
sometimes discovered at their expense.
The sources are thus biased. All of them are written, and because the Egyp-
tians themselves accorded a fundamental role to the written word, Egyptologists
are themselves blithely led down this path, perhaps adding something of their
own to ancient reality. The fact is that we cannot disregard, under pretext that it
has not survived to us, all the oral tradition of a civilization whose writings re-
flect only a part of it. In the area of religion, this other, hidden part, that of oral-
ity, is certainly more important than is generally acknowledged. Though cult and
festival rites carried out in the temples are minutely described on papyrus or
stone, we often know myths only by allusions to them. And this fact is not nec-
essarily because of the loss of documents, but because this is how the ancient
Egyptians did things. A brief notation, obscure to us, was enough to call a myth
in all its details to the mind of a literate person or a priest. There are also texts
alluding to secrets regarding a deity and his or her rites that were not to be di-
vulged. We must thus imagine that those who knew these secrets passed them
along orally. Though we cannot cast doubt on the validity of the written word,
we must place it in a more general context. In fact, if these texts did not exist, we
would know nothing of what the ancient Egyptians thought, but only their tal-
ent for construction work.
xii PREFACE

LACK OF CANONIZATION

In the matter of the validity of texts, there is another aspect that must be em-
phasized. Notwithstanding their distinct will to textualize, the Egyptians evi-
dently never, or at least, hardly ever, deemed it necessary to establish and adhere
to canonical texts. In fact, one version of the Book of the Dead, revised during
Dynasty 26, more than six centuries after this collection of texts made its ap-
pearance on papyri of the New Kingdom, ended by prevailing in the great ma-
jority of the examples known from that period on. This, however, is an
exceptional case. Egyptian religion was a religion of books, but it was not a Re-
ligion of the Book. Far from wanting to limit their theological reflection by stop-
ping it once and for all and by declaring it untouchable and dogmatic, they
preferred to keep their texts open to reflection according to their methods of as-
sociation and accumulation; it was as though their approach to the divine drew
ever greater strength from the multiplication of combinations, borrowing here
and there to unite and compare the multiplicity of viewpoints. The Egyptians
were fond of glossing. The same was true of Jews and Christians, but scholars
write their glosses in the margins of the Book. In Egyptian religion, the gloss was
at the heart of the theological process, giving rise to new speculations on the na-
ture of the divine. There was thus no canonical text to which reference was made,
but only points of view, though some of them acquired nearly the force of law.
Though it is difficult for us to do, when we find a text affirming something that
contradicts what we read elsewhere, we must assess the importance and the cred-
ibility we are to lend it.
This relative freedom of thought granted to theologians in a culture that was
nevertheless highly codified and obedient to strict norms perhaps explains the
fact that the system did not function like that of a revealed religion. At its heart,
there reigned what can perhaps be characterized as a tautology: the gods were
what they were. This was not an article of faith, it was not revealed to people in
the act of discovering transcendence. It was a physical reality that imposed itself
like day and night, something incapable of being called into question. But at the
same time, all pronouncements of this reality were possible, however more or
less approximate. No god proclaimed his existence; it was people who pro-
claimed it in their own way, and their ways were many.

RELIGIONS ... OR ONE RELIGION

This multiplicity of approaches to the divine ended in fragmentation, in an ex-

plosion (at least apparently) of religious thought. Drawing on an immemorial
era of which we have at best a partial knowledge, that of prehistory, the first the-
ologians at the dawn of history, when writing took form, spoke and wrote, each
PREFACE

in his own way, of the origins of the world, the succession and multiplicity of
the gods, and their destiny. This diversity eventually burst forth from one tem-
ple to another, and each town boasted of "its" god or goddess, who was greater
than all the others. We may add that forbidden acts, sometimes called taboos,
that were attached to the cult of a given deity did not usually extend beyond the
nome where that deity was revered, and to which the god or goddess was often
native.
In view of such facts, it is but a simple step to maintain that there was no sin-
gle Egyptian religion expressing a coherent imaginary system that was proper to
that culture, but rather a plurality of juxtaposed religions, rubbing shoulders and
sometimes interacting with one another. This step has been taken. We may add
the evident (and very real) opposition between the religion of the temples, of the
thinkers, of an elite devoted to intellectual pursuits and capable of soaring to
what may be called spiritual heights, and that of the people, ignorant and filled
with superstition. From that time on, what remained of "the" Egyptian religion?
Nothing, or almost nothing: a confused, illogical agglomeration, of which mod-
ern researchers can make a point-by-point description, rich in details and pecu-
liarities, but lacking in perspective, from which they glean, according to their
interests, some characteristic that seems pertinent to them, or revelatory of the
Egyptian mentality, but without their being able to attach it to some guiding
principle capable of linking all the religious phenomena manifested by a given
culture.
The development of religious anthropology and the influence of structural-
ism have overcome this narrow vision of things. Not that we may boast pre-
sumptuously of having arrived at a definitive understanding of Egyptian
religion: better knowledge of the sources (and this knowledge can only improve
through ever closer analysis), and new methods of approaching them, will surely
lead to yet another vision. Today, we can at least recognize, under the multitude
of manifestations of religiosity in Egypt, a common substrate in which all the
theologies, all the rituals and myths, find their source. Beyond all the local dif-
ferences, which the Egyptians never sought to suppress (indeed, quite the con-
trary), certain similar structures guided theological speculation, whether about
cosmogony or about the relationship between the one and the many.
The ethical stance of individuals in the face of life and their reaction in the
face of death were the same throughout Egypt, reflecting no local particularism.
In the instructions and the wisdom texts, when a man on death's doorstep ad-
dressed his son, he in fact exhorted the entirety of the cultural community to live
in conformity with Maat by means of this literary fiction. From one end of Egypt
to the other, access to temples and the conduct of the cult obeyed the same care-
fully codified norms, though, of course, the dates of festivals, like those of the
saints in the Western Middle Ages, differed at Busiris and at Esna, according to
the deity who was worshiped. This unity of mental structure was, in the end, in
xiv PREFACE

close conformity with the politico-economic structure, which was solidly crafted,
and which stamped its distinctive brand on the entirety of Egypt.

DIACHRONY AND SYNCHRONY

Where differences can appear, it is in time and not in space. In fact, this should
not surprise: when we compare the religious practices of the Old Kingdom to
those attested in the Ptolemaic era, we see that they are not identical. From the
one period to the other, two and a half millennia had gone by. Even in a culture
that had been highly structured from the moment of its origin, there was evo-
lution over time. Too often, scholars have tended to consider the domain of
religion as particularly stable, and even static, compared to other forms of intel-
lectual expression, perhaps because the visible manifestations of the religion of-
ten seem to obey immutable codes and because the attitudes of the faithful seem
to spring from fixed and somewhat backward-looking conducts. Nevertheless,
the anthropologist Jack Goody has pertinently demonstrated, in The Domesti-
cation of the Savage Mind, that this is in no way the case, and that at least to the
same extent as other areas of the imaginary, the religious was subject to un-
avoidable, and sometimes major, transformations and innovations.
Still, there can be no question of studying Egyptian religion in a purely
chronological manner, which would have little of interest to our purpose. Be-
cause of the hazards of the documentation, there would be many gaps, especially
for the earliest periods, while there would also be frequent repetitions. In fact, it
is often necessary to have recourse to later documents, which are generally more
prolix, to explain something earlier that is known only through allusion. This
method can present some danger, for we extrapolate from a late situation and
project it back onto an earlier period. But the danger is limited, for while there
was evolution, there was no revolution, and the same basic structures were al-
ways at the heart of Egyptian religion, except in the Amarna age.
Nevertheless, this book is made up of two parts that, although responding to
similar methodological questions for all periods, nevertheless constitute differ-
ent and distinct treatments, for it has also been necessary to take into account
elements peculiar to certain situations. Book I is concerned solely with pha-
raonic religion and has been organized thematically, except for the insertion,
where necessary, of a diachronic account of some specific religious phenome-
non. Book II covers the Hellenistic and Roman eras and the beginnings of Chris-
tianity. This was an epoch of mutations, in which we are confronted for the first
time in the history of Egypt with the presence of several religions of different
origin, in which we see substantial innovations born of the policy of new sov-
ereigns. It is clear that this aspect of the religions of Egypt falls outside the
framework instituted for the pharaonic period, even down to the latter's latest
PREFACE XV

manifestations, which themselves date to the Hellenistic age. While it has been
necessary to make a separate treatment of the diverse religions practiced in Egypt
at that time, we have nevertheless done away with the arbitrary boundary that
until now, in most works treating the subject, has been established as a stopping
point in the study of the phenomenon of religion in ancient Egypt. First of all,
the properly pharaonic religion survived down to the fourth century of our own
era. Moreover, other religions Greek, Jewish, Christian were introduced into
the land, where they experienced specific developments that must be taken into
account in order to paint a complete picture of the religious landscape, all the
more so in that complex interrelationships sometimes arose among them, along
with influences or exchanges, however limited they might have been.
Christiane Zivie-Coche
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE

In this book, the following conventions have been followed in the citations
from ancient texts:

Parentheses () enclose words or brief explanations that have been added for clar-
ity.
Square brackets [ ] enclose words that have been restored in a lacuna.
An ellipsis ... indicates that a word or words in the original text have been omit-
ted in the citation.
An ellipsis in square brackets [...] indicates the presence of a lacuna for which no
restoration has been attempted.
A question mark in parentheses (?) indicates that the translation of a word or
phrase is uncertain.

English-speaking Egyptologists have no single set of conventions for the ren-

dering of ancient Egyptian and modern Arabic personal and place names. Most
of the names mentioned in this book occur in a standard reference work, John
Baines and Jaromír Málek, Atlas of Ancient Egypt (New York, 1980), and the ren-
derings here follow those in that volume. The principal exception is the omis-
sion of the typographical sign for ayin; this consonant does not exist in English,
and it was felt that its inclusion would serve only as a distraction to the reader.
The title of book I, chapter 5, "Death Will Come," is that of a poem by the Ital-
ian writer Cesare Pavese, "La morte verrá."
Except as otherwise noted, the translations of ancient Egyptian and classical
texts are those of the authors.
D.L.
GODS AND MEN IN EGYPT
 BOOK I

PHARAONIC
EGYPT

CHRISTIANE ZIVIE-COCHE
 PART I

THE WORLD OF THE GODS

 CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS A GOD?

THE GODS EXIST

To enter into the world of homo religiosus, the world of the imaginary that hu-
mankind tried to decipher and explain by means of the signs at its disposal, it is
first necessary to consider the notion of god, such as we can attempt to discern
it through the images and texts the Egyptians left us. Only then will it be possi-
ble to approach the figures of the gods, their functions, their history, and the cult
that was rendered to them through rituals. But even before that, certain com-
ments and clarifications about the study of the phenomenon of religion need to
be offered so as to define as exactly as possible the object of our study.
The gods existed. Every study in the history of religions entails this premise.
Contrary to a theologian or a philosopher, we do not need to wonder whether
gods, either those of others or our own, exist and how to prove it. Though they
did not belong to the real world, for the historian, they nevertheless have no less
reality than any other classic historical phenomenon: war, political succession,
famine, and so forth. They existed because they constituted the skeleton of the
imaginary realm of the Egyptians, the perceptible signs of the invisible realm
that the Egyptians created.
The object of the history of religions, like that of history in general, is acces-
sible and known only through that which the people of a given culture said about
it, through the traces of it that have subsisted. The Egyptian gods have existence
only because the Egyptians told us they existed.
To be sure, we must emphasize that for these people, the assertion "the gods
6 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

exist" had an entirely different meaning. Figures of the imaginary realm who had
a preponderant place in the description of the world, they nevertheless had as
much physical reality as the elements of nature, because they could be defined
as "emergences from the maximal concentration of diffuse forces that constitute
the universe," to cite the definition of them given by Philippe Derchain. The re-
ality of the gods was thus on the same plane as that of the sky, of the air, of the
land, and of living beings. This is why belief and faith in these gods were not
posed in the terms to which the revelation of the monotheistic religions has ac-
customed us. Since the gods were phenomenological realities that belonged to
the physics of the universe, and in this regard were immanent in it, it was absurd
to believe or not believe in their existence. Faith depends on a revelation, and
here, it did not take place. Egyptians were thus not confronted with the urgency
of accepting or denying it, of admitting or denying its validity.
Still, we cannot completely reject the question of knowing whether the Egyp-
tians believed in their gods. In principle, the existence of these divine powers did
not need to be, nor could it have been, questioned, but we can nevertheless imag-
ine that certain individuals, entirely on their own, took to doubting the actual
efficacy of this or that deity. Such could have happened more easily during pe-
riods when events came to contradict the theory of a cosmos organized accord-
ing to the norm of Maat, when disorder reigned instead of order, demonstrating
the relativity of the power of the gods. We must also wonder whether, in part at
least, doubt did not participate in the elaboration of the theological doctrine of
Amarna, when the power of gods other than Aten was denied, and when a solar
phenomenology that abandoned mythological explanation was elaborated.
The gods existed. This plural is crucial, for it is, from the outset, the implicit
acknowledgement of polytheism. The gods were multiple, and their names, their
forms, and their images were varied, because the gods had more than one ap-
pearance, which is a characteristic of Egyptian polytheism. It is not useful to re-
turn in detail to the question of polytheism versus monotheism, which has
served as the thread for many studies down to the present and which has already
been thoroughly analyzed by Erik Hornung. We shall, however, once again recall
that a study of the religious phenomenon must consider the latter as it presents
itself to us in order to try to understand the structures of the imaginary universe
of Egypt, and not attempt to read it according to a grid conforming to the model
of some other religion. In a polytheistic religion, it is obvious that we encounter
the many, but that the one also manifests itself. It would be dangerous, whatever
the route we take to get there, to reduce, insidiously, the former to the latter. For
without doubt, the specificity of Egyptian religion lies in this play on multiple,
perhaps infinite, combinations of the one and the many, which is its particular
approach to the divine.
The gods were mortal. They even had various ways of being mortal. The study
of their myths will show how they were born, grew old, and died according to an
WHAT IS A GOD? 7

anthropomorphic process. But for the moment, there is something else at stake.
Just as they existed on the historical level as the image and reflection of the con-
cepts of the Egyptians, so they died one day with the end of the civilization that
sustained them and of which they were the emanation. These gods no longer
have devotees and are nothing more than objects of study. It is not our lot to take
the place of the theologians of the "houses of life:' for our subject, contrary to
all appearances, is not identical. Yet this difference, which is born of the rela-
tivism of cultures, is not an admission of failure or indifference. Beneath this dis-
parity of approaches, we consider that there is an irreducible core, particular to
humankind, that enables us to speak of others from our own vantage point, at-
tempting to put ourselves in their place, viewing them as near and far, for the di-
vine is without doubt a universal preoccupation.
These prefatory reflections bring us quite naturally to the wonderful apoca-
lyptic prophecy of Hermes Trismegistos in the Asclepius, so often cited, but
whose Egyptian inspiration was so often denied in the past, though it seems
firmly established today:

And nevertheless, because a sage should know all future things in advance, there
is one thing you must know. A time will come when it will seem that in vain did
the Egyptians honor their gods, in the piety of their heart, with an assiduous cult:
all their holy adoration will fail, ineffective, and it will be deprived of its fruit. The
gods will leave the earth, will regain the sky; they will abandon Egypt; this land that
was once the domicile of holy liturgies, now widowed of its gods, will no longer
enjoy their presence. Strangers will fill this land, this country, and not only will
there be no care for observances, but, the most painful thing of all, it will be com-
manded by would-be laws, under pain of prescribed punishments, to abstain from
all religious practice, from every act of piety or cult towards the gods. Then this
most holy land, homeland of sanctuaries and temples, will be entirely covered with
sepulchers and the dead. O Egypt, Egypt! Of your cults, only fables will remain,
and later, your children will not even believe them; nothing will survive but words
written on stone recounting your pious exploits. The Scythian or the Indian, or
some other such, I mean a neighboring barbarian, will establish himself in Egypt.
For suddenly, divinity will mount to the sky; men, abandoned, will all die, and
then, without god and without man, Egypt will be but a desert.'

NETJER, GOD

The Egyptians had a word we translate as "god": netjer (noute in Coptic). The
equivalents in Greek, theos, and in Aramaic, Eloha (from the Semitic root El)
leave no doubt on this subject, although the term, in passing from its traditional

' Translation based on that of A. Nock and A. Festugière, Corpus Hermeticum, vol. 2 (Paris,1945), chap.
24, pp. 326-27.
8 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

use to what was made of it in the Gospels, came necessarily to be loaded with
different connotations. At the very least, we are certain from Coptic, the last stage
of the Egyptian language, and from Greek, which was used in bilingual docu-
ments of the Ptolemaic Period, that for the speakers of these languages, the word
had a single, unique sense that we translate as "god." But translation into another
language, however valuable it may be, does not allow us to grasp the semantic
range of the term for the Egyptians themselves.
We shall thus examine the word itself in the various contexts in which it was
used, and consider its etymology. We shall also take into account other words be-
longing to the same root and the semantic field in which they were used. But
first, we shall consider the sign that from the beginning served to write the word.

SIGNS

Given the importance the Egyptians accorded to writing and the close relation-
ship they established between the signified and the signifier which was never
perceived as arbitrary, but on the contrary, as having an intrinsic link with the
signified we must carefully examine the sign that was principally used to write
the word, along with other words that had a similar use.
The ideogram of the word god appeared at the beginning of Egyptian history,
or perhaps even in the protohistorical period, with the development of the writ-
ing system, and it would continue to be used in the latest texts of the Roman Pe-
riod, though at that time, other writings were competing with it. Observation of
certain of the earliest examples, from a point in time when the writing system
was not yet definitively institutionalized and codified, once led some scholars to
think that it was an ax, a sign of power. This interpretation was quickly aban-
doned in favor of that which prevails today. The sign is a pole wrapped in a ban-
dage that ends in a banner perpendicular to the pole (see figure i). It has been
compared to the masts that stood in front of the primitive sanctuary of Neith,
which always retained its archaic characteristics; these masts are indeed similar
to the sign.
The fragmentary Roman Period papyrus from Tanis, which furnishes a list of
hieroglyphic signs accompanied by a description, gives the sign a brief but evoca-
tive definition: "netjer: that which is buried." In other words, it is undoubtedly
some thing, rather than someone, that is mummified and wrapped in bandages
like a deceased person.
From these observations, it is nevertheless extremely difficult and hazardous
to draw conclusions regarding the original reason for the choice of this sign to
write the word god. We shall note only that when writing began, an inanimate
object represented the concept of god.
From the earliest periods on, however, in a parallel development, a falcon
perched on a standard served regularly as the determinative of the word netjer,
WHAT IS A GOD? 9

FIGURE 1. Signs and determinatives used in writing the word god. From P. E. Newberry, Journal of Egyp-
tian Archaeology33 (1947): 90, fig. 31; and N. de Garis Davies, The Mastaba of Ptahhetep and Akhethetep at
Saqqarah, vol. 1 (London, 1900), pl. 7, no. 87, and pl. 4, no. n.

especially in the cursive hieratic script. In Ptolemaic, the falcon was commonly
used as the ideogram of the word. Finally, a seated person with his chin adorned
with a beard would frequently be one of the determinatives of the word, from
the end of the Old Kingdom on. There were thus different manifestations under
which a god could reveal himself, and they were used as the ideogram of the word
or as its determinative: the object symbolically linked to the person of the god,
the animal guise under which he might appear, and the anthropomorphic form
in which humans often imagined him. In Ptolemaic texts, netjer is also written
as a star belonging to the celestial realm, and it is this writing that Horapollo re-
tained in his Hieroglyphica. In these same inscriptions, scribes also used the sign
that had always served to represent the god Heka and to write the word magic,
thus appealing to another sphere of divine activity.
As for the feminine form of the word, designating goddesses, it was written
with the same sign, accompanied by the feminine gender ending. Aside from the
image of a woman, which simply represented femininity, two determinatives,
which were used from the Middle Kingdom on and would later become quite
common, reveal something of the essential functions that Egyptians attributed
to female deities. One was an egg, which otherwise played a fundamental role in
the Hermopolito-Theban cosmogony, a symbol of origins and birth. The other
was the cobra, which ended by actually serving to write the word goddess; we are
left to think that the uraeus form in which many goddesses were incarnate was
an essential vehicle for apprehending the divine in its feminine aspect. The name
of the goddess Kerehet was certainly not very widespread, but from the Middle
10 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

Kingdom on, it appeared, like the serpent, with the egg as determinative. Al-
though she is not well understood, we know that this goddess represented a sort
of ancestor of the species, going back to primordial times. At the same time, in
the later periods, kerehet, used as a common noun, designated the matrix, the
place of origins.
By way of conclusion, we see that when we go back to the origins of the sign
netjer, it is quite risky to determine precisely what was considered particularly
representative of the divine in the choice of the object. But the determinatives
placed after the words, from the oldest periods to the later ones, testify to an
evolution of the writing system that might reflect transformations in thought
and shed some light, albeit a partial one, on the multiplicity of the aspects of
the divine.

WORD AND WORDS

Scholars have also tried and this was not a priori unreasonable to seek an et-
ymology that would clarify the meaning of the word netjer. Today, there is agree-
ment that the results are highly disappointing; the proposed explanations are
tantamount to fantasy and speculation, with no convincing proofs to support
them. For instance, there has been a suggestion that the word means "he who re-
mains young," connecting it with the term ter, "year," which is written with a hi-
eroglyph depicting a plant stalk, or "he who remains pure," because of a
homophony with netjer, "natron," a substance used in purifications. But can we
progress beyond such homophony? Others have broken the word down accord-
ing to a grammatical form that is indeed known, but which makes little sense
here, taking it as "he of the ter-tree;' a tree that is ill-defined. Unfortunately, we
must admit that in the present state of our knowledge, we cannot recover
what the Egyptians originally had in mind when they spoke and wrote the word
netjer.
Before turning to the applications of this term and of words derived from it,
we must note that other words could be used to designate gods, though of course,
this is not to say that these words had the same meaning as netjer; they could,
however, cover at least some of the same ground as netjer. In lists of categories
of beings such as we find them, among others, in cosmogonies, the gods are ac-
companied by men, by the dead (a marginal group), and by akhu, the "lumi-
nous" or "transfigured." The latter is the state to which, from the Old Kingdom
on, humans aspired in the afterlife, and which placed them in the celestial sphere
of the divine.
For bau, the plural of ba, the question is more complicated. Like humans,
gods had a ba, which was thus a component of a divine or a human being. It was
a form of vital energy that, in the case of human beings, subsisted after death. In
the singular, it is often said of a god that he is the ba of another god: thus, Amun
WHAT IS A GOD? 11

is the "great ba" of Kematef, the serpent of origins, or of Shu. Such a divine per-
son could be manifest under the guise of another deity. This theme of transfor-
mation and emanations will be evoked in greater detail in connection with
divine functions. For the moment, we shall content ourselves with the mention
of groups such as the bau of Heliopolis, Pe, and Dep; in these expressions, the
term has long been translated as "souls." In these cases, these are beings who be-
long to the sphere of the divine, though they are not specified as being gods. The
case is similar with sekhemu, the "powerful ones." This root otherwise underlies
the name of the goddess Sakhmet, the incarnation of power. The word sekhem
would come to designate an image of a god, for instance, the king, and ultimately,
it would be used concurrently with netjer in texts of the later periods of Egyp-
tian history.
This quick review enables us to see, though without taking account of the later
semantic evolution of the words, that a certain number of terms designated
forces that we cannot stricto sensu call gods, but which belonged to the sphere of
the divine. Via their lexicographic abundance and the polysemy of their vocab-
ulary, we can see that the Egyptians did not consider from a single point of view
that which, in their imaginary realm, related to the divine, and that they differ-
entiated, in a way that we are unable fully to appreciate, between that which was
netjer, ba, or sekhem.

SEMANTIC RANGE OF THE ROOT NETJER

Since we are unable to determine the origin of the term netjer and the specific
role to be attributed to the ideogram that represents it, it remains now to turn
t0 the uses of the word and of all the many words deriving from the root. In
Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt, Hornung has, for his part, chosen a partic-
ular point of view. Collecting personal names containing the word netjer and
analyzing them according to the various constructions in use in the Egyptian
onomasticon, and establishing parallels with anthroponyms that included the
personal names of gods and others that included the names of goddesses, he has
been able to show that there is no question of recognizing in them the presence
of a single deity bearing the name "God." Moreover, throughout Egyptian his-
tory, the word was always used in both the masculine and the feminine, in the
singular and in the plural, and in the dual in cases of pairs of deities. John Baines,
in treating fecundity figures and the system of personification, concluded that
the categories of netjer and remetj, "man," do not correspond to what we today
classify as "god" and "man."
In a relatively recent study on the "notion of god;' Dimitri Meeks has sought
to go further by systematizing his research on the root netjer with the basic prem-
ise that all the words belonging to this range of application have a common de-
nominator. The latter is the divine and the funerary cults, and the rituals they
12 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

entailed. Every being, object, and process denoted by the root netjer was neces-
sarily implicated in a cultic act. Thus, the king became netjer, as his titulary as-
sures us, when he experienced the rites of coronation. And an ordinary private
person, once deceased, achieved a divine afterlife only after his mummy and his
tomb were the object of the appropriate rituals. Certain texts leave us to think,
however, that in an individual, even during his lifetime, there was an element
that came close to being divine: the heart, qualified as "the god that is in man."
From this heart issued the rules of conduct according to norms; "to follow one's
heart," as the Egyptians put it, was to act according to Maat, and not simply as
one pleased. This is undoubtedly why, in late texts, we encounter a word netjery,
determined by the hieroglyph depicting a heart, that designates this organ.
When it served as an intermediary (in Egyptian, uhemu) between humankind
and the gods, an animal, such as Apis, Buchis, or the divine falcon of Edfu, itself
became a god. Enthroned, he was the only one of his species. When the mum-
mification of animals became widespread in the Late Period, each individual of
the species, on the human model, could acquire divine status after its death.
Incense, senetjer, was "that which deifies" or "ritualizes" and was an indis-
pensable element in the conduct of funerary or divine rituals. The gods who ben-
efited from it were, of course, already gods and did not have to become divine,
but ritual assured the unbroken continuity of this state of affairs, its permanent
reactualization, which was otherwise the title borne by the text preserved on Pa-
pyrus Salt 825: "ritual for the conservation of life." The gods had need of this hu-
man intervention to remain what they were.
This line of argument has the great merit of offering a coherent structure into
which the words of the netjer-field can be integrated without great difficulty. Rit-
ual, which assured survival, or quite simply life, served as the connecting thread.
Yet, the result is to reduce the notion of netjer to a fleshless concept to which
some substance must be added. To be sure, all deities laid claim to a cult, but they
were also distinct persons, endowed with a certain number of functions that
were linked by a complex organization.

NETJER PURE AND SIMPLE

Before considering the gods in their diversity and their specificity, we must touch
on one last point concerning the use of the word netjer in certain types of texts
and the interpretation that has been given it. Just as in archaic personal names,
we also find texts where the term netjer appears alone, not seeming, on a first
reading, to refer to a particular deity. The opportunity was too good, and a whole
current in Egyptology, including Étienne Drioton, made use of these texts to af-
firm that monotheism, founded on the existence of a single, omnipotent god,
had indeed existed in Egypt. These mentions are scattered in autobiographical
texts and especially in wisdom texts, whose existence we can trace from the Old
WHAT IS A GOD? 13

Kingdom to the Late Period. In autobiographical inscriptions, persons justify

themselves to their peers and to the gods, stating they led a life that conformed
to Maat, so that they deserved the enjoyment of the status of akh in the afterlife
and, after the Old Kingdom, the status of an Osiris. These texts are marked by a
strong social and local context, and the god, though invoked in a way that seems
abstract to us, is nevertheless the one who is otherwise called "the god of the city,"
that is, the local god. It is always this particular deity, with whom the individual
had a privileged relationship, and whom he had no need to name for lack of am-
biguity, who is invoked.
In the wisdom texts and the instructions, the question might seem less sim-
ple. We must immediately set aside the examples in which it is clear that netjer
designates the pharaoh, for the latter, as holder of the royal office with which he
had been ritually invested, had become divine. There remain the others, sources
of a monotheistic interpretation that readily opposes the oneness of the god of
the sages to the plurality of the gods of the people. It was Jozef Vergote who
brought the examples together, but we easily follow Hornung's more recent
analysis of them. It suffices to note that "god" is the most frequent word in these
didactic texts, but that we also find it in the plural, and especially that some gods
appear bearing their personal names, such as Horus, Re, Thoth, and Sia. That, I
believe, suffices to annul the validity of a monotheistic theory, for, so far as we
know, a monotheism would not tolerate the presence of other gods, even invok-
ing the "multiplicity of approaches," as some scholars have done. For a certain
number of these mentions, it is possible we are to understand the personal name
of a god who is not explicitly cited. But the use of the definite article before the
word god in texts in Late Egyptian authorizes an explanation of a more general
extension. It is the name of the species or of the social category, as Georges
Posener clearly showed in his Enseignement loyaliste. The anonymous god is an
indeterminate god who responds to what one expects of a deity, but not God,
unique and absolute.

FIGURES OF THE DIVINE

ICONS

The gods were representable, and they were represented. The multiplicity, the va-
riety—and even, according to some, the confusion and inconsistency of di-
vine images are trademarks of Egyptian iconography that have always been
striking, and whose process and raison d'être are in need of explanation. Corre-
sponding to this multiplicity of images was that of names and functions: com-
bining them made for the Egyptian style of approaching the divine.
The gods, figures of the imaginary, gave concrete expression to the powers
loose in the world; they were representable, in that they were persons, and it was
14 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

only via representations that humankind could address them. Otherwise, in Ju-
daism and Islam, there is a formal proscription against the representation of
God, one that can even be extended, in the latter case, to that of people. The ban
was undoubtedly a precautionary measure against what was called the worship
of idols, which was dreaded. This leads us to the heart of the problem of figura-
tive polytheism, which was already invoked in the Asclepius. Were idols (eidôlon,
imago) the gods worshiped by men, to whom they rendered a cult, and above all,
whom they created, and thus only imagined, as maintained by their detractors?
Certainly not; they were only their images. The Egyptians made statues and im-
ages of the gods, but at the same time, they tell us that they were themselves cre-
ated by a god, who thus conceived the images of the divine. Thus, it is proclaimed
by Ptah Tatenen on the Shabaka Stone, also known as the Memphite Theology:

He had given birth to the gods, ... he had set the gods in their cult places, he had
instituted their offering bread, he made their visible bodies, according to what sat-
isfied their hearts. Then the gods entered their visible bodies, of every sort of wood,
every sort of stone, every sort of clay.

If men invented the gods, the proposition is immediately reversible, for in the
imaginary construction they conceived to apprehend and explain the universe,
a creator god made men at the same time that he created the other gods and their
images.
Returning to the domain of representation, when men depicted gods, they did
it, necessarily, with the figurative means at their disposal, which they transposed
into material images made of stone, wood, or metal, in statues or reliefs, just as
the deity of the monotheistic religions is spoken of only in human language,
however radically different it might be. Quite unlike the concepts of "noble sav-
age" or "primitive man," as invented and manipulated by philosophers of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Egyptians knew perfectly well that the
statues were nothing more than icons of their gods, or otherwise put, metaphor-
ical representations serving to describe them, albeit partially and imperfectly.
They proclaimed as much with considerable clarity, simply by affirming that the
statues were images of a god who otherwise had a body and a ba.
In this respect, Pharaoh, when he was invested with his royal office and acted
within its framework, and not as an ordinary mortal, was the son of a god and
the image (often qualified as living) of this god. When he carried out a ritual, he
acted as a god, face to face with another god. The gods incarnate in the figures
created by men were merely images, both on the level of the imaginary and on
that of a cult object, such as a temple statue.
Yet these images were not just metaphors charged with meaning but devoid
of being. The cult image of a god, which was the visible part of the divine on
earth, was invested with divinity; it was not just an illusory reflection of the di-
WHAT IS A GOD? 15

vine, but an integral part of it. In some sense, to make use of a linguistic com-
parison, an image, no more than a sign, was not arbitrary. The Ptolemaic ritual
of "touching the sun" or "uniting with the sun disk" was the translation, on the
cultic level, of this theological reality. Once (or several times) a year, the princi-
pal statue of a temple, along with those of his consorts and of the secondary
deities, were removed from the darkness of their shrines to experience contact
with the rays of the sun the ceremony was often carried out on the roof of the
temple and be recharged with divine energy, of which the sun was the symbol
par excellence.
Another ritual, whose existence is attested from the Old Kingdom on, and
which experienced only minor changes thereafter, is also extremely revealing.
Through a series of magical gestures accompanied by appropriate formulas, the
officiating priest restored or gave life to a fleshly body or to an effigy by endow-
ing it with the use of its senses. By opening its mouth hence its name of "rit-
ual of opening the mouth" and its other orifices he enabled it to breathe and
eat, and also to see, hear, and speak. The statue thus became a living image of a
deity, whom it represented and who was at the same time incarnate in it. The
statue could thus play the role for which it was intended, which was to receive
the cultic attention through which it would at the same time reach the person of
the god, whose ba was in the sky and whose body or cadaver was in the duat, the
subterranean realm of the hereafter.
In accordance with this polytheistic profusion, the figures of the gods were
many, each divine person being different and thus imagined and represented in
his or her own way. But while some deities had a somewhat fixed and stable im-
age, such as Ptah or Osiris, each of whom was anthropomorphic and wrapped
like a mummy, most of them had a multiplicity of appearances, which the Egyp-
tians conveyed by means of the expression "with many kheperu," this last word
covering a vast semantic field that signified the transformations and manifesta-
tions that a being, divine or otherwise, experienced, or by means of the expres-
sion "with many visages." This principle of transformations was anything but
incoherent or confusing; rather, it accorded with a theory that we can concep-
tualize as follows. Each icon was linked to a function, or perhaps to an aspect, of
the divine person. The Egyptians attempted to clarify their deities as closely as
possible by means of a network of combinations that were not mutually exclu-
sive, and a god could thus be presented under many aspects, each of which was
considered as a facet, and not as a global vision. Conversely, a single icon could
serve to represent various deities, each of whom would keep his or her own
name, or perhaps associate that name with another, though in a nonexclusive
manner.
Certain icons were exclusively attached to a single god, such as the ibis to
Thoth, though at the same time, the latter could be represented as a baboon,
while this same baboon could otherwise depict the god Khons. While the many
16 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

images of the mongoose were linked exclusively to Atum, and the goose was em-
blematic only of Amun, the symbolic figures of the bull, a generative power
(Montu, Min, and also Osiris); the cow (Hathor and Isis in all their aspects); the
baleful lioness that, appeased, transformed into a cat (Sakhmet/Bastet); the co-
bra (dangerous goddesses, the eye of Re); the falcon (the many Horuses and
other sky gods); the ram (Amun, Khnum, the ba of Mendes); and others as well
constituted referents that were constantly used in the iconography of the gods.
Still, nothing authorizes us to see this system as a form of pantheism that can
be subsumed under the formula "all is one." The multiplicity of appearances does
not coincide with totality. The fusion of a specific divine being with the All was
neither attempted nor realized in the open system of Egyptian thought, in which,
moreover, it was not considered that "Ml" applied to the sphere of the divine.
Deities retained their original specificity, and certain combinations seem to have
been impossible: the distinction between male and female, except for the case of
the creator god, was practically absolute, and there were other combinations that
were obviously never made. Nor were cosmic gods ever confused with the ele-
ments they metaphorically represented. When Amun, the unique god of origins,
transformed himself"into millions," it was still not into "everything." We can cite
late texts that assimilate Isis or Agathos Daimon (the Egyptian Shai) to the "All";
but while these texts, written in Latin or Greek, are undeniably of Egyptian in-
spiration, they nevertheless bear the trace of Greek influence that can explain
their deviation in the direction of pantheism.

ANTHROPOMORPHISM AND ANIMALITY

Two basic traits enable us to characterize and classify the multiplicity of divine
images: anthropomorphism and zoomorphism, and the combinations that re-
sult from them. The Egyptians invented many variants on these two basic ele-
ments: an animal head on a human body, the combination of the head of one
animal with the body of a different one, a human head on an animal body, all in
a consummate style with almost no detectable transition. These combinations
did not fail to surprise and even shock the Greeks, whose pantheon was domi-
nated by anthropomorphic figures; except for Pan, they relegated hybrid beings
to second rank, with no real divine status. Further away, Mesopotamia also knew
human-animal hybrids, mostly with animal bodies and human heads, and even
further still, India. A mere glance at the walls of temples or of the royal tombs of
the New Kingdom suffices to convince us of the essential role played by animal-
ity in divine iconography. Animals had a particular meaning and a particular role
in relation to the divine, and these need to be explained.
To understand better the relationships between these icons, each constituting
a different avenue of approach to the divine while itself insufficient to enable
complete apprehension of it, we might prefer to go back to the origins, to the
WHAT IS A GOD? 17

time when these images were devised. To be sure, they experienced transforma-
tions and enrichments over the millennia, yet from the remotest periods on, they
nevertheless displayed certain set features.
Unfortunately, though, our knowledge of religious facts prior to the third mil-
lennium, that is, prior to the point when texts aid us in explaining images, is ex-
tremely tenuous. The evidence is sparse and sometimes of dubious origin, such
as the bearded anthropomorphic figures of the predynastic era, which were con-
sidered by some to be divine images, but whose authenticity has been doubted:
some of them stem from the antiquities market. In the same period, animals
were buried, either with people or by themselves, in cemeteries that have been
excavated. Perhaps these were the earliest manifestations of a cult addressed to
a deity in animal form, rather than an offering to a pet animal. But here, too, we
have no positive evidence. There was a time in Egyptology when two hypothe-
ses, maintained respectively by Kurt Sethe and Hermann Kees, confronted one
another. For the former scholar, anthropomorphism preceded zoomorphism;
for the latter, the opposite was the case. In actuality, in their rigid theorizing, nei-
ther reflected the reality of the facts, which cannot be reduced to such simple ex-
pressions, and many aspects of which still remain obscure.
What needs to be noted is that throughout the ages, the bestiary present in
the divine iconography was extremely coherent. It did not include animals that
could live in Egypt at a remote point in time (giraffe, rhinoceros, elephant) but
left because of climatic change well before the period of historical, political, and
religious formation, nor did it include those introduced at a much later time,
such as the horse. More precisely put, while the horse played a role, it was in di-
rect relation to foreign deities such as Anat and Astarte, who entered the native
pantheon during the New Kingdom.
Around the time of Dynasty 2, at one and the same time, there appeared
purely anthropomorphic forms such as Min, Neith, Nut, Shu, and Mum, along
with other, purely animal ones, such as the Apis and Mnevis bulls and the ram
of Mendes, and also mixed forms associating the head of the Seth animal or that
of the falcon with a human body. The system was in place.
Anthropomorphic divine figures looked like human beings, and quite often,
their groupings, such as the Ennead, resembled the social hierarchy of the hu-
man realm. The Egyptians otherwise said of the gods that they had the face of a
remetj or of a pat, two of the categories that comprised the human race, in par-
ticular the Egyptians themselves, who were "human beings" par excellence. The
human body, and in particular the face, are the mark of individuality, of differ-
ence. The body constituted one of the aspects of a person, here that of a god,
whose name was the other indispensable constituent. Nevertheless, the corpo-
real differentiation of the gods in the iconography was not very distinct, and in
many cases, it was insufficient for recognizing them. To the masculine was op-
posed the feminine. Deities did not generally participate in both genders, except
1ó PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

for creator gods, though without that appearing in the representations we pos-
sess: the ithyphallic Mut of chapter 164 of the Book of the Dead constitutes an
exception to this sexual division. Only the Hapy genies, symbols of fecundity, are
regularly conspicuous by their androgynous characteristics. Gods could also ap-
pear in the form of a young child with a head that was shaved, except for a
braided lock on one side. This representation symbolized one aspect of a god
who constantly renewed his youth and maintained himself in this state.
Among masculine deities, those who could move freely, with their legs disen-
gaged, were distinct from those who were bandaged, with closely sheathed bod-
ies, such as Ptah, Osiris, and Min, who were in one way or another linked to
chthonic or subterranean forces, to vital energy in the course of being unleashed.
The clothing of other deities, both male and female, was rather stereotyped: a
short kilt or a close-fitting, long tunic held up by shoulder straps, and bare feet,
even when the Egyptians had taken up the habit of wearing sandals. The gods
were scarcely submitted to the hazards of fashion; their clothing belonged to the
classical wardrobe of the beginnings of iconography, both human and divine.
These garments alone would not enable us to differentiate them indubitably,
were they not accompanied by their name, or perhaps also by a symbolic object
or animal, or by their regalia. Crowns, which became ever more complex, were
one of the signs of their differentiation, still poorly studied. We shall end by not-
ing that anthropomorphic deities were clothed. Nudity was not appropriate, ex-
cept for child gods and for one or another of the foreign goddesses from the Near
East, such as the goddess riding a horse, or Qadesh, who was, moreover, repre-
sented frontally, which was also rare.
We shall make brief mention here of foreign deities. Aside from those of the
margins of the land such as Ash, lord of the Libyans; Sopdu, who kept watch
over the east of the land both inside and outside the frontier of Egypt; and Ded-
wen the Nubian practically all of them were imported from the Asiatic Near
East, from the Syro-Palestinian sphere, in the course of the New Kingdom. Here,
we are not taking into account the deities of Greek origin in the Hellenistic and
Roman Periods, who will be studied later in this work. Foreign deities were ad-
mitted into the Egyptian pantheon without great difficulty for two reasons. On
the one hand, polytheism was not exclusive, and it was always possible to intro-
duce a new divine figure having a form, a name, and a function of his or her own,
even one of foreign origin. On the other hand, the creator god, at the time of the
constitution of the world by differentiation, created the gods of Egypt and also
those of other peoples, who could afterward pass from without to within. For
the rest, was not the Egyptian Seth the prototype of the "other," the fomenter of
disorder in the very bosom of the Egyptian divine realm?
The foreign deities Reshep, Baal, Anat, Astarte, and Qadesh all had a hu-
man figure that the Egyptians assigned to them. Without doubt, they would have
found it difficult to slip into an animal or composite form, for these stem from
WHAT IS A GOD? 19

the deep structure of the Egyptian concept of the divine. Haurun had a place of
his own in this constellation. A god with a falcon's head, he was identified totally
with the sun god he had become in the New Kingdom: Harmakhis, the Great
Sphinx of Giza. He was represented in this form, endowed with his attributes
and functions, under the name Haurun-Harmakhis, assuring him the same
function as the Egyptian god.
The Sphinx is the most famous and the most striking example of the kind of
composite being that Egypt was able to create with such skill that we forget that
a priori, there could have been something of the monstrous in this hybridization
of different categories (which is to be found in all cultures, to be sure, though
generally as a popular manifestation in stories and legends). What were the prin-
ciples regulating these many combinations? As the Egyptian cosmogonies tell us,
humankind did not occupy a privileged place at the summit of the scale of ani-
mate and inanimate beings. In texts that enumerate the categories of the created
world, deities, humans, and animals are on the same level. From the wisdom texts
down to the texts in the Ptolemaic temples, human beings are designated the
"cattle" of the shepherd god, who assures their protection. In these circum-
stances, we should not be surprised that animality, along with anthropomor-
phism, was one of the forms that the divine could assume to manifest itself
visibly to human eyes. And a better one, perhaps, because unlike a human being,
an animal was not an individual but an example of a species, and was thus closer
to the undifferentiated divine that the use of the anonymous netjer also conveys.
As for the combination of human and animal into a single figure, it rests, again,
on the fact that there was no absolute separation of categories that could forbid
it, and that a double representation of a god under two different species enriched
the approach, which was always approximative and incomplete, to these cre-
ations of the imaginary realm.
The most frequent combination was that of a human body and an animal's
head: Anubis with the head of a jackal, Seth and his fabulous animal, Hathor
with the head of a cow (the latter capable of being reduced to cow ears plastered
onto a human head), Horus with the head of a falcon. The animal in its entirety
or a purely human figure could represent many of these deities, according to the
aspect the artist sought to privilege. The human body expressed the individu-
ated person of a deity, while the animal head symbolically represented his or her
function. The converse combination also existed, but there were far fewer vari-
ations on this arrangement. Of human-headed animals, we know essentially the
sphinx with a lion's body and the ba-bird. In these cases, it is the body that marks
the power of the god, that of the lion, or the mobility of the ba, which became
visible after the death of a human being, or after the death of a god, in the case
of Osiris. The visage translates or betrays "the presence of the human in the di-
vine," as Dimitri Meeks has justly stressed.
In the later periods of their history, as they pursued and refined their theo-
20 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

logical effort, Egyptians ended by creating extremely complex hybrids, of whom

Tithoes, or Tutu in Egyptian, was perhaps the quintessential example (see figure
2). Without taking account here of the many variations, he was ordinarily rep-
resented as a striding lion with various animal heads emerging from several
points on his body. This image, which, as Meeks suggests, we should call "pani-
conic" rather than "pantheistic," was the visible projection of a concept accord-
ing to which the more one multiplies facets, the more closely one approaches,
though without ever reaching it, the infinitely rich reality of the divine.
All things considered, gods with only an animal form are rare in the iconog-
raphy. Even Apis and Mnevis had a zoocephalic human image. But many ani-
mals could be linked to a single deity, and their form either might or might not
be mixed with the anthropomorphic form of the god. Several animals could be
attached to a single god: the ibis and the baboon of Thoth, though this god never
had an image in which man and baboon were mixed; and the ram and the goose
of Amun, for whom the same remark is true. Unfortunately, in most cases, we
do not know the symbolic link between the deity and the animal. Just as the
human and the animal could be combined into a single, unique figure, so the an-
imal image could be composed of several elements. It suffices to cite the crio-
cephalic sphinxes in which Amun is present via the ram's head; but sphinxes
could also be provided with a falcon's head, borrowed from Horus, or with that
of the Seth animal.

FIGURE 2. The paniconic god Tithoes. Stela in the Cairo Museum. From S. Hassan, Le Sphinx: Son histoire
à la lumière des fouilles récentes (Cairo, 1951), p. 72, fig. 22.
WHAT IS A GOD? 21

There was another way in which the Egyptians envisaged the presence of the
divine in an animal. This was not a matter of depicting a deity in one of his an-
imal forms, but of divine epiphany in a living animal. This was the case with the
Apis, Mnevis, and Buchis bulls at Memphis, Heliopolis, and Armant, and with
the ram of Khnum at Elephantine and the representative of the ba of Mendes.
We may add the equally well-known example of the "living falcon" of Edfu or
Athribis. Unlike the bulls, who fulfilled their role until the end of their lives, a
new bird was enthroned each year. These sacred animals conformed to extremely
precise characteristics. In no case was the entire species sacred and consecrated
to the deity; rather, it was a single individual, selected by men from among the
fellow members of their species by means of particular marks that designated
them as fit for this function. The livestock farming that was intensively devel-
oped at temples starting with the last native dynasties presents a borderline sit-
uation. At the temples, falcons, ibises, crocodiles, cats, and other species were
carefully raised by the thousands to the great satisfaction of the devotees. It was
there that the elect of the year, the one who would become sacred, could be cho-
sen, and it was there, certainly, that the animal mummies were prepared; thanks
to the funerary ritual practiced on them, these mummies entered into the realm
of the divine, while the faithful offered their god of choice his own image, from
then on multiplied into infinity. In addition to these animals raised in the tem-
ples, which were mocked by the Greeks and Romans, there were beasts killed
by human hands to augment (at a good profit, of course) the production of
mummies.
The sacred animal, whose personal name was distinct from that of his species
was not, properly speaking, a god, but rather his living representative on earth,
that which the Egyptians signified, once again, with the term ba. Both in the
iconography and in the cult addressed to a living, sacralized animal, the Egyp-
tians stressed the presence of the divine in its animal manifestations.
To complete and expand on this picture, we must evoke the curious repre-
sentations peculiar to the royal tombs of the New Kingdom. There, we see quan-
tities of genies with an object by way of a head on a human body lamp, knife,
rope, and so forth and which are the attribute of the genie's function, charged
with divine effectiveness.

GODS' BODIES, DIVINE SUBSTANCE

The divine icons we have just studied are only the visible signs by which deities
could manifest themselves to humankind. Neither the statue nor the animal was
the god, even if they were more than a simple image, or a mere reflection, given
that divine substance was incarnate or rooted in them, with the result that they
participated in that substance. The sign was not empty, though it remained a
sign.
22 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

How then did the Egyptians imagine this substance, the actual body of the
gods, and in what terms did they express it? First of all, it must be stressed that
normally, the gods were not visible to mere mortals, for they were not of this
world, even if their icons were strewn throughout it. Their true home was in the
sky. Thus, during their lifetimes, it was only in dreams that human beings could
find themselves face to face with them and hear them. During life, sleep was the
moment, both privileged and dangerous, when an individual slipped out of hu-
man time and into that of the gods. Otherwise, it was only after death that they
would be gifted with knowledge of the true appearance of divinity. The dreams
of kings we read of in literary fictions, as well as the ordinary dreams recorded
in the "dream books," often mention gods, but usually without describing their
actual appearance. We must turn to literary texts, whether stories or mytholog-
ical accounts, to encounter divinity in its true form.
In the well-known Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, the hero, who has been cast
onto an island, finds himself in the presence of a god who manifests himself in
the form of a serpent:

Suddenly, I heard a thunderous noise and thought it was a wave of the sea (wadj
wer). Trees splintered, the earth trembled. I uncovered my face and discovered that
it was a serpent that was coming. He was thirty cubits long, and his beard was more
than two cubits; his body was covered with gold, his eyes were of genuine lapis-
lazuli.

It was uncommon phenomena, rumbling and trembling, that announced the

arrival of divinity. As for the god himself, he was distinguished by his uncom-
mon stature and by the precious materials of which he was made, gold and lapis.
In the same vein, in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, Re is described as having
bones of silver, limbs of gold, and hair of lapis lazuli. These were metaphors ex-
pressing the incorruptibility and the radiance of the flesh of the gods. In hymns,
it is ceaselessly repeated that Hathor is the Golden One, she who sparkles and il-
luminates:

O perfect, o luminous, o venerable!

O great sorceress!
O luminous mistress,
O gold of the gods!'

Thus is Hathor invoked in a hymn from the temple of Dendara. Aside from lu-
minosity, divinity was conspicuous by its fragrance. When Amun approached
Queen Ahmose to lie with her and engender the future Hatshepsut in the course

2 Translation based on that of A. Barucq and F. Daumas, Hymnes et prières de l'Égypte ancienne, Lit-

tératures anciennes du Proche-Orient io (Paris, 1980, P. 445.

WHAT IS A GOD? 23

of the theogamy depicted on a wall of the temple of Deir el-Bahari, it was the
perfume of the god that awakened and penetrated her. In the same temple, when
their daughter Hatshepsut makes her appearance, playing the role of a goddess
at the return of the expedition to Punt, she is suffused with the perfume of
myrrh, while her skin shines like gold. Less imagistically, Egyptian texts speak of-
ten of the beauty, which is also the perfection, of the gods, and of the desire of
human beings to contemplate them, otherwise put, to find themselves face to
face with them. The metaphorical expressions for the reality of divine substance
leave us to understand clearly that in their true form, the gods were not accessi-
ble to humans, except through the imperfect mediation of visible images.

TRIPARTITION AND HIDDEN GOD

The images of the gods resided on earth, either statues hidden in the sanctuar-
ies of the temples or sacred animals, while their domains were in the sky, from
which their beauty radiated. Theologians developed, rather subtly and system-
atically, a theory of divine substance. A god's ba lived in the sky, his image on
earth, and his body or corpse (the terms were employed indifferently) in the
netherworld; this same scheme applied to deceased persons, at least in the fu-
nerary compositions of the later periods.

It is his ba, one says, that is in the distant sky.

He himself is in the Duat, foremost of the east.
His ba is in the sky, his body is in the west.
His statue is in Hermonthis, exalting his appearances.
One is Amun, who hides from them, who conceals himself from the gods,
his nature unknown.3

This passage, which dates to Dynasty 19, clearly reveals this tripartition which at
the same time corresponds to the total sovereignty of the god over the three el-
ements of sky, earth, and Duat. This division is often found in Ptolemaic texts,
where it expresses the very structure of the divine essence: "without carrying out
any plan, be it in the sky, on earth, or in the Duat," we read in a hymn to Isis from
the temple of Philae.
The ritual of uniting with the sun disk enabled the ba to unite with the im-
age on earth. The god was present in the different spheres of the cosmos and
reigned over them. Despite this tripartition, which could assume other forms
that will be mentioned later, he was one. It is thus that we understand the affir-
mation "one is Amun," rather than "unique," which he certainly was not, despite
the many translations that have adopted this point of view.

3 P. Leiden I 35o, chap. 200.

24 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

This oneness of the divine person, which was its totality, was not knowable to
human beings, who could not embrace its extent; it was hidden from them, no
doubt because it was without limit and because the human mind could grasp it
only in fragmentary glimpses that, even laid end to end, did not amount to a
global vision. This was the hidden god who is largely in question in the contin-
uation of the text just cited:

He is farther than the distant sky; he is deeper than the Duat.

No god knows his true nature.
His image is not unfolded in the writings.
There is no perfect testimony of him.
He is too mysterious for his prestigious majesty to be uncovered.
He is too great to be questioned, too powerful to be known.
One would instantly fall dead of fright if one pronounced his secret name,
intentionally or not.
No god knows how to call him by his name. Hidden Ba is his name,
he is so mysterious.

The notion of a distant, hidden god was applied to many gods other than
Amun, for example, to Ptah in the hymn preserved on Papyrus Berlin 3048. Still,
it needs to be stressed that this extremely subtle construct, which was built on
the very name of Amun, which means "hidden one," and whose heyday lasted
from the Ramesside Period down through the Ptolemaic era, began as the work
of the theologians of Amun. It did not necessarily represent all the religious cur-
rents, and notwithstanding its totalizing purpose, it in no way implied that the
other gods were included in this concept.

NAME, PERSON, AND FUNCTION

DIVINE NAME AND PERSON

In order to be recognized, the icons that tangibly revealed an aspect of the divine
had to be accompanied by the name of the god. The name, however, did not serve
only to designate a being, divine or otherwise; rather, it was an integral part of
his or her person. This is why, just as the image only partially reflected the veri-
table reality of a deity, the name attributed to the deity, which was known to all
and which served to identify him or her, was not the deity's true name. The pas-
sage from Papyrus Leiden 135o cited above expresses, in extremely strong terms,
this taboo that weighed on the true name and recalls that regarding the biblical
tetragrammaton. We find the same theme in a New Kingdom mythical tale de-
picting Isis and Re. The goddess desired to know the true name of Re, the one
that was not uttered. To do this, she had no other recourse than to invent a ruse,
making use of all her magical powers against the god, who was growing old; she
WHAT IS A GOD? 25

created a serpent that bit him, and then she offered to help him. To be cured, he
had to reveal his true name (which the text, it seems, does not report), which he
did, though not without reluctance.
Since we are unable to know the true names of the gods, given that they were
by nature never divulged, we must content ourselves with those used by the
Egyptians to designate the various divine persons. Though we shall not study
them exhaustively, the names of the gods call for some remarks. Some of them
seem at first sight like a sort of theological summary stressing either an attribute
of the deity or one of the functions that devolved on the god or goddess in the
functioning of the cosmos. Amun was the "hidden one." The name of Atum, the
creator god of Heliopolis, derives from a root whose richness of meaning is dif-
ficult to translate, for it is linked to the double notion of existence and nonexis-
tence: at one and the same time, he was "he who is realized" and "he who is not,"
that is, the totality of being before the creation was set in motion. Sakhmet was
the "powerful one," and Khons was probably the "traveler" or the "wanderer." It
is less certain whether we are to connect the name of Ptah, the artisan god of cre-
ation, with a homophonous root meaning "to fashion." The latter might merely
be one of those etymologies by homophony or punning to which the Egyptians
often had recourse in the later periods of their history, and with them, much later
in time, Egyptologists as well. We must acknowledge that notwithstanding var-
ious rather far-fetched explanations that cannot stand up to analysis, many di-
vine names remain problematic for us, including those of some of the most
important deities: Geb, Re, Min, Osiris, Seth.
The names of cosmic deities were entirely distinct from that of the natural el-
ement to which they corresponded, quite the opposite of what was the case in
Greece. This was true of Geb, god of the earth; Nut, goddess of the sky; and even
of Re, the sun god. This phenomenon is an important indication of the Egyp-
tians' concept of nature; the latter was not divinized, as would be the case in a
pantheistic theory. Divinity and the cosmic reality it symbolically represented
were not merged into a single, identical entity. In the same vein, the term for an
animal of a given species was generally not the same as that of the sacred animal
of the same species that was attached to a god. Otherwise put, there was almost
no name for an animal that was also the name of a deity.
We can easily identify other types of divine name formations. There are some
that express the geographical location or local origin of a god or goddess. The
vulture goddess Nekhbet was "she of Nekheb" (el-Kab). In addition to this type
of nominal form, in other cases there was an attribute describing the topo-
graphical situation of a god: Herishef, "he who is on his lake," was the god of Her-
akleopolis, which was located near Lake Karun, at the edge of the Faiyum.
To provide symmetry to a masculine deity, Egyptians sometimes invented all
sorts of goddesses who, despite their artificial origin, ended by leading an au-
tonomous existence. Re had a counterpart Rat, the female sun who, as Rattawy,
26 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

the female sun of the Two Lands, played the role of consort of Montu along with
Iunyt, whose role she shared. By the same token, to Amun there corresponded
Amaunet, who received a cult at Thebes from Dynasty i8 on; she figured promi-
nently at the side of the lord of Thebes, who otherwise belonged to a family triad
consisting of Amun, Mut, and Khons. Amun and Amaunet were also part of the
Ogdoad, which came to play an important role in the Theban cosmogony. The
pair obeyed the same principle of formation as the other couples that consti-
tuted it, a male being and his female counterpart Nun and Naunet, Heh and
Hauhet, Kek and Kauket—all of them expressing the reality of the watery, un-
formed, tenebrous realm of origins.
Finally, there was a category of deities whose name was closely attached to
their function, those that we customarily call personifications. The best known
of these was Maat, incarnation of both cosmic order and justice, the principle of
equilibrium that was the basic driving force behind the proper conduct of ritu-
als and the heart of Egyptian ethics. Far from being an abstract entity, as schol-
ars have sometimes maintained, Maat, who was depicted as a woman with a
feather (a sign of the divine and also the ideogram for her name) stuck in her
hair, was the object of a cult, like any other deity.
Other personifications corresponded to places or localities, such as Waset, the
goddess of Thebes. Many had an economic reality and symbolized abundance.
Prominent among them was Hapy, an androgynous being with a fat belly and
pendulous breasts, who represented the inundation and its fertilizing principle
(the Nile, in its capacity as river, was never provided with an image). Finally,
more conceptual notions like Sia and Hu, perception and speech, who were oth-
erwise associated with the heart and the tongue of the creator god Ptah Tatenen,
were elevated to the rank of deities, though without, it seems, receiving a cult, as
was also the case with Heka, magical power. We may add sight and hearing, the
seven utterances of Mehetweret, and many others. In all these examples, the
name of the divine being who received an icon was the same as that of the con-
ceptual notion that he or she represented. This quick review sheds light on, with-
out our necessarily being able to explain its origin or reason, the freedom with
which the Egyptians invented deities who represented cosmic forces and natural
phenomena, and also geographic and economic realities and abstract concepts.
Still, not everything was promoted to the rank of divine in this concept of things,
even though in principle, everything could participate in the domain of netjer.

MULTIPLICITY OF NAMES AND SYNCRETISTIC TENDENCIES

Just as the gods had multiple forms and could appear under different images,
each one appropriate to the function fulfilled by a deity, they also had multiple
names, though their real name remained hidden and unknowable. The name be-
ing part of a person, the variety of names that a deity could possess is another
WHAT IS A GOD? 27

way to approach the reality of his or her being. Litanies to a deity "in all his
names" occur frequently in liturgy; Osiris and Isis, among others, benefited
greatly from them.
Multiplicity of names was also expressed by associating most often two, but
sometimes three or four, distinct names that designate a single divine form.
Amun-Re, Re-Harakhty, Sobek-Re, Khepri-Re-Atum, Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, and
Harmakhis-Khepri-Re-Atum are examples. For goddesses, we may cite Hathor-
Maat, Hathor-Tefnut, Isis-Sothis, and Isis-Selkis.
Such associations enabled one deity to borrow the characteristics and attri-
butes of another, though without losing his or her own. It is clear that in the gen-
eral configuration of gods, the role and influence of Re were so great that he,
more frequently than any other, contributed to these alliances. The same was
true of Isis and Hathor.
Combinations could also express another theological reality. Khepri-Re-
Atum expressed the triple aspect of the sun god: Khepri, the sun rising in the
morning; Re, the sun shining at midday; and Atum, the sun setting in the
evening. Harmakhis-Khepri-Re-Atum was manifest specifically in the form of
the Great Sphinx, his image, which was one icon among others of the sun god in
his triple aspect.
These more or less complex arrangements between divine names seem to be
one of the expressions of the aspect, multiple and ungraspable in its totality, of
the gods "with many appearances" and "with many names," who did not cease
to transform themselves. This concept was what the Egyptians expressed in an-
other way by proclaiming that one god was the ba of another, the divine mani-
festation of the latter.
There was, however, a somewhat different case, that of the union of Re and
Osiris, which served as the pivot in all the great New Kingdom funerary com-
positions reproduced in the royal tombs. The destiny of the two gods would seem
irreconcilable, the one god solar and celestial, the other having experienced
death and reigning over the subterranean world. But daily, during his nocturnal
course, Re was obliged to penetrate into the Duat and to experience the fate of
Osiris before reappearing triumphantly in the morning. This phenomenon is
pithily summarized by the double legend that accompanies a ram-headed
mummy, crowned with the sun disk and protected by Isis and Nephthys, in the
tomb of Nefertari: "It is Re when he rests as Osiris, Osiris when he rests as Re."
This union was supposed to recur daily in the framework of the solar cycle.
This combinatory system is what we may call the "syncretism" of Egyptian
thought, provided we accord the word a definition that corresponds to Egyptian
reality. Erik Hornung has made an especially clear assessment of the situation.
The association of two deities via their names does not imply the disappearance
of the two original realities through fusion. The link established between them
remained ever transitory and reversible. It was not a matter of proceeding from
28 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

multiplicity to unity, but of describing, by means of these appropriations, the

multiform aspect of the god and endowing him with attributes and functions
that were not originally his. In a double name, one name refers to the person of
the god, the other to a function he has borrowed.

FUNCTION: LIMITS OF DIVINE POWER

The inevitable corollary of polytheism, or diversity and multiplicity of gods and

goddesses, was the division of functions and specializations among the deities.
Conceived of as a person manifest in one or several forms, or with one or sev-
eral names, each god or goddess took on one or several functions in the world.
But the division of labor was not entirely stable, and far from being specific to a
single deity, certain epithets expressing a divine function were applied to a whole
series of deities. Thus, "lord of the sky" could qualify all deities of a celestial na-
ture, which shows immediately that the link between this cosmic element and a
single divine person was not unilateral. By the same token, since many gods
could lay claim to this status, its significance was reduced, given that by their ori-
gins, their attributes, and their functions, they all had a privileged relationship
with the sky. Though he existed at the beginning, before the other gods and god-
desses, even the creator god was not omnipotent, which is the mark of a unique,
transcendent god. The Egyptians indicated this in various ways, in particular by
the fact that he was subject to the aging process. His creatures could revolt against
him, as in the Book of the Heavenly Cow, or other gods could trick him, after the
fashion of Isis when she wished to know the true name of Re so as to diminish
his power. More generally speaking, the historicization of the gods, such as we
find it in their myths, is also a way of indicating the limits of their existence and
their power.
Aside from the nonspecific character of divine attributes, given that several
gods could fulfill a single function, and the at least partial participation of the
deities in this world and its time, another aspect of theirs indicates a limit to their
powers. Most Egyptian deities had a local root that linked them to a city or to a
geographical region that depended on them, to the point that Egyptians fre-
quently spoke of a"city god," without mentioning his name and thus leaving him
anonymous. Such a god held sway over a limited territory, which can explain
how the taboos linked to the particular facts about a deity, such as we find them
in the geographical lists in temples, do not extend beyond the circumscribed area
of the nome over which that deity reigned.
To be sure, the extent of the gods' powers was greater than that of human be-
ings; if not, they would not be gods. Their relationship to time and space was not
the same as that of human beings. For the gods, time was reversible; though they
grew old, they perpetually renewed themselves. Amun, say the texts, "hears the
prayers of the one who calls on him; in an instant, he rushes from afar towards
WHAT IS A GOD? 29

the one who calls him." Nevertheless, the god, even if called "the greatest," which
perhaps means nothing more than "very great," never attains the dimensions of
pure transcendence, for he never ceases to be present on earth in the company
of other gods who simultaneously exercise the same, or nearly the same, powers.

THE ORGANIZATION OF THE DIVINE

Studying the world of the gods, Adolf Erman saw nothing in it but a terrible con-
fusion, undoubtedly because of the proliferation, and at least partial inter-
changeability, of forms, names, and functions. In the meanwhile, we know that
such thought, sometimes qualified somewhat approximately as prelogical, or
savage thought, according to the definition of Lévi-Strauss, is ill suited to be
qualified as "confused." Quite the contrary, it possesses classificatory systems
that, though they are not ours, nevertheless have a rigorous internal coherence
that assures their ability to function. Thus, we must study the modalities, the
family ties, the bonds of hierarchic dependence or numerical combinations that
govern the divine multiplicity. It is unthinkable that the Egyptians, in the face of
this proliferation of beings that emerged from their imagination, did not orga-
nize them according to an order that remains to be defined. We often invoke the
word pantheon, of course. If we mean by it simply the totality of the gods and
goddesses of Egypt, the term is acceptable, but it explains nothing. If it indicates
a global organization, comparable to the totality of human society, it is ill taken.
Unlike the Greek pantheon, which is our inevitable reference point, the divine
configurations of Egypt were structured on different levels that could always in-
teract with one another, without ever amounting to a panorama of a single, per-
fectly hierarchized society.

GENEALOGIES AND FAMILIES

Because the gods were fashioned by the creator god at the beginning of the cos-
mos, generations of gods came into existence, one after the other, according to a
normal reproductive process, though afterward, they had to live together con-
comitantly. This is what happened at Heliopolis, when either by masturbating
or by spitting, Atum produced the couple Shu and Tefnut, who in their turn en-
gendered Geb and Nut (see figure 3), who engendered Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and
Seth, a tradition that appears already in the Pyramid Texts. Osiris and Isis gave
birth to Horus.
This was one of the most widespread schemes in the divine configurations.
In general, the couple or pair represented the two sexes, though we must note
the existence of two inseparable sisters, Isis and Nephthys, and two inimical
brothers, Osiris and Seth, and an inimical uncle and nephew, Seth and Horus.
30 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

FIGURE 3. Shu separating Geb and Nut. From A. Piankoff and N. Rambova, Mythological Papyri: Egyp-
tian Religious Texts and Representations, vol. 5 (New York, 1957), p. 48, fig. 32.

Osiris and Isis were the image par excellence of a couple, one that doubtless goes
back to the emergence of the Egyptian gods, for the Pyramid Texts already de-
pict the search for the dead god, whose success was assured. Nevertheless, the fig-
ure of the divine couple was not used systematically in the earliest periods: thus,
Ptah and Sakhmet were first worshiped separately at Memphis, before the latter
became the consort of the former. In the same vein, it was only in Dynasty i8 that
Mut appeared in the company of Amun at Thebes. At Elephantine, it remains
unproven that Khnum and Satis were always a couple.
Couples, moreover, were integrated into a family unit made up of three mem-
bers, a father, a mother, and a child god, who was almost always a boy. In this
case as well, the archetypical model is to be sought in the family Osiris-Isis-
Horus, which was constituted in the earliest periods, though Horus otherwise
played different roles that came to be integrated into the original elements of the
myth. As in the case of couples, the creation of triads appeared relatively late in
the history of Egyptian religion, and generally at the same time: in the examples
already cited Ptah, Sakhmet, Nefertem and Amun, Mut, Khons—the child god
WHAT IS A GOD? 31

had previously led an autonomous existence that he did not lose after his inte-
gration into a family. This triadic scheme became systematic in the later periods
of history Horus, Hathor, and Harsomtus at Edfu; Montu, Rattawy, and
Harpre at Tod —a phenomenon corresponding to the patent effort at organiza-
tion that theologians were making at that time. In the same era, the avatars of
Horus multiplied and enjoyed great popularity, according to the specific func-
tion of this god that was privileged: Harpokrates, "Horus the child"; Harsiese,
"Horus son of Isis"; Harendotes,"Horus avenger of his father"; Harsomtus, "Ho-
rus who unites the Two Lands:' Also at that time, replacing the royal child born
of a divine union known from New Kingdom examples, the child-god assumed
the central place in the mystery of the divine birth; this mystery now depicted
only gods, but its aim remained that of assuring the legitimate succession of
power.
Aside from the Osirian triad, the family constellation perhaps played a less
fundamental role than would appear at first glance if we remember that it was
relatively late and somewhat artificial. But it corresponded to a triune structure
of Egyptian thought that expressed itself in many other ways. That is why divine
families, far from imitating human ones, were limited to three protagonists, with
the god and the goddess representing differentiation; as for the child god, a
young boy, his function was to assure legitimate succession, and at the same time,
he brought the number to three, which was the mark of the plural.

SOCIAL ORGANIZATION AND HIERARCHY

Divine figures entered into the framework of a system other than that of the fam-
ily, one that was taken horizontally or vertically: that of a social and thus hierar-
chized group, which often amounted to a family. From the earliest period on, we
encounter bodies made up of gods, such as the bau of Pe and Nekhen, those of
Heliopolis, and ultimately, the fourteen kas of Re. In the so-called Hermopoli-
tan cosmogony, there was a homogeneous group, the Ogdoad, that presided over
the beginning of the cosmos. Nevertheless, the association that would enjoy the
greatest success was that which we have already encountered in the form of the
Ennead; its prototype was that of Heliopolis, though the latter never received an
inviolate, canonical form. Horus could be included in it, while Seth would be
banned from it after the end of the New Kingdom, when, since he incarnated
evil, he was no longer fit to belong to it. This Ennead was founded on a ge-
nealogical chain, but also on a dynastic, and therefore historical succession that
ended with the triumph of Horus, the legitimate son installed on the throne of
his father and represented on earth by the pharaoh. The grouping of gods into
Enneads spread throughout Egypt. In the Memphite Theology, Ptah was also ac-
companied by an Ennead that was closely linked to that of Heliopolis. In the New
Kingdom, we encounter a Greater Ennead and a Lesser Ennead at Karnak, both
32 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

of them dominated by the figure of Amun. The notion of "greater" and "lesser"
indicates the relative importance ascribed to each of them, as a function of the
deities included in them. At the same time, the group included much more than
nine members: we count up to fifteen of them, because for the Egyptians, the ac-
tual number of members did not have to add up to nine. What was important
to them was the concept of Ennead: plurality in its perfect form.
These two Enneads at Karnak were headed respectively by Montu, who had
for a certain time been supreme over the Theban region, and by Thoth; but as
the texts indicate, it was Amun who commanded them. The latter, like certain
others (essentially, Nah and Osiris), answered to the name of king of the gods,
which implies a political and institutional domination modeled on the pha-
raonic organization. Otherwise, Ptah could also be qualified as king of the Two
Lands and Osiris as king of the gods. The king list in the Royal Canon of Turin
begins with a series of ten gods who had reigned on earth before human kings,
with no gap in time between the one group and the other. As is the case with
other epithets, those expressing divine kingship exercised over the other gods
and over Egypt were not specifically reserved for a single god, but simply privi-
leged him in a particular context, without any exclusivity. Such an attitude cor-
responds to the doctrine known as henotheism, or sometimes, monolatry: a
single god could be elevated, in a manner that was not universal, but only pro-
visional and reversible, into a figure superior to the others.

GODS AND NUMBERS

Among all the classifications we have been able to evoke, we discern one mode
of conceptual apprehension that played a major role in the organization of di-
vine configurations. This mode was numerical thinking, which enabled the iden-
tification of notions such as unity, difference, and plurality with numbers, and
the introduction of a system of classification that was simple, but which allowed
for complex thematic variations. In other cultures, such a relationship has been
expressed with other modalities, as in the Cabala, which bases the interpretation
of texts on the numerical value of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Here, we
shall pause only over those numbers that clearly played an essential role in Egyp-
tian thought.
The number one was the original indifferentiation, the unity experienced by
the creator god preexisting in the primordial Nun, before "two things existed,"
as we read in the Coffin Texts.
Two signaled the beginning of creation, the initial division that entailed sep-
aration and difference. The opposition of the sexes that we encounter in the di-
vine couples indicated this difference, though the creator god had both male and
female characteristics. Beyond this first moment, duality would continue to play
a major role in the organization of the world, for it would also be a characteris-
WHAT IS A GOD? 33

tic of the double kingship over Upper and Lower Egypt, as symbolized by the
double crown.
In Egyptian, three was the plural par excellence; two plus one, this was what
the family triads represented. But three had many other implications in the in-
terpretation of the divine system. We may recall that the nature of the gods was
marked by a fundamental tripartition: the ba, the cult image, and the body or
cadaver, which corresponded to the sky, the earth, and the netherworld. As Jan
Assmann has put it, the dimensions of the divine were threefold: cosmic, cultic,
and mythic. This triple character was expressed in the very modality of the gods'
existence: the denomination Khepri-Re-Atum encompasses the different aspects
under which the sun god appeared, a modal trinity that was also expressed by
the metaphor of the child in the morning, the young man at noon, and the old
man in the evening. In the Coffin Texts, Mum, the unique one, transformed him-
self into three by creating Shu and Tefnut, that is to say, three entities existed, one
of whom remained Atum.
The beginning of chapter 300 of the text of Papyrus Leiden 1350, the numer-
ical title of each of whose chapters is otherwise the object of a word play within
it, has inspired innumerable comments. There, we read:

Three are all the gods, Amun, Re, and Ptah, who have no equal.
His name is hidden as Amun.
He is Re in regard to his face.
His body is Ptah.
Their cities on earth are established for eternity;
Thebes, Heliopolis, Hutkaptah (i.e., Memphis) perennially.

The first and the last statements invite us to see in them the definition of a triad,
conceived in order to gather together the three most important dynastic gods in
Egypt at the time the text was written. We encounter the same three gods in the
list of the goods of temples in Papyrus Harris, which is only a little later in date.
In both cases, the three cities are cited by name. But the statements separating
the first and last lines of the citation are on another level, establishing corre-
spondences between the three divine names and the name, the face, and the
body, three aspects of the divine personality that of course evoke the sky, the
earth, and the subterranean realm. Does this subtle play of correspondences,
which are both horizontal and vertical, indicate that we are dealing with a trin-
ity that would represent, once and for all, the unity of the divine in the person
of Amun? I do not believe that. Here, the modes of divine existence are expressed
by a combination of three figures who nevertheless retain their autonomy, with
the understanding that three is a form of perfection. The dogmatic affirmation
stems from a combining of formulas and from speculation on texts and num-
bers, with no implication that other formulas are excluded; we should otherwise
34 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

have to wonder about the absence of Osiris from this triunitary expression, if it
was really conceived as an affirmation of divine unity.
Four was a number highly valued by the Egyptians, for whom it signified ac-
complished totality and plenitude, as revealed especially in space. The four car-
dinal points, the four supports of the sky, and the four winds represented the
world envisaged, in its integrality, to its ultimate limits. This is why so many rites
were carried out under the sign of quadruple repetition: the releasing of four
geese, the sacrifice of four calves, and so forth. The sons of Horus were also four
in number, as were the goddesses who protected coffins.
Eight, four times two, symbolized differentiation and unity. The clearest ex-
ample is the Ogdoad, which is made up of four couples, "four males, each one
with his female," according to a cosmogonical text from the temple of Khons at
Karnak. From the Third Intermediate Period, in an inscription on a coffin of a
priest of Amun, it is again said of this god, "I am one who became two, I am two
who became four, I am four who became eight, I am one who protects himself."
We are witness to a sort of mathematical dynamic of creation that ends in the
appearance of the Ogdoad through successive transformations of the god, who
is nevertheless preserved in his existence and integrity.
Nine, three times three, expressed the perfect plural, the plural of plurals, and
played an important role in constituting the groups of deities known as Enneads,
created either through a succession of generations or as social and hierarchized
groups. The value of the number nine could continue to be pregnant even when
the actual number of beings composing it surpassed nine. It is also worth not-
ing that the same word for Ennead, pesedjet, was sometimes not written with the
ideogram proper to it, but simply with nine netjer signs, indicating divine plu-
rality par excellence.
Millions: "One who made himself into millions" was one of the epithets of
Amun from the Ramesside Period on, and it occurs frequently in the Ptolemaic
texts from Thebes. Thus, we pass from nine, the plural, to millions, a manifesta-
tion of boundless infinity. Back to one, which the god was before the creation of
the cosmos. Once again, the interpretations differ considerably. Here, we must
have the courage to recognize that, in the face of this declaration, whose formu-
lation poses no real problem of translation, the interpretation a scholar makes
of it is subject to the viewpoint that he or she projects onto the Egyptian system.
We have no ancient theologian to answer our questions, and to the extent that
Egyptian thought was not dogmatic, divergent interpretations seem to manifest
themselves in the texts. Egyptians played on the polysemy of the word heh, which
means millions but was also a god linked with the air, such as Shu, which singu-
larly compromises reasoning about the radical transcendence of Amun. "The
one who made himself into millions" also expresses the plurality of the forms of
the god, which human beings are not capable of embracing in their totality. Far
from being outside the world in absolute transcendence, his mode of existence
WHAT IS A GOD? 35

is an explosion into an infinity of manifestations that cannot be completely as-

similated.
Numbers enabled the Egyptians to organize divine configurations according
to a simple system that gave rise to a multiplicity of subtle combinations, and
we must wonder whether they were not born of purely speculative games with
numbers.

DIVINE UNIQUENESS IN THE AMARNA PERIOD

In the face of the multiplicity of gods, and of their forms, their images, and their
names, the Amarna episode introduced the uniqueness of the sun god, affirmed
in an apodictic manner. This rather brief interlude in the history of Egypt has
stirred up heated passions, because some have viewed it as the first real mani-
festation of monotheism in history. This controversy is not what is important
here, any more than the search for the actual, underlying reasons that might have
led the pharaoh Akhenaten to impose his conceptual revolution for some years.
What is remarkable in this transformation is that two modes of thought and of
apprehension of the divine were opposed to one another. Until then, the gods,
emergences from the imaginary realm, represented all the forces of the universe
and made it possible to explain the functioning of the cosmos. Through the cult
they rendered to them, human beings assured the maintenance of this order,
which obeyed the rules of Maat. In the Amarna Period, rejecting icons and
metaphors, thinkers contented themselves with a phenomenological description
of the presence of the sun disk, without benefit of myths. He was the unique god,
and in the texts from Amarna, we note a repugnance for the term netjer and a
preference for calling the god by his name, Aten, which was the designation of
the sun disk itself. He received no form, anthropomorphic or animal.
Artists were content to represent him just as he was: a disk with sunbeams,
though the latter were provided with hands at their ends. This image alone is
omnipresent in the reliefs from Amarna, dominating all the scenes in which the
king and his family adore this highly material deity. In this regard, Amarna reli-
gion is clearly distinct from classical monotheism in that this god, qualified as
unique, is in the world, a power superior over all, to be sure, but still a cosmic
power. The other gods, especially Amun, who was also clothed in omnipotence,
were rejected, an exclusivism that pertained to this period alone in all the his-
tory of Egypt. The invisible part of the world, the subterranean cosmic forces,
no longer existed in this system based on the observation of visible phenomena
and not on a mythical explanation of the universe. This religion was a step to-
ward both a more conceptual way of thinking and an impoverishment of the
global approach to the cosmos, an entire portion of which disappeared. We have
yet to nuance and relativize this overly rigorous vision presented by the Amarna
revolution. Increasingly, archaeological discoveries have demonstrated that even
36 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

during the reign of Akhenaten, deities other than the sun disk continued to be
worshiped, in particular Osiris, especially outside the city of Amarna.
This new concept did not outlast the reign of Akhenaten, at least in the form
he advocated and of which he was the guarantor, the priest, the sole intermedi-
ary between the Aten and the human race. Nevertheless, during the Ramesside
Period, the speculations on the divine uniqueness of Amun-Re, notwithstand-
ing the fact that the other gods continued to exist, flowed from Amarna re-
flection, which in this regard had a lasting influence.

STORIES ABOUT THE GODS

MYTHS: DEFINITION AND FUNCTIONS

Polytheism, or the multiplicity of deities who are defined in terms of a person

and a function, gave rise to stories about them that constituted the narrative con-
tent of myths. The word myth is Greek, and when philosophy was born, thinkers
employed it as the antonym of the logical discourse that is logos. At the same
time, a certain number of authors, among them Hesiod, took up the task of col-
lecting myths and giving them some order and coherence, thus inventing
mythology. Modern historians of religion have accustomed themselves to using
the latter term extensively for all the religions of ancient or traditional societies,
though this is not always appropriate. In the particular case of Egypt, stories
about the gods did indeed correspond to what one can call a myth, though there
was no word for "myth" in the vocabulary. We must note, however, that properly
speaking, there was no mythological system that encompassed all the deities and
articulated stories about individual gods with those about the others. It seems
that we cannot adduce the shipwreck of a great part of the documentation to ex-
plain this lack. We have abundant documentation regarding Amun in the New
Kingdom, mostly hymns, but practically no trace of a myth depicting him, ex-
cept for his role in the theogamies; theological speculations, such as we have
glimpsed them in Papyrus Leiden 1350, for example, were generated within a se-
ries of subtle combinations. The Egyptians apprehended the divine less by
means of narrative depiction of mythic metaphors than by a more conceptual
and speculative process, hence the relative lack of myths in the religious land-
scape of Egypt.
Myths tell us what happened to gods, given that they were part of the universe
and hence were born, lived, and died. This is what we can call the historicization
of myth, as summed up perfectly by the beginning of the myth of Horus at
Edfu "in year 363 of His Majesty the King of Upper and Lower Egypt Re-
Harakhty, who lives beyond time and space" though at the same time, myth
was a literary form whose narrative metaphors related back to another level of
interpretation that permits an explanation of the cosmic or political phenom-
 WHAT IS A GOD? 37

ena that came into play in the stories about the gods. Myth was part of a system
of explanation, partial or global, of the universe organized into a cosmos.
Stories about gods unfold in illo tempore. The time of myth is none other than
the time of the First Occasion, when things came into existence, as is obvious in
the case of all the purely cosmogonic myths, but as can also be demonstrated
in the case of the others, though the Egyptians attempted to suppress any reso-
lution of the continuity between mythic time and historical time, as in the case
of the king list of the Royal Canon of Turin.
Moreover, in mythic thought, there is no radical break between the time of
myth and that of history. As a mode of apprehending the universe, myth serves
to explain the present and to inform it, for historical time is only the infinitely
renewed repetition of the First Occasion.
The telling of myth, whether its implicit presence in the carrying out of ritu-
als, or its actualization in a dramatic performance such as the one repeated each
year for Horus of Edfu, perpetuated it and ceaselessly reactualized it in the pre-
sent time. Stories about deities were necessarily true, because they expressed the
reality of the visible and the invisible world, such as the Egyptians understood
it, and because they were the metaphorical image that established a link between
the real world and that of the imaginary. To ask whether the Egyptians believed
in their myths is thus scarcely a meaningful question. Because the gods did not
reveal themselves, but rather manifested themselves, because their existence was
postulated as consubstantial with that of the universe, their stories were only a
manner of uncovering their function within the universe.
A mythic account was a literary text. Those we know from Egypt are relatively
late in date and do not go back beyond the Middle Kingdom in the form in which
they have come down to us. There thus arises the question, which is not easy to
resolve, of the date of the constitution in narrative form of the mythic accounts
we know of. Did they exist before the date when they were written down? Have
we lost any trace of them because before that time they had belonged to the do-
main of orality? Or were they crafted at the moment when they were written? At
the very least, the many allusions to the myth of Osiris in the Pyramid Texts in-
vite us to think that certain mythic themes, if not all of them, went back to an
extremely early period that preceded their formal organization. At present, de-
spite the many discussions written about this question, it seems difficult to fix
more precisely, with well-substantiated arguments, the evolution of the literary
history of myths.

SOME MYTHS OF EGYPT

Without making a systematic interpretation or an exhaustive study, we shall now

proceed to note some of the major myths we encounter in Egypt, except for
specifically cosmogonic myths, which will be the topic of the following chapter.
38 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

Because the latter touch on the constitution and functioning of the universe,
they played an important role in Egyptian thought, in that they dealt with exis-
tence itself, with life and death, and with time.
The historical and political theme of the legitimate succession of the son to
the throne of his father, which is otherwise one of the constituent elements of
the myth of Osiris, was represented in the temples, beginning with the New
Kingdom, in the form of a theogamy (divine union) of the divine father, in this
case Amun, with the queen, who would bear a royal child who was himself di-
vine. This was the form in which the birth of Hatshepsut was represented at Deir
el-Bahari, and that of Amenophis III in the temple of Luxor. Earlier, the theme
was already present in the form of a story: Papyrus Westcar, whose text was writ-
ten in Dynasty 12, recounts the prodigious birth of the first three kings of Dy-
nasty 5. From Dynasty 3o on, no doubt under the influence of political events,
the divine birth, which was always represented in a special edifice, the mammisi
(birth house), depicted only divine protagonists.
The Book of the Heavenly Cow, which recounts the myth of the destruction
of humankind, was copied in several royal tombs of the New Kingdom, accom-
panied by a vignette illustrating the text: the sun barques of Re travel inside the
belly of the celestial cow, while Shu and the eight supports of the sky hold her
up. The story relates how, when Re had become old, men plotted against him.
The god sent his eye in the form of Hathor to destroy them, but then changed
his mind before the carnage was widespread. Hathor was intoxicated with the
help of beer dyed red in imitation of human blood, and she returned pacified.
Following this episode, Re decided to distance himself from the world and from
humankind, and he took his place on the back of Nut, who was transformed into
the celestial cow. It was from the sky that Re then shone down on the earth, af-
ter designating Thoth as his substitute to regulate the affairs of the world below.
This is not, properly speaking, a cosmogony, but rather an explanation of the be-
ginnings of the world, for historical time inexorably followed that of the myth.
Some have wished to see here a sort of Golden Age, which is not stated in the
text. In this account, we make out the theme of the separation of the elements,
of sky and earth, but especially of the separation of the gods from humankind
after the latter's rebellion and near annihilation. The presence of evil in this
world, which is not imputed as a sin to humans, though they were punished for
it, seems to be inherent in its very existence, for one day they revolted against
their creator, without any explanation supplied for this rebellion that irrevoca-
bly transformed the situation.
The myths about the solar eye, the eye of Re, and the lunar eye, the eye of Ho-
rus that became the udjat, the hale and complete eye, are extremely rich and
complex, with, sometimes, interconnections between them. The constellation
eye-lioness-uraeus, which was associated with the sun god, offered numerous
WHAT IS A GOD? 39

variations on the theme of the distant or dangerous goddess who returned to

Egypt appeased and beneficent. These myths evidently had a cosmic back-
ground, one linked to the arrival of the inundation in Egypt at the moment when
the heat of summer was most intense.
Of all the Egyptian myths, the most famous, and also the richest because of
its multiple aspects and its different levels of interpretation, is uncontestedly the
myth of Osiris, or, more exactly, the Osirian mythological constellation, in which
diverse themes are intertwined. Its fame spread far beyond Egyptian culture, and
it is through the account by Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, that we are able to fol-
low the sequence of events in all its details; in the hands of this Greek author,
however, it underwent transformations and embellishments that did not belong
to the Egyptian tradition, whose various mythical themes need to be disengaged.
The story is well known. Having succeeded his father Geb, Osiris reigned on
earth and bestowed his blessings on it. Out of jealousy, his brother Seth decided
to kill him. Isis went in quest of the pieces of his dismembered body and suc-
ceeded in reconstituting it. After having sexual intercourse, in the form of a bird,
with the dead god she restored to life, she gave birth to a posthumous son, Ho-
rus. She raised him secretly in the marshes of the delta, and when the day came,
he battled mercilessly with his uncle Seth to avenge his father. Then, as legitimate
heir, he ascended his throne, while Osiris, having left the earth, reigned over the
subterranean domain of the dead. In the Egyptian texts, we find only scattered
fragments of the myth, though they enable us to reconstitute it in its general out-
line. The myth is well attested from the Pyramid Texts on, but always with a care-
ful avoidance of describing the murder of the god, who we nevertheless know
was cut into pieces and had to be put back together in order to regain life. Ele-
ments of the myth appear in hymns addressed to the god from the Middle King-
dom on. Others could be transposed into a purely literary version, such as the
New Kingdom story entitled Truth and Falsehood, in which the personifications
of abstractions replace the divine protagonists. Finally, the myth of Horus at
Edfu depicts the battle of Horus against Seth and his triumph after numerous
ups and downs, in the form of a dramatic performance that was repeated each
year.
We clearly distinguish certain paradigms in the different moments of the
story: the murder of the father, avenged by his son, the bad relationship between
the two brothers, the theme of the wife and loving mother, the bellicose rela-
tionship of the uncle and the nephew. But we cannot neglect the cosmic aspect
of the myth. The dead god had an agrarian function; sovereign of the nether-
world, through his "resurrection" he made possible the survival of all human-
kind and the annual return of the cycle of vegetation. An extremely complex
myth, it nevertheless attained, through its familiar and reassuring figures, an un-
equaled popularity. It is the only myth that, beginning with the first divine dy-
40 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

nasties, concludes with a perspective that is not only that of the perpetual re-
newal of the annual cycle and the royal institution, but also of triumph over
death, which is an inherent part of the universe.

WHAT TRANSCENDENCE?

We arrive at the end of this chapter, which has been dedicated to the study of the
divine, such as Egyptian representations and texts reveal it to us, via the person
of the gods, their names, their functions, and their myths. Along the way, I have
mentioned theoretical notions such as syncretism, pantheism, and henotheism,
because Egyptologists have sometimes invoked them in their attempts to explain
Egyptian polytheism not to mention the quasi-apologetic temptation to re-
veal a monotheism that always lay dormant under the polytheism! It has been
shown that these notions correspond only approximately, or not at all, to the
Egyptians' concept of the divine, whose principal characteristics I would like to
emphasize in this conclusion.
The deities of the polytheistic world were figures of the imaginary realm, en-
dowed with a personal identity, a name, a function, and perhaps a history. Being
many, they necessarily had their limits, which is especially perceptible on the
level of their function and their power.
But the limits that defined them were not impenetrable borders. The defini-
tion of a divine entity generally remained rather fluid and was susceptible to
modification. Gods could be manifest in different ways to the eyes of those who
imagined and represented them, because of what Henri Frankfort has labeled
"multiplicity of approaches:' There could thus be several appearances or icons,
according to the function a deity took on, as well as several names, or a double
name, one part of which defined the person and the other the function he or she
borrowed from another entity.
Through this system of combinations, whose elements partially overlapped
one another, the ensemble of gods and goddesses bore witness to the totality of
the representation of the world. In their imaginary realm, they mirrored per-
ceptible reality.
The gods, repeat the texts, are made up of a ba, a cult image, and a body or
cadaver, which correspond to the tripartition of sky, earth, and netherworld.
These constituent elements are no different from those of a human being, and
in this sense, there is no ontological difference between deities and humans.
What distinguishes them is their relative share in the real and the imaginary.
Even deities do not lack a share in the real world, for their ba alights on their
statue and animates it. This worldly image is also a part of the divine. Yet
notwithstanding their visible manifestation, the gods are also distant, unknow-
able, and hidden. Though such terms are most often attached to the name of
WHAT IS A GOD? 41

Amun, they also qualify other deities, and it is undoubtedly this quality that can
be called divine transcendence. The Egyptians were always conscious of the fact
that a god was more than that by means of which he was manifest. No matter
how many ways one attempted to approach him, he remained elusive. It was im-
possible to define or contain him with language. We may wonder whether the
Egyptians, who recognized the accordance of word and object, of the signifier
and the signified, and who were convinced of the performativity of speech and
sign, did not implicitly recognize the limits of their theory.
Each deity of this polytheistic world was transcendent otherwise he would
not be a god transcendent yet manifest in the world. This in no way means that
there was a single divine entity, of whom the manifestations that we know were
mere reflections. There was a unity before the cosmos was organized into deities
with plurality and differentiation, which were the two necessary conditions for
setting things in motion at the time of the First Occasion. Moreover, while hymns
to Amun speak repeatedly of the uniqueness of this god, other texts tell us insis-
tently of "all the gods" whom Amun in no way included. Amun could be "the one
who made himself into millions," that is, a reality intangible to human beings,
but he was not unique. In Egypt, there was no logic of the excluded middle. The
gods, all of them, were imaginary emergences of the differentiated world set up
as a cosmos. Present in the world yet transcending it, they made it possible to
represent and explain it, and also to assure its equilibrium, so long as human be-
ings carried out the rituals necessary for this maintenance.
 CHAPTER 2

COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME

EGYPTIAN ONTOLOGY

BEING AND NONBEING

Egyptian preoccupation with the realm of the imaginary and the ideal did not
stop with the concept of the gods, their being in the world, and their status. There
was a fundamental, first question that always imposed itself: that of the origin of
the world, if not its why, at least its how. It is obvious that questions occurred to
people aware of life and death, of cyclical and linear time, and of the laws of na-
ture, even if the latter were not yet on the level of physics. How and perhaps,
why does this exist? How did the world begin? An attempt was made to dis-
cover or reconstitute the primal scene with the help of available intellectual tools,
whether mythological or conceptual. From the many pieces of written evidence,
even if they are fragmentary or allusive, that the Egyptians left us, it is clear that
for them creation was a central point in the elaboration of their thought, around
which they organized their entire concept of the functioning of the world.
It must be noted that with this notion of the birth of the world, this search
for origins, we touch on an aspect of Egyptian ontology. Though we have re-
nounced the Western ethnocentrism that long prevailed, it has often been re-
peated, and it continues to be repeated, that there was no Egyptian philosophy.
In the strict sense of the term, such as it has been used since the successors of the
pre-Socratics developed this mode of thinking in Greece, we cannot speak of
Egyptian philosophy. We undoubtedly find no pure inquiry on a given concept,
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 43

in the sense of a manifestation of a mind reflecting on a topic. But that does not
mean that the concept did not exist. When the Egyptians evoked "that which ex-
ists and does not exist," that is, being and nothingness or nonbeing, did they not
arrive at an abstract concept free of any mythological element? Perhaps we
should give up on the implicit idea, which still underlies most of our discourse,
that the only concepts are those that we ourselves expound. Lexicography and
conceptualization have perhaps been confused. Because we find no single, un-
equivocal term for "time" in the Egyptian vocabulary, are we to conclude there
was no concept of time?
The questions touched on here are the most complex to formulate, whatever
the cultural context in which they are posed. They are both highly concrete and
pure mind game. When we make them an object of reflection, they remain a
stumbling block. The Egyptian thinkers' response to this problem was neither
more simplistic nor less perspicacious than that of present-day physicists, as-
tronomers, geologists, or paleontologists, not to mention, of course, the con-
temporary theologians who pass along their truth, elaborated centuries ago, as
an article of faith. Obviously, recent scientific research has made spectacular
progress in our knowledge of this world, opening perspectives unimaginable for
people in antiquity, whatever their culture and their belief. Yet the same ques-
tion remains, like an inaccessible horizon: what are being and time?
These preliminary remarks on method having been made, it is clear that we
shall not be able to be resolve all the difficulties we encounter in reading the Egyp-
tian sources. We must once again stress that these documents have come down to
us in bits and pieces, and in any event, that in many cases, they were already orig-
inally allusive, for the theologians did not always judge it necessary to set down a
carefully elaborated version of their concepts. There are only a few exceptions to
this rule, of which the Memphite Theology is a remarkable example.
Moreover, given the multiplicity of approaches used by the ancient thinkers,
according to the theological center they followed, we may at first feel a certain
confusion. There is no canonical text regarding the birth of the world that would
be the equivalent of the accounts in Genesis, but rather, a variety of explanations
that at first glance seem unrelated to one another, though an effort at rational-
ization and an attempt at internal coherence were at work on them, and not only
in the later stages of Egyptian history. But reading a bit more deeply, we discover
elements that are inevitably present in all the cosmogonies, elements that are
their mainstays and that enable us to follow their train of thought. It is these el-
ements that we shall analyze to extract the fundamental characteristics on which
all Egyptian cosmology was based. For notwithstanding the variety of texts,
which is moreover not artificial, it appears that the different cosmogonies con-
form to a single structure and that their schemes, though they cannot be per-
fectly superimposed, are nevertheless of the same nature. Therein lies the proof
44 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

that from the beginning on, beyond local and temporal differences, there was a
single underlying approach to the phenomenon of religion.

THE SOURCES

To uncover the structures that seem to me to govern Egyptian cosmogonic

thought, we shall turn to texts of various origins that make reference to it. We
lack a systematic account relating creation according to the extremely old con-
cepts of the priests of Heliopolis. It is thus through sometimes elliptic allusions,
diverse glosses, and occasionally more connected texts, from the Pyramid Texts
down through the Coffin Texts, the Book of the Dead, and Papyrus Bremner-
Rhind, that we can reconstitute its crucial moments: how Atum arose from Nun,
gave birth to Shu and Tefnut by masturbation or spitting, and how in their turn,
the latter were father and mother of Geb and Nut, who gave birth to Osiris, Isis,
Seth, and Nephthys. This is simply the mythological framework of a creation
whose principles we shall examine in greater detail.
We have already mentioned a document of Memphite origin, the Shabaka
Stone, also called the Memphite Theology. It contains a rather systematic ac-
count of the "intellectual" creation carried out by Ptah-Tatenen according to his
heart/will and the instrument of his performative tongue/speech, which carried
out the orders it received. This composition is only one part of a much longer,
but unfortunately lacuna-ridden text dealing at length with the quarrel of Ho-
rus and Seth over the succession of Osiris after the latter's death by drowning.
This complex document has been the object of a number of discussions con-
cerning its dating. The stone that has survived to us is dated to the Kushite
pharaoh Shabaka; he asserts that he copied the text from a worm-eaten papyrus,
according to a well-known literary topos. The first commentators (Kurt Sethe,
Hermann Junker) wished to see in it a genuine copy of an original going back to
the Old Kingdom, or even earlier. This position, which is difficult to support, is
no longer held today, for too many elements are anachronistic for the religious
world of the Old Kingdom. Neither is it a creation of Dynasty 25, for the text had
an earlier model. Today, there is agreement that it is a work of the Ramesside Pe-
riod, doubtless modified a bit during the Kushite Period. As for the strictly the-
ological portion of the text, it must be stressed that behind the person and the
function of Ptah-Tatenen stands the figure of Atum, the creator god of He-
liopolis, from whom the former borrowed a great deal. Far from being testimony
to a quarrel among theologians, as was once claimed, this text makes us aware of
the remarkable intellectual efforts that were made in the second millennium to
adjust Heliopolitan thought to the Memphite framework, which down to that
time does not seem to have been a source of complex speculations.
Of the Hermopolito-Theban cosmogony, which was based on the emergence
from Nun of an Ogdoad that created the sun disk, we have only scattered bits
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 45

and pieces, most of them quite late, reflecting the existence of different, parallel
traditions, without our being able to discern the connections between them.
Certain of them played a major role in the elaboration of the Theban cosmol-
ogy, of which we know scarcely anything prior to the New Kingdom, and which
became rich and complex in the Late Period.
We shall also have occasion to analyze certain aspects of the creation texts of
Esna. The theologians there had to face a delicate problem, because two deities
Khnum, the potter, and Neith, the venerable goddess of the delta, assimilated to
the primordial cow Ahet or Methyer—each played the role of creator. Moreover,
in the cosmogony of Khnum that we read in the temple of Esna, the theologians
of the Roman Period offer us an unparalleled picture of the creation of hu-
mankind.
In conclusion, we must stress that we shall not draw our information exclu-
sively from what can be called cosmogonic treatises, genesis texts of a sort.
Hymns intended to be sung on the occasion of a festival often contain precious
information regarding the creative activities of the deity to whom they are ad-
dressed. This is the case with the great New Kingdom hymns to Ptah (Papyrus
Berlin 3048), to Amun (inter alia, Papyrus Leiden 135o and Papyrus Boulaq i7),
and that in honor of Khnum, which was recited in the temple of Esna on the oc-
casion of the festival of the creation of the potter's wheel.
Occasionally, one or another of the wisdom texts, which will be studied in
depth in a later chapter, furnishes a detail regarding the way in which the Egyp-
tians conceived of the creator god. But this was not their principal subject, for
they were treatises on how people were to conduct their lives according to Maat.

BEFORE CREATION, NUN

If there was one element that all the cosmogonies agreed in defining as the first,
original element, it was Nun, the primordial entity, the unformed expanse that
had no beginning or end. Most Egyptologists agree in thinking that this was a
watery expanse and call Nun the primordial ocean; sometimes, they qualify it as
circular, on the model of the Greek Okeanos, but it is difficult and often inade-
quate to transpose images from one culture to another. The term appears already
in the Pyramid Texts, where its writings are only exceptionally accompanied by
the determinative evoking water that would always be present in the New King-
dom and later. Let us, then, set aside the circular primordial ocean, whose exis-
tence is attested by no Egyptian text, and propose a prudent, minimalist
definition: Nun was an unformed and dark mass, for light had not yet been cre-
ated, in which divine beings or dead people who had achieved divine status could
circulate.
How can we define this mass, for it was nothing of which we have knowledge,
46 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

while it was not absolutely nothingness or nonbeing? It is that which preexisted,

the uncreated, the unformed, the undifferentiated, the atemporal, to which was
opposed, after its creation, the cosmos, which was ruled by order. There is an ob-
vious temptation to see it as being par excellence, in that it is one, as opposed to
the multiplicity into which it in some sense exploded when this world took form
after creation. The Egyptian texts, however, do not reflect such a monism. If du-
ality and then multiplicity are indeed the sign of the appearance of creation, they
are in some sense independent of the nature of Nun, who subsisted, identical to
himself, after creation. The undifferentiated cannot be assimilated to the one.
Moreover, it is out of the question to identify him with a transcendent god who
would be the author of creation. He is sometimes known by the epithet "father
of the gods;' but this is just a way of expressing his anteriority, just as the appel-
lation "Nun the ancient" confers on him no active, driving role in the creation
of the world. On the contrary, Nun was an inert principle who contained in him-
self all the possibles, all the virtualities of being, some, but not necessarily all of
which would be activated at the moment of creation. Finally, he without doubt
harbored raw matter, which certain rare texts at Edfu and from the temple of
Khons at Thebes call the benenet, mother-substance, whose nature the Egyptians
did not clarify. Nun was what was before anything came into existence; it is in
this negative form that thinkers defined him in the most precise manner that
survives for us to read:

Before sky existed, before earth existed, before men existed, before death existed.'

This formulation persisted throughout the history of Egypt, with only slight
variations: "when there were not yet two things on this earth;' we read in the Cof-
fin Texts.
Another basic characteristic of Nun was his permanence. The passage from
the undifferentiated to the cosmos was not a Battle of the Titans that ended in
the transformation of the first into the second or in the disappearance, pure and
simple, of Nun. The latter subsisted after the creation of the cosmos. He was sim-
ply pushed back to the limits of the universe, where he existed below the earth
and above it. Was it not into Nun that the sun sank each night before reemerg-
ing triumphantly in the morning? Was it not in Nun that the source that fed the
terrestrial Nile was located? Was it not the place of Apopis, the fomenter of dis-
order, who was capable of hindering the smooth functioning of the cosmos? This
diffuse, constant presence is constitutive of Egyptian cosmological thought and,
more generally speaking, of its system of logic. The dialectic between contraries
was not one of exclusion but of complementarity. We can affirm only that the

1 Pyramid Texts spell 571, § 1466.

COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 47

existence, or in this case the preexistence, of Nun necessarily entailed that of the
cosmos. Yet, it seems that the Egyptians were unable to conceive the existence of
the cosmos as a negation of Nun. I think that this apprehension of the cosmos,
which is based on the rejection of exclusion and on the consubstantial perma-
nence of what we call contraries, is one of the most complex and subtle ap-
proaches to the incommensurable reality of being.
There is a final question to be raised. The Egyptians never seem to have asked
why Nun existed. For them, he was a reality that emerged as much, if not more,
from the domain of physics as that of belief. But we can try to inquire as to the
reasons that led the Egyptians to account for the origins of the world in this fash-
ion. The explanation that is often proposed, and which I give here for what it is
worth, rests on the affirmation that the Egyptian concept was not born from
pure speculation of the mind, but rather from observation of natural, geo-
graphical, and physical phenomena that were transposed onto the level of meta-
physics and mythology. In other words, the slow development of Egyptian
culture during the millennia of prehistory and the annual phenomenon of the
rise and fall of the Nile were images that could have inspired the concept of the
"anterior world" that was Nun. Even if it contains a part of the reality, this in-
terpretation is too reductive, and it does not suffice to account for the complex-
ity of the cosmogonic systems that theorized on the notion of being. At least,
though, it explains how one aspect of Nun, which is scattered throughout the
texts of the New Kingdom, presents him as one of the forms of the inundation,
gushing out of the very depths of the earth.

THE EMERGENCE OF BEING

THE AUTOGENOUS CREATOR

In this inert Nun, which preexisted everything, a creator god, whose name dif-
fered and whose attributes varied according to the theology in question, man-
ifested himself "on the First Occasion," and this, obviously, remained an
inexplicable mystery. He was not created ex nihilo, nor was he transcendent and
atemporal. He was an internal, unconscious force that became conscious of it-
self and then manifested itself of its own will. This was above all a transforma-
tion, and it was not without reason that the theologians used and abused the verb
kheper, which can be translated "come into existence," but also "transform, be-
come." In this regard, one of the most revealing texts, which proceeds from
metaphysical rather than mythological reflection, is that from Papyrus Bremner-
Rhind, a magical ritual dating to the fourth century BCE. The cosmogonic sec-
tion was written at a much earlier date. There is a New Kingdom model on an
unpublished papyrus in the Turin Museum, which itself includes formulations
48 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

from the "Book of Shu" in the Coffin Texts (spells 78-8o). The sun god Re, called
"lord of the universe," speaks and reveals his mode of existence:

When I manifested myself, manifestations manifested themselves. I had mani-

fested myself as manifestation of the existing; I manifested myself and manifesta-
tions manifested themselves, for I acted prior to the anterior gods I had created. If
I acted priorly among the anterior ones, it was that my name existed prior to theirs,
if I created anterior time and the anterior gods, it was to create all that is desirable
on this earth.

There follows a description of creation itself and its modes, to which we shall re-
turn later.
This god was autogenous. He fashioned himself, without father or mother, as
the Egyptians texts often colorfully tell us. He modeled his own body, and we
must note that this was almost always anthropomorphically; the Egyptians no
doubt were unable to imagine the primordial god other than in their own im-
age. Yet he was the "father of fathers" and the "mother of mothers," for it was
from him that the rest of creation proceeded, in particular, the hierarchy of gods,
certain of whom took up the baton in the genesis of the world properly speak-
ing, such as Shu, born of Atum. We should thus not be surprised that the creator
could be bisexual, for male and female had not yet been differentiated. He is not,
however, represented or described as androgynous in form. He was the unique
and solitary one who issued forth from Nun before everything. Nor is it sur-
prising that, when he created a god according to a physiological means—other-
wise, it was by will and speech he masturbated or spat as Atum.
This god who became conscious of himself manifested himself in different
ways, according to the theology in question. He was Ptah-Tatenen, the "rising
land," who appeared at the beginning of things, relegating the sun to the rank of
a simple luminary, which he created last, as formulated in the text of a Rames-
side hymn to Ptah from Papyrus Berlin 3048, which belongs to a group of The-
ban texts:

Greetings to you in the presence of the primordial ones you created after
you manifested yourself as divine body, who modeled his own body,
when the sky did not exist, when the earth did not exist, when the flood
had not surged.
You fixed the earth, you completed your flesh, you counted your limbs.
You noted that you were sole and unique, having made his place, the god
who fashioned the Two Lands,
Without a father who engendered you when you came into existence,
without a mother who bore you,
your own Khnum; efficacious one, who appeared efficacious.
You arose on earth in its inertia, that which was assembled afterwards;
 COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 49

You are in your appearance of Tatenen, in your manifestation of assembler

of the Two Lands.

From Heliopolis, we have already mentioned the creator god who was the sun
god in his form of Atum, but also of Re and Khepri:

I am Atum, when I was alone in Nun, (but) I am Re when he appeared at the mo-
ment when he began to govern that which he created. [gloss] Who is he?—Re at
the moment when he began to govern that which he created, it is Re who began to
appear as king, when the Support of Shu had not yet come into being.2

By eventually being identified with Re, local gods of sometimes obscure origin,
such as Amun, Khnum, and Sobek, assumed his basic characteristics, especially
that of the creator god who came into being at the beginning.

THE PROTOCREATOR AND THE SO-CALLED HERMOPOLITAN TRADITION

Another, somewhat different concept of the creator, or rather, the protocreator,

played a prominent role in Egyptian theology. The Ogdoad, Khmeniu, was
linked to Hermopolis, Khmun in Egyptian, but it is found in a number of local
systems, including that of Thebes. Here, the divine primordial entity is made up
of four couples, with a female corresponding to each male. They are called, re-
spectively, Nun and Naunet, the primordial water; Heh and Hauhet, infinity in
its spatial form; Kek and Kauket, darkness; and Amun and Amaunet, the hidden;
this last pair being later replaced by Niau and Niaut, who symbolize the void.
The texts clearly indicate that they were conceived as an indissociable whole, and
their names demonstrate eloquently that they belong to the primitive stage of
the unformed, the unnamed, and the unknowable. They are curious, anthropo-
morphic creatures, the males with frogs' heads and the females with those of ser-
pents, the amphibians and the reptiles recalling the waters from which they
emerged. In the present state of our documentation, it is only from Dynasty 26
on that they are differentiated by their names, four in the masculine, with their
four feminine counterparts. Some commentators have been tempted to make a
close connection between these four couples and the four entities, surnames of
Nun, listed in the Book of Shu of the Coffin Texts (spell 76): Hehu, Nu, Keku,
and Tenemu. But the context and the period are quite different, and there is no
assurance of a direct transmission from the one group to the other.
The so-called Hermopolitan theology is especially difficult to unravel, for it
is known only through texts that are extremely fragmentary, late, and of an ori-

2 Book of the Dead, chapter 17; translation based on that of S. Sauneron and J. Yoyotte, La Naissance

du monde, Sources orientales 1 (Paris, 1959), p. 48 . For an English translation of the text, see R. O. Faulkner,
in E. von Dassow, ed., The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (San Francisco,
1 994), plates 7-10.
50 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

gin that is not Hermopolitan, but rather, Theban and Krokodilopolitan; more-
over, as it passed from city to city, it experienced various transformations. It
seems that originally, the Ogdoad emerged on its own from the primordial Nun.
Later, it was assigned a sire in the form of Tatenen, who was borrowed from
Memphis, or the serpents Kematef and Irta, of Theban origin. There seems to
have been a stretching out of the appearance of creative forces into a succession
whose temporality remains indeterminate. These Eight nonetheless remained
the primordial gods of primordial times, who, when their work was completed,
died and were buried in a mound, where they received a funerary cult on the hu-
man model. Such mounds are known at Medinet Habu, at Edfu, and at Esna.
Their work was to make light shine forth, to give birth to the sun god in the form
of a child who emerged from the primordial lotus that bloomed on the Great
Pond of Hermopolis, where the Eight inseminated it. This mythic theme enjoyed
great popularity, and it is often represented in the form of a ritual offering of a
lotus in the Ptolemaic temples.
Another tradition located the birth of the sun god within a primordial egg.
But here, we must note that the few texts we have reflect different explanations
that prevent us from resolving which came first, the Ogdoad or the egg. Petosiris
himself, a priest of Thoth who lived at the end of the fourth century BCE, a pi-
ous individual and a keen theologian, resolved this delicate problem in his own
way, which will also be ours:

I reserved a zone around the Great Pond to prevent it from being trodden by the
common people, for it is the place where Re was born on the First Occasion, when
the earth was still encased in Nun, for it was the birthplace of all the gods who be-
gan to exist at the beginning, for it is in this place that all was born, for half the Egg
was buried in this place, and there, too, were all the beings who issued from the Egg.3

Whether it was a matter of a creator or of a succession of protocreators as at Her-

mopolis, Thebes, or Esna (where a primordial cow, Ahet or Methyer, the "great
swimmer," preceded the birth of Re), this initial phase was that of the pure emer-
gence, inexplicable and mysterious, of the being who activated himself and be-
came conscious of himself.

THE PLACE OF THE EMERGENCE OF BEING

It was in the primordial Nun that the autogenous creator conceived himself, it
was there that the protocreator appeared, floating with no place to get a foothold,
as Atum states in a passage of the Coffin Texts (Spell 8o BiC):

I was alone with Nun in a state of inertia, when I found no place to stand, when I
found no place to sit, when Heliopolis, where I am, was not yet founded, when the

3 Tomb of Petosiris; translation based on that of Sauneron and Yoyotte, La Naissance du monde, p. 6i.
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 51

wadi on which I sit was not yet constituted, when I had not made Nut, who is above
me and whom Geb married (?), when the first corporation of gods was not yet
born, and when the primordial Ennead had not yet come into existence, that they
might be with me.

Thus, soon after the appearance of the god, there emerged a solid element,
generally a mound, where he could stand, and which reminds us of the first koms
that emerged when the Nile waters began to subside after the inundation. Each
great religious center had its mound. At Heliopolis, it was the "high sand," but
also the benben, the primordial pillar that could serve as a pedestal for the benu,
the symbol of the renascent sun. Hermopolis boasted of its "raised hill," or of the
place of the dazzling illumination where the lotus emerged and gave birth to the
solar child; according to the other tradition that flourished in this same place,
this would be "the isle of the egg." Later, when every temple acquired a mythic
origin that went back to the age of the First Occasion, there was always mention
of the first land that emerged from the water, when darkness still reigned, or of
the original island. In the Ptolemaic Period, the multiplication of graphic puns
allowed for a confusion between the words iat, hill, and iu, island.
In certain cases, the name of the solid element that appeared at the beginning
served as a support and justification for the sacred etymology that explained the
name of the temple or its city: thus Edfu, Djeba, which derived from the name
of the "floater" (djeba) that drifted on the waters there. In the same vein, we can
witness the birth of the first soil at Esna:

Then she said, "May this place (where I am) become for me a platform of land
(set) in the midst of the initial waters, that I might lean on it!" And this place
(where Neith was) became a platform in the midst of the initial waters, as she had
said. And (this) was "the land of the waters" (= Esna), which is (also) Sais. Neith
took flight above this emergence, and Pi-Neter existed, which was also Buto.
She said, "I feel good on this emergence"; it was thus that Dep existed, and it
was thus that "Land-of-well-being" became the name of Sais.4

The Egyptians were pleased to base some of their myths on wordplays of this
sort. To complicate the situation, the creator often swam about in Nun and
stopped in various places that retained a trace of this primordial visit: thus, the
Ogdoad coming and going between Hermopolis, Memphis, and Thebes.
None of these texts enlightens us about how the first hill emerged, unless this
appearance responded to the need and the desire of the creator god. It was thus
undoubtedly through his will that this first deed was accomplished. Matter was
already in Nun, waiting to be coagulated to a point where the dry contrasted with
the unformed matter. But this was not a matter of the earth, of this world, which

4 Esna 206, 2; translation based on that of S. Sauneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna aux derniers siècles
du paganisme, Esna 5 (Cairo, 1962), p. 255.
52 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

still did not exist. The creator god made himself a platform where he could stand
and sit.

THE TIME OF THE EMERGENCE OF BEING

THE FIRST OCCASION

According to the Egyptian texts, Nun, the preexisting one, always existed. We
never encounter the notion of nothingness, for Nun, who was not being, was also
not nothingness. It thus seems that he was accorded neither a beginning nor an
end. From this confused mass, the creator god emerged and took form in order
to give birth to creation. In Egyptian, this moment was always called the "First
Occasion." Thus the denomination of a certain number of places, such as "the
exact place of the beginning of time," Deir el-Bahari, or "the holy place of the be-
ginning of time;' Medinet Habu, whose late theology made it the hill that was
the burial place of the primordial serpent Kematef and the Ogdoad, who ap-
peared precisely at the beginning of time.
This was the starting point of the process of creation, before which nothing
had happened. It was thus a commencement, a precise and specific moment,
which was nevertheless not dated, unlike the biblical Genesis, for the Egyptians
never made an absolute computation of time from the origins of the world. Was
this for lack of conceptualization, as scholars have tended to say? This is uncer-
tain, and we would do well to remember that our own calendar, which was put
in place after the triumph of Christianity, is itself quite relative and, after all, per-
fectly arbitrary. Perhaps, with good reason, the Egyptians reckoned that the mo-
ment of the First Occasion was undatable.
But we must seek something further in this remarkable expression "the First
Occasion." It indeed marked an absolute rupture between the before, when there
was something but nothing happened, and the after, when the process of cre-
ation was definitively set in motion. In this regard, it indicated the beginning of
time. But once there was "an occasion," it had to reproduce itself, and it did this
an incalculable number of times. The First Occasion was followed by an infin-
ity of others, of which the Egyptians often said that they occurred "like the First
Occasion." Here, we encounter a fundamental given in a concept of time that was
cyclical. It was made up of periods that renewed themselves, first and foremost,
of course, the daily rising of the sun. There were also the annual return of the in-
undation and the beginning of the year, and, on a no longer natural, but histor-
ical level, the succession of the reigns of the pharaohs.
It was these repetitions of the First Occasion that assured the continuity of
the world in its periodicity. From the fact that the First Occasion was in no way
a cosmic battle between chaos and cosmos for the purpose of annihilating the
former, and that Nun continued to exist alongside this world, a perpetual threat
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 53

weighed on this world and on the order of time, hence the necessity of cease-
lessly repeating the First Occasion, that is, the emergence of being and the es-
tablishment of the cosmos. Humankind took part in maintaining creation and
its harmony: the king or his delegates carried out rituals that, each in its own
way, made possible the regular continuity of the order that had been established
in the beginning. It seems that the primordial act of the creator god had en-
countered no obstacle, but that each of its repetitions, which were inevitable in
nonlinear time, was subject to the risk of failure, of catastrophe, and that human
beings, once they had come into existence, were in some way constrained to par-
ticipate in the functioning of the cosmos.

THE TEMPTATION OF THE GOLDEN AGE

Cosmogonies as different as that of Hesiod, narrated in Works and Days, and of

Genesis base the hard, laborious life of humankind, subject to sickness and
death, on the loss of an original paradise that a human fault forced them to leave,
that of Pandora or of Eve. Is such a concept of a lost paradise or a Golden Age
perceptible in the Egyptian cosmogonic texts? Did it have a place in the system
of creation imagined by the people of that land?
The time before creation, the Urzeit, could in no way have been that of a par-
adise that was ultimately lost. If we are told that there was no death or disorder,
as in the Pyramid Texts and elsewhere, this was not because a Golden Age pre-
vailed, but because nothing had yet happened. When life did not exist, neither
did death. When Maat had not yet manifested itself, neither had disorder. No one
wished for a return to this time before the First Occasion: it was feared as a cos-
mic catastrophe. What was it like after the First Occasion and the process of set-
ting the cosmos in motion? A passage in the Coffin Texts, as well as some later
texts, affirm that the creator god organized the world without defect. Yet after-
ward, disorder existed side by side with Maat, and death stood in opposition to
life. Humankind rebelled against Re, who decided to exterminate them, but
changed his mind. This theme of human revolt is described in the Book of the
Heavenly Cow and elsewhere. But this episode effected no basic change in the
status of humans in creation. Even in this case, humankind did not leave a par-
adise to enter into the world of suffering. All possibilities, both good and bad,
were present from the very beginning.
The many restoration texts issued by the pharaohs stress the return to the
good order of things, similar to that of the First Occasion, indicating that a
degradation had disturbed the course of history. Along with these topics of of-
ficial literature, we must also consider the prophetic texts left to us by the Egyp-
tians. While these were relatively numerous in the later periods of Egyptian
history, undoubtedly because of the political setbacks the land experienced, they
were infrequent earlier. The best example is the Prophecy of Neferti, which be-
54 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

longs to the literary genre of the political propaganda of the Middle Kingdom.
Yet even there, royal triumph over the depravity of history will not be the arrival
of a lost and regained Golden Age, but simply a return to the norm, to the prin-
ciple of regular continuity, which had been disturbed.
Yet a single, unparalleled text seems to offer another point of view. It is re-
produced, with some variants, in four exemplars: two on the propylon of the
temple of Khons at Karnak, dated to Ptolemy III Euergetes; one on the second
pylon of the temple of Amun at Karnak, which was decorated under Ptolemy VI;
and the last at the temple of Edfu, dating to Ptolemy X. Their date is late, and
their origin is undoubtedly a common one.

The anterior gods made the god of the horizon. Right was created in their time.
Maat came from the sky in their time. She united with those who were on earth.
The earth was in abundance, bellies were full. The Two Lands did not know famine.
Walls did not crumble, the thorn did not prick in the time of the anterior gods.5

The variants inform us that the primordial gods in each case, the Ogdoad—
created light according to the classical Theban canon, that Maat united herself
with the gods, that there was no evil on earth, that the crocodile did not bite and
the serpent did not sting.
In these passages, we must distinguish between several themes that seem to
be of different origin. The affirmation that abundance and order reigned in
Egypt was a commonplace that we often find in various periods of history. This
was a way of asserting that the equilibrium of the world, Maat, was respected,
generally thanks to royal effort, while here, the authors of the text place them-
selves on a level that is beyond history. There is also an allusion to the emergence
of Maat in the world, while everywhere else, Maat is considered as a part of the
world since the time of creation. But in particular, the authors leave the real
world for that of the imaginary when they affirm that the thorn did not prick,
and the crocodile and the serpent did not bite. Here, we enter the domain of an
irretrievably lost paradise, which, we note, is described with negative statements.
Given the unique character and the late date of this text, may we see in it the
evocation of a mythical theme that was traditional in Egypt? That seems rather
improbable, for while early texts might be lost to us because they disappeared,
there should at least be some allusions to the Golden Age in the contemporary
documents, which have survived to us in abundance, yet such is not the case. Like
Eberhard Otto, who has studied this question, I would rather see here the trace
of an external influence that has been integrated into the Egyptian system in per-
fectly traditional terms, though it does not belong to it. Moreover, it is not a

5 Bab el-Amara, propylon of the temple of Khons; K. Sethe and O. Firchow, Thebanische Tempelin-

schriften aus griechisch-römischer Zeit, Urkunden 8 (Berlin, 1957), p. 76 (90 k).

COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 55

unique case. While the theological texts of the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods
were, on the whole, a final, subtle emanation from the thinkers of Egypt, the lat-
ter were nevertheless influenced here and there by foreign concepts with which
they were led, willingly or otherwise, to coexist. In Egypt, in the ensemble of texts
that we possess, neither the Urzeit nor the time of creation is presented as a by-
gone Golden Age.

THE TECHNIQUES OF CREATION

To this point, we have been considering the emergence of the autogenous cre-
ator, who conceived himself, or rather, became conscious of himself in the very
midst of Nun and stood on the initial mound on the First Occasion. It is often
said of the creator that he came into existence, using the verb kheper, which
means "to become" and "to transform." But we encounter other terms linked to
engendering and conception, and to the act of self-fashioning, though it is un-
derstood that the original god performed this act alone, on himself and by
himself.
Neither the gods nor the earth, this world with its animate and inanimate be-
ings, yet existed. It was in a second moment, indicating already a form of suc-
cession and temporality, that the creator god set the world in motion, alone or
by delegating certain of his creative powers to gods he proceeded to create: a sec-
ond moment which was that, par excellence, of differentiation.

THE LEXICON OF CREATION

At first glance, even a rapid review of the terms employed by the Egyptians to
define the creative act reflects, through the lexicographic categories to which
they belong, the colorful conception they entertained of this founding proce-
dure. We shall need to analyze the texts further to see whether behind the im-
ages, poetic or crude, there is an implicit, more intellectual vision of the startup
of the cosmos.
It is in the Heliopolitan system in particular that Atum, the creator, uses
means that can seem purely physiological to bring creatures into the world. He
masturbates and ejaculates, giving birth to the first divine couple, Shu and
Tefnut. Another tradition has these deities born from Mum's spittle. And asso-
ciated with this use of expectoration in the creative process there is a mode of
reasoning that enjoyed an undeniable success in Egyptian theology. Scholars
have recognized that there is a close assonance, and thus a close analogy, between
the roots ishesh and tef and the names Shu and Tefnut. Between name and thing,
there prevailed a harmony of fact, and that is why sacred etymologies founded
on verbal analogy had such success in Egypt. Again, it was Atum who cried
56 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

(remi), and from his tears, humankind (remetj) was born; in the later periods of
Egyptian history, this theory would spread far beyond the Heliopolitan frame-
work and find a place in all the major cosmogonic texts, as at Esna, for example.
Naturally, the Egyptians lent pregnant symbolic meaning to what could seem
like mere wordplay to us, and it is perhaps not for nothing that suffering hu-
manity was born from the tears of the god.
Often, the terms used are vaguer. Belonging still to the domain of physiology,
we find "to engender" and "to be born." But in Egyptian, the latter root also has
the meaning of modeling, fashioning inanimate objects, for which other specific
verbs were also used. We often encounter the verbs "to make" (iri), which has a
vast range of meaning, or "to create" (kema, etc.) .
Borrowings made it possible to draw on another vocabulary, that of crafts-
manship and building techniques. The very name of Ptah, the patron of artisans
and artists, has been connected with a root meaning "to model;' though its exis-
tence is debatable. But however obvious it might seem, the relationship between
a divine name and its meaning is always tricky to interpret. In which direction
was the relationship established? Which came first? In the case of Ptah, the uses
of the homophonous verb are rare, and its translation is hazardous. If we think
of Amun, the "hidden one;' was he named thus because he was felt to be an un-
knowable power, or was he the deus incognitus because he was called Amun? We
must be cautious in these matters, and we must not make light of the fact that for
the Egyptians, the word and its written representation were not abstract, con-
ventional entities, but rather elements charged with the reality of being.
Returning to the modes of creation, we note also the regular use of the verbs
to construct, to fashion, to model, and to turn (on the potter's wheel). This last
image is linked especially to Khnum. For a long time, the ram-headed potter god
could be seen in the representations of the theogamies, modeling the image of
the royal child conceived by Amun, along with the child's ka, on his wheel. But
in late texts, especially those of Esna, his creative activity was extended to the
gods and to the entirety of the human race, while other verbs were used in ref-
erence to the creation of animals or other earthly realities.
To leave it there, we would have the impression that the creator god acted only
via his body, his secretions transforming into divine hypostases or human be-
ings, or simply by using his hands, like a skilled workman. This would be to
reduce Egyptian thought to a purely materialistic physiological or artisanal
vision, which was in no way the case. The architect of creation had many other
ways of acting.

CREATION BY PERCEPTION, SPEECH, AND WILL

A Ptolemaic text from the second pylon of the temple of Amun at Karnak in-
forms us that this god had only to speak of future things for them to come into
existence. Such a notion implies a knowledge of all the reality of the world in its
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 57

future and the ability to create, solely by speech, which serves to transmit knowl-
edge and will, things corresponding to the words.
This text passage is not just a late formulation. Such a concept, elaborated in
a highly sophisticated manner, already appears on an older monument, the
Shabaka Stone, otherwise known as the Memphite Theology. We have seen that
it has proved necessary to reject an Old Kingdom date for the text in favor of in-
dications of a Ramesside Period composition. Ptah manifests his creative will ac-
cording to his heart, seat of perception and will, by means of his tongue, which
transmits his effective word. Very early, there had been contaminations between
the Memphite system and that of Heliopolis; thus we should not be surprised to
find the Ennead, which was closely linked to Atum, as a hypostatis of Ptah:

He who manifested himself as heart, he who manifested himself as tongue, un-

der the appearance of Atum, it was Ptah, the great and ancient, who gave life to all
the gods and to their kas by means of this heart from which Horus emerged, by
means of this tongue from which Thoth emerged, in Ptah.
It happens that the heart and the tongue have power over all the members in
consideration of the fact that the one is in every body, the other in every mouth of
all the gods, of all humankind, of all the animals, of all the reptiles, of every being
that lives, to conceive and decree all that he wishes.
His Ennead was before him like teeth and lips, that is, this semen and these
hands of Atum, for the Ennead of Atum issued from his seed and his fingers, but
the Ennead was also the teeth and the lips in this mouth that conceived the name
of everything, from which Shu and Tefnut issued, and which gave birth to the En-
nead.
The eyes see, the ears hear, the nose breathes air; they inform the heart. It is that
which causes every completed thought to emerge, and it is the tongue which trans-
mits the thought of the heart.
Then all the gods were born and his Ennead completed. All the divine words
(medu netjer) came into existence according to that which the heart had thought
and the tongue had ordained.

It is perfectly clear in this text, which expresses an elaborate reflection on the

functioning of the psyche, that the psyche is human, and that it is attributed by
analogy to a divine power, here Ptah, and that the possibility of creating flows
from knowledge and will, which are closely linked and expressed by speech. For
to name things that the heart, that is, perception, has conceived, is to make them
come into existence. The creative power is intrinsically dependent on speech:
things exist only when they have a name. I am not, however, entirely in agree-
ment with Jan Assmann, who, in commenting on the text, proposes to see in it
a quasi-Platonic theory of the existence of the world: the ensemble of the ele-
ments of the visible world supposedly corresponds to the totality of the signs,
the medu netjer, understood as hieroglyphs created by Ptah, rather than as di-
vine words in the literal sense.
58 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

This theory of the psyche, which has been considered to be the most intellec-
tual theory ever elaborated by the Egyptians, was in no way confined to the
Memphite theology of the god Ptah. Though it is less obvious, it can be made
out elsewhere. The hypostases of perception and speech, or heart and tongue,
were the gods Sia and Hu, who played a significant role in all the cosmogonies.
The Book of Knowing the Modes of Existence of Re, recorded on Papyrus Brem-
ner-Rhind, which has already been mentioned, sheds clear light on the fact that
every physiological act from which creation proceeded, effected by the sun god
in his form of Re or Atum, stemmed from his will. After modulations on the ex-
istence of the existing, which were cited above, the god evokes the physical as-
pect of creation, which depends directly on his will:

It was alone that I knotted my hand, before they were born, without having spat
out Shu, without having expectorated Tefnut. It was my own mouth that I made
use of, and my name was Hekau... .
It was by means of my will that I was efficient; it was in front of my face that
my project was made. It was alone that I created all forms; it was from my will that
my project came forth. After I created other manifestations, many were the man-
ifestations of the existing; then were manifest their children in their manifestations
of children.

We easily see that it would be vain and artificial to distinguish a physiological or

manual creation from one that is intellectual and deliberate. Such was not the
concept of the Egyptians, who sought, quite the contrary, to find behind every
divine or human act a manifestation of the will, founded on knowledge, and to
ascribe a perfectly effective power to the word. It was the latter that in the form
of heka, magical power beyond the norms of nature, established a link between
magic and creative power. The newly created world was not pulled out of the hat
of a magician creator god; but the human magician, in imitation of the creator
god, acted through the power of verbal conjuration.

CREATION AND ITS CATEGORIES

To this point, we have studied the context of creation, the emergence of the au-
togenous creator god on the First Occasion. He became conscious of himself and
took bodily form as the Ennead, or the first group of gods, who could represent
his body; he projected his will outside of himself and set the cosmos in motion.
We must now have a look at the criteria according to which the texts present the
organized world. The latter was the place of differentiation, of separation, of cat-
egories, even if we do not always grasp their arrangement, which was different
from ours. It was in that respect that the creator god distinguished himself from
Nun, who was the unformed, the unorganized. This fact also implies multiplic-
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 59

ity, not in that it is opposed to an anterior unity, but in that it is consubstantially

linked to separation. This is undoubtedly why the creator god did not create
Man, but mankind.

CREATION WAS NOT ANTHROPOCENTRIC

Contrary to Genesis, the cosmogonic texts do not offer the carefully fixed cal-
endar of a process each step of which was duly recorded and which ended in the
creation of man and his companion as a unique couple, the pause sign at the end
of a week of incessant activity. For the Egyptian creator god, time does not seem
to have been a factor, though all creatures and all things did not appear simul-
taneously. We can speak of a succession, but it was not measured or divided ac-
cording to the reckoning of time, which certain texts otherwise tell us was itself
created and set in motion by the creator god.
That creation was not anthropocentric, that is to say, was not oriented toward
the ultimate, glorious appearance of man, is perhaps explained by the divine
conception of the Egyptian world. Most of the time, the first creatures who is-
sued from the god of origins were themselves gods, who in their turn gave birth
to a new divine generation. In creation, the divine order, which was that of the
imaginary realm, and the human order, which belongs to the real and visible
world, were mixed. The world was thus not created for man, above whom a tran-
scendent god would reign. The divine was also in this world that was made by
the creator god on the First Occasion. As a general rule, the gods appeared prior
to humankind, but we must refrain from systematizing this order, for in other
texts, we read of a contrary succession in which men were born from the tears
of the god, and only after that did gods appear, for example, those of the second
generation of the Heliopolitan Ennead. Moreover, because humankind em-
anated from the tears of the creator (as sometimes the gods from his lips), they
were in some sense a crystallization of the divine humors (in Egyptian, redju).
The image of the creator god modeling a body on his wheel also existed: it was
that of Khnum, the potter. In this representation, however, it was not so much
the matter, the clay, that counted, it was the human form, which was gradually
fashioned and which the god would animate by means of his breath of life. The
Near Eastern symbolism, so familiar to us, of the creator god fabricating the first
and unique man with his own hands is far distant from the image offered to us
by Egypt.

THE PROVIDENTIAL GOD

The world existed, with its gods, its men, its creatures, and its laws that ruled it.
But there are texts that nuance this vision of a god who was indifferent to the
creatures born of his power. In the Instruction for King Merikare, the author
60 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

goes so far as to tell us that the creator god conceived the world for the sake of
humankind:

Well provided are men, the herd of the god. It is for them that he made the sky and
the earth. It is for them that he repulsed the greed of the water. It is so that their
nostrils might live that he made the breezes, for they are his images, issued from
his flesh. It is for them that he rises in the sky; it is to nourish them that he made
plants, herds, birds, and fish.

This text, which is exceptional, leads us to raise a question that it is perhaps vain
to try to resolve. Humankind is in the image of its creator. The chosen word is
part of a vast range of terms that we often translate by "image," without always
grasping all their lexicographic nuances. We are surely not to seek here an idea
that is widespread in Western thought: that there is a divine spark in humankind,
in that we possess a soul. As created by the Egyptian creator god, man was made
in his image in the same way as a divine statue, which was still not the god.
More often, the creator was a providential god who provided for the subsis-
tence of each of the species in his creation:

He made grass for the cattle to live,

and fruit trees for the henmemet.
He made what the fish in the river live on, and the birds who people (?) the sky.
He gives breath to the one in the egg, animates the young of the lizard,
makes what the flies live on,
and the worms and the fleas,
and makes what the mice in their holes have need of,
and gives life to the winged race on every tree.6

We see the god's solicitude in providing each species according to its needs. A re-
markable hymn to Khnum, carved on a column of the temple of Esna, explains
the potter god's fabrication of the human body with a surprising wealth of de-
tails. Anatomy and physiology, such as they were conceived at that time, are the
basis of this description, which reviews, member by member, organ by organ, all
the constituent members of the body, which the god created with a view to their
function:

He made the locks of hair grow,

he made hair sprout, modeling the skin onto the limbs;
he constructed the skull,

6 Hymn to Amun from Papyrus Boulaq 17; translation based on that of A. Barucq and F. Daumas,

Hymnes et prières de l'Égypte ancienne, Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient io (Paris, 198o), p. 197.
For an English translation of the text, see J. A. Wilson, in J. B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts
Relating to the Old Testament, 2d ed. (Princeton, 1955), pp. 365-67.
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 61

he modeled the face,

in order to give a characteristic appearance to figures (?);
he made the eyes open,
he opened the access of the ears,
he put the body into intimate contact with the atmosphere;
he made the mouth to eat,
he constituted the teeth to chew;
he also loosened the tongue to express itself.'

Working in the domain of differentiation, the god created the different races
of humans, whom he distinguished by the color of their skin:

Hail to you ... Atum, creator of humans, who distinguished their form, who made
their life, who distinguished them from one another by the color of their skin.8

Despite the marked ethnocentrism of all Egyptian thought, which considered

the people of the Nile valley to be the only true humans, the creator god was
made into the father of the human race in all its diversity. To reinforce their dif-
ference from one another from the beginning on, he endowed them with differ-
ent languages. This theme is already present in the hymn to Aten from Tell
el-Amarna:

Humans, cattle, small animals,

all that is on earth and that walks on feet,
that which is above and flies with wings,
Syria, Nubia, and the land of Egypt.
You assigned each one its proper place,
creating what is necessary for his needs.
Each one is provided with nourishment,
and with a duly measured lifetime.
Their tongues in their mouths differ in language,
and their appearance as well;
their skin color is distinct,
for you have differentiated the foreign peoples.9

This function often devolves on Thoth, the lord of language and writing: "Thoth,
who separated the languages from land to land." Human beings are thus not de-
scended from a common race possessing a universal language that was lost after
the episode of the tower of Babel. Humankind never knew a golden age when

Esna 250, 9-10; translation based on that of Sauneron, Les Fêtes religieuses d'Esna, p. 96.
8
P. Boulaq 17; translation based on that of Sauneron and Yoyotte, La Naissance du monde, p. 69.
9
Great Hymn to Aten, VI, 8-9; translation based on that of P. Grandet, Hymnes de la religion d'Aton
(Paris, 1995), pp. 110-11.
62 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

the possibility of mutual comprehension was taken for granted; it was always
marked with the seal of difference and separation.
The texts generally have less to say about the elements of nature; sticking to
what is essential, they are content to mention the creation of sky and earth. It is
again the same hymn to Khnum from the temple of Esna that offers a more de-
tailed vision of the world below:

He caused plants to be born in the midst of the countryside, and he brightened the
riverbanks with multicolored flowers; he made the fruit trees produce their fruit
to furnish a means of subsistence for men and gods. Finally, he opened rocky faults
in the mountains, and he constrained the quarries to spit forth the mountains they
enclosed. l o

What matter did the creator god use to give birth to the elements of nature
and to the creatures? Whence did he draw it? This was a question about which
the Egyptians were quite discreet. There is a well-known passage in the Instruc-
tion of Amenemope that makes man a being of clay and straw, sounding a bib-
lical note for us. But in the Egyptian text, it is an image of the constitutional
frailty of the human being, whose destiny is in the hands of the god, rather than
the representation of a man born of dust and destined to return to it; the latter
idea is, moreover, opposed to the postmortem beliefs of the Egyptians, as we shall
see later.
Khnum modeled creatures on his wheel, and we may think that he used silt
drawn from Nun, just as the human artisan employed that of the Nile. Without
doubt, the first matter was contained in Nun before being actualized by divine
work. But we are told many times how the creator animated his creatures: it was
by breathing the breath of life into them that he brought them into existence.

ORDER AND DISORDER IN CREATION

Not content with setting sky and earth in place and with creating gods, men, and
animals, the creator god also began by instituting the machinery of society, that
is to say, cities and temples, and the offerings and statues of the gods. In the Mem-
phite Theology, we read:

Then Ptah was in peace, after he made every thing and every divine speech. He had
given birth to the gods, he had made the cities, he had founded the nomes, he
had placed the gods in their cult places, he had instituted their offering loaves, he
had founded their sanctuaries, he had made their visible bodies in accordance with
what satisfied their hearts.

io Esna 250, 15-16; translation based on that of Sauneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna, p. 104.
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 63

The institutions whose functioning assured the continuity of the order of the
world were personally conceived by the creator god at its outset, thus guaran-
teeing the temples an antiquity that went back to the very beginnings of the
cosmos.
It was thus no doubt useless for the Egyptians to specify that Maat reigned
from that time on. Only the texts already cited, which evoke a bygone golden age,
signal her appearance in the world; but they are not indicative of a current of
thought in Egypt. Maat, cosmic order and divine and human justice, was in-
trinsically linked to divine creation, and it was the responsibility of humankind
to maintain it in the world, for it was at the same time perpetually threatened.
From the Coffin Texts down to the texts of the Ptolemaic Period, such as that
describing the creation by Amun on the second pylon of the temple of Karnak,
we know that the creator god ordained no defects in the world: "I made each man
the equal of his neighbor. I did not command them to do evil, (but) it was their
hearts that transgressed what I said" (Coffin Texts spell 113o) .
Later, we shall consider the role of freedom in human action. But at this point,
it is clear that although man can do evil and is thus a sinner and can otherwise
recognize himself as such, he was not originally responsible for sin. He was not
constitutionally the bearer of an original sin. He did not eat Satan's apple, nor
did he open the box that was entrusted to Pandora. He could act against the gods,
and especially against Re, as we are told in the texts about rebellion, of which the
Book of the Heavenly Cow is the most explicit. But he was not forever branded
by the wrong that was committed.
If neither god nor man bore responsibility for the existence of evil, whose
massive presence in the world was evident, where did it come from? When we
attempt to follow the ins and outs of Egyptians metaphysics, this question often
embarrasses us. We must remember that the birth of the world was not the elim-
ination of Nun at the end of a battle, but only his repulsion to the margins of the
organized cosmos. All potentialities were latent in this unformed and unknow-
able mass. Maat, which was constitutive of the cosmos, was inaugurated along
with it. Disorder, the quintessential form of evil, was the counterpart of Maat,
forming a pair that was complementary, not antithetical. It was not the monop-
oly of humankind or of Seth; in the bosom of the Egyptian pantheon, the very
figure of disorder was present in the world, including the divine level. No more
than Maat, disorder did not make its appearance at the time of the First Occa-
sion. Maat was part of the cosmos as a constitutive principle; we might say, like
physical reality, which it is not possible to deny, just as life, and then death, mark
the passage from Nun to the cosmos, though they had no prior existence.
Still, in the lengthy account of creation at Esna, this time according to Neith,
not Khnum, we witness the birth of Apopis, the incarnation of the principle of
evil:
64 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

But they (the anterior gods) repelled a drop of spittle from her mouth, which she
had produced in the bosom of the initial water; it was transformed into a serpent
of ioo cubits, which was named Apopis. Its heart conceived revolt against Re, with
its associates that issued from its eye.' 1

In this particular vision of the world, which I think has no parallel, evil was cre-
ated in its symbolic form of Apopis. The faults worked in the cosmos by the pres-
ence of evil were not contrary to the creative will of the creator god, and this
point of view was a way of mythically ratifying the reality of this world and its
deficiencies, which were otherwise incarnate in the equivocal personality of Seth.

TIME AND CREATION

THE MYSTERY OF TIME

Time has already entered into our analysis of Egyptian cosmogonies. The birth
of the world was the moment of the First Occasion, which had to be regularly
perpetuated to prevent the functioning of the cosmos from ceasing. We have also
noted that life and death were elements linked to creation. We must now attempt
a closer analysis of "the most concrete reality" and "the most fleeting of myster-
ies, which is time;' as Marguerite Yourcenar has defined it. Its understanding is
so difficult that it has inspired an abundant Egyptological literature containing
the most divergent of opinions, yet which does not, it must be admitted, furnish
a key capable of fully resolving the question. If the problem is without a defini-
tive solution, this failure has reasons that need to be recalled.
First of all, it has often been alleged that the Egyptians had no concept of time,
for they had no single word for it, but rather a whole series of terms that applied
to specific semantic fields. We are not always able to distinguish between them,
and we have difficulties translating them into modern languages with terms that
are distinct and yet appropriate. The case of "eternity," neheh and djet in Egyp-
tian, which is perhaps not eternity according to our modern definition, is the
most obvious example. Would it not be less arrogant and more perspicacious to
acknowledge that the lexicographic extension of a word had no reason for being
the same for the Egyptians as it is for us, and that we can learn from their vo-
cabulary what, more or less, time was?
Second, we must remember that the concept of time, or simply the more dif-
fuse and less structured notion of this reality, belongs more than any other to the
domain of culture, the world of the imaginary. From one civilization to another,
time can be perceived in radically different ways that are thus difficult to com-

' 1 Esna 206, io—ii; translation based on that of Sauneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna, p. 265.
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 65

municate to and be perceived by others. Moreover, within a single given culture,

it is far from certain that "time" responds to a unique concept to which all ad-
here. This point is all the more true when we speak of the particular aspect of
time that is eternity. Otherwise, why have so many theologians and philosophers,
and also so many poets and novelists made of time the fault, the point of rup-
ture around which they have attempted to build their systems of thought? Was
this not also the case in Egypt? Who can assure us that in that culture, whose
imaginary structures we struggle to make out by relying on the faint traces that
have survived to us, there did not coexist, without mutual denial or destruction,
several ways of thinking about time?
Despite the difficulty of method and the ambiguity of the object to be appre-
hended, we must nevertheless attempt to present the data that we discern in the
Egyptian texts.

THE CREATION OF TIME

Time had a beginning, which was that of the emergence of creation on the First
Occasion. That occasion marked a rupture, the passage from preexistence to the
cosmos, even if the Egyptians did not reckon time from the creation of the world.
Nun remained beyond the limits of time. It was in the world that life and death
manifested themselves; neither they nor the divisions of time had a prior exis-
tence. In cosmogonic texts and in prayers, it is not rare to encounter the creator
god as the creator and lord of time. Thus, in a major hymn to Neith, recited at
Esna on the celebration of the festival of the thirteenth day of Epiphi, it is said
of the goddess:

She made the moment,

she created the hours,
she made the years,
she created the months,
she gave birth to the season of inundation, to winter, to summer. 12

The gods were also, by way of consequence, masters of human lifetime, which is
also a division, in this case existential, of time. Lifetime was otherwise marked
by ruptures through which that which continued to subsist outside of time in-
sinuated itself. Thus, the Egyptians considered sleep and dreams as parentheses
in life, during which the disordered forces of Nun could surge forth. Whatever
its characteristics, time was a dimension of the world organized into a cosmos,
and it had not always existed.

12 Esna 163, 25; translation based on that of Sauneron, Les Fêtes religieuses d'Esna, pp. 291-92.
66 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

PERIODICITY AND CONTINUITY

There are two ways to imagine time: linearly and cyclically. The first includes the
notion of a lifetime, which is characterized by its beginning (birth) and its end
(death), notwithstanding the Egyptians' determination to make death not a de-
finitive rupture, but rather the moment of a passage to another time. They oth-
erwise used a particular term to describe the length of a life, one that derived
from the verbal root "to be standing"; the time imparted to everyone was fixed
from the start and in the hands of the gods, who, in most cases, could grant ad-
ditional years, as the faithful begged in their personal prayers. But for the Egyp-
tians, the linear character of time scarcely seems to have exceeded the domain of
individual existence. Linearity did not apply to cosmic time, or even to histori-
cal time. We have seen that the First Occasion never served as an absolute de-
parture point of a reckoning of time, not because time had no beginning, but
because the beginning, this original "occasion," was destined to be repeated in-
definitely. We could at least imagine a sort of relative but linear calendar, simi-
lar to that which we employ, but nothing of that sort ever existed. The only
known dating was that which began again at the beginning of each reign, except
for a few rare attempts to inaugurate longer cycles, which in any case remained
within the framework of a perpetual return. This is because on the historical
level, as on the cosmic level, of which the historical was undoubtedly only the
projection in the real world, the only thing that counted was the perpetuation of
a continuity. The new king who replaced the dead pharaoh was only the main-
tainer of the institution of kingship, which was confirmed on the occasion of ju-
bilee festivals. After a crisis, he reestablished order such as it had been on the First
Occasion, once again triumphing over disorder.
This cyclical functioning played a fundamental role in cosmic time, of which
historical time was only an application or an avatar on the human level. The
march of time was ruled by the obligatory passage from day to night and from
night to day, from light to shadow, the return of the inundation, the beginning
of a new year. Each of these passages was a source of danger, a threat of dys-
function and an irruption of disorder. This fear was particularly felt at the end
of the year, during the transition of the five epagomenal days that had to be
added to the calendar of 36o days to obtain a reckoning that was close to the as-
tronomical year. The catastrophe that was dreaded is described in a gripping
manner in the opening sentences of Papyrus Salt 825, which contains a "ritual
for the maintaining of life in Egypt":

It [ is not] lit during the night, and daytime does not exist. A lamentation is made
(two times) [in the sky] and on earth. The gods and goddesses place their hands
on their head, the earth is laid waste, the sun does not come up, and the moon is
slow, it does not exist. Nun is unsteady, and the earth is capsized; the river is un-
navigable.... All the world groans and weeps. Souls, gods, goddesses, men, "trans-
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 67

figured" spirits (akhu), the dead, small and large cattle ... weep, they weep, very
much, very much.' 3

It was to battle against this always-possible emergence of catastrophe that priests

regularly carried out rituals of conservation that served to maintain order. De-
struction could thus be avoided, or at least, constantly be beaten back or de-
ferred, thus assuring the continuity of the world, a continuity that was based on
its periodicity.

END OF THE WORLD, END OF TIME

If the world and time had a beginning, if their continuity was continually chal-
lenged, we can also imagine the end of the world and of time, which would cor-
respond roughly to the calamity described by Papyrus Salt. From the texts of the
Prophecy of Neferti and the Potter's Oracle to the invectives hurled by the ma-
gician against recalcitrant gods, this theme persists through all the periods of
Egyptian literature, but in the form of a threat, rather than of a prophetic an-
nouncement.
One text, which has been often cited and the cause of much controversy, de-
scribes the state of things after the destruction of the world. It presents Atum,
the creator of the universe, addressing the deceased during a verbal sparring
match in chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead:

You have been destined for millions and millions of years, a lifetime of millions of
years. But me, I shall destroy everything I created; this land will return to the state
of Nun, to the state of flood, as (was) its original condition. I am what will remain,
with Osiris, when I have been transformed anew into a serpent that men cannot
know and that gods cannot see. 14

Here, the cosmic cataclysm is not caused by the forces of latent disorder, but by
the creator god himself, who will destroy his creation, while Osiris will subsist
along with him. The fate of the deceased, though he is promised a lifetime of mil-
lions and millions of years, remains obscure. And if one wishes to point out that
this text has only one parallel in the temple of Opet and is otherwise not neces-
sarily representative of the entirety of Egyptian thought, we may point out that
it is not exactly the return to the original chaos, for Osiris, "ruler of eternity," will
also continue to exist. Does this passage announce the apocalypse, or is it rather

13 Translation based on that of P. Derchain, Papyrus Salt 825 (B.M. 10051), Rituel pour la conservation

de la vie en Égypte (Brussels, 1965), p. 137.

14
Translation based on that of P. Barguet, Le Livre des morts des anciens Égyptiens, Littératures anci-
ennes du Proche-Orient 1 (Paris, 1967), p. 261; for an English translation of the text, see Faulkner, in von
Dassow, ed., The Egyptian Book of the Dead, pl. 29.
68 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

a threat made by the creator god to affirm his power? At the very least, it is clear
that the evocation of the end of the world and of time is not the hope of a future
paradise. Nor does it exist in an eschatological perspective that will witness the
triumph of the creator god and his "justified" creatures after their appearance
before the divine tribunal of the afterlife. If men triumph over death, it is, if we
may risk this paradox, in the here and now.

TIME AND ETERNITY

The question of time leads inevitably to that of eternity, or at least, what we are
accustomed to calling eternity: a stretch of time that has neither beginning
nor end, an immobile duration, in some sense the opposite of time, supposing
that we can apprehend such a concept, or perhaps the same thing. "Eternity is,
no doubt, only the same thing otherwise," as Marguerite Yourcenar has sagely
put it.
In Egyptology, this question has inspired innumerable discussions leading to
contradictory conclusions, in which it is not always easy to discern valid argu-
ments. Recently, there have been basically three German Egyptologists—
Wolfhart Westendorf, Erik Hornung, and Jan Assmann—to whom we must add
the Hungarian Laszlo Kákosy, who have brought the controversy to its most ad-
vanced point.
The Egyptians used two terms, neheh and djet, to refer to an undetermined
length of time. For a long time, these terms have been translated, and they con-
tinue to be translated, by "eternity." We can at least agree on the fact that this
translation is inappropriate to the extent that neither neheh nor djet coincides
with our definition of eternity, to which we must otherwise add that the defini-
tion is not the same from one philosophical system to another. But it is extremely
difficult to translate these words otherwise, much less fully comprehend them,
much less make the terms accord from one language into another, each language
reflecting its own concept of the universe. It has been suggested that neheh and
djet are two nearly synonymous terms that supposedly encompass the totality of
time; but this is highly improbable. The Egyptians often resorted to duality to
express a reality of existence or of the imaginary, but for the most part, under-
lying this duality is a dual concept that is in no way categorical; it is a matter of
the complementarity of opposites that is opposed to the principle of exclusion.
Thus we have already encountered the pair "that which exists and that which
does not exist." It is thus quite likely that the use of neheh and djet is not pure re-
dundancy, but that it represents distinct semantic concepts. Another argument
goes in this direction: the terms are not always used together; they can occur
alone, a clear sign that each has its own meaning.
In an opposite manner, in order to resolve the difficulty of explaining the du-
ality of terms, it has been proposed that one of them, djet, had a spatial, not a
COSMOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 69

temporal, connotation. It is true that it is determined by the hieroglyph repre-

senting the earth, but that does not suffice to relieve it of all temporal meaning.
Moreover, several words linked to the measurement of time have, in addition to
the sun disk, the classic sign used to indicate temporality, a determinative related
to the category of space; while examples of this phenomenon multiplied in the
Ptolemaic Period, they are already to be found in earlier texts. Furthermore,
there is no doubt that the concept of time was closely linked to that of space, so
that djet does not necessarily lose all temporal value. Nor is this close correlation
between the two notions foreign to us. In its linear aspect, no doubt more than
in its cyclical aspect, time is conceived under the auspices of space. Is it not in
some way a succession, finite or infinite, of points, each of which is impercepti-
ble, because it has already passed by or is yet to come?
If, relying on the many Egyptian texts that make allusion to this double no-
tion and attach them to other religious realities, we consider that time was not
homogeneous, we can perhaps attempt to clarify, in a manner that will neces-
sarily be partial and hazardous, what the Egyptians were expressing when they
spoke of neheh and djet. Between the two, there were both opposition and com-
plementarily. Neheh was closely linked to Re, and thus to the day and to light. It
in some sense represented the future in its virtuality, but also in its cyclical and
discontinuous, uncompleted return. Djet, the domain par excellence of Osiris,

FIGURE 4. The ouroboros, borne by Shu and Tefnut, surrounding the sun god. From A. Piankoff and N.
Rambova, Mythological Papyri: Egyptian Religious Texts and Representations, vol. 5 (New York, 1957), p. 22,
fig. 8.
70 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

belonged to the night, to the subterranean world of the duat, and the writings of
djet and duat could be confused in the Ptolemaic Period. It represented a more
static and completed aspect of time. But we know otherwise that the theologians
made an immense effort to make of Re and Osiris two indissociable aspects of
the divine, representing the course of the sun in its diurnal and nocturnal as-
pects, symbolizing yesterday and tomorrow. Neheh and djet are thus consub-
stantially associated. This double aspect is summarized with great concision in
two complex but extremely evocative signs that were used in the Ptolemaic texts.
The sun disk, appearing in the horizon and containing a falcon, an image of the
sun god, represents neheh, while a serpent wrapped around a mummy, or better
still, around Osiris himself, served to write djet, the prototype of the ouroboros
(see figure 4). Time, in its form of neheh and djet, time that cannot be quanti-
fied, which is counted indefinitely in millions and millions, nevertheless had a
beginning and undoubtedly an end. It exists because the cosmos exists, because
it is a part of it, while chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead affirms that Osiris will
subsist along with Atum when the latter brings the world back to its original
state. Thus, it was said of Neith in the final years of paganism, "the eternal du-
ration of time (neheh djet) passes before your face."15

15 Esna 206,3; Sauneron, Esna 3 (Cairo, 1968), p. 3o.

 CHAPTER 3

THE GODS ON EARTH

We have attempted to approach the nature and function of the gods, the aspects
with which they were invested, and the relationships that were woven between
these aspects. We have made mention of their stories as told by men in other
words, myths seeking to find in them the structure of their imaginary realm.
We have followed the creator gods at the time of the First Occasion and the emer-
gence of being, when they created, each in turn, other gods, and the creatures
and things of this world.
But these gods were also present on earth, day after day, even when, in another
aspect, they were "distant" or "hidden." They were present, for their images,
which were more than just effigies or simulacra, but rather a constitutive prin-
ciple of their being, inhabited Egypt. What place did the Egyptians accord them?
What role and what function? What was the relationship between the gods and
their images? Penetrating into the temples, which sheltered the images of the
gods, and where the cult was carried out, and analyzing their nature and func-
tion, we shall attempt to understand what position men assigned to the gods on
earth.

THE CHRONOLOGICAL EVOLUTION OF TEMPLES

AND THE PROBLEM OF SOURCES

Without a doubt, an Egyptian temple was always the house of a deity, where his
or her image dwelled and received a cult, whatever form the latter might have
72 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

taken. Moreover, a certain stability of structures subsisted throughout the course

of Egyptian civilization, and we can speak of one religion throughout the land
and through the course of three millennia of a specific, uninterrupted culture.
This is why, when treating religious phenomena, we are able to consider sources
as old as the Pyramid Texts side by side with others as recent as the theological
discourses of Ptolemaic temples, often clarifying what is merely allusive in the
former with the help of the latter. With due methodological precautions, such
retrospective extrapolation is relatively safe.
With regard to temples, we face this same problem, but in a much more crit-
ical manner; we must thus address the state of the question and set the limits be-
yond which we cannot venture without risk. This situation is essentially due to
the poverty of the documentation for the oldest periods. The mention here of a
certain number of temples is not intended to constitute an exhaustive topo-
graphical list; rather, it serves to offer milestones that enable us to follow the evo-
lution of Egyptian temples from the earliest periods on.

INDIRECT TRACES

From as early as the Predynastic Period, we have representations showing us var-

ious types of "primitive" sanctuaries intended for a cult that was divine, not fu-
nerary. These were the per nu and the per wer, modest chapels built of light
materials: wood, reeds, mats, bricks, or adobe. The per nu corresponded to the
north of Egypt and the per wer to the south, but we cannot say whether this had
to do with a political division or whether we are to see in them the reflection of
the styles of different habitats. According to this same bipartition, they were re-
spectively connected with the cities of Buto and Hierakonpolis. When temples
became more differentiated and elaborate, the Egyptians long retained the mem-
ory of these archaic sanctuaries, humble ancestors of the great establishments of
the New Kingdom and later, whose complex structure obeyed subtle rules and
whose functioning was strictly codified.
Yet other types of chapels, whose names and images would never disappear
from Egyptian vocabulary and iconography, were already in existence at this
early time. Thus, the seh-netjer, the "tent of the god," would remain closely con-
nected with Anubis, its lord. Thus also, there was the sanctuary of Min, a sort of
round hut that was always specifically attached to that god and would remain so
down to its latest representations; its constant presence beside images of the god
is a characteristic sign that enables us to recognize him and to distinguish him
from other, similar ithyphallic gods.
It would be useless to comment on the actual nature and function of these
earliest constructions, about which we know almost nothing. They testify, how-
ever, to the existence of cults addressed to deities who thus possessed places of
their own, as early as the predynastic, and undoubtedly the protohistorical era.
THE GODS ON EARTH 73

It was from this substrate, which was never forgotten, that the Egyptian concept
of temple developed in the course of centuries and millennia, a concept charac-
terized by the persistence of a certain number of traditional representations,
though they remain silent to us, for their primitive forms tell us nothing about
their roles.
Turning to the other end of history, when we consider the Ptolemaic temple
of Dendara, certain inscriptions there furnish information that is highly reveal-
ing of its antiquity, above and beyond the fact that a statue of Pepy I was found
in the sacred enclosure of the goddess. One inscription states that the temple was
rebuilt and reorganized by Tuthmosis III, who himself based his work on ancient
documents going back to the time of King Cheops, or, according to another text,
to the "followers of Horus," that is, to the first kings of the unified country. It
could be argued that this indecision on the part of the writers of the texts is a
bad omen for our ability to lend credence to what might only be a pseudo-
history of the temple. Moreover, the search for archetypal models, the taste for
archaism that attached the present to an immemorial and glorious past is a con-
stant topos in Egyptian discourse. But in this specific case, several indications
come together to lead us to think that these late statements indeed stem from a
historical tradition, even if it was in some respects a vague one. We cannot deny
that the Egyptians had, if not a true sense of history, at least the notions of trans-
mission and collective memory. Thus, it is in no way surprising that in the time
of the Ptolemies and the Roman emperors, there was a recollection of the earli-
est constructions at Dendara. We may also bear in mind that in the most fortu-
nate cases, such as at Elephantine, we can follow the development of a single
temple from the Old Kingdom down through the latest periods of history.
Another indication undoubtedly the most revealing of the existence of
divine cults in the Old Kingdom and probably earlier and, thus, of appropriate
chapels, rests in the presence of names of deities and allusions to their myths in
the oldest religious composition, the Pyramid Texts. We thus know that a large
part of the Egyptian pantheon, both major and minor figures, was in existence
and that the myths in which these deities were protagonists went back to an even
more ancient past, though we cannot fix their time of origin. This is true of Ptah,
Atum, Re, Hathor, Isis, Osiris, and Min, to cite only a few preeminent figures.
Though archaeological traces are lacking, we may suppose that these deities re-
ceived a cult somewhere, probably in a small structure that resembled the houses
of the living rather than those of the dead. Another reason for supposing with
some justification the existence of these cults is the somewhat frequent presence,
in the lists of the titles of officials who were close to the king, or in those of their
wives, of titles of priests and priestesses of this or that deity. Examples are the
"greatest of seers (?)," the highest office at Heliopolis, and the priestesses of
Hathor or Neith in the Memphite region. The earliest mention of a priestly of-
fice of Isis goes back to the end of the Old Kingdom. As in the case of the repre-
74 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

sentations of primitive chapels, the texts are too succinct for us to be able to de-
duce the exact duties of a priest of this period. Finally, the text of the Palermo
Stone, which contains the royal annals of the Old Kingdom down to the middle
of Dynasty 5, mentions domains and goods belonging to temples, a concrete
proof that they were functioning and playing a role in the economic activity of
the realm.
This bundle of convergent indications allows us to draw merely a broad out-
line of the effective existence of divine cults in the Old Kingdom and earlier.
Though they were not fundamentally different from those we know better from
later periods, they were certainly less elaborate.

OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOM TEMPLES

Though they are extremely rare, some divine, nonfunerary temples dating to the
Old Kingdom have survived. The Middle Kingdom left more traces of them. But
once they have been described, their interpretation is scarcely easy, for too often,
they are silent or nearly so. We may note that Egyptian temples were not always
abundant in iconography and inscriptions; such abundance was the fruit of a
slow progression and a lengthy elaboration that reached their culmination in the
Ptolemaic temples.
There are two distinct cases, of which the first is by far the more frequent. At
a great many sites, excavations have uncovered, and continue to uncover, traces
of Old Kingdom occupation, among which are elements that incontestably be-
long to cult buildings. This is as true of the delta, despite the ruined condition
of most of the tells in that region, as it is of Middle and Upper Egypt. Such finds
enable us to establish that a monument dedicated to a certain deity existed in the
Old Kingdom, but further interpretation is impossible.
This state of affairs, which is disastrous for our understanding of the most an-
cient levels, not only in the area of religion but also in that of history, is the out-
come not only of the ravages of time, the result of human destruction, and the
negligence of the first archaeologists. In part, at least, it results from the attitude
of the ancient Egyptians toward their own monuments. They did not content
themselves with enlarging and transforming structures; often, they destroyed
them, sometimes razing them to their foundations so as to build anew. Still, it
was not rare for them to reemploy, for reasons that could have been both sym-
bolic and economic, material from the earlier edifice; archaeologists have thus
found this material reused, the sole trace of the preceding stage.
Certain temples, however, escaped this fate, no doubt because they quickly
ceased to be in use, and they were preserved in practically their original appear-
ance: thus, the temple built in front of the Great Sphinx of Giza, immediately be-
side the valley temple of Khephren, in a similar architectural style. While it is
THE GODS ON EARTH 75

clear that it was conceived and constructed as part of the king's complex, which
also contains the Sphinx, we are less sure of its function solar, perhaps, with
its open-air court; but nothing proves that there was a correlation between this
edifice and the colossal statue. A little further south, at Abu Ghurab, under Dy-
nasty 5, a dynasty that was clearly devoted to worship of the sun, King Neuserre
erected an open temple dedicated to the sun god, whose court contained an
obelisk, an image of the primordial benben of Heliopolis (see figure 5). While this
type of building was not a unique prototype, it was also not the model of a tem-
ple of the most classical type. Recent excavations at the site of the temple of Satis
on the island of Elephantine at Aswan have enabled a theoretical reconstruction
of the changes and successive enlargements of the building from the Predynas-
tic era down to the Ptolemaic Period. But there, too, each earlier stage was
reconstructed with the aid of blocks that were reused in a later stage of the
monument.
Already in the Middle Kingdom, there was a little more variety, and the list of
preserved temples is a bit longer. The case of Tanis, which furnished an abun-
dant harvest of Middle Kingdom and Hyksos Period evidence, must be set aside:
transported there in the Third Intermediate Period from Pi-Riamsese, itself a
Ramesside foundation that had inherited objects borrowed from elsewhere, this
evidence in no way sheds light on the earlier history of the site. In the Faiyum,
there still exists the temple of Medinet Madi, dedicated to the goddess Renenutet
and the god Sobek, a small building with decoration on its walls that was pre-
served in the course of its later enlargement. On the shore of Lake Qarun, the
construction of Qasr el-Sagha is architecturally related to the temple of Medinet
Madi, but for lack of representations and texts, we do not know to what deity it
was consecrated.
The example of the temple of Amun at Karnak is by far the most revealing,
given the importance it would later be called on to experience. The still obscure
god from the Theban nome, who had perhaps been earlier worshiped in a prim-
itive sanctuary, saw his role grow from the beginning of Dynasty 12 on. If we gaze
on the temple in its present condition, we are in the presence, in a sense, of the
negation of the Middle Kingdom temple, which was replaced by what scholars
call the Middle Kingdom court, where at an early date, Egyptians scavenging for
limestone wreaked their ravages. The latter structure continued without much
change down to the reign of Tuthmosis I, who initiated an uninterrupted series
of construction work by the kings who succeeded him. Meticulous study of ar-
chitectural elements belonging to Senwosret I and his successors has enabled
scholars to conclude that the Middle Kingdom temple already included all the
essential elements of the classical temple known from the New Kingdom on:
naos, festival hall and barque sanctuary, courtyard. Following an oft-attested
Egyptian custom, an alabaster barque sanctuary built by Senwosret I was care-
FIGURE5. The sun temple of Neuserre ( Dynasty 5 ) at Abu Ghurab. From J. Vandier, Ma nueld 'archéologie
égyp tienne, vol. 7./2(Paris, 1955), p. 583, fig. 320.
THE GODS ON EARTH 77

fully dismantled to serve as fill in the Third Pylon. It is there that it was discov-
ered; it has been restored to its original appearance, but scholars have been un-
able to determine its original location.
As the cult of Montu flourished during Dynasties ii and 12, his temples at
Madamud, Tod, and Armant, all in the neighborhood of Thebes, experienced
considerable enlargement. Under the site of the Middle Kingdom temple at
Madamud, there remain traces of what, according to the excavators, is the orig-
inal structure, which they date to the First Intermediate Period. Their proffered
explanation, which is only an insufficiently supported hypothesis, would make
it a sanctuary of the Osirian type. We know that this god was present in the tem-
ples of the region, which were rebuilt in the Ptolemaic Period, but it would be
imprudent to make an archaeologically unproven link between these two peri-
ods so distant in time from one another.
It was in the Middle Kingdom that the cult of Osiris at Abydos began to en-
joy great renown, after he supplanted the local god Khentamentiu, who was also
a funerary deity. What might remain from this period often appears in reused
material, for the temple there, which undoubtedly changed little in the period
from Dynasty 12 to Dynasty 17, experienced tremendous change after the begin-
ning of Dynasty i8.
After this rapid survey, which has enabled us to establish some chronological
reference points, some remarks need to be made. Monuments devoted to divine
cults already existed in the predynastic era and during the Old and Middle
Kingdoms. Known from direct and indirect traces, they were rare in the Old
Kingdom, but already more numerous in the Middle Kingdom. It would be con-
venient to attribute this state of affairs to the age of the monuments, consider-
ing the fact that the further back we go in time, the less chance we have of
uncovering a building, even one that is poorly preserved. This is undoubtedly an
argument we must take into account, but it can in no way serve as a global ex-
planation of this situation.
We have already noted that the Egyptians had the custom of not contenting
themselves with enlarging buildings they inherited from their predecessors,
keeping the most ancient part as a kernel, but of destroying, or rather disman-
tling, the older structure and reusing its material. By the same token, the oldest
stage often no longer exists and cannot always be even theoretically reconsti-
tuted. In certain cases, though they were rare, the Egyptians destroyed the work
of a pharaoh whose legality had been called into question for political reasons,
as in the case of Hatshepsut, or for religious reasons, as in the case of Akhenaten.
But in all other instances, we must refrain from accusing those who committed
these acts of an intent to destroy, for on the contrary, the old materials were care-
fully conserved in the shelter of foundations or fills. Were these materials not the
proof of the antiquity of the monument, which sometimes dated back to
pharaohs of ancient times? Creating a new work, kings perpetuated and re-
78 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

newed, in their own name, the First Occasion, whose importance in Egypt we al-
ready know.
This attitude persisted through the millennia of Egyptian civilization, but for
the Old Kingdom, and a fortiori for the older periods, we must think of another
reason, undoubtedly an important one, for this poverty of divine monuments.
It seems to me that it was linked to the internal development of Egyptian reli-
gion, which, though it had a protodynastic or predynastic past of which we are
almost entirely ignorant, did not spring up as an intangible and completed whole
at the dawn of history.
Considering the monuments of the Old Kingdom, a simple thought comes
inevitably to mind. This was a period when Egyptians suddenly and successfully
mastered the working of stone and produced what would be the most imposing
constructions in all the history of their civilization. What were they? Tombs,
royal or private, for the most part, with complementary buildings to perpetuate
the funerary cult after the burial ritual, according to a system that seems already
to have been strictly codified. In a parallel development, texts that must have long
been in gestation saw the light of day in Dynasty 5 in the form of the Pyramid
Texts. This written collection of magical formulas intended to assure the con-
tinued life of the king offers us a picture, albeit imperfect, of beliefs about deities
who already existed and of myths that had already been made up.
In contrast to this majestic pomp, we find only rare divine temples that are
still standing, along with the traces of others, none of which attained colossal di-
mensions. This disparity cannot be due simply to ancient or modern destruc-
tion, for it would then be inexplicable, although it is true that there was no reason
for a funerary temple to be altered later, for it had been built for a precise and
unalterable purpose. Our perception of these early manifestations of the reli-
gious phenomenon leads us to think that the funerary cult experienced a hy-
pertrophic expansion in this period. Of course, we cannot radically separate
divine cult from it. The funerary cult was linked to survival in an afterlife that
belonged to the imaginary realm, and this included the gods, their cults, and
their myths, above all in the perspective of an afterlife as opposed to life on earth.
This observation would explain the fact that the existence of deities and their
cults, though attested, had need of only modest manifestations. By the same to-
ken, certain rituals were undoubtedly at first funerary before being diverted to
other objects, such as divine statues. In the great New Kingdom ensembles of di-
vine cult, scholars have been able to demonstrate borrowings from the royal fu-
nerary complexes of the Old Kingdom, down to the copying of their structure.
Without doubt, the Middle Kingdom was the period in which Egyptians most
independently elaborated temple plans, rituals, and liturgies intended for deities,
before theology assumed its definitive form in the New Kingdom; the latter pe-
riod saw the development of a complex system that drew its material from an-
cient sources, exploiting their latent potentials. Funerary architecture and cult
THE GODS ON EARTH 79

were the archetypes of divine temples and cults; the gods were similar to the
dead.

THE TEMPLE ARCHETYPE FROM THE NEW KINGDOM

TO THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD

Just as evidence of temples is rare for the Old and even the Middle Kingdom, so
it is abundant from the New Kingdom down to the Roman Period, notwith-
standing the ravages that temples have suffered, in some cases leading to the to-
tal destruction of an edifice, either in antiquity, or, though only sometimes, in
the course of the nineteenth century. Thus, of the hundred Ptolemaic temples
listed in various sources, the majority have been destroyed. Egyptians continued
to replace old monuments with new buildings, but they also enlarged a temple
with successive additions, as at Karnak, which makes it difficult at first glance to
make out the classic plan, which was augmented by numerous additions. It
would be of no use to give the long list of divine edifices that dot Egypt from
south to north. Instead, we shall specify the basic elements that were indispens-
able to the coherence and function of a temple in the form endowed to it by the
Egyptians beginning in the New Kingdom, when, drawing inspiration from
older examples, they made a thoroughgoing effort at systematization. Naturally,
we can encounter edifices of a slightly different type that differ from the ideal
plan. When rock cut temples were excavated (the most famous of these is Abu
Simbel), it was necessary to adapt the original model to the local topography, but
the change from a freestanding temple to a hypogeum scarcely entailed a total
transformation. By the same token, a specific function at one or another temple
could lead to the addition of supplementary chapels that otherwise did not ex-
ist in a systematic manner; an example is the so-called "counter-temple," an ex-
terior chapel adjoining the rear wall behind the naos and devoted to a particular
cultic function. There are some small buildings with a reduced number of
rooms, but the essentials were preserved. Despite a certain rigidity of structure,
the Egyptians always displayed an adaptive flexibility that enabled them to face
new situations with originality. In the New Kingdom and later, the immense
complex of Amun at Karnak presented all the characteristic elements of a tem-
ple, which is sometimes difficult to discern because of the many additions that
were made to it by the successive pharaohs who worked there and also because
an axis perpendicular to the original one was created during Dynasty i8. Yet it is
on the basis of this example, and that of other, simpler temples, such as that of
Ramesses III at Medinet Habu and that of Khons in the Karnak enclosure, that
we shall identify the distinctive parts of a classic edifice, the ideal prototype.
A temple temenos, its sacred enclosure, in which various subsidiary buildings
could be constructed, was closed and protected by a high, thick wall of brick; the
wall was provided with one or more stone gateways, depending on the size of the
80 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

edifice. Most often, the enclosure walls that have been excavated date to the Late
Period, Dynasty 3o, or the Ptolemaic Period, for they replaced other, older ones.
Tanis, however, offers a very fine example from the Third Intermediate Period
with the monumental enclosure wall of Psusennes. The front gate was often
linked to a quay with a landing stage, located on the Nile or on a canal; the tem-
ple was accessed by boat. The same waterway was used by the barque of the god
when he left his home on procession. The road leading to the water was bordered
by sphinxes, or by their variant, criosphinxes, as at Karnak.
A pylon, a monumental construction consisting of two towers with trape-
zoidal bases, usually flanked the main gateway; the towers were decorated with
masts, and obelisks and statues were sometimes erected in front of them. Kar-
nak, Medinet Habu, Edfu, and Philae present us with the most beautiful exam-
ples. Passing through the pylon, one came to a courtyard surrounded on two
sides, at least, by a colonnade. In the ancient Egyptian vocabulary, it was called
either the forecourt or the festival court; the people had access to it on the occa-
sion of major festivities such as the processions of the god.
The court gave access to the covered parts of the temple, beginning with a
columned (hypostyle) hall, the most impressive of which is at Karnak. In texts,
it is called the "hall of appearance," and in the Ptolemaic Period, there could be
two of them. From there, one passed through the hall of offerings, which gave
access to the naos (the holy of holies), which sheltered the divine statue, itself
protected within a naos of stone. The Greek term naos, which we employ in de-
scribing Egyptian architecture, presents a certain ambiguity, because it desig-
nates not only the most secret room of the temple, which the Egyptians called
the "great seat;' but also a shrine either fixed (in stone) or transportable (of
wood) in which statues were enclosed. In certain cases, it was deemed neces-
sary to add an intermediate room, the barque sanctuary, which contained a base
on which this indispensable element of the god's possessions rested. As for the
naos itself, it could be a single room, or three chapels side by side when it was a
triad that received a cult (see figure 6) .
The Ptolemaic temples preserved this structure for the most part, with vari-
ants that were appropriate to individual monuments, such as the great colon-
nade at Philae or the bipartition of the temple of Kom Ombo, which was
consecrated jointly to Sobek and Haroeris; each god had his own part of the tem-
ple, which was built with two parallel axes. There were, however, more signifi-
cant modifications that were linked with the very function of the monument.
From this time on, the naos was almost always surrounded by a hallway called
the "mysterious corridor," which served to reinforce the autonomy of the naos,
the heart of the temple, conceived as an independent architectural entity around
which the rest of the temple was built. Onto this corridor opened a series of
chapels dedicated to various deities who cohabited with the lord of the temple
and who, by their presence, introduced complementary theological elements.
FIGURE 6. Plan of the temple of Ramesses III in the temenos of the temple of Amun at Karnak. From B.
Porter and R. L. B. Moss, Topographical Bibliography of Ancient Egyptian Hieroglyphic Texts, Reliefs, and
Paintings, vol. 2, Theban Temples, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1972), pl. 8.
82 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

Such chapels could also be kiosks constructed on the rooftop terrace of the
building, as at Dendara. Less deep into the temple, other rooms were added that
had a more functional, but nevertheless ritualized, origin: examples are the lab-
oratory, placed under the authority of Shesemu, lord of perfumes; the treasury;
the hall of fabrics; and the library, where certain "books," written on papyrus and
intended for liturgical use, were stored, while lists of yet other books were in-
scribed on its walls.
An element essential to carrying out the divine cult was introduced almost
systematically in the Ptolemaic temples: the wabet, or "pure place," which was
composed of an open-air court (the Court of the New Year) and a room, usually
quite small, to which the court gave access; the wabet was the starting place for
the rites of "uniting with the disk," after the divine statues were clothed and
adorned with jewelry in order to go out in procession. We must also add the
crypts, whose walls were sometimes decorated; built into the thicknesses of walls
or under the floor of the temple, these crypts served as storerooms for divine
statues and precious liturgical objects. The temple of Dendara, in particular, has
a large number of crypts. From the archaic models down to the last temples,
which were conceived under the Roman pharaohs, temples were gradually en-
hanced and diversified, with each of their parts having its own specific function.
Outside the temple proper, but within the god's temenos, certain subsidiary
structures not counting the temples dedicated to other deities that multiplied
in the enclosure of Amun at Karnak also had a role to play. Mentioned in texts
from the earliest periods on, the sacred lake (in Egyptian, the "divine lake" or
"pure lake"), of which we have a number of examples, had different forms, ei-
ther rectangular or crescent-shaped (isheru in Egyptian); the latter shape is
mostly to be found in the sacred enclosures of goddesses. The lake was indis-
pensable, on both the ritual and the theological level, to the functioning of the
temple. Also related to the hydrological and sacred phenomena, one or more
wells were dug within the temenos to reach the water table and the pure water
that sprang from Nun. In all periods, temples were provided with an abundance
of storerooms. Some were integrated into the temple itself and served to store
material needed for the cult. Others, built of brick, occupied a large area of the
temenos, as still demonstrated by the ruins of the Ramesseum; these were packed
with agricultural products that came from the domains of the god and were used
in the offerings of the daily cult, and with precious commodities that the pha-
raoh dedicated to the deity, as in the case of Hatshepsut after the return of the
expedition to Punt. Nor may we forget the abbatoir, where animals intended for
the god's consumption were led to be slaughtered, cut up, and cooked, or the
bakeries that furnished bread and cakes for the divine offerings.
Beginning with Dynasty 3o, temples were accompanied by another, special
edifice, called mammisi from the time of Champollion on; the mammisi was de-
voted to the mystery of the divine birth, that of the child god, in the triads of
THE GODS ON EARTH 83

the latest stages of Egyptian history. Another late innovation either surprised,
amused, or shocked Greek visitors. With the astonishing spread of animal cults,
it became necessary to raise livestock of all sorts of species, from among which
was selected, when the moment came, the beast promoted to the rank of sacred
animal, either until it died, as had always been the case with the Apis or Buchis
bull, or for a year, such as the falcon that was enthroned at Edfu. The temple of
Edfu, like that of Athribis, had a falcon house. Elsewhere, the sacred menageries
were filled with ibises or crocodiles.
With the decor of the divine theater on earth thus described, we can turn to
its protagonists and the roles that they played. Information pertaining to the ear-
liest periods being far too thin, more so than with any other aspect of the reli-
gious phenomenon, we must draw on the rich arsenal of the New Kingdom and
later periods in order to understand how a temple functioned, which became
ever more subtly codified over time.

THE DWELLING OF THE GOD

House of the god and not "house of God": to misapprehend the nature of an
Egyptian temple is to misunderstand its role and function. It cannot be com-
pared to a synagogue, a church, a mosque, or a Hindu temple. It was not a place
of assembly where the community of the faithful came to proclaim its faith, to
pray and praise its unique and unrepresentable god, to commemorate ritually
the sacrifice of Jesus, or to make offerings to its gods of Brahmanic origin. More-
over, in Egypt, no one was ever required to make a declaration of faith, and it
was a specialist, an indispensable intervener, who had the job of making the of-
ferings within the temple. A temple was not a place where assembled people pro-
claimed the existence of the divine, but rather the place where the divine was
rooted and manifested itself directly and visibly on earth, its permanent recep-
tacle and thus itself divine.

NAME AND ORIGIN

The designation of a temple in the Egyptian vocabulary proves what has just
been asserted. It is not a matter of the "personal" name that each cultic building
received and that reveals a specific theological aspect that distinguishes it, such
as the sanctuary in the east of Karnak, called "Ramesses and Amun are those who
hear prayers," an evident allusion to the beneficent act of hearing that the god
and the pharaoh, his representative on earth, could manifest with regard to hu-
mans who did not penetrate into the temple, but rather remained at the gates.
Again, in the Old Kingdom, the sun temple of Neuserre at Abu Ghurab was
called "that which arouses the joy of Re," a programmatic name reflecting the
84 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

Heliopolitan system of belief. Nor is it a matter of reviewing the words that be-
longed to the architect's vocabulary and enable us to distinguish a type of chapel
that had a particular form.
In Egyptian, the general term hut-netjer, which we translate as "temple," and
which the Greeks translated as hieron, literally means "mansion of the god," and
it goes back to the Old Kingdom. Later texts confirm that it is indeed the temple
itself, shut up within its enclosure and consecrated to the god. But it needs to be
noted that from a semantic point of view, nothing in the designation of the place,
the hut "mansion, palace," signals any sacred character; the word could be used
for the houses of kings and for those of living and dead persons. It is the word
netjer that limits the semantic field: that of the god. The expression hut-netjer
became an almost inseparable entity, though we can also encounter a designa-
tion of the type "mansion of Atum," in which it is the name of the god himself
that immediately endows the expression with its sacred connotation.
A second term was often used in association with the name of a deity: per,
"house." Without it being absolutely systematic, the word per had a larger range
of meaning than hut. Along with the divine edifice, it also included the lands and
goods that the god possessed. It was his domain, from which the temple and its
personnel drew their resources, agricultural and otherwise; the gods were
landowners in proportion to their power.
Finally, we often encounter another relationship between a deity and a place,
which testifies to his or her local roots, whether he or she goes back to the be-
ginnings of Egyptian culture, or whether the deity came to be inscribed only later
in history; thus, Thoth was not always linked to Hermopolis Magna. A god was
"lord" or "ruler" of a locality. Conversely, the locality could often be designated
by a periphrasis of the type "city of ..." Thebes is the prime example of this phe-
nomenon. It was the "city of Amun," the No-amon of the Bible, while Armant
was the "Heliopolis of Montu." The Greeks who settled in Egypt were aware of
this relationship, and in their language, they replaced the Egyptian toponyms
with designations of the type Panopolis, "city of Min," Lykopolis, "city of Anu-
bis," and so forth.
Reaching what is perhaps the profoundest mark of the local rooting of the di-
vine, the Egyptians, particularly in their autobiographies, their wisdom texts,
and their individual prayers, often referred to their local deity as "god of the city,"
without further specification, thus implying of their own city. The "god of the
city" was the one with whom they naturally had the closest relationship, the one
whom they were especially obliged to honor, and from whom, in return, they ex-
pected mercy and pity, for this deity represented the divine that shone on the re-
stricted circle of their existence.
This close connection, this complicity between the deity and the limited space
of a city, found yet another expression whose manifestations are again particu-
larly transparent in late texts. In the explosion of local cosmogonies that repre-
THE GODS ON EARTH 85

sent a search for an explanation of origins, the intrinsic link between a god in his
geographical dimension as lord of this or that place is obvious. It was he who,
on the First Occasion, caused a primordial mound to emerge, solid ground that
served as the original foundation of his temple. Thebes became "the City" pure
and simple, mother of the other cities, but similar phenomena are to be en-
countered elsewhere, at Edfu and Esna, for example.
We should not, however, accord this spatial rooting a more fundamental im-
portance than it had for the Egyptians, nor should we view the origin of the
development of their religion as the disunited pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. The ge-
ographical, local, and spatial dimension of a god was only one of his compo-
nents, in no way excluding the others, the cosmic and the theological, and not
necessarily explaining them. Amun was lord of Thebes, but he was the "hidden
one." Thoth, lord of Hermopolis, presided over writing. As for Horus, who was
worshiped in many cities in the north and the south of the land, he was both a
celestial god and the son of Osiris and Isis, elevated by the latter fact to a special
destiny.

THE TEMPLE AS ECONOMIC POWER

In mentioning the Egyptian term per, "domain" as a designation of a temple and

its outbuildings, we alluded to the economic power this institution represented.
Even before considering its cultic and symbolic functions, we cannot neglect the
vital economic role that it played throughout the history of Egypt. A detailed
study of this role would be too lengthy, and it would in large part exceed the lim-
its of our topic; we must, however, touch on it briefly.
Like the king, the gods were landed gentry. Though we cannot determine the
origins of this phenomenon, we nevertheless suspect that these possessions were
initially granted to them by the pharaoh himself, even if they were later increased
by dint of effective negotiations on the part of the clergy and according to their
skill. The situation was obviously highly unequal, and there can scarcely be any
comparison between a small provincial temple with only meager resources and
the gigantic domain of Amun, which reached its apogee under Dynasties i8 and
19. Papyrus Harris I lists the possessions of the great religious domains at the end
of the reign of Ramesses III, and it contains some surprises. Wealthier by far than
Ptah of Memphis and Atum of Heliopolis, Amun possessed more than 700
square miles of fields. His personnel, from actual clergy down to the peasants
who worked on his domains, amounted to more than 8o,000 persons, and his
livestock to more than 400,000 head. A whole administration of scribes and
archivists had to count the tribute he received annually: precious metals, fabrics,
grain, and so forth. When the military expeditions the Tuthmosides led into Asia
returned home, a part of the booty went to Amun, along with a large number of
captives, who were pressed into his service. Papyrus Wilbour, published by Alan
86 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

H. Gardiner, is another invaluable source of information regarding the posses-

sions of Amun outside the Theban region itself.
From a much later date, the lengthy donation text from the temple of Edfu
gives us an idea of the size of the landholdings of Horus of Behdet, which
stretched from the confines of Thebes to south of Gebel el-Silsila and which had
been donated to him by the king. There was another type of donation, this one
private but guaranteed by royal surety; it is attested by numerous stelae called
"donation stelae," dedicated by private individuals, nearly all of them dating to
a single stretch of time from the Libyan Period down to the Saite Dynasty 26.
This arrangement enabled temples to recuperate fragments of domains that had
been ceded by the king to persons he chose to recompense.
Otherwise stated, there were close links between the two great landowners in
Egypt, the pharaoh on the one hand and the clergies on the other, and especially
the clergy of Amun, with private persons playing only a secondary role in the
transactions that could take place. If, in the beginning, only the king was sover-
eign, it is clear that with the immoderate expansion of the domain of Amun, he
saw the rise of a power that could no longer be subject to him, but, quite the con-
trary, opposed him and assumed a more and more preponderant share of eco-
nomic and even political power. There was a confrontation between what we
would call "church" and "state," leading to the development of a state within the
state. It has been suggested that the sovereigns of Dynasty 18 supposedly made a
return to the solar religion of Heliopolis because they would not tolerate this ex-
cessive influence, and that the Amarna schism concretized this rupture. This vi-
sion of a religious turning point during Dynasty 18 cannot be ignored, but it
certainly does not suffice to explain the situation entirely. Conversely, with the
decline of the New Kingdom and the breakup of political unity, the high priests
of Amun acquired increased authority and, having become "priest-kings," they
competed with the Tanite sovereigns. It is undeniable that the material and eco-
nomic power of the temples, and consequently, of the gods, weighed heavily
throughout the history of Egyptian culture, but undoubtedly more on the his-
torical than on the strictly religious level. Certain changes that we observe in re-
ligious attitudes might in part have had their origin in specific historical
situations, but at the same time, they transcended those situations and did not
simply reflect them. This seems to me to be above all evident in the area of the
theoretical elaboration of theological concepts.

THE ROOTING OF THE DIVINE ON EARTH

As house of the god, solidly planted in the Egyptian soil from which it drew its
subsistence, a temple was above all the place where the divine was rooted on
earth, with the divine in some way incarnate in the statue of the god, which was
sheltered in the rear of the naos. The divine was sacred, and thus separate and
THE GODS ON EARTH 87

inaccessible, except to certain individuals who were permitted to approach it in

a strict condition of purity. While the villages and cities of Egypt were, as a gen-
eral rule, open, the temple and its sacred perimeter, the temenos, was surrounded
by a high wall of unbaked brick that isolated it from profane territory, marking
the boundary between what was without and what was within, the impure and
the pure. It served to protect the one who was supposed to dwell within it, shel-
tered and hidden. Certain late texts belonging to the autobiographies of officials
who were punctilious in their duties, tell how after periods of troubles, it was
necessary to cleanse the temenos of temples that had been invaded and soiled by
soldiers. Thus, Djedhor of Athribis recounts that he "found many dwellings of
soldiers within this enclosure," had them demolished, and "purified the wabet-
sanctuary after the dwellings that were inside it were demolished, for the vices
of slavery (?) were there."'
While passing through the gate of the enclosure was authorized to all on at
least certain occasions, to penetrate further, one had to belong to the personnel
of the temple and to place oneself in the required state of ritual purity.
The further one advanced along the axis of the temple, the closer one came
to the receptacle of the sacred. This progression was marked in two ways in the
architectural layout of the edifice. The floor gradually rose, while the ceilings be-
came lower, the volumes thus becoming gradually smaller, while light was dis-
pensed more and more parsimoniously. Those who entered the temple passed
from the full sunlight of the initial courtyards to the filtered light of the clois-
tered hypostyles, and then into the penumbra of the pronaos, which was lit only
by narrow slits. The naos itself received no natural light, except at the moment
when its door was opened, and the priests needed candles to carry out the cult.
It was by the density of its volume and the darkness in which it was maintained
that the Egyptians expressed the most particularly sacred character of the holy
of holies, which itself enclosed a stone or wooden shrine in which the divine
statue stood. The architects of the Ptolemaic Period also accentuated its charac-
ter as an entity unto itself, functioning on its own, by making it an independent
construction within the temple. It was built as a self-contained entity, and the
rest of the temple was organized around this core, which explains why it was sur-
rounded, separated, and protected by the "mysterious corridor."
All these precautions were amply justified, because in the sanctuary, the heart
of the temple, its "interior" (khenu in Egyptian), was concentrated all the divine
energy that animated the statue, which was an effigy and a constituent part of
the deity. At the same time, texts defined it in other terms that revealed its func-
tion; it was the "horizon" of the god or even the "sky," according to the inscrip-
tions of the high priests of Amun in Dynasty i8. As for the doors that led to it,

1 E. Jelinkova-Reymond, Les Inscriptions de la statue guérisseuse de Djed-Her-le-Sauveur, Bibliothèque

d'Étude 23 (Cairo,1956), pp. 101 and 102.
88 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

which were opened by the king or by his representative during the daily cult, they
were nothing other than the "gates of the horizon" or the "gates of the sky." If we
do not misapprehend, the naos was a projection of the sky onto the earth. And
while the effigy of the god belonged to the earth, his ba was in the sky, as late
texts reiterate. This aspect of their union was expressed by the ritual of "uniting
with the disk," which is first attested in the Ptolemaic Period. In its stony mate-
riality, the naos was the metaphorical image of the sky, because a form of the
god, materialized in his statue, permanently resided in it. Everything in the tem-
ple converged on this ultimate point.

THE TEMPLE AS MICROCOSM

As the dwelling of the divine statue, the temple was a sacred place, as opposed to
the profane world that surrounded it; the naos represented the image of the sky
on earth. The temple was the perpetually renewed point of irruption of the di-
vine into the world as constituted and organized into a cosmos; but because, in
Egypt, it was obligatory to make incessant reference to the First Occasion, it was
also the place where the existing emerged at the beginning of the world. From
the New Kingdom on, the temple as image of the primordial mound was a topic
of Egyptian texts. Thus, on the base of one of the obelisks of Hatshepsut between
the Fourth and Fifth pylons of the temple of Karnak, we read that it was "the
horizon on earth, the august mound of the First Occasion." The same theme
would be greatly expanded on in the lengthy dedicatory inscriptions on the Sec-
ond Pylon, with their eulogy of Thebes written under Ptolemy VIII; the texts in-
sist on the equivalence between the temple and the mythic place where Amun
set foot on the First Occasion. In the same way, from Dynasty i8 on, the small
temple of Medinet Habu was called the "precise (or sacred) place of the First Oc-
casion." In the late theology of Amun, highly colored by outside influences,
which began to be elaborated in Dynasty 25 and spread during the Ptolemaic Pe-
riod, this primordial place came to play a fundamental role, for it sheltered the
tomb of the dead gods: Kematef, the original serpent, and the Ogdoad who is-
sued from him.
By means of this translation and this return to origins, we can perhaps un-
derstand and explain the far vaster symbolic role of the temple. The place where
the world emerged on the First Occasion, it became the very image of the orga-
nized cosmos, in other words, a microcosm. This aspect of the temple, about
which the late texts are quite explicit, is well known. The wall that surrounded
and protected it, in certain cases constructed with recesses and projections, or
with undulations, was perhaps at the same time the image of Nun, who did not
cease to be present in the world that emerged from him; this widespread inter-
pretation should, however, be treated with caution, for it is weakly supported by
Egyptian texts describing temples. Even within the temenos, Nun was present in
THE GODS ON EARTH 89

another way, for the water of the sacred lake was in contact with the water table.
As for the two towers of the pylon, they were assimilated to Bakhu and Manu,
the eastern and western mountains, which were the limits of the course of the
sun.
In the architecture of the building, the floor represented the earth, from which
vegetation was born, the latter represented by columns with luxuriant plant or
floral capitals. The ceiling decorated with stars or with astronomical images,
such as the decans, is none other than the sky. At the bottoms of the walls, the
pharaoh approaches the god, the lord of the temple, leading processions of
"Niles" and "fields," personifications of nomes and various geographical or eco-
nomic entities, who metaphorically represent Egypt, which from the ancient
point of view was the entire world. On the remainder of the walls, the decora-
tion leads from the entrance toward the holy of holies. Consisting principally of
ritual scenes, but also of texts such as hymns or calendars, it functioned as an im-
age of the life of the temple and of the cosmos from a double point of view, both
ritual and symbolic.
By a trick of mirrors that engendered no contradiction, the temple was an en-
clave of the sacred in the profane world, but at the same time, the metaphorical
image of this world as cosmos. By assuring its uninterrupted functioning, Egyp-
tians could maintain the beneficent presence of the sacred on earth and the or-
der of the cosmos.

THE CULT: RITUALS AND LITURGIES

If the temple was the house of the god, the dwelling place of his effigy, which was
more than a simple, inanimate image but rather a veritable part of his being, en-
dowed with a sort of life, this effigy required constant care to keep it alive, to sat-
isfy and appease the god (the Egyptian term for "satisfy, appease" is hetep, a word
that also designates offerings). The regularity of this service enabled the proper
functioning of the temple and, consequently, that of the world that depended on
the gods. The latter were responsible for this functioning, but humans were also
responsible for it, and it was they who had to assure this service. Thus, we see a
close connection between gods and men that scholars have sometimes wished to
summarize somewhat simplistically with the phrase do ut des, but which was in
fact more subtle.
The service of the god comprised a series of codified and ritualized acts, both
in the daily service and in the solemn liturgies of festival days. According to a
principle that had always existed in Egypt, the king, who represented the divine
on earth because of his office, was the only person authorized to carry out the
cult, that is, to stand face to face with the god. This was the reason for his om-
nipresence and his representation in all periods on the decorated walls of tem-
90 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

pies, facing its divine protagonists while making the ritual gestures. But because
he was only one man, specialized priests took his place, fulfilling the conditions
necessary to this service. Study of the "grammar" of the temple will also shed
light on the symbolic role of a certain number of rituals.

THE DAILY CULT RITUAL

The texts of papyri in Berlin, representations from the temple of Sethos I at Aby-
dos, and those from various Ptolemaic temples have demonstrated the existence
of a cult ritual intended to satisfy the daily needs of the god. Perhaps dating back
to the Middle Kingdom, it was codified in the New Kingdom and would con-
tinue down to the Ptolemaic Period. The examples, even the fragmentary ones,
that we possess attest that it was the same everywhere in Egypt, though without
doubt there were local adaptations of detail that in no way modified its basic
principles. In the specific case of the daily ritual, the agreements between the
texts of the papyri and the temple representations lead us to think that it was car-
ried out, for the most part, in the way we can still observe on the walls, though
we should not consider these scenes as an aide-mémoire for the officiant, who
supposedly followed them step by step. The representations of other types of rit-
ual show that this was not the purpose of this iconography.
The life of the temple began at dawn. The various priests and specialists
charged with preparations, mostly alimentary, completed their purifications and
then went into action. The officiating priest advanced as far as the hall of offer-
ings in front of the naos, where loaves, cakes, vegetables, fruits, red meat, and
fowl had already just been heaped on the altars. He broke the clay seal on the
door of the holy of holies, chanting the morning hymn: "Awake, great god, in
peace! Awake, you are at peace;' as we read in the hymn to Horus of Edfu.
It was then necessary to replace the candle of the previous evening, which had
been consumed. Then the priest broke the seals of the naos that sheltered the di-
vine statue and opened its door leaves. He saw the god in this solemn moment
of "revealing the face," which was the initial step in bringing him to life after a
night of sleep. This act was accompanied by adorations and praises.
Then began the god's meal, which was ready in the adjacent room. Only one
tray of fresh bread entered the sanctuary, however, and it would remain there un-
til the next morning. Perhaps there were practical reasons for this frugality: the
bread was the sole foodstuff that could remain unspoiled for an entire day in the
confined air of the sanctuary. Though he rejoiced at the aroma of the "fats that
mounted to the sky" as it rose from the rotisseries, the god would not have ap-
preciated that of rotting food. But it was also the case that a symbolic offering
sufficed, a single item removed from the totality of the dishes consecrated to the
god, to nourish his effigy and his ba, which came to join it. As for the rest of the
food presented in abundance on the altars arranged throughout the edifice for
THE GODS ON EARTH 91

its lord and for the deities who surrounded him, it would later be redistributed
to the personnel of the temple.
Of all the foods offered to deities, we must pause over the meat sacrifices,
which played a significant role in most ancient religions. The Greeks established
an extremely rigid codification of this key practice, which could be organized by
a magistrate or a private person, and which was followed by a public banquet;
we also encounter this phenomenon at Rome. In Egypt, we find no ritual for the
slaughter, carving, and distribution of the pieces of meat intended for the holo-
causts or, more often, for simple grills. Nevertheless, from scattered information,
it seems clear that in this procedure, whose result and goal was to cause the
aroma of the roasted meats to reach the gods, it was less a matter of consuming
the meat than of destroying the animal or perhaps the person, for we can not
completely deny the existence of human sacrifice, a question that itself raises
many questions and cannot be settled in a formal manner. The victim was con-
sidered dangerous: the sacrifice of specially chosen cattle, wild bulls, or oryxes
had an apotropaic value, for the victim that was chosen incarnated the malefi-
cence of Seth or Apopis. The ambivalent role of the meat offering, which we
commonly call "sacrifice" under the influence of the Judaic, Greek, and Roman
cultures, did not, at the very least, have the importance conferred on it by the lat-
ter civilizations, compared with other types of offerings.
At the end of the meal, the officiant presented incense (figure 7) and offered
Maat, the latter in and of itself symbolizing the totality of human offerings to
the deity. In certain small temples, there was no room to carve the totality of the
ritual on the walls. In such cases, it was enough to include a scene of censing and
offering Maat, which is not to be considered as pars pro toto, but rather a verita-
ble summary and program of the entire ritual. Thus, in the temple of Deir el-
Shelwit on the west bank of Thebes, we find no trace of any stage of the ritual
except for the praise and the elevation of Maat on the rear interior wall of the
naos.
After the meal, there followed the toilette and the clothing of the god, to
whom four strips of linen were offered, one white, one blue, one green, and one
red; on festival days, the statue's clothes and jewels were changed, these differ-
ent items of adornment being kept within the temple itself, in the hall of fabrics
and the treasury. The last act was that of anointing the brow of the statue with
medjet-oil. The deity was thus brought back to life.
After a sprinkling with water and the presentation of grains of natron for pur-
poses of purification, the face of the god was again veiled and the naos sealed.
The priest proceeded to leave, sweeping away the trace of his footsteps and leav-
ing the lit candle to be consumed. The holy of holies was once again closed.
Two other services punctuated the day: at noon and in the evening, that is,
when the sun reached its zenith and at sunset. These were much briefer than the
morning service, and the holy of holies was not reopened. At midday, the offi-
 hi
FI GUR E
7. Ptolemy VI II Euergetes offer ing incense to Osiris, Isis, and Nephthys in t he rnammisi of P lae.
From H. Junker and E. Winter, Das Geburtshaus des Tempels der Isis in Philä (Vienna, 1965), p. 52.
THE GODS ON EARTH 93

ciants contented themselves with lustrations of water and fumigations with in-
cense in the rooms adjoining the naos, in this way repeating the purification. In
the evening, they also renewed and reconsecrated the offerings, but this time
outside the holy of holies, before closing the doors of the temple.
Several times a month, this ordinary service was replaced by a more solemn
service, evidently on the days of lunar festivals. A larger number of officiants
took part in a longer, more elaborate liturgy based on the model of the ordinary
service. In both cases, the divine statue remained in the holy of holies, where it
was perhaps handled in order to clothe it, but it did not leave the room.
Commentators have often been pleased to stress the highly ritualized charac-
ter of this cult, according it a pejorative connotation and assimilating its ritual
to formalism. In their view, it was a succession of acts that were practically de-
void of meaning, carried out automatically, with no "spirituality" emanating
from them. Such a value judgment is dangerous: in the first place, this sort of
reasoning by dissociating a style of thought and a style of functioning, is tauto-
logical. By definition, a cult no matter what cult or what religion is ritual-
ized, or it does not exist. It functions according to a code that is modified only
rarely and for serious reasons. Furthermore, it is impossible today to know the
state of mind of the priest carrying out the cult in an Egyptian temple. We can-
not affirm or even suggest that these individuals entered the holy of holies in to-
tal indifference otherwise, why not suspect the same of the clergies of the
religions of our own times? Had they been indifferent, the functioning of the
temple and that of the world, which in no way depended on their fervor, would
not necessarily have been affected.

THE SOLEMN LITURGIES

The regular functioning of the daily ritual was quite often upset, for the rituals
and liturgies of the many festivals that punctuated the year were substituted for
it. Each of these festivals was annual, but their number was such that each month
included several of them. We know them first of all from calendars, some of
which, from the New Kingdom on, have come down to us on papyrus. These cal-
endars contain lists that were valid for all Egypt, the most important festivals be-
ing celebrated everywhere, even if they contained local variants here or there. In
addition to these, temples also possessed calendars; the oldest, fragmentary one
is that of Abu Ghurab. The list from Medinet Habu, dating to Ramesses III, is
the most detailed. The great Ptolemaic temples Edfu, Dendara, Esna, and Phi-
lae—all preserve one. In them, we find indications concerning the festivals cel-
ebrated there, certain being specific to that temple, while others, such as that of
the New Year ("opening of the year"), were celebrated throughout the land. The
information in the calendars is for the most part succinct, consisting only of the
name of the ritual.
94 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

In the temples, however, there are also representations of the most important
festivals, some of them quite detailed. The festival of Opet, when Amun, Mut,
and Khons went on procession from the temple of Karnak to that of Luxor, is
represented on the walls of the colonnade of the latter temple. At Medinet Habu,
we can gaze on the images of the "procession of Min;' whose existence goes back
to the Old Kingdom. The Ptolemaic temples are rich in representations. In them,
we find images of the unfolding of rituals, and also their liturgies, carved in
stone. At Edfu, we can reconstruct the festival of the New Year (called "festival of
the seat of the first festival"), as well as that of the Goodly Reunion, when Hathor
of Dendara came to join Horus of Behdet; the coronation festival, during which
the living falcon was enthroned; and, finally, the victory festival that commem-
orated the triumph of Horus over Seth. At Dendara, we are struck by the im-
portance accorded to the festivals of Osiris in the month of Khoiak, whose
lengthy ritual is preserved to us. Elsewhere, this was a festival that was celebrated
with great pomp in all the cities of Egypt. The publication and translation of the
texts of the hypostyle at Esna have enabled us to discover entirely original cele-
brations, such as the festival of the "institution of the potter's wheel," linked to
the god Khnum; that of the "arrival of Neith at Sais," which recounted the pere-
grination of the delta goddess; and the "festival of taking the crook;' otherwise
called the "victory of Khnum."
Not all the festivals of the liturgical calendar were represented in the temples,
for there was not enough wall space. We may suppose that the master decora-
tors' criteria for choosing corresponded to the importance accorded to a festi-
val, both its ritual and liturgical value, and the mythological weight with which
it was loaded, as in the case of the festival of victory at Edfu, or the mysteries of
Osiris at Dendara.
We must beware of considering these images as exact copies of how the rites
were carried out. Sometimes, moreover, the ritual indications are nearly absent,
while the liturgical part is developed at length. At Esna, we find an unusual abun-
dance of hymns that were probably recited during the course of festivals. These
were not aides-mémoire carved in the stone and intended for the officiants. Of-
ten, not all the rites were carried out in the place where they are represented: one
part of the festival of the Goodly Reunion, which is represented in the court of
the temple of Edfu, took place outside the temple walls. Moreover, the texts spec-
ify regularly enough that the priests were provided with appropriate papyrus
rolls containing all the information they needed, and which were kept in the
"house of books;" the library of the temple.
The builders of that period had a different desire, one that had to do with
making the temple a vast condensation of the entire liturgical and mythological
apparatus that pertained to the temple. From that time on, the way in which the
edifice functioned was carved on the walls and thus perpetuated, but it had no
practical use for those who assured what went on there. Going to an extreme, we
THE GODS ON EARTH 95

could say that the temple was capable of functioning on its own, without priests,
for the combination of images and texts on the walls were in and of themselves
performative, even when no one came to animate it.
Festivals can be divided into several categories, according to the point of view
adopted. Scholars have contrasted the solemn commemorations that took place
within the building with those that entailed a procession, or even a voyage, on
the part of the gods. Thus, the first day of Thoth, the "Opening of the Year," af-
ter the crucial passage of the five epagomenal days, was a major day in all the
temples of Egypt, since it was necessary to assure the maintenance of order, a
new starting point for the normal unfolding of a year. On this occasion, at Edfu,
the statues of Horus and his consorts were taken out of their naoi and, after a
stay in the wabet, they were carried to the roof of the temple, where a vital rite,
the "Uniting with the Sun Disk," took place. The effigies, which had been taken
out of the darkness, were recharged with the energy of the sun. The texts also
state that the ba of the god, which descended from the sky, united with his effigy
on this occasion. This rite, which was unknown, at least in this form, prior to the
Ptolemaic Period, is frequently attested, and not only during the course of the
New Year's festival, for it could be carried out several times during the year. Of
necessity, it took place in the open air in the presence of the officiants, though
within the shelter of the temple walls.
Hathor of Dendara left her home and journeyed by boat to rejoin Horus at
Edfu, where she stayed for several days during the month of Epiphi, in a huge
popular festival that attracted all the people from the south of Egypt. The annual
coronation of the living falcon also enjoyed a notable success. All could see the
god in his sacred animal form; the texts have much to say about the jubilation,
accompanied by more profane acts of rejoicing, that brightened such days. From
the New Kingdom on, the people of Thebes displayed their joy on the occasion
of the Opet festival.
Another characteristic of many festivals was a strong mythological content,
though this feature was not systematic. The New Year, for instance, was above all
the repetition of a passage, a new beginning that might be related to the royal sed
festivals, while the coronation of the falcon reminds us of that of the pharaoh.
But it suffices to cite the festival of the victory of Horus to assess that it indeed
reactualizes the delta myth of the contendings of Horus and Seth, down to the
final victory that assured him the throne. With regard to the text recounting this
myth, it is clear that we are dealing with a "dramatic text:' punctuated by litur-
gical sections, with its stage directions that the actors who played the gods fol-
lowed. At the same time, in a manner that differed from the carrying out of a
ritual, this active perpetuation of the myth participated in the maintenance of
the order of the world and in the triumph of Maat. The festivals of the month of
Khoiak, which we know especially from Dendara and about which Herodotus
provides some information, are clearly the commemoration of the murder of
96 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

Osiris and the subsequent victorious quest of Isis to reconstitute his body and
give birth to his son Horus. The festival of the arrival of Neith at Sais was a means
of recalling and reactualizing the birth of the world according to the cosmogony
associated with this goddess.

THE GRAMMAR OF THE TEMPLE

It suffices to gaze on the walls of the Ptolemaic temples, which are decorated
from top to bottom and from one end to the other, to realize that representa-
tions of the daily ritual, festivals, liturgies, and religious dramas do not exhaust
the repertoire of scenes carved on these buildings. We have already considered
the temple as an architectural whole and the symbolism the Egyptians conferred
on it: the emergence of the divine into the human realm, it was also a miniature
image of the world and was supposed to function just as it did. But superim-
posed on the architecture and blending with it, there was the temple decoration,
some of which we have just discussed. This decoration was obviously not orna-
mental, nor was it conceived as an illustration of the activities carried out in the
temple, even though a certain number of ritual scenes from the daily cult, such
as they are illustrated, correspond to the actual conduct of the cult. The decora-
tion of the temple, which complemented its structure, was functional through
the symbolism that governed it and whose rules we must attempt to decipher.
Nowadays, there is a tendency to use the vocabulary of linguistics outside its spe-
cific field of reference. This shift works somewhat well for Egypt, in which im-
ages are closely linked to texts and can be read as signs, with transfers of meaning
from one image to another, as from sign to sign.

THE VOCABULARY OF RITUALS

The number of rituals attested more or less frequently in representations and

texts is considerable, and despite the many specialized studies devoted to them,
they have yet to be systematically inventoried. Certain series forming a coherent,
easily detectable whole are easy to identify and isolate: thus, the rites of found-
ing and consecrating a temple, which had existed since the beginning of history.
Because of its divine character, a temple could not be built without obeying pre-
cise rules. The king, assisted in his activities by the goddess Seshat, first deter-
mined the orientation of the angles of the building and then dug the foundation
trenches, into which sand was poured, while foundation deposits marked the an-
gles. The representations proceed directly to the consecration of the temple, leav-
ing the actual construction process unrepresented, except perhaps for a scene
depicting the offering of bricks. This was the ritual of "giving the house to its
THE GODS ON EARTH 97

lord," in the course of which the pharaoh purified the temple with fumigations
of incense. In addition to these scenes, there are the dedication formulas that of-
ten adorn the propylon and the gateways of the temple, and the specific dedica-
tion inscriptions in each room, informing us of its function, which was linked
to mythological events.
Looking at the other scenes, without making an exhaustive list of them, we
can divide most of them into major categories. Food offerings are quite numer-
ous, including the general "offering," along with meats, vegetables, bread, and
liquids (water, milk, beer, wine). The products of the perfumery are present in
the form of oil, incense, and olibanum. There are also flowers, mirrors, jewelry,
and other items of personal adornment, and fabrics. Other types of rituals seem
at first glance to be symbolic, because of the object that is offered: meadows, un-
kheb (long considered a clepsydra), udjat-eyes, sistra, potter's wheel, and, above
all, Maat, which does not mean that the offerings listed above are purely mater-
ial: ritual necessarily entailed symbolism. Other rituals, such as the raising of the
sky and the adoration of the god, were not characterized by a specific object, but
by the action performed.
In the face of this multiplicity, the first task is to study a specific ritual with
the help of all the examples we can collect from various periods, with the Ptole-
maic Period always being the richest. Parallels and their variants are then estab-
lished, and a common structure can be discerned. It is sometimes possible to fix,
if not the date of a ritual's appearance, at least that at which it was codified, which
often goes back to the New Kingdom. The ritual might have well existed before
that time, but without exception, the sources are too scanty to go back any fur-
ther. More or less expansive allusions give an idea of the ritual's geographical ori-
gin. We also see that certain rituals could be addressed indifferently to most of
the deities of the pantheon, while others are intrinsically linked to a specific de-
ity, either because the object that is offered belongs exclusively to him, such as
the potter's wheel of Khnum, or because the symbolism links the offering to the
deity, such as the ankh djed was (life, stability, power) presented to Osiris in the
form of amulets, or the scribal kit of Thoth.
The title and the formula define the content of the scene, while the royal and
divine epithets supply theological and mythological allusions. Analysis of the
various texts enables us to shed light on the functional character of the scene and
its mythological referent, which is rarely absent, and to catch sight of its sym-
bolic function. Thus, the slaughter of a wild bull is a hunting ritual with an
apotropaic character, the animal incarnating evil, while the sacrifice of an oryx
resembles the learning of a consumption technique, though this was gradually
demoted to second rank by the astronomical character that was later accorded
to the ritual. Unlike drama, ritual was not, properly speaking, an actualization
of myth. It symbolically recalled the myth or myths that were attached to it, per-
98 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

haps secondarily, and it must be read on two levels, the one strictly functional
and the other mythological. Finally, such a study must take into account the place
in the temple where the scene is carved.

THE SYNTAX OF THE TEMPLE

Analysis of the rituals, taking them separately and dissecting them exhaustively,
is an indispensable approach that leads, in the best of cases, to a knowledge of
the vocabulary of the temple, or otherwise put, of the components that consti-
tute the basics of the language. But to know the latter fully, it is necessary to dis-
cover its syntactic elements, which enable the language to convey meaning. The
rituals have their own internal meaning, but the Egyptians did not just juxtapose
them haphazardly on the walls of the temples; they introduced a direction of
reading or better, directions, for we are not in a linear perspective, but rather
in a pluridimensional space, one that was used with a subtlety that often puzzles
us. This temple grammar, whose existence was early suspected by our remark-
able precursor, the marquis de Rochemonteix, has barely begun to be explored,
and it will be a long time before scholars mine its riches.
We can nevertheless trace certain central themes. First of all, "the decoration
runs in the direction of the holy of holies, it does not lead out of it," as Philippe
Derchain has rightly stated. The king or his substitute, the officiant who pene-
trated into the temple, advanced from the least to the most sacred place within
it, the naos containing the effigy that was the concentration point of the divine.
The edifice was built along a longitudinal, symmetrical axis, as a result of
which the scenes on the walls corresponded to one another in pairs. Their cor-
respondence manifested itself in a number of ways, and in the case of a perfect
analogy, the offering is the same. More often, it is a matter of similar, comple-
mentary offerings, whose relationship can easily be discerned and whose mytho-
logical referents are similar. The deities themselves are also complementary,
often geographically, except when the same deity is represented on each of the
two walls. We must therefore read such scenes together, not separately.
We must also take into account spatial proximities from scene to scene on one
and the same wall, both horizontally and vertically. Vertically, we can attempt to
establish a link between the scenes by means of the columns of text relating to
the king, but this overly systematic interpretation suffers from many exceptions.
Horizontal relationships, though, can be demonstrated with greater certainty
and conviction. These relationships have to do either with the replacing of one
symbol by another whose symbolism partially overlaps its own, according to
what Derchain has called "the unconscious rules of analogical thinking," or with
geography. A coherent series of deities is thus represented, each playing a role in
the specific ritual in which he or she is involved. The god who is lord of the tem-
ple is not the only divine actor in all these scenes. We also find all the other deities
THE GODS ON EARTH 99

who have a place in his dwelling first and foremost, his consort and the child-
god, as well as deities who were permanent guests for theological or mytholog-
ical reasons. This circle could be enlarged to include deities from geographically
nearby places or who belonged to an even larger territorial system of belief.
Closer analysis of these groups of scenes will probably enable scholars to dis-
cern other kinds of links between them. Nor may we neglect the particular place
that a specific scene occupies, such as the representations of the slaughter of wild
animals or foreign enemies on the towers of the pylons, which assured the pro-
tection of the entire temenos, or the offering of a field made at the bottom of the
doorjambs of propylons. Clearly, the organization of temple decoration be-
comes intelligible only by working out the many combinations that entered into
its elaboration and enriched its meaning.
Finally, the meaning of the decoration as a whole must be considered in the
same light as that accorded it by the Egyptians. The decoration belonged to the
realm of the imaginary and the symbolic. It was not necessarily there to show
what actually happened in the temple, notwithstanding an occasional coinci-
dence between image and reality. Many of the rituals that are represented were
never actually carried out, while others that are never depicted were repeated
regularly. Nor was it an aide-mémoire for the officiants. The daily or annual per-
formance of rituals was necessary for the proper functioning of the temple, and
as a consequence, of the cosmos. In an equally necessary way, the mere depiction
of rites and liturgies effectively assured the protection of the edifice and of the
world against evil powers and to assure the harmonious unfolding of time.

THE OFFICIANTS

THE RITUALIST KING, PROTAGONIST OF THE GODS

Carrying out the rituals necessary for the correct functioning of the temple and
the cosmos the reanimation and the daily care of the divine effigy was the
responsibility of the pharaoh alone. Is it not he whom we see exclusively, per-
forming all the duties on all the walls of all the temples throughout Egypt? The
priests, who we know were numerous in the temples of the gods, are singularly
absent from the iconography, with but few exceptions. Scholars have often ex-
plained this phenomenon, which is at first glance surprising, by calling it a fic-
tion. In its usual meaning nowadays, this word does not adequately express
Egyptian practice. No one was fooled by the iconological principle, and all knew
that the king did not carry out the cult everywhere at one and the same time.
This point alone clearly underscores the fact that the images on the walls were
not literal representations of what went on in the building, because the one hu-
man protagonist who was perpetually present was in fact almost always absent.
The representations in the temples belong to the imaginary realm, not that of
100 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

documentary film. There has been spirited debate regarding the divine or hu-
man character of the pharaoh. It seems that an approach has finally been found
that explains the Egyptian theory as closely as possible. As an individual, he was
only a man, subject to mortal vicissitudes, but insofar as he occupied the royal
office, he belonged to the divine. Son of the gods and their permanent repre-
sentative in this world, he was the sole protagonist authorized to act face to face
with them and on their behalf, for he belonged to the same sphere as they. He
was par excellence the ritualist who knew what acts to perform and what words
to speak. It was thus right that he alone appeared in the temple decoration, which
was conceived as a representation of the functioning of the world according to
the rules of the imaginary realm. Since it was impossible for him to fulfill this
duty perfectly, he delegated it to officiants who substituted for him, represent-
ing him in the daily encounter with the divine effigy. To do this, they had to sub-
mit to a certain number of conditions, for by penetrating into the domain of the
sacred, which was in principle forbidden, they themselves also participated in
the divine.

FUNCTIONS AND DUTIES OF THE OFFICIANTS

As substitutes for the pharaoh, the officiants acted like him in the temple frame-
work in the capacity of ritualists; they were competent specialists. We generally
speak of priests or prophets, because that was what the Greeks called them, but
these terms correspond to a reality far distant from what we usually mean by
them. They were not priests in the Christian sense of the word, responsible for
the faithful whom they exhorted and intermediaries between them and God, nor
were they like Hebrew prophets, for they had no revealed truth to unveil to a
community of believers.
Knowledge and skill were required of them, not proof of spiritual capacities,
though these were not absent among them; but the latter had to do with their
personal attitude in the presence of the divine, and this attitude was indepen-
dent of their job. They had to be infallibly capable of steering themselves through
the maze of the rituals, of pronouncing, without altering them, the words that
accompanied the rituals, and of chanting the hymns.
Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the training of the priests, who
were undoubtedly quite young when they entered the service of a temple and ex-
perienced their apprenticeship on the job. There was probably an actual initia-
tion, similar to a rite of passage; this initiation made it possible, at any given time,
for a member of the clergy to rise to the highest priestly offices, which led him
into direct contact with the divine in the holy of holies.
The texts have much more to say, however, about the requirements of purity
that were demanded of the priests, with the intent that the separation of pure
and impure, of sacred and profane, would be scrupulously respected. The mem-
THE GODS ON EARTH 101

bers of the clergy attached to a temple were allowed to live within the temenos
for limited periods of time, though their goings and comings between the out-
side and the inside were frequent. By means of a system of rotation, the officiants
were actually in service only a few months a year, and the rest of the time, they
tended to their civil occupations outside the temple. Daily ablutions with the wa-
ter of the sacred lake or basin were indispensable. To complete the purification
of their bodies, the priests had to depilate themselves completely, including their
hair and eyelashes. They wore only linen, the authorized fabric, for wool, which
was of animal origin, was proscribed. Certain foods were forbidden, but usually
by local custom, in direct relation to the god who was venerated in the nome.
The clergy was called on to fast for the sake of purification, but in daily practice,
their nourishment was assured by the redistribution of the divine offerings. The
priests, who could marry as they wished, were always required to abstain from
sexual relations before taking up their service in the temple. We know that cir-
cumcision was practiced, but it is difficult to say to what extent.
Some texts carved in the Ptolemaic temples at Dendara, Edfu, and Kom
Ombo, written on a common model with local variants and known as "recom-
mendations to the priests," reveal what was expected of the clergy and what was
feared by way of shortcomings on their part:

O you prophets, great pure priests, guardians of what is secret, pure priests of the
god, all you who enter into the presence of the gods, ritual priests who are in the
temple! Oh all of you, judges, administrators of the domain, intendants who are
in your month ... turn your face toward this domain in which His Majesty has
placed you! When he sails across the sky, he looks below: and he is satisfied if his
law is observed! Do not present yourselves in a state of sin! Do not enter in a state
of filth! Do not tell lies in his house! Divert none of the provisions; do not levy
taxes injuring the little person in favor of the powerful! Do not add to the weight
and the measure, but lessen them! Do not set to pillaging with the bushel.... Do
not reveal what you see in any secret matter of the sanctuary! Do not stretch out
your hand over anything in his home, and do not go as far as to steal before the
lord, bearing a sacrilegious thought in your heart! One lives on the provisions of
the gods, but one calls "provision" that which leaves the altar after the god has sat-
isfied himself with it!2

Borrowing from a variety of sources funerary, autobiographical, and theolog-

ical texts these documents insistently stress that beyond the purely formal con-
ditions of purity, purity of heart and conformity to written rules was required,
that is to say, a degree of competence and knowledge.

2 Temple of Edfu; translation based on that of M. Alliot, Le Culte d'Horus à Edfou au temps des
Ptolémées, vol. i, Bibliothéque d'Étude 20/1 (Cairo, 1944), pp. 184-86.
102 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

WRITINGS AND TRANSMISSION

Though we are poorly informed regarding the stages of a priestly training, we do

have traces of the places where knowledge was elaborated, handed down, and
stored. The Egyptians made their late temples into a gigantic ritual repertoire ca-
pable of functioning permanently, but we must search elsewhere for their living
memory. There are two places that played an important role in this regard.
Within the temple itself, there was a library that was called the "house of books."
That of Edfu is a small room in front of the hypostyle hall, with niches in its walls.
It was found empty, but carved on its walls was a precious list of the papyrus and
leather rolls that once were stored there, and this "card catalogue" is thus at our
disposal. The collection consisted of a set of rituals that were used either daily or
on special occasions.
Since space was limited, the lector-priests used it as a storage place for the
most current works, going there and helping themselves to books as they needed
them. But they could not read or write there. Adjacent to the temple, there was
a per ankh (house of life), where archives were accumulated, texts were copied,
and priestly lore was elaborated. We know that "houses of life" existed at Mem-
phis, Amarna, Akhmim, Abydos, Koptos, Esna, and Edfu, but archaeologists have
been able to locate only the one at Amarna; unfortunately, it was empty. Since
they served as depositories and as the place where theology was elaborated, all
the major divine domains surely included one.
Scribes and lector-priests who also officiated in the temple were attached to
the houses of life. They copied the old rituals, myths, and hymns, sometimes cor-
recting them and adding new glosses. Notwithstanding the fact that transmis-
sion was all-important in the eyes of these lettered persons, their copying was
not mechanical. It was certainly in the houses of life that the most subtle texts of
Egyptian philosophy were prepared and written down, and where thousands of
Books of the Dead and other funerary texts were copied. There, too, were pur-
sued all the branches of learning that we ourselves consider profane: history, as-
tronomy, mathematics, and even literature. Books of this sort long remained in
use in Egyptian culture. The huge archive of Tebtunis in the Faiyum yielded hun-
dreds of papyri or papyrus fragments, mostly written in hieratic, Demotic, or
Greek and dating for the most part to the second century of our own era. They
touched on all areas of priestly knowledge, which was still very much alive. The
scribes who wrote them were as much concerned with copying Middle Kingdom
tomb inscriptions from Middle Egypt as with glossing religious texts of the New
Kingdom.

THE CATEGORIES OF CLERGY

Though the officiants who served in the temples were only substitutes for the
king in their encounters with the gods, they nevertheless played an eminent role
THE GODS ON EARTH 103

in society when their divine master was a powerful god and they were highly
placed in the hierarchy. Moreover, the hierarchy could, as in the case of Amun,
become a veritable power or counter-power in conflict with the pharaoh. In the
smallest temples, the personnel was reduced to a minimum and was little differ-
entiated; but things were otherwise in the large institutions. The officiants were
called "servants of the god," a phrase that scholars habitually translate as "priests"
or "prophets."
The clergy of Amun had a "first prophet" who was at the summit of the hier-
archy, as well as a second, third, and fourth prophet, each the sole holder of his
rank, and then a mass of undifferentiated prophets. In principle, only the first
prophet had access to the holy of holies, while the others, accompanied by lec-
tor-priests or ritualists, whose specialty was reading the papyrus rolls, stopped
at the hall of offerings. A large part of the personnel consisted of ordinary wabs,
"pure priests." The latter conformed to the minimum of required purity but did
not have access to the most sacred places in the temple; on the occasion of festi-
vals, however, they were allowed to participate in transporting the barque. There
were also male and female singers; women were present in the cult from the Old
Kingdom on. It seems that women tended to belong to the clergies of goddesses,
though not exclusively; for instance, many female singers and musicians partic-
ipated in the cult of Amun at Thebes. In the Ethiopian and Saite Periods, the Di-
vine Adoratrice, who was consecrated to Amun and sworn to celibacy, played a
predominant role vis-à-vis the first prophet of the god. A crowd of subordinate
servants pastophoroi (bearers of sacred objects), sacrificers, artisans of various
sorts, and gardeners constituted the remainder of the personnel. In certain
clergies, the high priest bore a specific title, such as the "greatest of artisans"
(other interpretations are possible), who headed the priesthood of Ptah, or the
"greatest of seers (?)" at Heliopolis. From Dynasty 26 on, there was a flourishing
of obsolete titles that suited the taste of the day, and many prophets of local gods
were distinguished by a particular title. We also note some examples of the rare
and revelatory title "priest of gods who have no priest," which made it possible
to include the multiplicity of gods without omitting any of them.
In the course of Egyptian history, there were various ways of entering priestly
office, some of which, it seems, were privileged. Since priests were only royal sub-
stitutes who acted by delegation, it was in principle up to the king to choose
them, as was perhaps the case in the earliest periods. Later, the pharaoh usually
contented himself with naming only the high priests, or with rewarding an es-
pecially meritorious servant with a priestly office. Though there was no legisla-
tion in this matter, hereditary transmission of office was the most common
phenomenon, and families entrusted with an office, which was often supple-
mented with an attractive prebend, regarded these positions as their right. The
innumerable statues of priests from the Karnak cachette inform us of lines of
prophets going back nearly twenty generations; we cannot be certain whether
these genealogies are fictitious or real, but it would be difficult indeed to contest
104 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS

the advantages acquired by such dynasties, which we also encounter in the clergy
of Ptah at Memphis. Nonetheless, the cooptation that undoubtedly occurred in
venerable families that already had priestly ties, as well as the purchase of offices,
the latter practice only in the later stages of history, also furnished the clergies of
Egypt with new members.
It does not seem to have been necessary to move up through all the echelons
in order to be promoted in the hierarchy. Moreover, ecclesiastical offices could
be combined with one another, and they were frequently associated with civil
and administrative offices: a priest was not consecrated to a god and to his ex-
clusive service, and he could occupy himself with other offices in the profane
world. The conduct of his life within the temenos of his god was, however, cod-
ified and punctuated by veritable rites of passage. He had to experience a form
of initiation ( bes in Egyptian) in order to accede to the highest offices, as we learn
from the annals of the priests of Karnak. There were thus, on the one hand, the
closed space of the temple, which was a sacred representation of the world, func-
tioning as its image and as receptacle of the divine, with its hierarchy of servants
of the god, and, on the other hand, the realm of the profane, to which these
priests returned when their job was done. Thus, the rupture between the two was
not absolute, as also attested by the practices of personal piety.
 PART II

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

 CHAPTER 4

OF MEN AND GODS

PERSONAL PIETY: ATTEMPT AT DEFINITION

Encountering deities they recognized by tangible signs in the world, the Egyp-
tians organized highly institutionalized cults to satisfy the gods and goddesses
and thus make it possible to maintain the precarious equilibrium of the cosmos
and the world. These cults and their rituals were carried out above all in the
framework of the temple, which sheltered the effigy of the god. They were the
monopoly of the pharaoh, who delegated his duties and powers to a clergy made
up of specialists. Excluded from the temples, the Egyptian people played no role
in this system, except for the minimal degree of implicit adherence to the cos-
mic order: the tacit consensus of all of society, which caused the temple to be
recognized by all for what it was, that is, an instrument necessary to the func-
tioning of the world. Ordinary private persons did participate, though indirectly
and incompletely, in the life of temples. This participation, however, could not
suffice to nourish the hopes of every individual for a religious life, for a rela-
tionship with the deity or the deity's perceptible manifestations. It is not a mat-
ter of presupposing that each individual felt and expressed the need for religious
expression, but of affirming that Egyptians sought to maintain a relationship
with their deities in ways other than that of the institutional cult.
There is a problem of terminology, one that goes far beyond a simple ques-
tion of vocabulary. For a long time in the past and recently again, scholars op-
posed an official or even royal religion to another one that was called "popular,"
or even the "religion of the poor." To take only the second of this pair of terms,
1o 8 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

its approximative character is evident. As for the first, in French, at least, "pop-
ular" has a somewhat pejorative connotation that placed the term in opposition
to that which is refined and recondite, so that it has a highly social connotation.
In Egypt, unless one was a priest attached to the service of a god and his temple,
one was excluded from the institutional cult. But can we call the religious aspi-
rations of a government official "popular"? And what can we say about the "re-
ligion of the poor," given that the latter, who were without financial means, are
excluded from the sources we are in a position to use, not because they lacked
religious sentiment, but because they were unable to leave material traces of it?
Although manifestations of individual piety take us down to a lower level of the
social scale, we nonetheless never reach its bottom. Peasants and cowherds are,
with rare exceptions, conspicuous by their absence, yet did they not also call on
their gods?
Besides the official cult, or rather, the cult that was institutionalized accord-
ing to strict norms, we encounter evidence of personal piety, by means of which
each individual attempted to express his relationship with the divine by other
means, ones that did not proceed through the machinery of the temple. These
means of access to the divine, however, were parallel to those of the institution-
alized cult but did not stand in opposition to them, as certain analyses of "Egyp-
tian religions" would have us believe. According to these analyses, as opposed to
the official religion, which was sustained by elaborate and complex rituals and
learned theology, and which was reserved for a chosen elite capable of rising to
spiritual spheres, there was a simplistic religion intended for the ignorant and
stamped by superstition and magic. Summed up in these somewhat schematic
terms, we are apparently dealing with two religions, and we can scarcely make
out what they have in common. Closer analysis, however, shows that nothing
could be farther from the case. Just as the official cults and rituals were not made
up of a heterogeneous assemblage of plural religions, so there were not two re-
ligions, side by side with but ignorant of one another, one a royal religion and
the other of popular origin. These were different vehicles for approaching the di-
vine, intended to respond to all human demands and needs, and they drew their
material from a common substrate: the deities invoked are basically the same,
both inside and outside the temple, and the ways in which Egyptians acted with
regard to their deities were not radically different. There was no declaration of
faith common to all, because the very basis of polytheism did not impose such
a declaration, but rather a general consensus to adhere to certain concepts that
were implicitly shared by all.
Personal piety, or personal devotion, seem to be the best available terms to ex-
press the relation of the single individual to the divine, insofar as he was a per-
son and not an element of a social and political collectivity. But behind the
expression "personal devotion," there is hidden no vague pietism or purely emo-
tional relationship that would have put the individual and the god into contact.
OF MEN AND GODS 109

While personal piety was not institutional in character, for it was practiced out-
side the framework of the temple, it was nonetheless codified, and it obeyed
norms accepted by all, norms that were the obligatory mediators in the man/god
relationship. To draw an opposition between a ritual formalism of the temples
and an independent and autonomous religious practice, one not subject to com-
mon rules, would be to project modern notions, ones linked in particular to
Christianity, onto an ancient religion. The individual called on the deity by him-
self and on his own behalf, unlike the priest, who acted in the name of the
pharaoh in order to maintain the cosmic and terrestrial order; but each of them
did what he did within defined frameworks that were accepted by all. Moreover,
neither of these two facets of religious activity could substitute for or replace the
other; each had a distinct role, and they were not interchangeable.
Thanks to the abundance of texts preserved to us notwithstanding the rav-
ages of the millennia, it is possible to paint a relatively precise picture of what
the temple cults were, and to delve, albeit with an only approximate under-
standing, into the theology of one or another deity, and to reconstruct, at least
roughly, one or another myth. But what of personal devotion? Can we render a
faithful image of the practices of individuals? Obviously not, because we can
glimpse them only through the evidence that has come down to us, which cer-
tainly represents only a tiny percentage of all that once existed, a much smaller
percentage than what we can attribute to the major monuments, and especially
because these pieces of evidence stelae, ostraca, amulets, and ex-voto objects
—reflect only a small fraction of the religious behaviors of individuals. Inscribed
or uninscribed, they are but the visible remains, bearing witness to an infinitely
greater mass of religious behaviors that have fallen into oblivion without leav-
ing a trace.
There are two reasons for this state of affairs. The first, which is sociological,
has already been noted. In Egypt, in every respect, the bottom of the social lad-
der is not, or is practically not, represented. A guard at a temple gate had only a
subalternate rank in the personnel attached to that edifice, but at least he was en-
dowed with a higher social status than that of a herdsman or launderer, though
even the latter can be encountered on a poor-quality stela. Our vision of per-
sonal devotion is thus a matter of false statistics. Though they left no traces of
themselves, the majority of the Egyptian people certainly did not any the less
visit the places "where the people pray" and attend the processions of the gods
on festival days, or seek interpretations of their dreams, or have recourse to the
aid of a magician.
Notwithstanding the primacy of the text in Egypt, we must not conclude that
something not consigned to writing did not exist. Quite the contrary, from the
remnants that have come down to us, we can infer that similar things were done
by a much larger number of individuals without their having sought to com-
memorate them in any way whatsoever.
110 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

The second reason has to do with the very essence of the religious act. Not
every prayer, whether of praise or entreaty, addressed to a deity was carved on a
stela; a special occasion was necessary for that, and we often do not know the
reasons behind it. Religious practices surely occurred much more frequently
than what we know through pieces of evidence that mention them or are the tan-
gible signs of them. Because the creation of such evidence was not necessary in
the eyes of those who were immersed in this religion, not everything that was
done in the domain of the religious left a trace, hence our difficulty in assessing
such matters as the frequency of prayers. Absent a codification imposed by di-
vine law or by a clergy responsible for the faithful, we do not know whether in-
dividuals, in imitation of the usages of the daily cult in the temples, had a daily
rhythm of prayer or whether, on the contrary, there was a certain freedom in this
domain. Analyzing evidence for personal devotion, we can glimpse a certain
number of the ways in which homo religiosus conducted himself and attempt a
reasonable deduction regarding the validity of this practice for all of Egyptian
society, though our picture will nonetheless remain somewhat impressionistic.
We can shed some light on the crucial stages in the life of a person, but his daily
life will remain blurred.
There is another pitfall in the way of our knowledge of personal piety. We have
already seen that the specific forms assumed by the nonfunerary, official cult in
the Old Kingdom and even in the Middle Kingdom are difficult to determine
for lack of evidence, both in quantity and in explicitness. The situation is even
less favorable in the case of personal devotion, of which there are rare traces prior
to the New Kingdom, with the exception of onomastic evidence, which is of
course present in all periods; this rarity once led scholars to consider personal
devotion to be a phenomenon that arose in the New Kingdom, specifically, after
the Amarna Period, though with some pre-Amarna precursors. According to
them, the reasons for the rise of this phenomenon were the dissatisfaction of
simple individuals in the face of the official cult, from which they were excluded;
a need for direct communication with deities, especially to ameliorate life's af-
flictions; and a search for a personal salvation that was not taken into account
by the official cult.
But what about earlier? Did Egyptians not feel the same need for a protective,
consoling divine proximity, or might their need lie concealed behind the opaque
screen of the social and political institution that was put in place at the begin-
ning of history? Recent analyses, such as those of the British Egyptologist John
Baines and of Hellmut Brunner before him, indicate that there was indeed an in-
dividual piety prior to the New Kingdom, though very few traces of it have been
preserved to us and perhaps were never produced in abundance. Even in early
periods, Egyptians had recourse to divine intervention to explain and justify
their acts, for example, Ankhtifi, a notable at Moalla in Upper Egypt during the
First Intermediate Period, or Sinuhe, the hero of a famous story, who was in ex-
OF MEN AND GODS 111

ile in the Near East during the reign of Senwosret I. There is no doubt that magic
was already practiced, and scholars think that Egyptians made use of divine or-
acles even before their first written attestations, which date to the New Kingdom.
Still, it is certain and this needs to be emphasized that there was political
and social, and consequently religious, change from the period of the Old King-
dom down to that of the New Kingdom. We may assume that already in the old-
est periods, there was more individual practice than can be discerned in the
preserved evidence. Nevertheless, in the Old Kingdom, the pharaonic institu-
tion, which was highly centralized and hierarchized, and whose political status
blended with the religious, remained recently founded and rested on a solid ba-
sis, leaving scarcely any place for individual expression in its tightly woven so-
cial network. Yet already, men such as Hardjedef or Heqaib were deified and
could serve as intermediaries between the terrestrial realm and that of the gods,
if only for the benefit of the social elite. It was not until the notion of monarchy
was rethought by the ideologists of the Middle Kingdom and until this same
monarchy experienced the stinging reverses of the first two Intermediate Peri-
ods that the individual acquired the status of a person vis-à-vis the divine oth-
erwise than in the shadow of the king, though without in the process destroying
the social consensus.
It is thus not false to say that the New Kingdom, especially after the Amarna
Period, and then the later periods of Egyptian history, mark a turning point in
the evolution of personal piety; that rapport with the divine, which made a more
visible irruption into the lives of individuals, experienced change; and that the
divine power of salvation weighed more heavily in favor of humankind. We must
examine more closely this transformation in human/divine interaction, while
taking care not to make it into the sign of a passage from immanence to tran-
scendence in the Egyptian concept of the divine.

PERSONAL PIETY AND INSTITUTIONS

Before analyzing the content of personal piety what type of relations existed
between men and gods, and which gods we must shed light on the means by
which it was expressed, given that the frameworks of institutional religion were
in place and functioning.

THE TEMPLE: WITHIN AND WITHOUT

At first glance, the functioning of a temple, the house of the god that sheltered
his effigy and where the daily cult or that of festival days was rendered to him by
specialists, excluded the presence of anyone who was impure and unauthorized
to carry out these ritual acts. The holy of holies, the naos that sheltered the statue
112 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

was, without exception, the domain of the first prophet of the god. But further
away from the naos, the sacred, and thus the separated, nature of the spaces di-
minished and the interdiction became less formal. According to a text of
Ramesses II, the hypostyle hall at Karnak was "the place of acclamation by the
people." Penetrating beyond the pylons and the forecourts, the people were al-
lowed to come as far as the first columned hall and associate themselves, at least
from a distance, with the sanctity of the temple. In the same vein, in the court of
the temple of Luxor, we find mention of "the place of supplication," where the
requests of men were heard. Still, late texts at the temples of Esna and Philae,
among others, indicate that access was closed to foreigners, called "Asiatics," who
doubtless were viewed as the incarnation of impurity in this period.
These forecourts or courts were also the place where private people who were
not necessarily members of the temple personnel had the possibility of leaving
their statue and thus participating indirectly in the life of the sacred edifice. This
usage became more widespread from the New Kingdom on.
But the place par excellence where people could come from everywhere at any
time was at the doorways or gates of the edifice or of its enclosure wall. More
than mere points of passage between the building and what lay outside it, they
represented the boundary between the domains of the sacred and the profane,
the contact points between these two spheres. The very name often given to them
is revealing: "god X, worshiped by the people." The eastern entry to the temple
of Karnak, the "upper door of the house of Amun," around which an exterior
chapel was built, was reserved for devotees who did not have access to the tem-
ple; there, they invoked "Amun who hears prayers," along with the successive
kings who had occupied themselves with construction work in this area of Kar-
nak, Tuthmosis III and Ramesses II. Eventually, the door was open "to all" by
Ptolemy VIII, "who answers prayers," the last king to work in this area. Similarly,
at Memphis, the crowd could render an extramural cult to Ptah "who hears
prayers" near a basin whose wall took the form of a niched façade, resembling
the wall of the city, which was put there for that purpose. The text carved on it
greets Ptah "at the base of the great rampart, for it is the place where requests are
heard."
Colossal statues, along with smaller ones, flanked the doors of pylons and
came to play an important role in individual devotion. Particularly revealing is
the example of the Tenth Pylon at Karnak, built or at least decorated by
Haremhab, which was located at the extreme south of the temple and gave ac-
cess to the dromoi that connected the residence of Amun to that of Mut and to
the temple of Luxor. In the courtyard there, along with royal colossi, were found
scribal statues belonging to the vizier Ramesses before he became king and in-
augurated Dynasty 19, and to Amenhotep, son of Hapu, who had lived under
Amenophis III and gained great fame before later being deified. The texts carved
on Amenhotep's statues clarify their function:
OF MEN AND GODS 113

O people of Karnak who desire to see Amun, come to me, I shall transmit your en-
treaties. I am the intermediary of this god, ( just as) Nebmaatre (Amenophis III)
designated me to transmit the words of the Two Lands to him.'

In the middle of the kilts, where these texts were carved in bas relief, these stat-
ues bear marks of wear caused by the rubbing of the hands, thousands of times
over, of the faithful of Amun, a gesture that crosses religions: touching or em-
bracing a statue of God or of a saint, relics or consecrated objects, or the scrolls
of the Law. The Cairo Museum has two other statues of this type, perhaps from
the forecourt of the temple of Mut, whose owners offer to intercede with their
mistress on behalf of the faithful.
Egyptians could come not only to the doorways of the temples, and even en-
ter them, thus impregnating themselves with the sacred character that emanated
from them, they could also find a sympathetic ear for their prayers, for here, the
gods assumed a form capable of hearing prayers from outside the temple. Stat-
ues of intercessors or intermediaries were supposed to aid the faithful by facili-
tating communication.
In the Ptolemaic Period, the only period from which we have explicit evidence
of this phenomenon though it probably existed earlier the doorways played
yet another role. In all the major temples, we find a rut-di-Maat, "door of ren-
dering justice," the term Maat here being taken in its most restricted and strictly
juridical meaning. A text from the temple of Edfu declares that "It is the place
where the requests of all litigants are heard, where the weak and the powerful are
judged so as to distinguish justice from iniquity."2 It is highly revealing that hu-
man arbitration between litigants occurred in the very confines of the sacred
perimeter, with the result that it was thus placed under the influence of the gods.

CHAPELS AND ORATORIES

In descriptions of the Egyptian religious landscape, it is too often forgotten that

besides the gigantic temples such as Karnak, with their solid clerical organiza-
tion and their ties to the state, numerous oratories, chapels, and pilgrims' sta-
tions dotted the villages and the countryside or were located at the boundary
between the cultivated fields and the desert. It is impossible to draw up an ac-
curate list of them: these were small affairs, often just light mud brick con-
structions with only their doorways sometimes made of stone, and most of
them have undoubtedly disappeared, with certain of them known only by a
chance mention in a text. The situation in the Ptolemaic Period is more explicit,

' Translation based on that of J. Yoyotte, Les Pèlerinages, Sources orientales 3 (Paris, 1960), p. 43.
2 E. Chassinat, Edfou, vol. 8, Mémoires de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale 25 (Cairo, 1933),
pp. 162-63.
114 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

and certain small towns in the Faiyum had scores of oratories consecrated to
deities, each with his or her specialization. Unless we suppose that this period
witnessed a heretofore unknown proliferation of local chapels, something that
has not been proved, we can retrospectively deduce that a more or less compa-
rable situation already prevailed in earlier periods. Moreover, there is evidence
that this was so.
The village of Deir el-Medina on the west bank of Thebes, which was home
to the workmen who constructed the royal tombs, has revealed a profusion of
chapels dedicated to deities of the local pantheon: Hathor, mistress of the West;
Ptah; Meret-seger, "she who loves silence," personification of the Theban moun-
tain; and Amenophis I and his mother, QueenAhmose-Nofretari, both of whom
were deified. Other gods were "imported," such as Thoth the moon, and Satis
and Anukis, goddesses of the First Cataract, while a constellation of Syro-Pales-
tinian deities Reshep, Haurun, Astarte, and Qadesh—were also at home in this
small community.
In the Late Period, at least, on the occasion of his travels between Luxor and
Medinet Habu every ten days, or perhaps only on the occasion of more im-
portant festivals, Amun of Opet followed a processional route, "the route of
Amenope," along which stood a number of bark stations where a cult was ren-
dered to him, undoubtedly in the presence of the faithful. Also on the west bank
of Thebes, but a little further to the north, in the bay of Deir el-Bahari, an old
chapel of Hathor, undoubtedly excavated into the rock in the Middle Kingdom,
was restored by Tuthmosis III and became the center of a "popular" cult where
"the people of the nome of Thebes, both rich and poor" gathered together.
There, people left ex-voto gifts of a great many small objects of piety: scarabs,
rings, female statuettes with shapely figures, Hathor heads, and amulets of var-
ious sorts.
Moreover, Egyptians generally had a certain predilection for places that were
already "old" in their eyes, charged with historical prestige or with a mytholog-
ical aura; such places could also become the destination of a pilgrimage, if only
a local and occasional one. The Memphite region on the border of the western
desert was particularly rich in sites displaying these characteristics. At Saqqara,
the pyramids of Kings Djoser and Teti, who became intercessors with the major
deities, received visits that were commemorated by stelae or graffiti. Further to
the north, at Abusir, in the disused funerary temple of Sahure, there was a Dy-
nasty 18 representation of the goddess Sakhmet that became the object of a pop-
ular cult down into the later stages of Egyptian history under the name Sakhmet
of Sahure. The old building was transformed into a veritable chapel that grew in
size over the centuries and was administered by a clergy.
These reuses and reinterpretations of a preexisting statue for new purposes
find a striking confirmation in the cult addressed to the Great Sphinx on the
plateau of Giza. Beginning with Dynasty i8, the Sphinx was known as Horus-in-
OF MEN AND GODS 115

the-Horizon, Greek Harmakhis; closely associated with him was the Syro-Pales-
tinian god Haurun, who took on his form and his epithets. Brick walls built at
least as early as Tuthmosis IV protected his open-air temenos, and into these
walls devotees set scores, even hundreds, of votive stelae. Chapels erected during
Dynasties i8 and 19 flanked Harmakhis, and he was the goal of a pilgrimage that
often included the kings themselves, on the occasion of their frequent stays at
Memphis. We can easily see how, once it was cleared of the sands that encum-
bered it, the colossal statue of this hybrid being, visible to all, with the pyramids
as its backdrop, could only be an object of astonishment and admiration. In a
parallel development like that at Abusir, a small chapel abutting on a subsidiary
pyramid east of that of Cheops found itself reused. It became the cult place of
the goddess Isis, who was called, beginning in Dynasty 21, "mistress of the pyra-
mids," that is, the tutelary goddess who extended her protection over the Giza
plateau. Here, too, the evidence testifies to a cult that attracted the favor of ordi-
nary private people. At the site of the chapel, archaeologists have found stelae
and libation basins, as well as deposits of faïence rings, all of which are charac-
teristic of this kind of cult place.
From the site of Qantir in the eastern delta, where the city of Pi-Riamsese once
stood, we have nearly a hundred stelae, the so-called Horbeit stelae. They bear
witness to an important cult of royal and divine statues in one or more chapels,
though we are hard put to describe these chapels and statues for lack of archae-
ological remains. In any event, these various cult centers, which must have been
much more numerous in antiquity than those for which we have evidence, re-
veal an intense religious life that was in no way limited to a few central institu-
tions. We always find the same specific material: stelae, basins, ex-votos in the
image of the god, or small objects of piety. Thus, at Abydos from the Middle
Kingdom on, there was an accumulation of hundreds of commemorative stelae
dedicated to Osiris by devotees who were not buried there, in the immediate sur-
roundings of his temple.
We must also mention, though with some reservation, the graffiti to be found
on the many floors, terraces, and walls of temples. Their examination shows, for
instance, that in the temples of the Karnak enclosure, they are often the work of
members of the lower clergy of the temple, who took advantage of their situation,
with the result that they do not indicate the presence of outsiders in the edifice.
The social range represented is highly significant: it runs the gamut from high
court officials, via scribes, soldiers, and local notables, down to various groups
of artisans. The many uninscribed objects, mass produced and of rather poor
quality, lead us to believe that persons of even more modest extraction, who
could purchase only cheap objects to dedicate, nevertheless had access to these
sanctuaries. The poor state of preservation of these sanctuaries and the absence
of texts mentioning the cult that was carried out in them make it difficult for us
to know exactly how they functioned. We may nevertheless suppose that access
11 6 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

to them was less restricted than in the major temples, and that lay people had a
better chance of entering their sacred perimeter.

WHEN GODS LEFT THEIR TEMPLES: FESTIVAL PROCESSIONS

Sanctuaries both great and small sheltered an image of the god, nearly always
hidden in a naos, notable exceptions being the Great Sphinx (figure 8) and the
colossal statues set up in front of the gateways of temple enclosures. Aside from
his prophet, private persons had no access to the god, and they had to be satis-
fied with participating in the sacred character of these places by approaching
their entrances or penetrating only into the first courtyards, where they could
contemplate the bas-relief images of the deity. Nevertheless, under special cir-
cumstances, the wish to "see the god" so often expressed in prayers found its sat-
isfaction. While the daily cult unfolded unseen in the penumbra of the holy of
holies, the god did go out into the open air on the occasion of the major solemn
festivals that were often only annual. These were the occasion of manifestations
of joy, and the participants included not only court officials and members of the
clergy, but also the entire population of the area and sometimes people who
came from further away. Temple reliefs and the legends that accompany them,
the festival calendars of the Ptolemaic temples, and the accounts of Herodotus
enable a rather precise description of these occasions of rejoicing.
From the Middle Kingdom on, at Abydos, which became the cult center of
Osiris, and where a reliquary contained the head of the god, major gatherings of
people occurred annually at the beginning of the inundation season. The god
was carried with great pomp in his sacred barque, which was flanked by that of
his wife Isis, from the holy of holies of his temple to his tomb, which was located
in the desert in a place called Poqer. Standard bearers, servants laden with offer-
ings, and lector priests accompanied him, escorted by the crowd of pilgrims. The
god's death and triumph were commemorated, after which he was taken back to
his home. Busiris in the delta, the other city of this dead god, must have had a
similar festival. Thebes was the stage for many processions of the great god
Amun (figure 9), when he traveled with pomp from Karnak to Luxor, that is, to
the Opet temple (called "Southern Harem" in Egyptian), in a portable barque
carried on a litter and was then transported in an actual ship on the Nile, and
when he crossed the Nile to visit the way stations in the holy places of the The-
ban necropolis and the funerary temples of the deceased kings on the occasion
of the Beautiful Festival of the Valley. Another specific form of Amun of Luxor,
Amenope, traveled, at least theoretically, at the beginning of each ten day period
from his temple in the city to the west bank. Once a year, Hathor of Dendara
sailed upstream on the Nile to Edfu to join with Horus and consummate their
marriage during the festival of the Goodly Reunion. At Memphis, it was Ptah-
Sokar who was dragged around his temple on a sledge. On such occasions, the
FIGURE 8. The scribe Tutuia worshiping the Great Sphinx of Giza under his name of Haurun (Dynasty
18). From S. Hassan, Le Sphinx: Son histoire à la lumière des fouilles récentes (Cairo, 1951), p. 97, fig. 35.
118 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

"sacred staffs" that were effigies of the god's power were displayed. As for the
statue itself, the representations of barques with their naos often hidden by a
large veil lead us to think that the statue was not directly visible to the crowd that
was gathered on the riverbanks and along the processional route. This is a ques-
tion that has sparked controversies among Egyptologists, and it cannot be de-
finitively settled, in my opinion, for lack of absolutely explicit representations or
texts. Was there a moment when the statue was removed from its naos, or when
at least the doors were opened? Perhaps: at such times, ordinary private persons
would have been present at what the Egyptians called the "revelation of the face:'

FIGURE 9. The processional barque of Amun, depicted on the red granite chapel rebuilt by Philip Arrid-

haeus, Karnak. From A. Piankoff and N. Rambova, Mythological Papyri: Egyptian Religious Texts and Rep-
resentations, vol. 5 (New York,1957), p. 18, fig. 1.

Whatever the case, these were occasions for the faithful and onlookers alike
to rejoice and to feast; at Edfu, bread, beer, and haunches of beef were distrib-
uted to the "men of the city, who spend their time drinking, taking pleasure be-
fore the august god, rubbing themselves with unguents, and loudly playing the
tambourine in the company of the women of the city."3 Similarly, at Esna, the
population was exhorted to display their joy during one of the festivals of Neith:

3 E. Chassinat, Edfou, vol. 5, Mémoires de l'Institut français d'archéologie orientale 22 (Cairo, 1930),
p. 127.
OF MEN AND GODS 119

"May women and men make festival! May this entire city make shouts of joy, and
may no one find sleep until sunrise! May Esna be in festival! "4
At Luxor, the beautiful reliefs of the colonnade of the temple, which were
carved under Tutankhamun and Haremhab, enable us to be present as the Opet
festival takes place.
Herodotus, who was witness to them in the middle of the fifth century BCE,
gives us a colorful account of the festivals of Bubastis, Busiris, Sais, Buto, and Pa-
premis. According to the historian, the festival of Bubastis in honor of the god-
dess Bastet attracted a goodly portion of the population of the delta,5 who
flocked to the city in heavily laden boats to dance and drink. Sais was aglow with
light on the night of the Festival of the Burning Lamps. Though the Greek his-
torian liked to wallow in picturesque observations, many of his details have been
verified by actual Egyptian texts.
Whether or not the face of the god was revealed to those who had come run-
ning to gaze on his passing, these festivals were major moments in the liturgical
calendar and also in the communal life of the Egyptians, who on the occasion of
processions were accorded the privilege of closely approaching the divine ob-
jects: statue, barque, sacred emblem.
Yet another manifestation of the divine was accessible to ordinary people, es-
pecially in the later stages of history, when the cult of sacred animals developed
on a large scale. At Edfu, when the Horus falcon was enthroned for a year on the
occasion of the coronation festival, he was presented to the crowd at the gate of
the temple enclosure. We also know that the burial of the Apis bull, whose
mummy was taken from the embalming house at Memphis to the Serapeum on
the plateau of Saqqara, was the occasion of manifestations of grief on the part
of the inhabitants of the region just as his enthronement had been surrounded
by joyous demonstrations as evidenced by autobiographical texts on stelae
from the Serapeum.6 These practices were not limited to these few particularly
famous examples, for many sanctuaries of middling size included a sacred ani-
mal stockyard among their outbuildings.

ORACULAR PRACTICES

On the occasion of these outings of the divine statue, people often made in-
quiries of the god according to oracular practices; the latter became ever more
popular from the New Kingdom down to the Roman Period. Far from being
confined to serious political decisions concerning a royal succession or a mili-
tary expedition, the oracles were called on to resolve the most banal problems
that came up in everyone's existence. How to find a lost object? Is it a good time

4 Esna, 207, 22; S. Sauneron, Esna, vol. 3 (Cairo, 1968), p. 37.

5 Herodotus, Histories, book 2, chaps. 59-63.
6 Ibid., book 3, chapters 27-29.
120 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

to leave on a trip? To get married? Will this illness be cured? Is the accusation of
theft true or not? Representations on stelae or on the walls of temples in the form
of elaborate graffiti, as well as ostraca (pieces of pottery or splinters of limestone)
on which questions were written enable a rather precise reconstruction of how
oracles worked. The best-known oracles are those rendered by Amun of Karnak,
often on the Opet festival, and by the deified Amenophis I in the workmen's
community of Deir el-Medina; on many occasions, the latter was approached
without necessarily waiting for him to leave on procession.
The person requesting an oracle stood before the litter borne by the priests,
on which the naos of the god rested. The question was posed directly or through
a priest. According to whether the litter moved by divine force, it was be-
lieved—moved forward or backward, the answer was positive or negative. The
question was thus usually brief. The request was sometimes made in writing on
an ostracon, with different answers on other ostraca. In the rubbish dump of
Deir el-Medina, into which the archives of the entire village had been thrown,
archaeologists recovered ostraca with only the word "no" written on them. But
we do not know how or just when the god or his representatives chose the re-
sponse they wished to give. Later, in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, clerics
had recourse to another procedure that undoubtedly was felt to be effective by
the confident faithful: the divine statue was pierced with holes through which
the voice of the priest, who was hidden behind it in a secret room, emanated.
If this simple system enjoyed a certain favor, it is because it responded to needs
that could not be satisfied otherwise. The answers were formulated clearly and
simply, just like the questions. The procedures were quick, certainly quicker than
those of human justice, whose dilatoriness was excoriated by the Eloquent Peas-
ant of a popular tale. In certain cases, litigants did not hesitate to appeal to ora-
cles precisely because a human tribunal would not hear their case. In the face of
the venality and corruption of human authorities, equity was expected of the
divine.
The oracle was not confused with justice, however, because its decision did
not entail inevitable execution. It could happen that if someone was not satis-
fied with the response of one god, he could go and consult another one. The in-
dividual was free to act or not, depending on the response he received. Two
questions need to be asked regarding the workings of oracular practices. Ac-
cording to what criteria were the priests led to choose a favorable or unfavorable
response? Nothing in the texts tells us. Moreover, the questioners could not have
ignored the fact that the answer came to them through human intermediaries,
yet they never called the system into question: not because of naiveté, but be-
cause they believed that through the divine image, notwithstanding the fact that
it was manipulated by men like themselves, they were addressing themselves to
a superhuman power and thus had the possibility of establishing a direct com-
munication with the divine.
Since we have evidence of oracles only beginning with Dynasty i8, scholars
OF MEN AND GODS 121

have posed the question of whether they existed in earlier periods. Some are of
the opinion that the New Kingdom, especially after the Amarna episode, was
characterized by the development of personal piety, by a need that would thence-
forth be expressed by an individual relationship with the divine, and that orac-
ular practices were just one of a number of expressions of this phenomenon.
Abandoning an ethos that kept them at a remove from the gods and their will,
Egyptians were thus led to ask them directly about the circumstances of their
lives. But this explanation neglects the fact that after the response of the deity,
individuals were entirely free to act or not to act. As some evidence, albeit scanty,
suggests, oracles existed prior to the New Kingdom, though on a small scale, with
the result that the New Kingdom does not mark a rupture, but only the moment
when the process was accelerated.

THE CLERGY AS INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE

By definition, a temple was a closed place, the house of a god, the receptacle of
his effigy and his ba, isolated and protected from the outside, profane world by
its enclosure wall. Only the clerical personnel, from the prophets down to the
guards according to a defined, hierarchical gradation, had access to it, provided
they conformed to the indispensable requirements of purity.
Nevertheless, the barrier between these two worlds was not as impenetrable
as it might seem at first glance. Lay people could not only come to the doors, but
even pass through them and enter the first courtyards. The oratories that must
have abounded in the countryside and at the desert edge were undoubtedly more
accessible to ordinary private persons than the home of the dynastic Amun. And,
in particular, the gods left their retreat and were carried around on festivals that
were days of rejoicing. These festivals were the most favorable occasions for
putting questions to the statue, and often enough, the priests were called on to
play a determining intermediary role.
But the influence of the priests on the life of the population was not limited
to strictly religious matters. If we consider the temple personnel all the sacer-
dotal classes, both specialists and auxiliaries we arrive at a relatively large num-
ber of individuals. Although the office of first and second prophet of a god was
often hereditary, de facto if not de jure, any layperson could perform the func-
tions of a doorkeeper, sacrificer, or even lector-priest, provided he was compe-
tent to do so. In the case of lector-priests, literacy was indispensable. All these
men who daily entered the temple nonetheless lived outside it, just like other
groups of professionals, for they were in no way consecrated to the god. More-
over, because of the system of phyles, or "priestly groups," which were four in
number and which succeeded one another on a monthly basis in carrying out
the cult, the members of the clergy served only three months a year, leading
"civilian" lives the rest of the time.
Although the arcana of the rituals and theology were not revealed outside the
122 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

temple, this constant coming and going between the sacred domain and the pro-
fane world certainly had its consequences. Those without access to the temple
undoubtedly received bits and pieces of information, and rumors surely circu-
lated. However small it might have been, clergy and scribes could have divulged,
outside the temples, some bit of the knowledge handed down in the "houses of
life." Moreover, if this communication did not exist, if the world of the temples
was hermetically sealed, we would not be able to understand how it was that or-
dinary people addressed their prayers to the very gods who were worshiped in
the temples. The general population might not have participated in the thor-
oughly codified functioning of the temple, but they were not entirely ignorant
of what went on in them.

MAGIC

THE NOTION OF MAGIC

In their relations with the invisible, ordinary Egyptians remained outside the
system of the temple and did not participate, directly at least, in its functioning.
But they had other ways of entering into contact with deities; among them,
magic played a prominent role.
The word magic is heavily laden with negative connotations that have long
rendered it difficult for scholars to find an approach to the topic that is not
founded on a prioris that mask its reality. Common sense immediately associ-
ates magic with sorcery, in the Christian tradition of Satanism. But in particu-
lar, we run up against two concepts that have had their disciples in the field of
history of religions. One is that magic preceded genuine religion, that it was re-
ligion's prehistory, a theory upheld by the members of the school of James G.
Frazer. The other is that magic is an avatar of religion, a degraded form of it that
leads to the most aberrant superstitions; the positivist school and, in Egyptol-
ogy, Adolf Erman, were ardent adherents of this view. But there have also been
scholars who have acknowledged that the notions of magic and religion are in
no way opposed to one another. It would be better to propose the hyphenated
term cult-magic, reserving for the word religion a vaster range of meaning that
covers the totality of human behavior vis-à-vis the invisible, including both cult
and magic. Cult and magic are not antithetical concepts; rather, they both have
their roots in the same common substrate, that of a certain concept of the world
and its workings, as we find it in Egyptian texts. In reality, various aspects of the
cult rendered in the temples were closely related to, or even intermingled with,
what we are about to define as magical practices. In both cases, the officiant or
magician sought to intervene in the functioning of a world subject to invisible
forces and, to cite Philippe Derchain's apt phrase, to "tame the imaginary."
Roughly speaking, in the framework of the cult, the officiant followed a cod-
OF MEN AND GODS 123

ified ritual in an attempt to maintain the presence of forces and to maintain the
order of the world just as it was, in its unstable precariousness. In the framework
of magic, he attempted on behalf of a client to manipulate hostile forces that
were also an integral part of cosmic reality. It is this double, complementary as-
pect that has often led scholars to make an overly radical distinction between the
official cult carried out on behalf of the entire group and magic, with its private
and individual character. Yet, as in the case of execration rituals, magical pro-
cesses were often intended to be effective for the collectivity, and not just for an
individual. Like the officiant, the magician was a man of action who put his pow-
ers to work against other, maleficent powers, whether divine or human, living or
dead. This action took place outside the framework of the natural order and the
laws of causality, but it did not any the less answer to a logic of its own. It was
used as an extraordinary means when ordinary methods were judged to be in-
appropriate, ineffective, or simply insufficient. The relationship between medi-
cine and magic, two domains that were closely interwoven, is a probative
example of this phenomenon.
The driving force behind any action of this type was a supernatural energy
called heka, with which the gods were endowed by their very essence, with the
result that they could be described as being "of powerful hekau" or "with many
hekau." In the Pyramid Texts, the cannibal pharaoh has no other means of ap-
propriating some of this heka than to devour several gods. But humankind was
not deprived of it, as we learn from the text of the Instruction of Khety for His
Son Merikare: "God has given heka to men as a weapon capable of frustrating
the normal course of events." And the magician knew how to make use of it.

METHODS AND MEANS OF MAGIC

The practice of magic was above all oral. It was a matter of pronouncing the re-
quired formulas t0 destroy what one feared or t0 obtain what one wanted. The
ability to do this was directly linked to the effective, active power of words, which
were not related in an abstract and arbitrary manner to what they expressed, but
were an integral part of it; hence the importance of knowing a name, which made
it possible to have power over the one who bore it. In a mythological tale, Isis,
who was famous for her artifices, affirms that thanks to a stratagem, she knows
the true name of Re, which will enable her to manipulate him as she wishes. Con-
versely, the destruction or mutilation of a name was an infallible means of mak-
ing its bearer, once deprived of it, incapable of doing harm. Thus, criminals were
"debaptized;" and actual or potential enemies were saddled with dire names. Fi-
nally, conjurations depicting gods often included mythical allusions that added
to their effectiveness, for the magician thus proved that he was ignorant of noth-
ing in the god's story.
To know and to say. Knowledge that was in principle secret, that was not sup-
124 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

posed to be revealed. But a notation on one papyrus demonstrates that this

knowledge was not confined to a few initiates, and that it could be divulged:
"Whoever uses for himself the formula borrowed from this book will find him-
self in the presence of the august god:'7
As is to be expected in Egypt, oral practice was backed up by written texts.
Collections of conjurations medical and magical treatises and charms writ-
ten on ostraca or on papyri that were worn rolled up as talismans, were innu-
merable from the New Kingdom down to the Roman Period, to the point that
we still lack a systematic inventory of those in museum collections or a complete
publication of these documents.
The recitation of charms was in all likelihood accompanied by a certain num-
ber of ritual gestures that on the whole we know rather badly, for there was never
a systematic repertoire for the use of magicians, or, at least, one has yet to be dis-
covered. In certain cases, the recitation was done over the remedy that was to
cure someone who was ill or over an image of an animal or a deity.
Only the rites of execration are relatively familiar to us, both from the dis-
covery of objects used in the ceremonies and from late texts in temples or on pa-
pyri that detail the course of the procedures. Execration was the most radical
means of destroying hostile powers, whether divine and cosmic powers, with
Apopis assuming various animal forms hippopotamus, oryx, tortoise or hu-
man powers the dead, rebels, or foreign enemies. In this case as well, use was
made of an image of an animal or a crude figurine of a prisoner with his hands
tied behind his back, made of wax (they melted and disappeared), of fired clay,
or of stone; the names of enemies were carved on these pieces. The conjuration
was recited, and then the image was mutilated before throwing it into the fire.
Admittedly, there were variations between the usages of the Old Kingdom and
those of the Ptolemaic Period, according to whether the rite was carried out in-
side a temple against a cosmic power or outside the temple against other men;
but the principle remained basically the same.
In stories, magicians are capable of astonishing feats that contributed to the
popularity of this literature but surely were not encountered in the daily prac-
tice of magic. Written in the Middle Kingdom, Papyrus Westcar, whose story
takes place in the prestigious reign of King Snofru, the founder of Dynasty 4, re-
lates some highly remarkable events. So that a female rower can recover a jewel
that fell into the water, the magician who is called to the rescue separates the wa-
ter of a pleasure lake into two parts, superposing one on top of the other. When
the object is recovered, he returns the water to its original state. Though the rea-
sons for the acts are entirely different, we cannot help recalling the crossing of
the Red Sea by the Hebrews fleeing Egypt. Moreover, according to the biblical
text, Moses had participated in a sort of contest with Egyptian magicians in the

Translation based on that of S. Sauneron, Le Monde du sorcier, Sources orientales 7 (Paris, 1966),
p. 33.
OF MEN AND GODS 125

presence of Pharaoh, until they admitted their defeat, powerless as they were be-
fore a skill greater than theirs. Such contests were common among magicians, as
we can see in one of the tales from the Demotic chronicle of Setne-Khaemwas.
These experts also knew how to make figures of wax and bring them to life, and
how to replace severed heads and restore life to the beheaded. At heart, these
wonders do not astonish us, accustomed as we are to reading the Thousand and
One Nights, Charles Perrault's Tales of Mother Goose, or the story of the Golem.
But this personage of uncommon talent was not the one to whom sick persons
or those hounded by fate turned. This personage was a literary and imaginary
figure who was undoubtedly based on everyday reality, but idealized via fiction
and the marvelous.
Objects were tangible aids to magical power and effectiveness. First of all,
there were amulets, mass-produced by the thousands, which were not only in-
tended for the postmortem support of the dead, but also served to protect the
living. Magicians dealt with amulets only occasionally, pronouncing an appro-
priate formula over them. For the most part, their shape, their material, and their
mythological referent sufficed to make them, once they left the hands of the ar-
tisan who made them, an effective phylactery that was worn around the neck,
the wrist, or the ankle, or over the heart. Among them, special mention must be
made of the highly popular stelae depicting Horus on the crocodiles, depicted
full front, his hands full of serpents and a Bes figure above his head. This repre-
sentation is accompanied by incantations against serpent bites and scorpion
stings. Some of these cippi were so small that they served as amulets, but other,
larger ones were independent monuments or were part of a group that included
a statue.
These statues, called healing statues, are remarkable; they were used more and
more from the end of the New Kingdom on. They depicted men who were es-
pecially known for their piety; an example from Dynasty 3o is Djedhor of
Athribis, who repaired the temple of the god Khentekhtai, which had been dev-
astated by invasions, and who was called "the Savior." The appearance of these
statues is remarkable: the body, with the exception of the face (but not the wig)
and the hands, is entirely covered with inscriptions that are conjurations against
serpents and scorpions. Poured onto the statue, water was sanctified by running
over the protective spells, which conferred magical power on it. The water, which
was undoubtedly intended to be drunk, was collected. The person who drank it
thus swallowed the magic, both literally and metaphorically.

THE CATEGORIES OF MAGIC

Often intended to protect against illness by means of intimidation, threat, or co-

ercion, magical practices ran a gamut ranging from prophylaxis to counter-
magic. In the category of defensive charms, there were practices that were
preventive (to prevent miscarriage, headache) or prophylactic, especially against
12 6 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

the bites of serpents and scorpions, which the Egyptians feared. There were also
formulas against bad dreams and others to afford protection from immanent
dangers to the workings of the universe. Prevention was needed against the rav-
ages of Apopis and against the risks that were run during the five epagomenal
days at the end of the year. We can perhaps add the hemerological conjurations,
the calendars of lucky and unlucky days. The earliest such calendars contain only
the notation "good" or "bad"; others add a mythological allusion explaining the
dangerous character of a certain number of days on which it was prudent to re-
frain from doing anything. The widespread practice of wearing amulets was also
a form of prophylaxis.
Formulas of productive magic are relatively rare. They were nevertheless used
in the domain of medicine, especially to facilitate and hasten the birth of a child.
Men had recourse to charms to attract a woman they had their eye on: "Cause
that so-and-so, daughter of so-and-so, seek me out, as a cow seeks its fodder, as
a servant seeks her children, as a shepherd seeks his flock."8 There were also
charms that enabled an abandoned woman to regain her husband.
Sometimes, a magician had to pit his conjuring skills against those of one of
his colleagues. Texts clearly attest to the existence of countermagic: "We shall
protect him from the magic of a Syrian, from the magic of a Nubian, from the
magic of a Libyan, from the magic of the people of Egypt, from the magic of an
enchanter or a sorcerer, and from every possible form of magic."9
The most violent magic of all was the destructive magic effected by the exe-
cration rites already described. Certain texts give detailed descriptions of how
this form of magic was carried out:

You will depict every enemy of Re and every enemy of Pharaoh, dead or alive, and
every proscribed deed he might dream of, the names of their father, their mother,
and their children every one of them being written with fresh ink on a sheet
of unused papyrus—and their (own) names being written on their chest, they
themselves having been made of wax and bound with bonds of black thread; they
will be spat on, they will be trodden with the left foot, they will be struck with a
knife and a lance, and they will be thrown into the fire in a blacksmith's furnace. "'

THE MEN OF MAGIC

For ordinary situations in daily life, persons were supposed to be able to recite a
magical formula suited to the situation. In all other, more serious cases, they had
recourse to the paid services of a specialist, who needed to be literate in order to
make use of the collections of spells at his disposal. These were the hekau, those

8 Translation based on that of ibid., p. 41.

9 Translation based on that of ibid., p. 5o.
10 Papyrus Bremner-Rhind 26, 2-4.
OF MEN AND GODS 127

who were guardians of heka, and sau, dispensers of sa, magical protection. Physi-
cians, as well as the priests of Selkis, the scorpion goddess, were also practition-
ers of magic, for medicine and magic were in no way incompatible. Rather often,
we find mention of "lector priests;' ritualists with their rolls of papyrus, who
staffed the "houses of life" attached to temples, where contemporary knowledge
was elaborated in all its forms, knowledge that could be used outside as well as
inside the sacred enclosure.
We are poorly informed regarding the preparation required to pronounce a
conjuration, which was perhaps accompanied by a specific rite; the texts have lit-
tle to say on this subject. It is possible that only a few things were done: a simple
purification, ablutions, or in exceptional circumstances, a sacrifice. But the very
content and wording of the formulas shed light on the power attributed to ma-
gicians. Let us leave aside the magicians of the stories, which do not offer an ac-
tual image of the social and historical reality of Egypt. The peasant seeking
assistance from a specialist in his village surely did not ask him to reattach the
severed heads of his cattle or fowl.
When a magician recited a conjuration, he would admonish and intimidate
the gods. He had power over them and over the order of the world, and in case
they did not act according to his will, he threatened that most feared of all
calamities, a return to chaos: "The sky will no longer exist, the earth will no
longer exist, the five days that complete the year will no longer exist; the sun will
no longer shine, the inundation that comes at its time will no longer rise.""
What conferred such power on him was his assimilation to the gods them-
selves. In the formulas, he often intervenes in the first person, affirming, "I am
Horus" or "I am Thoth." In analyzing magical texts, scholars have perhaps taken
this assertion of consubstantiality of man and god too lightly, seeing in it only a
standard formula. But in the logic of this system, the magician could take effec-
tive action against the gods only if he was of the same nature as they. We must
ask though without being able to supply a response whether this might have
been something rather like shamanistic possession. A story by Dio Cassius about
Marcus Aurelius's wars in central Europe describes the miracles worked by a cer-
tain Harnouphis, an Egyptian magus who used his artifices to cause rain to fall,
just as a rainmaker in the world of shamanism would have done.
One text, this one Egyptian, reveals that the magician entered into direct con-
tact with the deity, leaving the human time of history and entering that of the
gods:

I have rinsed my mouth, I have taken in natron, and I have mingled with the En-
nead of gods; in the evening, I have lain down in the bosom of Horus, and thus I
have heard what he was saying, while he held in his hand a viper of one cubit, as

l' Papyrus Leiden I 348, verso 2, 5-8.

128 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

evil as a viper of a dozen cubits! It was thus that I was instructed in the words [that
have been used forever, going back to the time when Osiris was still alive.] Thus, I
now slay a horned viper of one cubit, I being Horus instructed in words.' 2

In magic, in a double way based on the reality of the invisible world and the
possibility of human intervention in that reality, the individual put himself into
a state of direct relationship, whether passive or active, with the world of the
gods: passive for the one who benefited from the conjuration that was supposed
to relieve his ills or simply prevent them, active for the one who pronounced it,
adorning himself with the name and the qualities of a deity. In the latter case,
the barrier between the real world and that of the imaginary was abolished.

PERSONAL PIETY IN THE COURSE OF A LIFETIME

The relationship between man and the divine realm was not limited to visits to
temples and chapels, to the spectacle of solemn processions, to consulting ora-
cles, and to magical practices. Quite the contrary, all these were manifestations
of devotion that marked a break with the banality of everyday life, testifying to
a desire to participate, whether closely or from afar, in the life of the gods as it
was codified by their priests. But in this everyday world, day after day, there was
exerted the beneficent or maleficent power of a crowd of deities who were im-
manent in it. Though the Amun of the theologians might well have been a deus
absconditus who nevertheless listened while he remained unseen, it was also true
that meteorological phenomena, the Nile inundation, harvests, and above all,
sickness and health, and life and death depended directly on deities who formed
a colorful pantheon with whom the Egyptians were familiar. Despite the gap be-
tween the institution of the temple and what lay outside it, the rest of the world
was peopled by these deities, whom we sometimes refer to as "minor" and to
whom Egyptians submitted themselves, performed acts of allegiance, and re-
quested their aid, throughout their lives.

BIRTH

Obviously, birth was particularly subject to these parahuman forces. It was a

fearsome moment in the lives of women, many of whom died in childbirth, while
infant mortality was also quite high. This moment of passage thus took place un-
der the auspices of propitiatory deities who were supposed to facilitate the course
of events and assure the health and safety of the mother and her newborn child.
Meskhenet was the personification of the birthing bricks on which the woman

12
Prophylactic statue of Ramesses III; translation based on that of Sauneron, Le Monde du sorcier,
p. 38.
OF MEN AND GODS 129

in labor crouched to give birth according to a tradition that is still very much
alive in Africa. This goddess would also come to represent the (good) fortune of
the child, along with Shai, destiny, who is mentioned more and more often from
the New Kingdom on, and his female counterpart, Renenutet. In scenes depict-
ing a royal birth, the happy ending of a theogamy between the king and Amun
in the New Kingdom, the young prince who was fashioned by the potter god
Khnum on his wheel is also surrounded by the protection of Kas and their fe-
male counterparts, Hemsut. From an earlier date, Papyrus Westcar relates the
birth of the children of Rudjedet, three future kings of Dynasty 5. In the tale, it
was Isis, Meskhenet, and Heqet, the frog goddess who was spouse to Khnum,
who attended to the proceedings: "They went in to Rudjedet, and then they
closed the room with themselves and her (in it). Isis placed herself in front of
her, and Nepthys behind her, and Heqet hastened the birth." Even in ordinary
households, Egyptians invoked the goodly Taweret, the gravid hippopotamus
and guarantor of an easy birth, along with Bes, the grotesque and mischievous
dwarf who warded off the evil eye.
The ugliness of these last two deities seems to have guaranteed their ability to
ward off dangers and evil spells. Numerous amulets bore their image, and wear-
ing them was recommended. Over the cradle of the newborn bent the seven
Hathors, fairies of a sort who might well also have been sorceresses. In the Tale
of the Doomed Prince, scarcely had the prince been born when "the seven
Hathors came to announce to him what would be his destiny; they said: 'His
death will come from a crocodile, or from a serpent, or from a dog.— They did
not put curses on people, for they were not mistresses of individual destiny, but
they did announce the circumstances.
Sterility was a condition that was borne sorrowfully, and all the deities of fe-
cundity were invoked against it: Bes, Taweret, Hathor, and Min. At the entrances
to the houses of Deir el-Medina, the villagers deposited so-called concubine fig-
urines, as well as ithyphallic statuettes or ex-voto phalluses, all of them intended
to remedy this incapacity. The Doomed Prince himself was born only after his
father had long begged the gods to grant him a son; the story does not tell us
whether girls had already been born.

THE NAME

No recourse was too extreme to favor a birth and surround it with maximum
protection, both for mother and child. If conditions were auspicious, it remained
to choose a name for the newborn child; this was often the prerogative of the
mother, the act of naming thus redoubling her natural childbearing function.
Naming was not simply a matter of attributing civil status to a child, choos-
ing among the names that were traditional in a family or among those that were
currently fashionable, though such influences could have been at work to a lim-
ited extent, especially in the latter case. For the Egyptians, giving a name was
130 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

something much more important, for the name was an integral part of the real-
ity of things and of the personality of living beings, not just an empty and arbi-
trary signifier. Along with other elements, such as the ba and especially the ka,
with which it sometimes merged in the later stages of history, the name was one
of the constituent elements of the human person. To name was not merely to
designate, but also to cause existence. To suppress a name, or to transform or
mutilate it, as could be done in cases of political conflict or rebellion, was to at-
tack the entirety of the person and to endanger his wholeness. Thus, a name
could not be chosen lightly. If we examine the onomastic evidence from all pe-
riods, it results though too impressionistically, for there has never been a
global statistical analysis that theophoric names are extremely frequent, what-
ever form they took, and that they changed from one period to another. This per-
sistence of the divine in personal names is incontestable evidence for individual
piety throughout the history of Egyptian civilization. In every period, gods and
goddesses were a part of the names that people bore, and this seems to have been
true for every level of society.
Theophoric names could simply be, though this was relatively rare, the names
of deities or those of persons who were deified after their death. More often, they
included divine names in various semantic formulations that corresponded to
different functions. Many were propitiatory or apotropaic: "May deity X grant old
age" or "May deity X ward off the evil eye." Others expressed a theological state-
ment that had no reference to the bearer of the name: Nykauptah, "Ptah is pro-
vided with kas," or were a divine epithet: Nebut, "the Golden One;' referring to
Hathor. Some names indicated that the deity had responded to prayers: Pe-
dubaste, "The one whom Bastet gave." "Deity X has granted that he lives;' very
popular from the Third Intermediate Period on, refers to the oracular practices
that were already frequent in the New Kingdom, but which were translated into
the onomasticon only a little later. To this brief summary, we must add local ties,
whether familial or professional, to a particular deity, and the related, widespread
custom of giving a son the name of his father or especially his grandfather and of
giving a daughter the name of her mother or grandmother. Thus, in many cases
but not all, for there were also basilophoric names (personal names containing
the name of a king), various nicknames, and onomatopoetic names from the
time of their birth, individuals were linked to a particular deity by their names.

DEATH

In the decisive life stages that were placed under the sign of the divine, we make
a quick leap from birth to death. It does not seem, at least from the sources we
have, that this seal marked other moments of existence. We know of no rite of
passage from childhood to adolescence, or from youth to adult age, that might
have taken on the aspect of an initiation in which the gods had a role to play. As
OF MEN AND GODS 131

for marriage, it was recognized by the simple fact of the cohabitation of the cou-
ple, and in the later stages of Egyptian history, it was sanctioned by a contract
dealing with the property of each of the spouses. But aside from this juridical
ratification, which had not always been in existence and was not obligatory, we
find no particular religious ceremony that marked its occurrence as opposed,
for example, to what was done in ancient Greece, where entry into the state of
matrimony was a major component in the organization of society. In Egypt,
while the institution of marriage undeniably contributed greatly to social cohe-
sion, it remained a strictly private matter. It was only the moment of death that
revealed the presence of deities around this feared event, whose means were
known to some from the moment of birth, as in the case of the Doomed Prince
of the story. The chapter that follows is devoted to the Egyptians' concept of
death from both the phenomenological and the religious point of view. Death
was a fundamental given around which they organized their perception of life
and imagined possible modes of survival beyond death. Here, I shall only men-
tion the huge crowd of demons who were believed to be messengers of the ma-
jor powers, charged with spreading calamity, terror, and death among the living.
Pictured as serpents, but more often as men with an animal's head (Seth, croc-
odile, bull), and always armed with knives, they roamed in bands, often of seven
or multiples of seven, and had strange names whose meaning we do not always
understand. Among them, the best known are the emissaries of Sakhmet, the re-
doubtable lioness; called her "seven arrows," they were capable of spreading epi-
demic and death. Nekhbet of el-Kab in Upper Egypt boasted of these same
sinister exploits, which had to be combated by the recitation of litanies of ap-
peasement addressed to this dangerous goddess. Wearing an amulet represent-
ing the goddess and her acolytes could confer effective protection, and such
amulets were also offered to her at New Year's. The gods, who perhaps disdained
stooping to such lowly deeds, thus had at their disposal an impressive army of
knife-wielding genies who posed a perpetual threat to the lives of human beings.
Finally, we must stress that like the processions of gods, burial but not the
mummification rituals that preceded it and were entrusted only to specialists
was an opportunity for lay people to be present at the unfolding of ritual acts.
Funerals, which we find represented in tomb scenes, and most especially the
Opening of the Mouth ritual that was performed on the mummy before it was
lowered into the funerary vault, were public. The entire family, along with a
cortège of mourning women, were present and listened to the recitation of the
funerary liturgy; often, it was the son who officiated on behalf of his father.

DOMESTIC CULTS AND FAMILIAR DEITIES

Between birth and death, the cycle of life was not punctuated by other points at
which the gods played a role, as in an initiation or a consecration, nor did Egyp-
132 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

tians go to see the gods in their temples or chapels on a daily basis. Nevertheless,
gods and goddesses were not absent from the daily lives of ordinary people.
In the countryside, the harvests were placed under the patronage of Re-
nenutet, the Thermouthis of the Greeks, who was also the consort of Shai, "des-
tiny." Along with her son Nepri, "grain," she was the patroness of granaries, and
she had many oratories throughout Egypt. Certain trees sheltered a deity, and
we may especially cite the goddess of the sycamore, who dispensed fresh water
and provided the deceased with offerings.
The houses of the living were also marked by the presence of familiar deities,
with whom the Egyptians rubbed shoulders daily. It is difficult to establish a gen-
eral state of the question regarding these deities, for many houses were entirely
destroyed in antiquity or in the modern era, and even at present, few of those
that are preserved have been systematically excavated. But the example of
Amarna, and even more so, that of Deir el-Medina, notwithstanding the special
nature of each of them, offer us a wealth of information that enables us to draw
a picture of religious life in the home. It is probable that these are not exceptional
cases, and that there were similar practices elsewhere in Egypt. The houses of the
necropolis workmen mostly consisted of two rooms. The first room, which
served as the entrance and was thus the obligatory place of passage, was provided
with an altar intended for the domestic cult, which was strictly linked to fecun-
dity, along with figurines of Bes or ex-voto propitiatory statuettes that could be
either feminine or masculine. In this same entrance were the "lares," busts of an-
cestors to whom a cult was also devoted, and the stelae of the akh iker, "the glo-
rified excellent ones." Thus the continuity and permanence, without which the
Egyptians could not conceive their social organization, were present. In the sec-
ond room, which was larger and used for all sorts of purposes, a domestic cult
was rendered to Amenophis I and his mother, Queen Ahmes-Nofretari, to whom
"false door" stelae were consecrated. There were also naoi sheltering statues of
domestic deities, such as Taweret, Renenutet, or Ptah, who were popular in the
village, along with utensils indispensable to religious practice: grills for meat of-
ferings and libation basins.
Outside the ambit of the temples, in the intimacy and the relative humbleness
of their homes, Egyptians devoted a private, individual cult to their deities. The
main protagonist was undoubtedly the head of the family, but all must have par-
ticipated. We are little informed regarding the details, but at least, considering
the objects that have been preserved to us, the cult conformed to a code similar,
albeit simplified, to that of the temples: offerings and libations that accompa-
nied a prayer or a hymn of praise.
In addition to this material, we should note that from beyond the framework
of Deir el-Medina, we have a mass of amulets in the form of miniature statuettes
representing a deity, amulets in the form of a prophylactic object, and phylac-
teries containing a charm to be suspended around the neck. These objects, which
OF MEN AND GODS 1 33

we encounter in large quantity but often out of their original context, are far
from belonging inevitably to funerary equipment. They were worn by the living
to protect themselves from all the ills that threatened them. A certain number of
late bronzes in the form of a god or goddess seem also to come from private
homes.

DREAMS AND ONEIROMANCY

On both ordinary days and solemn occasions, whether the latter were linked to
their personal lives or to external events of a religious sort, the Egyptians main-
tained close relations with the divine realm. There was also a state, that of sleep
and dreams, that seems to have been for them a privileged moment of contact
with the domain of the invisible. Sleep, though temporary, was associated with
the idea of death. During sleep, the irreversible flow of time, time that was a
mode of creation, was put between parentheses. During the hours of sleep, one
returned to a world of the unorganized, of the disorder that could prove dan-
gerous for the individual, which explains why the headrests that supported pil-
lows were often decorated with the representation of a protective deity and bore
a prophylactic text.
Egyptians dreamed, and the place they accorded to dreams in their literature
shows clearly that they ascribed an important role to them, believing that they
exerted a genuine influence on the course of their lives. Their texts do not enable
us to analyze clearly what was, for them, the nature of dreams, though etiologi-
cal notations indicate that the origin of certain dreams could be explained by al-
imentary or erotic reasons and not exclusively by the will of the gods.
On the linguistic level, the word reset, "dream," is derived curiously enough,
from our point of view from a root expressing the idea of wakefulness, which
led, in the ancient texts, to certain plays on words and ideas. But semantically,
this fact offers us little clarity, for this "wakefulness" after falling asleep would
the sleeper have been awakened? was certainly different from ordinary wake-
fulness. It was then that deities could manifest themselves, whether for good or
for ill, hence the usefulness in the latter case of magical formulas for protection
against bad dreams.
Dreams were often premonitory. The literature the royal chronicles and the
pseudohistorical texts of the "royal novel" genre offer us examples that were
always easy to understand, with the result that the pharaoh only rarely, as in the
case of the Kushite king Tantamani, had need to appeal to a specialist in oneiro-
mancy (dream interpretation) to explain them. We thus see that the gods man-
ifested themselves openly to the king or an heir apparent, their son on earth,
announcing the future fulfillment of a promise, usually the granting of the king-
ship as reward for the devotion he displayed on their behalf. But it could also be
a matter of the successful conclusion of an uncertain battle or a divine command
13 4 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

that the king restore abandoned cults or temples. This tradition of the historical
or pseudohistorical dream, which extends over a long period from Amenophis
II to the Ptolemies, could well be no more than a literary fiction, as in the story
of the princess of Bakhtan, or a political one, as in the case of the stela of Tuth-
mosis IV at Giza. But it is nonetheless true that it enables us to penetrate into the
world of Egyptian dreams and the use that was made of them. As was the case
with oracles, in dreams, divine power and will were directly revealed to the king,
who was in a position to encounter a god.
Ordinary mortals also dreamed, but according to the documents that have
come down to us, they dreamed differently. We know these dreams chiefly from
"dream books," the oldest of which was written in the Ramesside Period, but
which, from its vocabulary and style, seems to go back to the Middle Kingdom.
The later ones were written in Demotic in the Roman Period, and we can clearly
see their filiation with the texts of the New Kingdom. These "keys to dreams," as
they are also called, do not offer explanations, but rather, simple pronounce-
ments of the type, "if a man sees this in a dream, it means that ... ," to which is
added the evaluation "good" or "bad." The dreams are always premonitory, at
least those which constitute the material of these dream books. We thus cannot
deduce any general theory of dreams and their relationship to the situations ex-
perienced in a waking state, or the role of recollection. We are dealing with an
encoded system, and the coding is so very much cultural that often the link be-
tween the dream and the stated outcome escapes us completely. Nevertheless, we
can call attention to certain principles that emerge clearly enough. One princi-
ple is that a dream was not meaningful in and of itself, but according to the per-
son of the dreamer. That is to say, one and the same dream would have a different
meaning according to whether the dreamer was a man or a woman. Two other
main categories are to be seen in this lists: "men of Horus" and "men of Seth;'
the latter category being comprised of harmful persons, including redheads.
The dreams themselves are sometimes listed by type: sexual unions dreamed
of by a woman, the animals she dreams she gave birth to, a man's dreams of beer,
and what he saw or heard. We understand that some explanations are based on
wordplay, assonances that led to association of ideas, while others are based on
symbolic correspondences: thus, the serpent, image of Renenutet, the goddess of
granaries, symbolized abundance of goods. We also find the use of contraries:
what will happen is just the opposite of the content of the dream.
These collections were not in circulation among the population, who would
not have been able to read them; rather, they served as aides-mémoire for spe-
cialists who were consulted. These specialists were scribes of the "house of life"
or chief lector priests whose existence is attested not only by Egyptian texts, but
also by Greek texts and by the Bible, which reports the famous dreams that
Joseph interpreted for Pharaoh.
The aspirations conveyed by these texts are the same as those we find else-
OF MEN AND GODS 1 35

where: to reach an advanced age in good health, to increase one's goods, to life
without quarrel or lawsuit, and to occupy an advantageous social position. A sys-
tematic study of the content of dreams would reveal more of the mental con-
structions of the Egyptians, but to date, this area has been scarcely touched on.
We note, however, that in contrast to royal dreams, gods, at least gods mentioned
by name, are rarely present. Sexual relations are attested frequently, for men as
well as for women, and these relations are frequently abnormal: incest and es-
pecially bestiality, the latter not necessarily being a portent of a dire event. Must
we see in such dreams a repressed individual trying to express himself or herself
freely? We should bear in mind, however, that the animal can be an image of a
deity, and that the notion of bestiality need not come into play in such a case.

If a women has relations with her husband, she will have sorrow;
If a horse unites with her, she will be violent with her husband;
If an ass unites with her, she will be punished for a great fault;
If a goat unites with her, she will quickly die;
If a ram unites with her, Pharaoh will be full of kindness toward her;
If a Syrian unites with her, she will cry, for she will allow a slave to unite with her.' 3

Women also gave birth to a number of animals:

If she gives birth to a cat, she will have many children;

If she gives birth to a dog, she will have a boy;
If she gives birth to an ass, she will have an idiot child;
If she gives birth to a crocodile, she will have many children.' 4

It would also be useful to inventory the foods, the clothing, the types of ges-
tures made, and the words spoken, in order to complete the image of Egyptians
dreaming, or rather, as they are represented dreaming, with great freedom in this
coded system. What we have seen at the very least reveals that nothing was
banned in the realm of the imaginary or in its expression.
The dream books serve to explain dreams that occurred naturally. But there
was also the practice of inducing dreams in places of incubation attached to tem-
ples, which became widespread during the Ptolemaic Period, perhaps, it is
thought, under the influence of the Greeks. Incubation opened a vast field for
oneiromancy, and from that time on, full-time priests, scribes, and laypeople at-
tached to oratories reserved for incubation and to sanatoriums devoted them-
selves to it. People often went to such places and spent the night in order to
consult the god and implore a cure, or for a child in cases of sterility, though the

13 Translation based on that of S. Sauneron, Les Songes et leur interprétation, Sources orientales 2

(Paris, 1959), p. 37.

14 Ibid.
136 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

questions posed could be about other subjects as well, such as the construction
of a temple.
Induced dreams greatly resembled oracular practice in that a response was
made to a specific question. It was no longer a matter of entering every dream
that any individual might happen to have into a global system of interpretation.
At Canopus, at the Serapeum of Memphis, at Abydos (where the dwarf god Bes
reigned from that time on), at Dendara, and at Deir el-Bahari, people came to
dream in the subsidiary buildings of the temple and to receive interpretations of
dreams in which the deity of the place manifested himself.

MODES OF HUMAN-DIVINE RELATIONSHIP

We have defined what must be understood by personal piety and analyzed the
means by which it expressed itself at the margins of temples, through magic, and
in daily life. It now remains to study how and why persons established a rela-
tionship with the world of the invisible, what they sought there, and what they
found.

WHAT GOD?

The first question that arises is that of knowing what deity was addressed by an
individual in search of a direct relationship with the sphere of the divine. In the
course of their lives, in major events such as birth, or common and repetitious
ones such as harvests, Egyptians placed themselves under the protection of
deities, ones that were minor in the constellation of the Egyptian pantheon but
nevertheless known for their effectiveness. They in no way limited themselves to
these minor figures, however. Any of the gods could be the object of the prayer
of a simple layperson, and they could hear his request. There was no opposition,
or even separation, between the official dynastic pantheon and the minor figures
linked to popular devotion. The evidence at our disposal belies the artificial dis-
junction that some scholars have introduced into the study of religion. As we
know, most of this evidence dates to the New Kingdom and to the first millen-
nium BCE. On statues, stelae, ostraca, and papyri, and also on scarabs, we fre-
quently encounter Amun, Re, Ptah, Thoth, Hathor, and Meretseger, the goddess
of Deir el-Medina, as well as foreign deities such as Reshep, Astarte, and Qadesh.
Amulets are in the form of these same deities. An individual could also appeal
to a local god, his city god, whom he of course venerated. Sometimes, the deity
remained anonymous: "my god," the one whom a person chose for himself or to
whom he was attached by his theophoric name or by family tradition.
Even in purely personal prayers, these deities receive their classical epithets,
making them cosmic powers that were in principle inaccessible to mere mortals.
OF MEN AND GODS 1 37

Thus, on a group statue belonging to the royal scribe Amenemope and his wife,
now in Berlin, we read:

O my god, lord of the gods,

Amun-Re, lord of the thrones of the Two Lands,
extend your hand to me, save me!
Arise for me, let me live!
You are the unique god who has no equal.

It is undeniably the same Amun who was at home at Karnak and who had the
power to inspire terror who is implored here. His power is not ignored, but to it
are added qualities that make him sensible to human suffering. Amun was thus
a savior god, as Thoth and Ptah could also be. From the New Kingdom on, in
addition to these gods who had been around forever, or nearly forever, there
spread the cult of a young god, a form of Horus who bore the name of Shed,
"savior," and who was especially venerated at Deir el-Medina. Still, he had no
monopoly on soteriological qualities.
In order to save humankind, the gods were first of all attentive to prayers and
entreaties. The texts abound in mentions of the epithet "who hears prayers."
Amun could be unknowable and invisible to individuals, but he nonetheless
heard their requests. And what is more, this same epithet that stresses the "hear-
ing" of the god is to be found in the most official theological texts of the Ptole-
maic Period, removed from any context of personal devotion, an additional
proof that we are dealing with one and the same divine being. Re, the "august
god, the beloved, the merciful;' was the one "who hears the entreaties of the one
to cries out to him, who comes at the voice of the one who speaks his name." 1 s
The god became the shepherd, the pilot, the one "who guides men on all the
paths;' and "the father of the one who has no mother, the husband of the widow."
A compassionate god, he also had a social role to play: he was the defender of the
poor and the oppressed. Amun, the "judge of the poor man," was the honest
magistrate who assured the triumph of the cause of the humble in the corrupt
tribunal of human justice. It should perhaps be stressed that paradoxically, Osiris
and Isis, whose fortunes would rise from the Third Intermediate Period on, and
who were par excellence the pair of divine saviors and redressers of wrongs, had
a somewhat separate place in personal devotion. Egyptians possessed a vast
number of statuettes and amulets in their image, and they erected chapels of
Osiris the savior in the temenos of Karnak, but the prayers they addressed to
these deities were limited in number.
A person would address a savior god saying, "o my god," or "my master" or
"my lord," the use of the possessive indicating a relationship that was both indi-

'S Translation based on that of Barucq and Daumas, Hymnes et prières (Paris, 1980), p. 127.
138 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

vidual and mutual. The devotee himself was the god's servant; one of the words
used, hem, was the same word that served to designate a "prophet of the god,"
hem-netjer.

WORLDLY REQUESTS

The basic wishes of Egyptians, the ones that reflected their aspirations to live
prosperously and in good health to the age of no can occasionally be found in
personal prayers but are much more frequent in the basic funerary formula, "of-
fering that the king makes to the god X for the ka of so-and-so." This formula
often accompanies the wish itself.
When an Egyptian formulated a specific request, invoking a deity directly, he
could ask for the love of the object of his desire. In such cases, it was Hathor who
intervened:

I shall implore her; she hears my prayer

and sends me my mistress.
She has come to see me,
something great has happened to me.
I rejoiced, I was in joy, I experienced fulfillment,
for it was said, "See, she is here."
Before her as she came forward, the youths bowed down for great love of her. 16

Cases of blind persons imploring a god are not rare, as in this prayer addressed
to Thoth: "You have made me see the darkness that you created." We must dif-
ferentiate such cases from those in which blindness was the punishment inflict-
ed by a god on someone who had committed a sin. When a blind person asks to
see the god, there is an ambiguity as to whether it is a matter of recovering sight
or of being able to contemplate the god in a more metaphorical sense, though
Amun was indeed called "the physician who heals the eye."
A great many requests make reference to justice; this seems to have been a sore
spot in the functioning of Egyptian society, one that left much to be desired in
the opinion of litigants. Having only limited confidence in human tribunals and
their diligence and integrity, persons had no recourse other than to appeal to an
incorruptible and equitable god before whom all individuals had the same
rights. Certain prayers that served as exercises for schoolboys over the centuries
are eloquent in this regard:

Vizier of the poor (i.e., Amun),

who does not accept an iniquitous gift,

16 Papyrus Chester Beatty I; translation based on that of S. Schott and P. Krieger, Les Chants d'amour

de l'Égypte ancienne (Paris, 1956), p. 64.

OF MEN AND GODS 139

who does not declare himself in favor of the one who produces evidence
and does not look at the one who makes a promise.
Amun judges the land with his finger,
and he speaks to the heart.
He discerns the guilty,
whom he sends to the brazier,
while the just man is for Amenti.
Amun, lend your ear to the one who is alone at the tribunal,
when he is poor and without riches,
while the tribunal robs him of silver and gold
for the scribes of the mat,
and of clothing for the bailiffs."' 7

The general sentiment that emanates from these texts is one of the abandon-
ment, affliction, and misery of the world, against which the individual is power-
less. His only remedy and consolation are recourse to the god, whose power is
thereby all the greater. For the one who cries out from the depths of his misery,
he is the vizier, and "lo, the poor man is justified."' 8
In a bad year, the god was supposed to restore the order of the seasons:

Come to me, Amun,

save me from this year of misery!
The sun—lo, it no longer rises.
Winter has arrived in the middle of summer.
The months lo, they turn backwards,
The hours are confused. 19

The god cured illnesses; even more, he could prolong the duration of a life-
time, which was in principle fixed at birth: "He prolongs a lifetime, and he short-
ens it. He adds to the duration fixed by destiny on behalf of the one whom he
loves."20 And as the ultimate manifestation of his omnipotence, he "saves the one
who loves him, even if he is (already) in the Duat (the realm of the dead)."21
From this series of assertions there emerge certain traits of the Egyptian men-
tality, or at least, the Egyptian mentality from the New Kingdom on, though their
extent and impact are difficult to evaluate exactly. From their prayers, we have
the impression that individuals turned willingly to their god, who was accorded
a certain transcendence. At the same time, we shall see that in texts with ethical
content the instructions and the wisdom literature there is a parallel devel-

17 Translation based on that of Barucq and Daumas, Hymnes et prières, p. 253.

18 Papyrus Anastasi II, 9, 1.

19 Appeal to Amun; translation based on that of Barucq and Daumas, Hymnes et prières, p. 254.

20 Hymn to Amun, Papyrus Leiden I 35o, chapter 70.

21
Ibid.
14 0 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

opment confirming that from the Old to the New Kingdom there was indeed a
general change in the concept of this earthly life in Egyptian thought. This
change does not simply reflect the emergence of a personal devotion that sup-
posedly was not expressed earlier: moral texts of an entirely different origin re-
flect a similar spirit. We are perhaps to see the emergence of an individualism
that was limited at the beginning of history and gradually asserted itself. The in-
dividual was not merely an element of a group that was firmly cemented by an
implicit social consensus, but rather a singular being who defined himself as
such. The foundations of society, however, were never challenged. The ethic of
action and its corollary, immanent requital in the here and now, was neglected
but never entirely abandoned.
We may end by wondering whether, intrinsically linked to this feeling of sin-
gularity, there was a sentiment of the solitude of man in the world, who suddenly
became conscious of himself and found no remedy except in divinity, which was
a priori posited as existent.

APPROACHING THE DIVINE

Persons in distress who appealed to their god did not content themselves with
imploring his aid, whatever form it might take. Another aspiration came to light,
one that was detached from the contingencies of the world, but which was per-
haps not unrelated to the feeling of affliction. The individual wished to draw
closer to the powers of the invisible world, as expressed by the ad nauseam rep-
etitions of the wish to "see the god," to "see his beauty" or "his perfection." If the
god heard someone, the latter would boast of having seen him, notwithstanding
the fact that texts of a theological nature often state that the god was hidden from
view. Acquaintance with the divine was accomplished through the organ of sight
rather than by that of hearing, unlike the God of the Bible, who was invisible by
his very essence.
What, then, are we to understand by "seeing the god"? Doubtless, first of all,
it was to contemplate him via his images: cult statues, temple reliefs, sacred an-
imals. To "see the king" in the exercise of his divine office was much the same
matter. We may also mention natural phenomena, such as the appearance of the
sun disk each morning or the annual rising of the floodwaters. In Egyptian the-
ology, images were not the god himself, but rather the intermediaries via which
he revealed himself to human eyes; images participated in the divine by means
of the suitableness of the representation to what was represented.
"How good it is to see your beautiful visage each morning, more beautiful that
that of any (other) god, without equal."22 How far need we go in interpreting
this expression, whose literal meaning, explicit in the texts, is unequivocal? Did
the Egyptians see a god beyond the images? This is obviously not a question for

22 Prayer inscribed on a statue of a prophet of Amun; Cairo Catalogue général, no. 42208.
OF MEN AND GODS 141

Egyptology or the history of religion. We can reply to it only by pondering the

reality of incommunicable mystical experience, in whatever religious framework
it might occur. There is another expression that frequently appears in the texts
of prayers: to "follow the god," which doubtless has the concrete meaning of par-
ticipating in the cult, following the procession of the deity, but which also has a
larger and more metaphorical sense: to conduct one's life in accordance with di-
vine will. Indeed, was it not the god "who guides men on all the ways"?23

HUMAN ENCOUNTER WITH THE DIVINE

When an Egyptian had recourse to a deity, how did he comport himself? His ges-
tures were those of prayer. For the rest, the stelae often depict a faithful man
standing before his god in an attitude of adoration. The vocabulary used was
quite varied: praises, acclamations, but also joy and exultation. Prayer was a
manifestation of the individual's joy at encountering his protector, as in the
prayer of Pairi, a man who is blind but nevertheless desires to see his god,
whether physically or metaphorically:

My heart (desires) to see you;

my heart is in joy, Amun, protector of the poor.

Prayer expressed a relationship of interdependence between deity and worshiper.

The latter was not only the one who loved his god, but also the one whom the god
loved, as often expressed by the formula, "the god loves the one who loves him."
In this relationship, which was based on trust, a new attitude manifested it-
self. A person could declare himself culpable, a sinner, knowing that his merci-
ful god would pardon his faults. In a certain number of cases, he acknowledged
a precise sin for which he experienced the effects of divine punishment. Often,
it was bearing false witness that was the cause, so it was believed, of blindness:

I am a man who swore falsely by Ptah, lord of truth.

He made me see darkness in (the light of) day.
I shall thus proclaim his power
to the one who does not know it and to the one who knows it,
to the little and the great.
Watch out for Ptah, lord of truth!
He caused me to become like the animals in the street,
and I was in his hand.
He made me a spectacle for men and gods.
I was like (?) a man
who had done something abominable to his lord.
Just is Ptah, lord of truth, towards me!

23 Hymn to Amun, Papyrus Leiden 135o, chapter 9o.

142 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

He taught me a lesson.
Be merciful to me,
and I shall see your mercy. 24

In other cases, there is simply an allusion to faults in general that a person has
committed and for which he begs divine clemency: "Do not punish me for my
many sins."25
Human existence was not burdened by an original sin whose weight was borne
by each individual, as in Christian theology. An individual was accountable only
for his own acts, but in a way that differed radically from the declaration of in-
nocence in the Book of the Dead. Actually, the two phenomena coexisted, and one
and the same person could admit his misdeeds and also affirm that he had com-
mitted none. This fact did not result from incoherence in Egyptian thinking, nor
can we accuse such people of insincerity. This apparent contradiction is explained
by the entirely different contexts. During his lifetime, a person addressing a god
whose pity he sought was ready to admit his errors, especially if be believed he
was experiencing punishment for them and could thereby alleviate it. But once
deceased, a person had need, by affirming that he had submitted to the order of
Maat, to use all the magical power of words in order to triumph at the moment
of the weighing of souls in the Judgment of the Dead.
There are texts that lead us to think that certain individuals went further in
their devotion to their god. There is the case of Simut, surnamed Kyky, who gave
all his goods to Mut his name already suggests that he was a devotee of this
goddess though less mystical reasons, such as a desire to disinherit his family,
might have led him to this act:

There was once a man of Southern Heliopolis, a true scribe in Thebes, Simut, his
name from his mother, surnamed Kyky. His god instructed him and made him
knowledgeable in his learning; he had placed him on the path of life to protect his
body. The god recognized him from childhood, he assigned (him) abundance and
prosperity. Then he meditated regarding himself to find a patron. He found Mut
at the head of the gods; Shai and Renenutet were in her hands, the duration of life
at her disposal, the breath of life under her jurisdiction, all that occurs under her
command.
He said, "Lo, I give her all my goods and all my acquisitions, for I know that she
is useful to have seen, that she is efficacious, (she) alone. She has suppressed an-
guish for me, she has protected me at a difficult moment, she has come preceded
by a gentle breeze when I called her name. I was a miserable man of her city, an in-
digent vagabond of her city. 26

24
Stela British Museum 589; translation based on that of Barucq and Daumas, Hymnes et prières,
NI 408-9.
25 Prayer to Re-Harakhty, Papyrus Anastasi II, 10.
26
Translation based on that of P. Vernus, Revue d'égyptologie 3o (1978): 144.
OF MEN AND GODS 1 43

Another inscription, written on an ostracon, also shows how persons some-

times surrendered themselves entirely to divine providence:

I have abandoned yesterday and today into the hands of Amun; I have found my-
self well, my condition stable; I have assured myself a happy state of being until I
end my existence; I have given myself entirely to him; it is he who grants the land-
ing. 27

Here, the terms are too vague to enable a precise interpretation, but we feel we
can see the signs of a man who has consecrated himself entirely to his god, aban-
doning his own will and perhaps giving himself over to contemplation.
Contemplation, meditation, ecstasy, mystical experience: these are terms that
scarcely appear in studies on Egyptian religion, which is usually qualified as rit-
ualistic and formalistic. But by their very nature, these are experiences that are
difficult to convey in discourse, for they have no outward, tangible manifesta-
tions. Recently, Philippe Derchain has shown how, in two obscure passages from
the Coffin Texts, we can discern the conditions and signs of contemplation. No
doubt close examination of other texts would enlarge our perspectives on the di-
mension of meditation, which the Egyptians had no reason to be ignorant of and
which has probably remained unrecognized until now because of an overly su-
perficial reading of the texts. At the very least, we know that drunkenness played
a role in certain festivals, particularly those of Hathor, to produce a state perhaps
something like that of a trance.
Personal devotion drew its resources from the same religious substrate as the
official cult of the temples and took up its themes and codes. Undoubtedly be-
coming ever more widespread over the course of time, it expressed the needs and
the aspirations of the individual in a world peopled by divine powers that of-
fered an answer to care and anguish.

THE CONDUCT OF LIFE

DEVOTION AND ETHICS

What we call personal devotion expresses human anxiety and the need to estab-
lish a privileged relationship with the world of the invisible and the imaginary,
which is the permanent horizon of a human life. Analysis of the ways in which
it manifested itself shows that far from being confined to exceptional occasions,
piety could reveal itself in the humblest and most common aspects of daily life.
But in all cases, it is placed under the sign of the divine, of the possible and de-
sired intercession of a deity at a given moment in the life of an individual. The

27 Translation based on that of G. Posener, in Vernus, Revue d'égyptologie 3o (1978): 131.

144 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

Egyptians existed in a world inhabited by the very gods who are frequently said
to be"distant."
Vast though its field of deployment may be, however, we cannot limit our-
selves only to the concept of devotion if we hope to take into account all the as-
pects of human relationships with the invisible. There is another, larger register
that enables us to understand the Egyptians' image of life in this world. It is that
of ethics, as we are accustomed to calling it, or how to comport oneself in life,
how to adopt, according to some imperative, a conduct in the face of a particu-
lar situation in an organized society. There can be no mistake about it, devotion
and ethics quite often overlap. There was no religious level of prayer and cult and
another, unrelated, profane level that included the other aspects of existence.
"Moral" texts show that Egyptians did not just turn to their god at every mo-
ment of their existence, but that they also recognized ethical duties linking men
in an imperative manner, at least on the level of principles, whose application
was a function of the liberty and the capacity of each individual.
These texts are a precious source for evaluating what the Egyptians consid-
ered to be a suitable attitude in life; beyond that, we can even attempt to discern
what, for them, was the meaning of existence. They were written in great num-
ber, in the form of instructions and wisdom texts, beginning in the earliest pe-
riods of history. This fact is a measure of the importance ascribed to them in a
society in which the handing down of knowledge and expertise was essential to
maintaining its cohesion. Quite unlike the area of devotion, we have written ev-
idence stretching from the Old Kingdom to the Roman Period. Such a length of
time implies an inevitable development of thought, not only in the expression
of ethical thought but also in some of its foundations, a development that can
be set in parallelism with that of piety. Aside from wisdom texts, the Egyptians
also expressed moral concepts in autobiographical texts, in which we encounter
the same themes, but expressed in a more succinct manner. Moreover, these
texts, which also appeared from the Old Kingdom on, had a precise function.
Carved in tombs, on stelae, or on statues of private persons, they are a post-
mortem testimony that a particular man lived in conformity with the ethical
principles of his day. They assure the living and the gods of his merit. They did
not serve to transmit an instruction in morality from one living being to an-
other; rather, they attested to its application. Later, we shall study these epitomes
of life and morality in detail within their framework, which is that of man in the
face of death.

THE ORDER OF MAAT

There is agreement that properly speaking, there was no philosophy in Egyptian

discourse, at least in the meaning given to the term in the history of Western
thought since Plato: an independent discipline that treats, according to its own
methods, clearly defined topics such as metaphysics, logic, and ethics. Moreover,
OF MEN AND GODS 1 45

we also cannot speak stricto sensu of religion, which is supposedly a reserved area
opposed to other, secular ones, such as politics or even ethics. This caution,
which is only apparently a paradox, was already noted at the beginning of this
work. But it is perhaps apposite to recall it as we turn to an analysis of the cen-
tral concept of Maat.
The word Maat, which has long been translated as "truth;' "justice," has been
the object of much reflection and analysis, for scholars have sensed that it was at
the heart of Egyptian thought. We know that Maat was manifest in the world
since the cosmos was instituted, and that it was consubstantial with the cosmos.
For this reason, scholars today prefer to recognize in it a notion of the order of
the world as applied to such diverse areas as cosmology, social order, individual
duty, and postmortem destiny. The basic, penetrating studies by Jan Assmann
have lent new focus to this vast concept and its varied implications. With regard
to Maat as applied to social order and its correlate, individual conduct, we can
follow the thread of a veritable thematization of the concept through the series
of what we call the wisdom texts and, a contrario, the texts dealing with the in-
version or absence of Maat and the accompanying disorder and negation of val-
ues, such as the Complaints of the Eloquent Peasant, the Prophecy of Neferti,
and the texts of the genre known as "pessimistic" literature.

ACTING IN ACCORDANCE WITH MAAT

The principle of an order to be respected, that of Maat, was the veritable founda-
tion of the Egyptian civilization organized around the central institution of
pharaonic power. The relationships of individuals with the king and with one an-
other were based on this postulate. It constituted the framework of the social fab-
ric, which was extremely coherent in the Old Kingdom and then called into
question after its fall, during the First Intermediate Period. The Old Kingdom was
a period when the life of the individual, his future, and his duty were above all
governed by a social relationship based on reciprocity, and it was only slowly that
a more individual, and perhaps more solitary, concept of a person emerged. From
the Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom, some texts that are quite different in
nature but are all based on the societal Maat enable us to reconstruct this notion
and the duties of an individual who was subject to such an ethical law.
It has often been written that the wisdom texts were utilitarian in nature, that
they advocated a somewhat Prudhommesque, petty-minded, petit-bourgeois
morality: knowledge of how to behave at table, comporting oneself according to
one's station before superiors, not committing excesses, sticking to the rule of
"all things in moderation." Without really knowing what is hidden behind these
vague terms, scholars have claimed that higher moral aspirations are absent. This
is doubtless a misreading of the texts that have come down to us, which are dif-
ficult to understand or even to approach. There is indeed the question of table
manners, but this is in no way surprising or particularly trivial if we bear in mind
146 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

that every last action in life was subject to a social code that recognized no dif-
ference between the material and the spiritual. The Egyptians did not find it nec-
essary to write, on the one hand, a treatise on the social graces like those studied
by young people at the beginning of the twentieth century and, on the other
hand, a separate moralizing book on charity.
Scholars have also misunderstood the more strictly doctrinaire passages that
represent the very underpinning of the ethical system. The first requirement was
to act and not be lazy. This exhortation occurs in a context of reciprocity, as the
texts often insist: it is the one who acts for whom action will be taken. In one of
his complaints about the inactive intendant who does not hasten to correct the
injustice done to him, the Eloquent Peasant proclaims:

A goodly act returns to its place of yesterday,

for it is commanded to us:
Act for the one who acts
so as to commit him to remain active.
That means, to thank him for what he has done.28

The pessimistic texts, such as The Dispute between a Man Weary of Life and
His Ba, deplore the disappearance of this philosophy of action. "One does not
remember yesterday, one no longer acts on behalf of the one who has acted
nowadays." Despite developments in thought, this sentiment still occurs in fu-
nerary inscriptions of the Late Period, where it is admirably summarized:

How good it is to act for the one who acts!

Happy is the heart of the one who acts for the one who has acted for him. 29

In addition to this solidarity, which inserted the individual into a closely wo-
ven social network, there was another, no less strong solidarity between the pre-
sent and the past, which the Egyptians called "yesterday." On this solidarity
depended the maintenance of the social order and its values, in the sense of a
civilization sustaining itself by its collective memory. This is why, in political and
historical texts that mention disorder, the authors stress that the past has been
forgotten:

Lo, one fights on the battlefield,

for yesterday is forgotten.
Nothing succeeds for the one who no longer knows the one he knew.30

28
Translation based on that of J. Assmann, Maât: L'Égypte pharaonique et l'idée de justice sociale (Paris,
1 989), p. 39.
29
Translation based on that of Assmann, Maât, pp. 38 and 41.
" Instruction of King Amenemhet I; translation based on that of Assmann, Maât, p. 39.
OF MEN AND GODS 147

Reference to the past is often an obligatory theme in Egyptian texts in search of

an archetypical model in the hope of reactualizing it in historical time; perhaps
comfort was drawn from a certain nostalgia for better times, a nostalgia that
could only grow when political difficulties took an unbearable turn. Based on
this nostalgia, it was easy for commentators to insist in these texts on the con-
servative side of the Egyptians, who preferred a rigid society to one that was in
flux. This is not false, but in the framework of an ethical discourse, we should
doubtless seek another dimension on which, when all is said and done, our own
society could usefully meditate. A civilization without a past, which has forgot-
ten yesterday, is without culture, without ties, and thus without direction and lit-
erally insane. In such a society, perhaps everything is permitted. Is this not what,
using words from the discourse of their own time, Ipuwer says in his lamenta-
tions, or the Man Weary of Life in his dialogue with his ba?
If the individual is faithful to the past, if he maintains the bond of acting for
others, he will be able to overcome egotism and greed and renounce insensitiv-
ity. His own personal, familial, and social success will occur within the frame-
work of a relationship of solidarity with others, without which his success would
be empty. Maxim 19 of the Instruction of Ptahhotep perhaps best summarizes
this commandment, which is far from the petty mindedness that has been too
often attributed to this text:

If you desire that your conduct be perfect, stand apart from such an evil. Beware
of an act of greed, for that is a serious, incurable illness that cannot leave room for
intimacy; it demeans fathers and mothers, and brothers from one and the same
mother, it embitters the sweetness of friendship, it distances a friend from his mas-
ter, it separates spouse from spouse. It is an "extract" of all that is bad, a "coating"
of all that is blameful. But the man who conforms to Maat, and who proceeds ac-
cording to its steps, will endure. He will be able to make a testament from that. But
the greedy man has no tomb.31

ETHICS AND KNOWLEDGE

Attaining or approaching this state of perfection advocated by Ptahhotep and

his later emulators was not granted out of hand to every individual. We do know
that the greedy person, the egoist, never attained it. But the Egyptians believed
that a person could progress on the path of Maat through apprenticeship. This
learning was the very raison d'être of these "instructions," as they were called by
their authors, whether they were a king addressing his son, as in the case of Khety
and Amenemhet, or a man addressing his son, who is either anonymous or iden-
tified, as in the case of Ptahhotep, or later Khety (in the Satire of the Trades) and
Ankhsheshonqy. These texts took their place in the line of literary and sapiential

31 Translation based on that of Assmann, Maât, p. 53.

148 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

testaments in which a man who has reached old age hands down his knowledge
to his son, and via him, to future generations. This transmission took place be-
cause of the need for social memory. It was far from being a literary topos void
of meaning, for certain texts were regularly recopied from the Middle Kingdom
down to the Saite Period, as in the case of the Instruction of Khety and the Satire
of the Trades.
After drawing up a frightening list of the ravages of age, Ptahhotep begins his
discourse, "teaching knowledge to the one who does not know it, and the rules
of perfect words; these will be most useful to the one who will listen, but some-
thing harmful to the one who transgresses them." At the other end of history,
Ankhsheshonqy, this time in a literary fiction, wrote the instruction he intended
for his son on shards while in detention in the jails of Daphne.
To the words of introduction at the beginning of these texts, there correspond
those at the end, "See, I have told you what can be useful to you, and which is
mine. Act now in conformity with what has been set before you." Thus ends the
Instruction of King Khety for his son Merikare. The Instruction of Amenemope
ends similarly: "Consider these thirty chapters; they inform and they educate .. .
They make the ignorant into a well-advised man." The individual could learn
with the exception, says Ptahhotep, of those predestined by the divine to remain
bad, "the insane one who will not listen":

There is no one who will act for him, he considers knowledge as ignorance, and
the useful as harmful. He does everything that is odious to the point of being
blamed for it every day. He lives on that of which one dies. His pernicious nour-
ishment is talk.32

This apprenticeship and this transmission of knowledge are accomplished by

speech and listening. Ptahhotep subtly constructed the last hundred verses of his
instruction on this theme:

It is useful to listen for a son who listens, because everything that is heard enters
into the one who listens, and the one who listens becomes a man who is listened
to.
If listening is good, speech is good, and the one who listens possesses something
good. To listen is useful for the one who listens, listening is better than anything
that exists, for it results from it that love will be perfect.33

Conversely, the leitmotif of one of the songs of the Man Weary of Life "To
whom can I speak today?" conveys the distress and solitude of man in the face
of the meanness, the falsity, and the greed that have obviated the possibility of

32 Instruction of Ptahhotep; translation based on that of Assmann, Maât, p. 46.

33
Translation based on that of Assmann, Maât, p. 43.
OF MEN AND GODS 1 49

dialogue. While the relationship with the divine was established first of all by
sight, "seeing the god," the relationship with other men, neighbors in this world,
occurred through hearing and language. A society in which people acted ac-
cording to Maat, or at least in which they were supposed to act according to
Maat, was based on language that was spoken, and what is more, that was heard.
From the New Kingdom on, the true sage distinguished himself by silence.

BAD CONSCIENCE

Following Maat pertained to the ethical code of human action, which does not
mean that the divine was absent from the instructions. Most often, it occurs in
the anonymous form "the god," which has sparked many explanations on the
part of commentators on these texts. Except for some cases in which the term
explicitly designates the king, we must again stress that this is a generic term, as
suggested by Georges Posener: a generic divine being and not a monotheistic god
sensed or known by the authors of the wisdom texts. It goes without saying that
it was the duty of a person who acted according to Maat to render a cult to this
god and erect monuments to him, "for the god knows the one who acts for him,"
as the Instruction for Merikare puts it. In the same vein, the idea of divine retri-
bution is to be found in Ptahhotep: "Do not set fear among men, or the god will
punish you with the same ... Do not allow the fear of men to manifest itself; it
is the will of the god that should manifest itself." "Act for the god he will do the
same for you" is again affirmed in the Instruction for Merikare. Nevertheless, this
reciprocal interaction of man and god in no way undermined freedom and the
human necessity to act.
Beginning with the Instruction of Any, which dates to Dynasty i8, we see a
slow but ever more perceptible development that continues through the in-
structions of Amenemope and Ankhsheshonqy and Papyrus Insinger. Scholars
have drawn a parallel, doubtless correctly, between this phenomenon and the de-
velopment of personal piety, at least as it was expressed at that time: a search for
a direct relationship with a deity whose beneficent intercession is requested. The
instructions were always based on the concept of acting according to Maat, but
from that time on, Maat depended directly on a personal god, as Amenemope
teaches: "As for Maat, it is the great gift of the god, he gives it to whom he pleases."
As a consequence, the formula "the one who acts is the one for whom action will
be taken" was transformed into "the one who acts, it is the god who rewards him."
Individuals would continue to act on behalf of others, to be sure, but this action
would not receive an automatic response and would not necessarily be followed
by consequences. Man would act in direct dependence on his personal god, who
bestowed his favors according to his will. From that time on, the individual
was in the hand of his god: "all good fortune is from the hand of the god"
(Ankhsheshonqy 20, 6). "There is no true protection outside the work of the
150 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

god" (Insinger); each chapter of this last Egyptian wisdom text ends in the re-
frain, "The luck and fortune that comes, it is the god who sends them."
From this subjection of the individual to a personal god in whom he placed
his confidence, there emerged no assurance regarding life in this world. Indeed,
quite the contrary. It was because the individual had become conscious of his
solitude, of the precariousness of his existence, that he attempted to draw closer
to the divine. Already, Ptahhotep had said: "One does not know what can hap-
pen, even the one who (thinks he) knows tomorrow"; but later, this uncertainty
regarding the future weighed more heavily on human destiny. Nothing is ever
acquired, asserts Any:

One man is rich, another is poor; but food remains for the one who makes two
shares of it. And last year's rich man can be a vagabond this year... .
When last year's watercourse has drained away, another is here this year; vast
seas become arid expanses, while last year's riverbanks become (watery) depths. A
man has only one way of existing.

It is perhaps in a well-known passage from Amenemope that we find the

clearest expression of the sentiment of human frailty: "Man is clay and straw.
The god is his creator. He destroys and builds each day. He makes a thousand
poor men through his will; he makes a thousand men into chiefs when he is in
his hour of life" (XXIV, 13-18). And again: "The god is always in his perfection;
man is always in his weakness" (XIX, 14-15). The Egyptians always considered
man to be the creation of the gods, but here he is but a wisp of straw in his fini-
tude and his lack. He will continue to act, however, but with lucidity and de-
tachment vis-à-vis the consequences of his action.

FREEDOM AND EVIL

In any culture that reflects on the human condition, especially one that believed
in a world peopled with divine presences, the problem of human freedom will
arise. If such freedom exists, it is exercised in the framework of an ethical law
that in Egypt was embodied in the principle of Maat. The attitude of the indi-
vidual with regard to Maat was a subject with which the Egyptians were greatly
preoccupied. In the face of this imperative, whose application was the sole means
of maintaining the cohesion of the world and of society, as well as the means of
making a man into a true person vis-à-vis his fellow man, each individual re-
mained free to act or not to act, to act in conformity with this principle or con-
trary to it. The term "freedom" stricto sensu does not appear in the Egyptian
vocabulary, but the notion certainly existed, if only vaguely conceptualized. Were
there no restrictions on this liberty, at least in the final stage of Egyptian think-
ing, when we are told that man was in the hand of the divine? Without doubt,
OF MEN AND GODS 151

but it was not necessarily granted to act, and thus to choose. The consequences
of his acts could escape him, but not the decision to undertake them. It was not
an external force or will that caused him to act. There was not, properly speak-
ing, a predetermination or predestination, and with the exception of the insane,
the individual was responsible for his actions. This freedom was exercised within
the framework of the human that is to say, the mortal condition.
In this regard, the Tale of the Doomed Prince can be envisaged as an apology
for this condition. The seven Hathors predict that the child will die by a croco-
dile, a serpent, or a dog. When all is said and done, man must die, even if he does
not know in advance just how, and when the young man in the tale grows up, he
decides to depart and live his life instead of remaining shut up, as his father
wishes.
If the individual enjoyed freedom, albeit a limited one, this implies he could
do evil, for evil was there, and in their prayers, individuals acknowledged that
they were guilty of sin. It was only too easy in Egypt, as elsewhere, to infer the
existence of evil from injustices, social disorder, sickness, and death. Humans
had even gone so far as to rebel against Re, who nearly massacred them but
changed his mind and gave them a second chance. There was no theodicy in
Egypt, and responsibility for the existence of evil could not be imputed to the
gods. As early as Coffin Texts spell 113o, the creator god affirms: "I made each
man equal to his neighbor. I did not command them to do evil, (but) it was their
hearts that transgressed what I said." There remains the open question of why
evil existed. The gods had not willed it; humans committed it, but they did not
bear responsibility for it from the moment of their birth; they were not sullied
by it by their very nature. Egyptian texts are not particularly clear on this sub-
ject; like death, evil was an inherent part of creation. Only the cosmogony of Esna
depicts the birth of Apopis, the incarnation of evil, but without really explain-
ing it. Though Apopis was driven back toward the exterior when the cosmos was
organized, he nonetheless remained present and threatening, a possible virtual-
ity that often was actualized.

THE HUMAN CONDITION

Recommending action in conformity with Maat, while attributing an ever

greater place to divine will, recognizing the existence of evil in the world and
their responsibility for it from this information, can we get an idea of the
Egyptian assessment of the human condition? In all this people's literature, only
the Man Weary of Life, in his dialogue with his ba, longs for death as an end to
and deliverance from a life he can no longer bear. The theme of the uselessness
of life also permeates the Admonitions of Ipuwer, but in a specific pseudohis-
torical context. If the order of things is overturned, man no longer has his place
in it. Many individuals must certainly have been driven to despair, as revealed in
152 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

a negative injunction in a maxim of Ankhsheshonqy: "In misfortune, do not pre-

fer death to life out of despair." The leitmotif of the brevity of life otherwise oc-
curs often in harpers' songs, which urge individuals to profit to the fullest extent
possible from the present moment that was granted to them, for they did not
know what the morrow would bring. But existence was not necessarily consid-
ered as absurd; only disorder in the world could seem senseless.
In a rather abrupt manner, the same Ankhsheshonqy affirms the triumph of
life, which continues after death: "No one turns away from life because of the
death of another." Egyptians thus kept on going until the end of their destiny, in-
eluctably.
 CHAPTER 5

"DEATH WILL COME"

Of all civilizations, Egypt's offers to the curious and the specialist alike—in-
numerable testimonies of the presence of death in the midst of life: tombs and
their contents, mummies and funerary furnishings, and a great abundance of
texts informing us about survival in the afterlife as the Egyptians imagined it. It
is the enormity of death and the wealth of the paraphernalia that surrounded it
that have struck, indeed fascinated, sometimes morbidly, the minds of Western-
ers. Of Egypt, people often recollect only its pyramids and its rock-cut tombs
with their still vivid paintings, its dead and resuscitated god Osiris, and its mum-
mies. In the Middle Ages, the latter were highly sought-after as an ingredient in
potions with miraculous powers; the same is true today, it is said, in magic stores.
In our own time, in a civilization that has tried to mask death by every possible
means, we nonetheless bend with avid curiosity over the mummies that are to
be found in the major Egyptological collections, a curiosity that is all the more
aroused when the remains are not anonymous, but belong to an illustrious
pharaoh. The more or less successful preservation of bodies has enabled such en-
counters, doubtless pathetic but nevertheless striking, between a dead person
and a living person separated by more than three thousand years of history. This
was not the goal sought by the embalmers, but in this case, the modern taboo
regarding death is lifted, because it is not a matter of our own dead but of those
of distant strangers. No more than the treasure hunters of centuries past, mod-
ern archaeologists generally do not have the feeling that they are violating a bur-
ial when they open and explore a tomb.
Moreover, in Egypt, the thirst for knowledge finds sustenance in the topic of
1 54 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

death. Scientific, sophisticated analyses of mummies enable scholars to discover

the illnesses from which individuals suffered, and to determine their age and
even their ethnic affiliation. The study of tomb reliefs has been, and still is, an
invaluable source for knowledge of the daily life of great personages and of the
crowd of servants in their employ. Finally, and above all, Egyptological research
has sifted through the elaborate rituals that surrounded death. Thus, for as long
as there has been Egyptology, and even before its birth as a science, scholars have
accorded a special status to that which touches directly or indirectly on death. In
doing so, observers of ancient Egypt have perhaps done no more than to take too
literally, with no care to critical thought and interpretation, what the Egyptians
left behind for them to see: cities of the living in ruins, the shapeless remnants
of houses built of fragile and ephemeral bricks, even those of the pharaohs, while
what survives are pyramids of stone intended for immortality and rock-cut
tombs excavated into hillsides, though they have long since been pillaged. Real
though this vision might be, it has given birth to a mirage that has proved diffi-
cult to shake off: that the Egyptians were eaten away by a pathological preoccu-
pation with death, and that if, during their lifetimes, they spent so much energy
on building tombs for eternity, it was because their postmortem condition was
more important than the life that preceded it. Here, then, were a people haunted
by death.
In their preoccupation with the study of funerary practices, scholars have
sometimes forgotten the anthropological aspect of death. How did the Egyptians
conceive it? How did they feel about it? What did they experience? What rela-
tionship can we attempt to establish between their concepts and their practices?
What role, whether private or social, did they accord to these funerary practices?
If we ask such questions and attempt to answer them, Egypt will perhaps seem
to be less a land of tombs and more a land inhabited by living persons who at-
tempted to tame death, and more ambitiously, though without illusion, to enter
into an unequal but never abandoned battle with it.

KNOWING DEATH

Since the days of the earliest human communities, awareness of death as an in-
eluctable end has certainly been a characteristic of man, both as an individual
and as a member of a society. It is not a matter of the presentiment of its end
sensed by an animal that hides itself to die, but of a fact common to all and thus
incorporated into social practices of mourning and burial that stem from a de-
sire to preserve the remains in one way or another. We encounter such practices
already in prehistoric Egypt, when the deceased were buried in jars or even di-
rectly in the sand (where if not a mummification, at least a natural desiccation
could occur), along with a few baubles and pots. Poor as they are, these remains
"DEATH WILL COME" 1 55

attest to the existence of a major preoccupation: what to do with the dead? But,
of course, we must await the historical period and the appearance of writing to
discover, through texts and not just through practices, the concepts elaborated
by the Egyptians.

THE NAME OF DEATH

From the root mut, the Egyptians derived the verb "to die" and the nouns "dead
person" and "death." "Death" is clearly the opposite of "life;' ankh. Of a god, it
could be said that he was "master of life and death." In the Pyramid Texts, the
pharaoh, called on to experience a posthumous celestial destiny, is addressed,
"You do not depart dead, you depart alive."
In a written Egyptian word, whatever its grammatical function, an important
role is played by its determinative, a hieroglyph that serves to place it in a given
conceptual category. For certain words, we sometimes find two or more deter-
minatives, because different conceptual categories can overlap one another, but
especially because changes in the writing system can easily be explained by the
longevity of the use of words. Yet there is nothing of this in the word mut; from
the Old Kingdom on, there was almost no change in the way it was written. It
had only one determinative: a kneeling man holding his hand to his head, from
which a stream of blood flows. As we know from other words this hieroglyph
serves to determine, this man represents an enemy wounded in combat, whose
blow to the head we may presume is fatal. It is remarkable that the sign repre-
sents a violent death, a death that is dealt, not accepted in short, the death of
another. Given the importance of the signifier in the hieroglyphic writing sys-
tem, we may suppose, with no excess of extrapolation, that from the earliest texts
on, this choice of signs was a deliberate one that expressed the Egyptians' basic
idea of the event of death. Are we to see in it a recollection, in the writing sys-
tem, of prehistoric battles from an era when warriors died in combat, as is de-
picted on palettes from the protohistorical era? It is rather naive to search the
writing system or iconography and myths, for that matter for distant recol-
lections from an epoch that was considered archetypal. Even in those times, in-
dividuals did not die only a violent death in mortal combat, but also of sickness
and old age. The bleeding man expresses the concept that even in its most peace-
ful forms, death is always an act of violence, that it is an enemy, an inexorably
menacing evil. But it is also possible that death is the implacably other, not be-
cause one can hope to escape it, but because one has only an indirect knowledge
of it, through the death of others and not through one's own. Like birth, it is an
event that one does not experience personally, at least, in a way that can be com-
municated, and for good reason.
Whatever the case maybe, down to the texts of the Ptolemaic Period, mut and
its bloody determinative remained the designation of death. The mummy, which
15 6 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

was used as a determinative for other words pertaining to death, was never used
to determine the word mut, notwithstanding the fact that it was the corporeal
state that every individual hoped to enjoy after the end of his life.
It must thus be stressed that the Egyptians did not hesitate to name, clearly
and directly, an event they otherwise dreaded. Nevertheless, side by side with the
unique term designating the phenomenon in all its brutality, they developed a
euphemistic vocabulary. Did this vocabulary serve to tone it down, to conceal it,
or rather to image a reality that was impossible to perceive? Basing himself on
Plato, the philosopher Vladimir Jankelevitch has admirably demonstrated that
we cannot conceive of death, and that we can barely even speak of it. In a differ-
ent context, did not the Egyptians sail onto this reef on which reflection is ship-
wrecked?

EUPHEMISMS FOR DEATH

Attested already in the Pyramid Texts, one of the oldest euphemisms for death
is the verb meni, which means "to land;' indicating the end of a voyage, a river
voyage; this is not surprising, given that in order to be buried, it was often nec-
essary to cross the Nile to reach the west. Other terms for travel, shem, "to go,"
and khepy, which has a similar meaning, were also used, and we may recall our
own expression "to pass." But there was also the image of inertia, "to be weary;'
whose principal exemplar was the figure of Osiris, the "weary one," or the "weary
of heart," as the texts call him, the inert one who was reawakened by the minis-
trations of Isis. Sleep was also an image of death, for death was absolute sleep, a
sleep that both resembled and contrasted with the temporary sleep of everyday
life. Once again we find terms that other civilizations have adopted, reactions
constituting a universal phenomenon that can be the same everywhere, without
our having to explain them by invoking influences or heritage: "he is sleeping his
last sleep," "he is sleeping in the peace of the Lord." An old Christian legend
makes mention of the "sleepers" of Ephesus. And in Greek mythology, was not
Hypnos (sleep) the brother of Thanatos (death), both of them sons of Night?

DEATH IS NOT REPRESENTABLE

Explicitly or via euphemisms, death was thus named in an antithetical pairing

with life. Egyptian culture otherwise created many images, not only of gods
properly speaking, but also of realities in the natural world or of abstractions
that were personified. The Nile, Hapy, was an androgynous, elderly figure whom
we see accompanied in geographical processions by young women bearing the
name of their nome on their head. The "laboratories" of the temples, where oils
and unguents were made, had their god, Shesemu. There was a goddess who was
beneficent to the dead and inhabited sycamore trees. "Sight" and "Hearing," who
"DEATH WILL COME" 157

accompanied Thoth, assumed human form, as did above all Maat, the little,
squatting goddess, her head adorned with the ostrich plume that served to write
her name, who incarnated the principle of cosmic order and human and divine
justice. Maleficent demons were legion, often monstrous beings with knives for
heads, emissaries of deities who were dangerous to humanity, and sometimes
even emissaries of death come to snatch away the living. But there was no image
of death. This fact is singularly striking in an iconic civilization that constantly
strove to make images, if only symbolic ones, of invisible realities.
The Egyptians never adopted the image so familiar to the West since the Mid-
dle Ages, the skeletal Grim Reaper leading the sarabande of the Dance of Death,
because for them, a dead person could not be, should not be, reduced to a skele-
ton, with the result that it would have been incongruous for them to have rep-
resented death itself in this form. Nevertheless, we must cite certain objects,
exceptional in their rarity (there might have been others) and whose provenance
is unknown. These are wooden figurines, only a few inches in height, that had
the form of a skeleton and were placed in small chapels that were also of wood.
These figures seem to be late, dating approximately to the end of the first mil-
lennium BCE. Were they amulets? Were they part of the funerary equipment?
Scholars have, of course, compared them to the well-known passage in He-
rodotus I in which we are told that during the course of banquets, the guests were
presented with a wooden figurine one or two cubits in height (between 21 and
42 inches, much taller than the objects that have been found). He says only that
they resembled a dead person; we do not know whether he means a mummy or
a skeleton. This was the occasion of invoking the good advice of carpe diem
(seize the day) in the face of ineluctable death. This information accords well
with the content of the harpers' songs that were sung during funerary gather-
ings, but there is no proof that there were exhibitions of a deathly image, the
ancestor of the "vanities" of the Renaissance. In any event, shawabtis, small,
mummiform figurines that substituted for the dead in his tomb, were never ex-
hibited in such settings; the many banquet scenes represented on the walls of
tombs contain nothing of this sort. At a very late date, the skeleton could be rep-
resented for reasons that remain obscure, perhaps under foreign influence, but
it was never a personification of death.
As ingenious as they were at putting together the unusual, even formidable fig-
ures that people the walls of royal tombs, did the Egyptians never conceive an im-
age of death that could symbolize their horror of it? To be sure, there is the
terrifying figure of the Great Devouress who is present at the weighing of the soul
in the Judgment of the Dead, ready to swallow anyone who does not emerge suc-
cessfully from this trial. But she was only a subsidiary demon, not death itself.

' Histories, book 2, chapter 78; see A. de Sélincourt, Herodotus: The Histories (Harmondsworth,1972),
p. 158.
158 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

A Dynasty 21 papyrus shows us a monster who differs little from others of his
ilk: a winged serpent with two pairs of human legs and a human head, his tail
ending in a jackal's head. He is called "death, the great god who makes gods and
men." In this unique instance in Egyptian religious iconography and literature,
a scribe, representative of a tradition otherwise unknown to us, or perhaps an
innovator who did not succeed in attracting followers, imaged death as a whole
iconology, combining man and animal with the ultimate chthonic form of the
serpent that was so often present at the origin of the world. Pairing an image and
a name, he accords them an epithet appropriate to a creator god, "who makes
gods and men," thus inserting death into the very bosom of creation, of the or-
ganized world. This affirmation that death is necessarily present in the organi-
zation of the living is also to be found in other formulations. Thus, death was
created, like every other reality, and there was a time, before creation, when it did
not exist: "When the sky did not yet exist, nor the earth, nor men, when the gods
were not yet born, and death had not yet come about."2 This lone representation
of death is not without real meaning with regard to traditional religious imagery.
Death had no place in that imagery, not because of negligence, but because it was
not representable not because it was unknown, for the Egyptians were per-
fectly capable of representing what they did not literally experience, but because
it could not be depicted. The sight of it, like that of the Gorgon, who radically
separated the world of the living from that of the dead, would have been un-
bearable.

THE PERCEPTION OF DEATH

While the experience of one's own death is incommunicable, at least that of an-
other can be experienced as an objective phenomenon and thus capable of de-
scription. From this point of view, the Egyptians left various texts funerary
collections, private stelae, literary and medical texts that constitute a vast cor-
pus of empirical statements that enable us to understand how they apprehended
the phenomenon of death.
First of all, to be dead was to be absolutely deprived of the breath of life, to
which is sometimes opposed the breath of death exhaled by death's emissaries.
The god who created and granted life did so by breathing air into the throat and
enabling respiration, as Egyptian texts repeatedly tell us. Conversely, to be de-
prived of breath is to die. We must wait for many centuries and another concept
of the human body for cardiac rhythm to be taken into account as the principle
of life. For Egyptians, the heart was the center of thought and understanding,
the organ of the will by means of which persons carried out Maat.
Moreover, to be dead was then to be deprived of the use of one's legs and to

2 Pyramid Texts, spell 571, § 1466.

"DEATH WILL COME" 1 59

remain immobile. We thus understand how it is that one of the wishes most fre-
quently expressed in the Book of the Dead is to come and go at will, without hin-
drance—though somewhat paradoxically, at least for us, the deceased was duly
wrapped and thus impeded before being buried. The functions by which nour-
ishment was taken were done away with; once dead, one no longer ate or drank.
Further, the dead no longer spoke, and those in the afterlife were the silent ones
par excellence, not like the wise man who knew how to measure his words, but
like one who had lost the use of his tongue. The ritual of "opening the mouth,"
which was performed over the mummy before it was placed in the tomb, was
thus needed to recover the totality of functions.
Worse than immobility, and worse than loss of the senses, of speech and sex-
ual power, was the putrefaction that threatened the body. The Egyptians knew it
well and feared it most of all. From the Pyramid Texts down to the Book of the
Dead, the funerary collections speak frankly about vermin and about the nau-
seating odor that emanates from the cadaver, which was an object of horror. The
assessment thus established is that of the cessation and destruction of the indi-
vidual, or at least, of his vital functions.

THE CAUSES OF DEATH

The Egyptians explained such cosmic events as the creation of the world and
physical phenomena mythologically, with superhuman powers called gods, and
they alone, playing a role. But for an experience common to the whole human
species, without exception, and whose effects they could measure daily, they
sought causes that we can call phenomenological, though a certain number of
deaths occurred for more mysterious reasons that had to do with destiny or
magic.
First of all, people died of old age, and from observation, it was known that
to grow older was to approach a death that, it was hoped, would be as late as pos-
sible, at the end of iio years of life; this was the ideal life span, according to the
Egyptians, though it was doubtless rarely attained, an exception being Joseph,
who had lived at Pharaoh's court. As Ptahhotep affirms, "great age is here, old
age has descended (on me),"3 and he goes on to make one of the most gripping
descriptions of decrepitude. Living in a foreign land, Sinuhe complains, "May
my body become young again, for old age has descended (on me) ... I am near
departure, (the day when) I will be taken to the eternal homes." There are innu-
merable stelae with a request, on behalf of the deceased, for "a fine burial after
old age," a natural and peaceful, almost enviable, death.
But most often, people died of illness, and based on the symptoms, the physi-
cians, who were somewhat powerless, prognosticated life or death. We must add

3 Instruction of Ptahhotep, 8-9.

i 6o PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

accidental death, including deaths from the bites of serpents and scorpions,
against which the Egyptians had an array of magical formulas, in addition to the
medical treatments they could undertake. In war, people also died a violent
death. Sometimes, at birth, destiny decided a death that could not be escaped, as
recounted in the Tale of the Doomed Prince. Thus were mingled etiology and
the power of fate.

SENTIMENTS REGARDING DEATH

From this set of facts that every individual was capable of putting together, the
authors of the texts that have survived to us drew conclusions of a general na-
ture and succeeded in conveying the attitude of society toward death. Here and
there, though, we see original attitudes that reveal an individual approach, rather
than an enduring current of thought.
Death was irremediable; this was a leitmotif through all periods of Egyptian
history, but it is expressed with particular clarity in a stela from the end of the
Ptolemaic Period belonging to a certain Taimhotep, wife of Pasherienptah, high
priest of Ptah:

As for death, its name is "Come."

All those it calls to itself,
towards itself, come without delay.
Their hearts are frightened, for they fear it.
There exists no god or man who sees it,
yet great ones are in its hand, just like little ones.
There is no one who can turn away the sign it makes,
from himself or from those he cherishes.4

We must add a slight reservation to this text, for Egyptians sometimes aspired to
obtain some additional years from gods on whom life and death depended; des-
tiny could be modified by deities who had power over it.
Death was also irreversible. No one returned to this world to share in the life
of the living. It was thus an end, whatever one might imagine and hope with re-
gard to the afterlife, which could only be different. "He who has departed never
returns"; these implacable words end the harper's song in the tomb of the vizier
Paser at Thebes. Elsewhere, we read: "He who has departed does not return
again."
The hour of death was unknown: "One does not know the day on which it
comes." But when it came, the individual left his family and his goods behind.
Death was thus feared, as we read on the stela cited above, and even hated. In

4 Stela British Museum no. 147; translation based on that of S. Schott and R Krieger, Les Chants
d'amour de l'Égypte ancienne (Paris,1956), p. 152.
cc »
DEATH WILL COME 161

the Middle Kingdom, on their funerary monuments, the deceased invoked

passers-by in these terms: "O you who love life and hate death." Death as an En-
emy, the title given by the Egyptologist Jan Zandee to his lexicographic study of
the vocabulary of death, corresponds perfectly to what the Egyptians felt. And
when death came prematurely to snatch an infant from its mother's arms instead
of taking an old man whose life was over, it became death the abductor, the thief
against which we sense that rebellion arose.
The converse of this hatred was a profound love of life, the only thing an
Egyptian could really hold in his hands; we shall see how it was celebrated. Sui-
cide, however, was not absent from Egyptian discourse. We read "to put oneself
to death;' though such terms appear only exceptionally. It would be interesting,
but no doubt nearly impossible, to try to make a statistical study of the frequency
of suicide and its sociological implications; this is an area where our informa-
tion is too scanty. In Egyptian literature, however, we find an attitude that has
often been called pessimistic, one that calls on and celebrates death as a deliver-
ance from the trials of life. These could be the evils of society, the eruption of
disorder, and the abandonment of traditional values, such as they were ex-
perienced during the First Intermediate Period, or the difficulty of man in re-
maining alive and its correlate, a quasi-romantic longing for death, which is
synonymous with beauty and voluptuousness:

Death is before me today

like the perfume of lotus flowers,
like a stay on the shores of drunkenness.5

But even if it was not the unique expression of a lone individual, this way of
thinking remained quite marginal, and we cannot assign it the status of a cur-
rent of thought that represents a common Egyptian attitude toward death.

THE DEAD

Because of death, there were the dead, persons in the state that everyone would
one day reach. From the root mut was derived a noun designating a dead per-
son, and it, too, was determined by a man with a bloody wound on his head.
When the Egyptians made lists of beings arranged by categories though with-
out attempting to be exhaustive, and according to categories that were obviously
different from our own we find in a certain number of texts, including exem-
plars of the Book of the Dead, a list that included men (that is, Egyptians, who
were men par excellence), the gods, and the dead. The dead thus did not belong,

5 Dispute between a Man Weary of Life and His Ba; translation based on that of Schott and Krieger,
Les Chants d'amour, p. 147-
l62 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

strictly speaking, to humanity, but formed a collective of their own. This list is
sometimes completed by the word akhu, which from the earliest religious texts
on designated the state to which a deceased person wished to accede, a state that
was at first reserved for the pharaoh alone, living a celestial life amidst the stars,
and which was later accessible to ordinary mortals. The akhu, the "glorified
ones," were of course deceased, but they were defined by their condition in the
afterlife and thus not simply individuals who had crossed the threshold of death.
Once again, the vocabulary offers a rich array of euphemisms to replace the
word dead; we may think of the "dearly departed," or the "late so-and-so," and
all the other circumlocutions used in modern languages to avoid the fatal word.
In Egyptian, we find "those who are at rest," or "are in peace;' "the perfect ones,"
and "the praised ones," the latter often used in the later stages of Egyptian his-
tory to designate especially venerable deceased persons, blessed ones who per-
haps served as intercessors with the gods on behalf of the living and received
special veneration in the courtyards of temples. In calling the dead "westerners:'
Egyptians evoked the place where they resided, the west, a term that also desig-
nated the cemeteries and the metaphorical location of the hereafter.
But what did persons call themselves when they spoke of themselves after
death? That is, what did they call themselves in the inscriptions carved on the
walls of their tomb or in stela inscriptions that they had written and prepared
while still alive, or whose preparation they entrusted to their son? In autobio-
graphical texts, on funerary stelae requesting perpetual offerings, and in the ap-
peals to the living, they never call themselves "dead." The deceased was a person
who enumerated in the past tense, of course the offices he had held in his
city, his nome, or at the royal court. Only one special epithet reveals his state:
imakh, which is often translated as "venerated." As applied to men or to a god,
imakh was a quality attained only after death, but it only indirectly indicated that
one had ceased to be alive. In the wording of texts intended to assure survival by
means of the perpetuation of offerings and of the name, what counted were the
status of the man or woman during life and the deeds the individual had ac-
complished. Death itself could bring the individual nothing that was not nega-
tive, for it subtracted the individual from the world of the living, from his or her
community. When a person testified that his acts were in conformity with the
demands of Maat, it was in the guise of a living one, before death affixed the seal
of destiny.
The Egyptians were not ignorant of, nor did they hide, the physical ravages
that occurred after death. They knew that a body became a cadaver. Even gods
the gods who died, like Osiris had a cadaver, just as they had a body, and the
Egyptians attempted to transform this object, which would soon have become
revolting, into an incorruptible mummy. The term occurs in contexts devoid of
ambiguity, permitting us to understand it clearly; moreover, it is determined by
a mummy. Other texts, however, make it clear that things were not that simple,
"DEATH WILL COME" 1 63

or, that at least, we do not know the exact semantic nuances conveyed by words
that are sometimes used side by side with one another. Thus, on a Saite stela, the
funerary god Ptah-Sokar-Osiris is called on to grant water to the ba of the de-
ceased, incense to his corpse, and cloth to his mummy. In such texts, it was en-
tirely normal to cite, along with the human remains whether body, cadaver, or
mummy the ba, an energetic principle that was supposed to endure after the
cessation of the vital functions of the body; but how are we to explain the si-
multaneous presence of the words cadaver and mummy? Moreover, employing
a tripartite distribution of their attributes, it is often said of gods that the sky is
for their ba, the earth for their effigy, and the hereafter for their cadaver. The
same was true of human beings, and the embalming ritual ends with the for-
mula, "You see your name in every nome, your ba in the sky, your cadaver in the
duat, your statues in the temples." Here, it is indeed the word cadaver that is used,
and not mummy. Did these words experience a semantic and lexicographic evo-
lution, or were they close enough in meaning that they could be employed indif-
ferently? Perhaps it is once again in the choice of determinative that we can find
a clue shedding light on Egyptian views in this matter. The word mummy is de-
termined by the object in question, or, if we wish to speak less precisely, by a
wrapped body with a bearded face. This same sign can be used with various
terms designating a statue. Was the mummy thus a sort of effigy of the deceased
person?
At the very least, the dead were a category at the margin of humanity. They
had a cadaver-mummy, as well as a ba, a ka (life force), and a name. When an in-
dividual projecting himself into the future wrote his autobiography, he was first
and foremost a social being who specified the offices he had held in life, and he
notes that he had become an imakh. He never calls himself "the late so-and-so."

IMAGES OF THE DEAD

Egyptian civilization was characterized by, among other things, a proliferation

of images. Given that an enormous proportion of the monuments that have sur-
vived to us were for funerary use in royal or private tombs or in temples com-
memorating pharaohs, we may suppose that the reliefs and statues they sheltered
are related to death. Above all, we wonder how the dead, the proprietors and oc-
cupants of these places, were represented there and in what form. In the temples,
the pharaoh was almost always depicted performing his royal functions, decked
in the appropriate attributes. And although New Kingdom temple reliefs repre-
sent the theogamy or divine birth of the child called on to occupy the throne,
there is no depiction of the funeral of this personage. Royal shawabtis, though,
are legion, and statues of the king in the form of Osiris adorn the temples. In the
tomb of Tutankhamun, his life-size wooden statues were covered with tar in im-
itation of the black skin of Osiris. It must nevertheless be stressed that death af-
164 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

fected the pharaoh only in his capacity as an individual; otherwise, the royal of-
fice, which was only incarnate in him and did not depend on him, would have
been called into question.
In the case of private persons, the few late statuettes of skeletons, which have
already been mentioned, certainly do not represent a given individual; they
probably have a symbolic value. We do not find an image of a skeleton in these
tombs, for macabre expressionism is missing from them, nor do we find an im-
age of the deceased or his remains. In the New Kingdom, space was often re-
served on the walls of tombs to represent the funeral preparations and the burial
itself. But it is already a mummy that is lying on the embalming bed, with Anu-
bis bending over it. The Opening of the Mouth ritual was carried out over the
sarcophagus. After seventy days in the hands of the embalmers, the cadaver was
hidden and thus as unrepresentable as death itself. These images of the mummy
occur only in strictly funerary scenes. In all the other representations, the tomb
owner and the members of his family are depicted alive, most often young and
good-looking, corresponding to an ideal dear to the Egyptians, as we learn from
autobiographical texts.

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

The dead were not men, or not entirely men; they belonged to a marginal cate-
gory, but they could not for that reason be easily got rid of, even by burying them
according to a duly codified ritual. The battle against death, an undertaking to
which the Egyptians devoted considerable energy, began with a step that con-
sisted of endowing the dead with a suitable place in social space, a place that was
specially consecrated to them, whatever might happen after death. But even that
was not enough. The deceased were able to continue to act on earth, often in a
manner harmful to the living. The Egyptians dreaded death and feared dead peo-
ple who were malicious and dangerous. There are abundant references to this
phenomenon. A passage from the Instruction of Any is extremely revealing:

Appease the spirit, do what he likes,

refrain from what disgusts him;
may you be preserved from his many misdeeds,
for every form of harm comes from him.
A beast led away from the field?
It is he who does such things.
Damage on the threshing floor in the fields?
"It is the spirit," one says again.
Tempest in the house? Hearts estranged?
All that is his doing.6

6 Translation based on that of G. Posener, Bulletin de la Société française d'égyptologie 112 (1988): 14.
"DEATH WILL COME" 165

What is this if not the ancestral and universal fear of ghosts that no civilization
has escaped? Naturally, these were above all wandering dead with no tomb, dan-
gerous dead who were capable of creating the worst kind of troubles on earth.
But the others as well, those who had been given a suitable burial, who were reg-
ularly nourished with offerings, could return to earth and do their misdeeds,
sometimes even against family members who had lavished their attentive care
on them during life and after death. In Egypt, some examples have been found
of a category of astonishing documents, "letters to the dead" addressed by the
living to a family member, most often a father or mother, to request them to in-
tervene on their behalf in a disagreement. But in one case known from a papyrus
of Dynasty 20, a husband addresses his deceased wife, whom he treated with de-
votion when she was alive, though she has not ceased to importune him after her
death, to the point where he finally threatens to file a lawsuit against her. In the
same vein, in a decree of Amun in favor of the deceased princess Neskhons, along
with guarantees accorded her for her survival, it is clearly stipulated that she is
not to harm her husband and his relatives, who are still alive. Interaction between
the community of the living and that of the dead was considered to be a reality
whose modalities could be regulated in the form of requests, but also in juridi-
cal terms, even lawsuits.
There was another, far more common course of action adopted by the living
against the potentially dangerous dead. This course of action was to set magical
forces to work, either orally or by execration procedures, of which we have many
examples. Imprecations and demands were common currency in magical texts
intended to repel "every dead man, every dead woman, every male enemy, every
female enemy who would do evil to so-and-so, son of so-and-so." We can read
other injunctions as well: "Get back, enemy, adversary, dead man, dead woman
... who makes so-and-so, son of so-and-so, suffer. You have said that you will
strike a blow to his head to force entry into his skull."7
If verbal threats were deemed insufficient, Egyptians proceeded to an execra-
tion ritual; in our own day, such rituals are practiced nearly everywhere in the
world of sorcery. Using wax, unbaked clay, wood, or stone, the practitioner made
a somewhat crude statuette representing a kneeling prisoner with his arms
bound behind his back; on it was inscribed the name and the status of the in-
tended enemy before carrying out the rites of destruction: they were struck, spat
on, and trampled, after which they were burned. In most cases, these were dead
persons who were still harmful: former criminals, foreigners, and "men of Seth."
The known examples show that most often, it was a collective of living persons,
and not a particular individual, who sought to be rid of their enemies. At first a
social magical practice, it was secondarily applied to the funerary realm.
While the living saw potential enemies in a certain number of dead persons,

Translation based on that of G. Posener, ibid., p. 15.

166 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

the fear of the dead that they themselves might encounter the living was no less
great and no less justified. The Egyptians were not unaware of the fact that their
tombs ran the risk of destruction and pillage. Against that, once again, the ulti-
mate protection was a magical imprecation formula against violations of tombs:

As for anything you can do against me in this my tomb of the necropolis, [the same
treatment] will be inflicted on your property, for I am an able lector-priest, to
whom absolutely no magic remains secret.
[As for anyone who] will enter this my tomb in a state of impurity, after hav-
ing eaten something disgusting that disgusts an able spirit, without purifying him-
self for me, as he is supposed to purify himself for an able spirit who did what
pleased his lord, [ I shall] seize [him] like a bird, I shall heap on him the terror I in-
spire, so that the spirits and those who are on earth will see and be frightened be-
cause of an able spirit.8

Still worse, perhaps, was forgetting, the forgetting of the offering and the for-
getting of the name, without which survival could not be assured. From the
earliest tombs on, there were innumerable appeals to the living to recite the in-
vocation offerings: "O living ones who are on earth, who will pass by this tomb
..."; we encounter a similar formula in epitaphs from Western Europe, appeal-
ing for the commemoration of the name.

WHAT TO DO?

LIVING LIFE

At the beginning of their history, the Egyptians made a hard, clear assessment:
death was there, at the heart of life, irremediable, entailing the cessation of the
vital functions. It was feared and hated, but never ignored. It was not, however,
an ultimate end, for the dead continued to have relationships, though sometimes
not affable ones, with the living.
These being the facts, the Egyptians adopted a set of conducts intended to bat-
tle against death, though the battle was unequal. In this regard, they were no dif-
ferent from other civilizations, for this effort seems to be a basic driving force
behind all human social organization, but they distinguished themselves by the
immoderate effort they put forth to save their dead from death, constructing
imposing tombs for them, their "mansions of eternity." That does not mean,
however, as has too often been believed, that their entire life was devoted to pre-
occupation with death and with preparing for it. If death was an end, it was not
a goal; and there was no fatalism or pessimism. Though it ended in death, life

K Translation based on that of A. Roccati, La Littérature historique sous l'Ancien Empire, Littératures
anciennes du Proche-Orient n (Paris, 1982), p. 153.
"DEATH WILL COME " 167

was no vale of tears, an obligatory though unattractive place of passage leading

to another, better life. Because it was known that it had an end, there was an ob-
ligation to live life fully, so that one could enjoy "a goodly burial in the west," but
only after "a long old age." Because time was important, one had to make the best
possible use of it, so as not to have to pronounce the fateful "it is too late."
One category of texts admirably conveys this way of thinking, which reflects
not spineless hedonism, but rather the affirmation that life is worth the pain of
being alive, despite everything. "Carpe diem" the harpers' songs were sung for
centuries, from the Middle Kingdom on, on the occasion of the banquets that
accompanied funerals, and perhaps on other occasions as well:

Spend a beautiful day of festival, o noble!

Forget what is bad and think of what is good,
until the day comes [when you arrive
at the land that loves silence].
Spend a beautiful day [of festival], all that you love—do it!
Make your body extremely happy .. .
Spend a beautiful day of festival, o noble!
See, your happiness has more [weight] than your future life.9

As late as the Ptolemaic Period, we find similar injunctions on the stela of a

woman addressing her bereaved husband; she is Taimhotep, who has already
been mentioned:

O my beloved, my husband, my friend,

O high priest,
do not stop drinking and eating,
being drunk, and loving.
Celebrate a beautiful festival."'o

Was there not something a bit paradoxical and pathetic about celebrating life
inside a tomb? Yet these songs were carved on the walls of tomb chapels, a social
place where the living came to bring offerings to the deceased and to spend a
happy hour with him, making contact with what lay beyond death:

Take (something) to drink,

so as to spend a happy day
in your house of eternity,
from the hand of your wife, Henut-nofret."

9 Tomb of Paser, Thebes, Dynasty 19; translation based on that of Schott and Krieger, Les Chants

d'amour, pp. 142-41

10 Translation based on that of Schott and Krieger, ibid., p. 151.
11 Translation based on that of Schott and Krieger, ibid., p. 81.
168 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

This search for happiness, for "Great Joy of the Heart," as one collection of texts
is entitled, is expressed elsewhere and quite liberally, for instance, in the love po-
ems of the New Kingdom. We even find a reflection of it in the wisdom texts,
though they have a different purpose, the carrying out of Maat. In one of these
texts, we read a caution not to enjoy happiness blindly: "Do not proclaim, `I am
in a happy moment' to the point of forgetting the destiny that is in it." 12

PREPARATION FOR DEATH

It is clear, however, that this attitude with regard to life could not do away with
the anguish that was experienced in the face of death, which was eminently pre-
sent and not something that could easily be disposed of. The same individuals
who proclaimed the urgency of living fully at the same time devoted a consid-
erable portion of their resources to prepare, in anticipation of their death, a duly
equipped tomb that would shelter their mummy and enable them to survive.
The fact was that while death was an end, it was not unless men or gods were
determined to destroy a deceased person definitively an ultimate end, a total
annihilation. Rare are the civilizations that have not conceived of a form of life
beyond death, one that is difficult to describe precisely because it does not be-
long to the visible world. Though Egyptians fell prey to doubt, they nonetheless
clung to the idea of an afterlife that they attempted to attain via a veritable ob-
stacle course.

PRESERVATION OF THE BODY

After death, it was first necessary to maintain the cadaver in the best possible
condition; if not, it would have been doomed to an abominable putrefaction. In
Egypt, the corpse was not burned; the remains were not left for birds of prey; it
was not simply buried in the expectation that the ground and time would have
their effects. In Egypt, the corpse was mummified, in response to a certain con-
cept of the human being. The carnal envelope was not the receptacle of the soul,
as Christianity would make it out to be; it was one of the components of a com-
plex ensemble, along with the ka, life force; the ba, an immortal principle that
maintained the cohesion of the living being; the shadow; and the name. All these
were supposed to subsist in one way or another after death. The ka and the ba
were not more visible before death than after it, and the Egyptians could only
represent them metaphorically: the ka was a human being with a pair of upraised
arms on his head, while the ba was a human-headed bird that could move about
freely and which we often see next to the mummy. Though they were invisible,
they nonetheless had need of care from the living, and offerings were made to

12
Papyrus Insinger 4, 12.
" DEATH WILL COME" 1 69

the ka of the deceased while the ba could drink fresh water. As for the body, per-
haps the earliest inhabitants of Egypt noted that cadavers placed in the sand ex-
perienced a natural desiccation, and for that reason they developed ever more
sophisticated techniques of mummification, a process carried out by a class of
specialists, the embalmers, to whom the remains were given for seventy days, as
we learn from ancient texts confirming Herodotus's information to that effect.
The viscera were removed by various processes and carefully preserved in four
canopic jars, along with aromatics and unguents that assured their conservation.
After being covered with natron to dry it out, the body was stuffed with cloth,
loaded down with ritual amulets, such as the scarab that took the place of the
heart, carefully wrapped with yards of linen bandages, adorned with jewelry and
a mask, and finally placed into nesting coffins, the innermost of which, at least,
was anthropoid, in any event in the New Kingdom.
From the New Kingdom on, a Book of the Dead was nearly always included
in the tomb as a vade mecum along with the body. The details of the techniques
changed during the long course of Egyptian history, but the principle remained
unchanged. The decoration of coffins varied in accordance with changes in style
or funerary beliefs. Thus, in the Middle Kingdom, when the Coffin Texts were
widely used, there was a particular type of wooden coffin on which the texts were
written. The richness of the jewelry and amulets reflected the wealth of the de-
ceased during life. This is not the place to analyze the history of mummification
in detail or to offer a catalog of the different types of coffins; there are already
excellent studies on these topics.
Certain of these procedures were depicted on tomb walls, but since they were
not intended as a "film" of the course of events, it is difficult to interpret them
precisely. But two Roman Period copies of the embalming ritual enable us, de-
spite their lacunae, to follow the thread of the procedures and to understand the
aim of the ritual. Each of their paragraphs contains two subdivisions: on the one
hand, technical indications regarding the action performed by the embalmer,
and on the other hand, the ritual formulas that he was supposed to recite for each
act he performed, for in principle, at least, these embalmers were not lowly em-
ployees of funeral establishments as we know them today. The material opera-
tion of preserving the body had to be accompanied by formulas that explained,
justified, and complemented the technical manipulations. Once each part of it
had been treated individually, the body regained its integrity and could continue
to live, or at least subsist, in the company of its ka and its ba and provided with
its name. There was thus no resurrection, either after death or at the end of time.

THE OPENING OF THE MOUTH

The corpse-cadaver-mummy was ready for its appointed burial at the end of the
seventy days of mummification, which were also a period of mourning for the
170 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

relatives who would accompany the sarcophagus to the tomb. In this case as well,
the course of the ceremony is rather well known from texts and from represen-
tations in tombs, which at every possible opportunity depict the cortege with its
tearful family, the mourning women often being professionals in ancient
Egypt, displays of mourning were an obligatory practice its men bearing of-
ferings and funerary equipment and the sarcophagus dragged on a sledge to the
entrance of the tomb before being lowered into the vault. Of course, there were
changes over time in the order of the ceremony, which, unlike the mummifica-
tion, was public. Nevertheless, the Opening of the Mouth ritual (see figure io),
which was first carried out in the "mansion of gold," the embalming workshop,
and then again later in front of or in the tomb, was always the central, indis-
pensable event in a funeral. Known from the era of the Pyramid Texts down to
the Roman Period, it was definitively codified in the New Kingdom. It was an
animation ritual consisting of magical gestures accompanied by ritual formulas,
intended to give life to the mummy by opening its mouth, as well as its eyes, its
nose, and its ears. The mummy could once again speak, breathe, move about,
and take its share of offerings, thus maintaining its vital functions. This ritual
was originally applied to divine and royal statues so as to transform an inani-
mate object into a living receptacle, for the effigy was considered to be one of the
elements of the divine being. The practice was extended to the mummy of the
deceased, and also to his statue, which was part of the funerary equipment. Like
the statue, the mummy was one of the manifestations of the deceased. We may
thus suspect that the Egyptians, fearing that the mummy might not last forever,
felt it necessary to add a statue, another image of the deceased more durable than
his embalmed remains. With the performance of this ritual, the individual was
reunited, "complete" as the texts put it, restored to life and decked out for the
hereafter.

THE TOMB

It remained only to place the mummy in the tomb that the deceased had already
prepared for this purpose during life and whose final touches were perhaps made
during the delay of seventy days that separated death and burial, at least when
the task of completing the tomb was not entrusted to a son. It is clear that when
the earliest human societies were constituted in prehistory, one of the oldest and
most constant preoccupations of persons organized into collectives, whatever
their size, was to settle accounts with the dead, to assign them a suitable place
that distanced them, while not excluding them, from the community of the liv-
ing and enabled their memory to be retained by their descendants. Thus were
constituted, in Egypt, the cemeteries of the predynastic period with their simple
tombs.
Tombs later experienced the surprising proliferation with which we are fa-
"DEATH WILL COME" 171

FIGURE 10. Scene from the Opening of the Mouth ritual carried out on the mummy in front of the tomb.
From E. Naville, Das ägyptische Totenbuch der XVIII. bis XX. Dynastie (Berlin, 1886), pl. 2.

miliar; to many observers, Egypt looks like a vast necropolis, bristling with pyra-
mids and riddled with rock-cut tombs, a cemetery where the roots of Western
memory are buried. Since the history of tomb development is well known, I shall
summarize it only briefly here. The royal mastabas and cenotaphs of the first two
dynasties were abandoned in favor of the pyramid in the reign of Djoser, which
was the time of Imhotep; at first it was a step pyramid, and then it was changed
into a perfect geometric form. Pharaohs were buried in pyramids down to the
end of the Middle Kingdom, after which they had deep rock-cut tombs excavated
at Thebes during the New Kingdom, and finally, they protected their tombs in
temple enclosures in the Third Intermediate Period and the Late Period. In a par-
172 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

allel development, beginning in Dynasty 4, the use of stone to replace unbaked

brick was extended to the construction of the tombs of private persons, which
were grouped into cemeteries around the pharaoh's pyramid, of which the ceme-
teries of Giza are the most characteristic. These large, parallelepipdal sepulchers,
called mastabas, were in use down to the Middle Kingdom, while for a long time,
rock-cut tombs were dug into the flank of the western mountains all along the
Nile valley; the rock-cut tombs of Aswan belonged to notables from the end of
the Old Kingdom through the Middle Kingdom, while the hugest necropolis
of the New Kingdom was located at Thebes. We must stress that all these
cemeteries were outside the domain of the living, preferably in the desert, in
the west, which was the preferred place for the dead. It is undeniable that there
were practical and economic reasons for this state of affairs. Fertile fields,
which were relatively scarce, were reserved for agriculture. Egyptians sought
the aridity of the desert, not the humidity of the valley, to preserve their bod-
ies and their funerary furnishings. But Imentet, the "west" where the sun disap-
peared each day, laden with religious connotations, was the domain of the dead
par excellence.

ROLE AND SIGNIFICANCE OF THE TOMB

Among the many words and expressions that served to designate the tomb in the
Egyptian language, "house of eternity" is especially revealing. Can we think that
a tomb had no other function than to shelter a mummy and preserve it as long
as possible? If it was a matter of a simple shelter, would it have been built on so
huge a scale? Would such care have been taken to decorate it with scenes and to
carve religious texts in it? Would so many funerary furnishings have been accu-
mulated that the rare unviolated tombs offer us such rich examples?
The tomb was the veritable house of the deceased, the place where he could
continue to live, his ba reunited with his body-mummy or his statue-effigy,
where he could freely come and go, as many passages from the Book of the Dead
proclaim. It is thus in no way surprising that a respectable tomb was richly pro-
vided with funerary goods, with furniture, toilette objects, and jewelry. This was
not a matter of taking terrestrial riches into another life; the Egyptians were well
aware that earthly goods were lost with death, even if an individual sometimes
had an object that had belonged to him in life buried with him. "No one takes
his goods with him," sang the harpist in the tomb of Inyotef. As a general rule,
the objects in the tomb were made for funerary purposes and were often only
imitations. But what was most important for survival in the afterlife was the
perennial supply of offerings, hence the institutionalization of a cult for the dead,
which was quite a different matter from a cult of the dead. It was owed them so
that they might continue to live, not because of what they had been, which ex-
plains why it was necessary for a man to have a son to whom he could hand down
"DEATH WILL COME" 173

his goods and who could assure his survival by the regular gift of an offering.
Undoubtedly for more security, this familial organization was often replaced by
a more official system in which specialized priests were paid to carry out the ser-
vices for the deceased, as was always the case with the royal funerary cult.
Even that arrangement did not suffice for the Egyptians, who were far from
reassured regarding the permanence of the cult they instituted; this was no doubt
a simple matter of experience. Just as they knew that the mummy could be de-
stroyed, with the result that they added a statue to counter this risk, and in the
Old Kingdom, "reserve heads," which have been found in great number in the
mastabas of Giza, so it could be feared that the offerings might soon cease to be
made. To compensate for this lack, the Egyptians put simulacra of food, made
of durable materials, in their tombs. But above all, on the walls of their tombs,
they depicted scenes of daily life whose purpose was to demonstrate the exis-
tence and the reality of the offerings. The products of the fields, the butchery,
and the bakery were forever prepared and offered in quantity to the owner of the
tomb, just as the depiction of the funeral testified that the deceased had bene-
fited from a burial that conformed to the religious practices that were appropri-
ate for someone of his social status. There has been much scholarly discussion
of the meaning of these tomb representations, which have been interpreted in
various ways. It was certainly not a matter of pretending that life in the hereafter
was in every respect like that in this world, nor even to represent life in this world
for the satisfaction and glory of the deceased, but rather, of guaranteeing the de-
ceased individual all the conditions necessary for survival. The Egyptians doubt-
less came to believe that life in the "Field of Reeds;' one of the mythical places in
the hereafter, was a more or less faithful replica of life on earth, but this concept
was not the foundation of their belief in "eternal" life, which was not defined as
the endless repetition of this life.
In the chapel, the public part of the tomb, the making of offerings and the re-
lationship between the living and the dead were assured. This was true first of all
because of the cult, and secondly, by the presence of effective images.

COMMEMORATION

There was a final means, one that encompassed all the others, of assuring the
eternal afterlife of the deceased: speaking his name, for to name beings and
things was to make them exist. To be sure, it was first and foremost the son who
was supposed to pronounce the name of his father to make him "live again." But
in the Old Kingdom, the deceased appealed to all living persons who passed by
the tomb to speak his name and recite the offering formula, in return for which
they would enjoy the favor of the gods.
So long as this verbal commemoration took place, oblivion and nothingness
would not befall the dead, for this commemoration was much more than a mere
174 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

personal or familial remembrance that could occasionally be invoked. Certain

learned persons exceeded the traditional framework and took matters further,
making writing into the sole recourse against oblivion and annihilation. Only
the names of illustrious writers were handed down gloriously from generation
to generation because of their work, while their tombs had long since fallen to
the assaults of time and pillagers:

Their names are pronounced because of the books

that they created during their lifetimes.
Good is the memory of their writings,
eternally and forever.

A book is better than a house that has been built,

than tombs in the west.
It is more beautiful than a mansion that has been erected,
than a stela in a temple.

They have gone below.

Their names would be forgotten,
but their writing causes
them to be remembered.1 3

In this culture in which survival depended first and foremost on the preserva-
tion of bodies, this eulogy of literature, the first in the world, as something that
preserves the memory of individuals, resounds for us with moving familiarity.
Even after the disappearance of its visible and tangible signs, the past wells up in
the present, which takes nourishment from it.

THE FALSE EQUALITY OF DEATH

To this point, we have followed the series of funerary rites that functioned in ac-
cordance with an image of death that the Egyptians entertained rites intended
to assure the passage from life to death by preserving the body, interring the de-
ceased, and making offerings to him, and to assure that beyond this passage,
there would be survival; we shall see how they imagined the latter. At the same
time, this system was part of the global functioning of this society, which most
of all had to resolve the problem of what to do with its dead, to whom a space
and a role needed to be assigned. In what was said about death, which was never
the object of theorizing but is mentioned in innumerable texts, it was the same
for all: no one escaped it. We could see in this fact an egalitarian discourse on the

13 The Immortality of Writers; translation based on that of Schott and Krieger, Les Chants d'amour,

pp. 160-62.
"DEATH WILL COME" 1 75

human condition, but that would only be an assertion born of our own experi-
ence.
Beyond this inconsequential reflection, we must inquire as to the daily real-
ity of death in Egyptian society. Did its ineluctability have an impact on the
highly socialized practices that constituted the funerary ritual? Not at all. Let us
put aside for the moment that which has been habitually called the "democrati-
zation"—or "demotization," following the terminology of Jan Assmann—of fu-
nerary customs, as a result of which texts originally reserved only for the pharaoh
came to be used by persons of common extraction. The process was rather one
of an "aristocratization," if we may dare this neologism, not because there were
in principle social classes that were forbidden access to funeral rituals, but sim-
ply because there were de facto differences in social position and wealth. In many
respects, the world of the Egyptian dead was in the image of that of the living, a
faithful reflection of a society that was fundamentally inegalitarian and deeply
hierarchized. As far back as we can go in history, we observe that those who were
close to the pharaoh his collaborators and officials had a right, undoubtedly
always by royal decision, to a tomb that would preserve them from annihilation;
the mastabas of the protodynastic period and those of the Old Kingdom bear
witness to this fact. But what about other Egyptians? Of the thousands of work-
men who took part in the construction of the pyramids of Giza, never have their
burials been found, because they do not exist, except for those of the foremen
and specialists, which have recently been discovered in the southern zone of the
site; the same is true of the peasants who constituted the majority of the popu-
lation. The workmen of the Theban necropolis who excavated and decorated the
tombs in the Valley of the Kings are an exception, a small, homogeneous group
that enjoyed a privileged status thanks to royal favor. The remainder of the pop-
ulation, anonymous to us, were thrown into a common ditch or buried directly
in the sand without having passed through the embalmers' workshops, though
doubtless with a minimal vade mecum for survival. Even when use of the Book
of the Dead became widespread, never have archaeologists found one that be-
longed to a baker, a cowherd, or a fisherman.
It is true that for lack of documents not documents that have been lost to
us, but documents that never existed it is difficult to discuss the death of poor
people. Still, we should not paint a too black a picture of the situation. Even in
a highly codified, literate society, it is clear that there also existed an implicit sys-
tem of the unspoken and unwritten, in which all individuals participated by solid
social consensus, one that is particularly difficult for us to know, for it left no
traces, or scarcely any. No doubt Osiris, the god who died and was restored to
life, became a paradigm for all Egyptians. But we must not lose sight of the fact
that what we know about death in Egypt has come down to us from the discourse
of a small fringe of the population, and that this "religious" discourse had an un-
deniably social basis. The good order of death corresponded to the good order
176 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

of society. When the latter was upset, the former was, as well. Texts from the First
Intermediate Period, written after the fall of the Old Kingdom and the ensuing
political and social troubles, reveal this fact with great clarity, and also great in-
nocence. The authors of these texts for once show social reality as it was and not
as it was supposed to appear. This candor entailed two very different results: on
the one hand, doubt regarding the effectiveness and even the necessity of funer-
ary practices, as we see in the harpers' songs, and, on the other hand, righteous
indignation over the abandonment of traditional values and the end of the es-
tablished order, as we read in the Admonitions of Ipuwer:

Now see, many dead persons are thrown into the river, the water is a tomb, and
the Pure Place is now in the water.
See, he who was buried as a divine falcon is now on a stretcher, and what the
pyramid concealed is now empty.

Naturally, it was only a fault line in the system that opened up when political and
social cohesion collapsed. The dead were no longer the guarantors of society;
then, order was reestablished. Nevertheless, this fissure was expressed in another
way in the life of the collective.

INVERSION OF VALUES

The violation of burials, the pillaging of tombs, was a constant practice in the
course of Egyptian history, and not only during its troubled periods, to such an
extent that it is difficult to see in it only scattered deeds, anecdotes that from time
to time the Egyptians did not fear to report. It was a veritable phenomenon in
this civilization. It was not a matter of profaning the tranquillity of the dead for
some act of black magic, or of pursuing, out of hatred, an individual or a group
in the hereafter, but simply of stealing the riches that everyone knew were accu-
mulated in the tombs. Nevertheless, with these acts, the thieves showed their dis-
dain for every law, about which they cared nothing, and attacked the integrity of
the cadavers. Mummies were torn to pieces and often finally burned. These in-
dividuals did not care in the least about the imprecation formulas carved in the
tombs against persons of their ilk, threatening them with dire punishments. Ac-
cording to Egyptian theory, the spoken or written word had the force of action,
yet it scarcely inspired fear in the violators of tombs, or at least, if they experi-
enced fear, they were able to overcome it. Thus, magic did not work. No barrier,
whether real or symbolic, was effective against those who coveted the riches of
this world that were deposited in the homes of the dead.
The more that precautions were taken and defenses multiplied replacing
wood with stone, barring passages with portcullises, digging pitfalls in rock-cut
tombs the more the pillagers persevered, sometimes at the risk of their lives,
"DEATH WILL COME" 177

increasing the damage. To the funeral industry, which was a large component of
the economy, there corresponded the banditry in the cemeteries. We are thus
witness to a parallel circulation of goods by means of transgressing the funerary
practices, a circulation that could well at least in part have been assured by those
very officials who were the upholders of social order and thus charged with pro-
tecting the dead. The minutes of certain sensational legal proceedings that took
place under Ramesses IX and Ramesses XI have come down to us, and in them,
high personages and Theban officials are implicated. Reciprocally, there were
priests genuinely concerned with the law who reburied the dead with great care,
hiding the mummies of kings whom they wished to protect from outrages in
caches like those of Deir el-Bahari. Everyone was au courant, everyone knew
there was no escape from this blight. Though the Egyptians generally offered
only a sophisticated image of themselves in their texts, an image that conformed
to a precisely defined normative ideal, they were not able to abstain from evok-
ing the pathetic result at which they had finally arrived.
It was those of low status, the poorest, the nearly anonymous who could most
easily escape the vandalism. Who would have taken the trouble to sack a miser-
able shallow pit tomb that contained, beyond the more or less summarily mum-
mified, or merely desiccated body, scarcely anything more than a few valueless
amulets and some crude pottery jars? Thus, there was despite the norms and
contrary to them —a sort of inversion of the social order. The major cemeteries
had been built in the image of the homes of the living. Only those wealthy in life
could hope for a tomb worthy of the name and often ostentatious, but only those
were pasture for the predators. This inversion sometimes had a more moral con-
notation. There is a curious fable in the late story of Setne-Khaemwas that makes
us think of the parable of Lazarus and the bad rich man.
Though this fault line was embedded in the system and was recognized as
such, it did not call the system into question. Just as a person, in his capacity as
an individual, could entertain doubts as to what awaited him in the afterlife, in
the same way, he could assert that the social organization of death had been
sapped from within. It was nonetheless true that in the face of the ineluctable,
he maintained a constant attitude: to do what was necessary to get through this
passage and succeed in accepting death, however radically foreign and perpetu-
ally threatening, as a fact of life.

MERIT AND JUSTIFICATION

We have studied the various steps from the moment of death until the closing
of the vault, and then in the practice of the funerary cult, which would one day
be reduced to the mere pronunciation of the name that enabled the deceased
to survive according to the Egyptian concept of death and its aftermath. We have
encountered two types of behaviors, one purely material, the other magical and
178 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

symbolic: on the one hand, preservation of the body, construction and protec-
tion of the tomb, and offerings consecrated to the deceased, and on the other
hand, the embalming ritual, the Opening of the Mouth ritual, the symbolic use
of tomb representations, and the commemoration of the name. In all of this, the
individual makes no appearance, either by dint of his personality or through the
vagaries of his life, his actions, or his behaviors, as though, at heart, what he had
been and what he had done mattered little at the hour of his death. But in fact,
Egyptians were greatly preoccupied by the way in which they presented them-
selves to other persons at the moment of their death, and in the hereafter, to the
gods. They were supposed to be able to answer for their life and thus to merit a
tomb that was suitable and recognized by the living, as well as a postmortem sur-
vival, an immortality that was conferred by the gods.

Autobiographies
Beginning in the Old Kingdom, and especially in Dynasty 6, a gradually codified
text genre became more common in the tombs of officials, and it did not cease
to flourish throughout Egyptian history, with some variations in the form it took
and where it was written: in the New Kingdom and later periods, it was often
written on statues that were placed, not in the tomb, but in a temple. This was
the idealizing (or "autothematizing," as Jan Assmann has recently called it) au-
tobiography. It was an autobiography, rather than a biography, as these inscrip-
tions have sometimes been called, for in the inscriptions, it is always the subject
who speaks in the first person, painting a portrait of himself for future genera-
tions. At first, the autobiography was composed of two distinct parts, which were
later combined in the examples of the genre from the First Intermediate Period.
In them, we see the narrative element, describing the career of the individual,
which enabled him to distinguish himself in the service of the pharaoh. These
professional autobiographies stress the eminent position of the subject in the bo-
som of society: thus, Weni, who lived during the successive reigns of Teti, Pepy
I, and Merenre, and who carved the major events of his career on a wall of his
tomb at Abydos; Harkhuf, governor of Aswan, a traveler and explorer at the end
of the Old Kingdom; and Ahmose, son of Ebana of el-Kab, who successfully con-
ducted the wars of Ahmose. From the other end of history, we have innumerable
inscriptions of highly placed individuals generals, priests, and physicians
who continued to serve their pharaoh brilliantly and honorably during a period
that was prey to political disorder, even when the pharaoh was of foreign origin,
such as Ptahhotep, the physician of Darius, or Panemerit, governor of Tanis in
the reign of Ptolemy Auletes. They thus earned the recognition of posterity, and
in their autobiographies, they stressed the privileged place they had occupied in
society during their lifetimes.
Once the obligatory tropes of the genre have been removed from these ac-
"DEATH WILL COME" 1 79

counts, the historian will, of course, find information on the period in which the
subject lived, but the historian of religion will take special account of the other
part of the autobiography, that which constituted its first part from Dynasty 4
on, though it did not assume its definitive form until the end of the Old King-
dom. This part is impersonal; never does it allude to the career of the personage,
but solely to his virtues, a fact that enables us to recover, from one tomb to an-
other, and practically word for word, the various formulas that could be included
in this ideal portrait, not because we are dealing with a stereotyped model, but
because this declaration constituted a consent to the ethical principles that gov-
erned society and were never subjected to challenge during all the history of
Egypt, despite the changes revealed in the wisdom literature regarding the theme
of taking action and the relationship between individuals and their deities.
Persons acted during life in the spirit of Maat, in so far as Maat was the social
order regulating human relationships according to a civilized code: a man was
not supposed to behave like a wolf toward his fellow man. Rather, people were
socialized and responsible. Given the structure of the society, the rich took care
of the poor, and if they conformed to these principles, they obtained in return
the respect and love of others and earned a tomb:

I departed from my town.

I descended from my nome.
I carried out Maat for its lord,
I satisfied him in what he loves.
I spoke Maat, I did Maat,
I said what is good, I repeated what is good.
I attained perfection, for I desired that it be well for me with (other) men.
I judged two plaintiffs so that they were satisfied.
I saved the miserable from the one more powerful than he,
in that over which I had authority.
I gave bread to the hungry,
clothing to the naked,
passage to the boatless,
a coffin to one who had no son.
I made a barque for the one who was without a barque.
I respected my father,
I had the affection of my mother,
I raised their children.
Thus says the one whose "good name" is Sheshi.14

These texts, of which we may note that they speak of men and not women,
clearly define an ethics of conduct during life: occupying oneself with the poor

' 4 Mastaba of Nefersekhemre, near the pyramid of Teti; translation based on that of J. Assmann, Maât:

L'Égypte pharaonique et l'idée de justice sociale (Paris, 1989), pp. 62-63.

18o PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

and subvening their needs, such as the ultimate need for a tomb for one without
descendants, being equitable in passing judgments, and speaking what is good.
Thus, in carrying out Maat, of which each of these acts is but one application,
individuals attained perfection and the state of imakh, in the presence of their
god, perhaps, but first and foremost in the presence of their fellow men, from
whom they then had a right to claim a cult and the remembrance of their name.
These discourses are the application, to the tomb and to survival, of the long de-
velopments encountered in the wisdom texts, which treat the human condition
as a whole. At the end of life, the individual was what he had done, for which he
was accountable, and not just who he had been.
Scholars have not failed to emphasize the self-satisfied character of these texts,
which always present us with an idealized individual, as is also true of his images
on the walls of his tomb. But, after all, an autobiographical text was an epitaph,
a genre in which no one has ever listed the vices and failings of the deceased;
rather, it is a display of the palette of his virtues, however illusory. Via these af-
firmations, even though we are allowed to doubt them (where is the innocent
man who has never reproached himself?), we nevertheless discover the ethical
obligations to which all individuals were in principle supposed to submit them-
selves so as not to be excluded from the community.

Justification
Having thus taken responsibility for his actions before his peers, the individual
survived in the condition of imakh in their presence and in the presence of the
gods: "May he be conducted on the sacred paths of the west, on which the pos-
sessors of the condition imakh walk."15 The individual was in search of another
state, however, not simply of survival, but rather of immortality, similar to that
of the king, who enjoyed immortality by right, being a god by virtue of his royal
office, as is made clear in the Pyramid Texts. To do this, the individual had to un-
dergo a judgment of his actions before a divine tribunal in the hereafter. We al-
ready encounter inexplicit mentions of a tribunal of the "great god" in the Old
Kingdom, and of a judgment in the Coffin Texts, but it is in chapters 3o and 125
of the Book of the Dead that, beginning in Dynasty 18, the theme of judgment
by a divine tribunal found its definitive expression. Previously, the tribunal
seems especially to have punished enemies of the deceased who made accusa-
tions from which he had to defend himself, or who wished him ill. While this no-
tion never entirely disappeared, showing that justice in the next life was in the
image of that in this life, the Judgment of the Dead as it appeared in the New
Kingdom was on a much vaster scale, for the individual now had to prove de-
finitively that he had not contravened Maat.

15 Text on an anonymous lintel from Saqqara, Dynasty 6; translation based on that of A. Roccati, La

Littérature historique, p. 150.

"DEATH WILL COME " 181

The Egyptian image of this judgment is widely known. It is the weighing of

the heart, sometimes erroneously called psychostasis, before the tribunal of
forty-two gods, presided over by Osiris or Re, in the presence of Thoth, the di-
vine scribe and court clerk who was handed the verdict. Anubis, the leader of
souls, introduced the individual, because the judgment was a rite of passage and
enthronement that enabled the deceased to enter the immortal domain of Osiris.
The individual's heart, which was supposed to represent the purity of his acts,
was weighed against Maat, who was often symbolized by her feather. The result
depended on the lightness of the heart.
At the same time, the deceased recited the double declaration of innocence,
attesting to everything he had not done that would have been contrary to the re-
quirements of Maat. This famous text has often been called a "negative confes-
sion;' a name it would be better to give up, for it is too much stamped by the
Christian concept of sin. Here, it was not a matter of a repentant sinner con-
fessing all his sins so that he might be pardoned, but rather a matter of declar-
ing with the confidence of an innocent person that the list of sins against Maat,
which was codified and conceived of as exhaustive, had not been committed by
him. In this regard, Egyptian religion was not a salvation religion, though prayers
expressing the devotion of a living person to a god could be an opportunity to
confess his faults and obtain forgiveness in a context far removed from that of
death and survival. In the Judgment of the Dead, the individual was purified,
"justified," or he was "true of voice;' as affirmed by the common epithet that al-
ways accompanied the name of the deceased person; he could thus enter the
kingdom of the west.
The notion of Maat was thus expanded. If evil committed against her was not
punished already on earth, at least it would be punished in the hereafter. Only
the man who followed his heart and his god escaped punishment. At the end of
the New Kingdom, Beki, overseer of the granaries of the pharaoh, proclaimed
his adherence to the doctrine of Maat, for which he was rewarded both before
and after his death:

I was a righteous and just man, free of disloyalty, who placed (his) god in his heart,
instructed by his power. I arrived at this city of eternity after having done good on
earth. I did not provoke affliction. One did not have to reproach me. My name was
not pronounced in any degrading situation regarding any fault whatsoever. I re-
joice in speaking Maat, for I know it is useful for the one who practices it on earth
from birth to death, and that it is a solid defense for the one who speaks it on the
day he arrives at the tribunal that judges the miserable and uncovers his character,
punishes the guilty and decapitates his soul. I exist as an irreproachable being,
without an accuser and without sin on my part before them, so that I emerge from
it triumphant, as one praised in the midst of the imakhu who have gone to their
ka. 16

16 Stela Turin 156; translation based on that of Assmann, Maat, pp. 91-92.
l82 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

At a later date, Petosiris, priest of Thoth at the beginning of the Hellenistic

Period, the owner of an imposing tomb at Hermopolis and thus one who re-
spected all the traditional funerary ritual, outlined an ethical ideal based on a
perfect submission to Maat:

The west is the door of him who is without sin. Happy is the man who arrives there.
No one arrives there except the one whose heart has been exact in practicing Maat.
There, there is no distinction between the poor and the rich, except in favor of the
one who is found to be without sin when the balance and the weight are set in place
in the presence of the lord of eternity; a person who escapes the verdict when
Thoth-baboon from atop his throne is ready to count each one according to what
he has done on earth.''

Though in their ultimate expression, these declarations put rich and poor on
an equal basis at the decisive moment of death, they did not prevent Egyptians
from continuing to apply their funerary practices, both the material and the
magical ones, with the same care. Moreover, the declaration of innocence itself,
along with other exhortations of the deceased to his body and to the tribunal,
were themselves magical formulas intended to constrain the gods to allow him
to attain an immortal destiny. It was thus that one could avoid "dying a second
time in the realm of the dead,"8 an enigmatic formula that doubtless evokes the
death of the ba, against which nothing would any longer be effective. Scholars
have too often evaluated the Egyptian concept of the Judgment of the Dead by
the yardstick of Christian theology and faith, in the name of a moral superior-
ity that is either overtly expressed or implicitly restrained, perhaps because in
each case, the idea of immortality is intrinsically linked to it. Inevitably, this com-
parison leads to the assertion that the Egyptians had not succeeded in ridding
themselves of a magical concept of survival. If their postmortem fate was de-
cided at the moment of judgment, what mattered the care with which they sur-
rounded the cadaver, the offerings that they placed in the tomb, the formulas of
injunction directed to the living and the gods? In fact, the Egyptians had no ob-
jection to any of the means they developed to assure their survival. The funer-
ary ritual with its various resources, along with magical practices and submission
to the order of Maat that was in force before and after death, were not incom-
patible, but rather combinatory. Their accumulation could only increase their
effectiveness.
The history of Egypt was a long one, and each of these approaches did not al-
ways enjoy the same favor, though none of them was ever eliminated. The Egyp-
tians were also prey to doubt as to the effectiveness of their practices, whatever

'7 Translation based on that of J. Yoyotte, Le Jugement des morts, Sources orientales 4 (Paris, 1961),
13- 67.
18 Book of the Dead, chapter 44.
"DEATH WILL COME" 183

their nature. Just as they perceived the pallor of the afterlife compared to the lus-
ter of even a poverty-stricken life and sensed the futility of tombs that would one
day or another be pillaged or destroyed, they could also fear the ineffectiveness
of a magical ritual.
The weighing of the heart was not, after all, automatic. In front of the scale,
the Great Devouress awaited the criminal, and the deceased feared this second
death that would have taken him to the east, the place of desolation: "an abom-
ination is the land of the east."19 Yet scarcely any Egyptian imagined himself a
damned man suffering in the eastern inferno; it was always others whom this
punishment threatened, a fact that was but the logical counterpart of the uni-
versality of the declaration of innocence. In theory, at least, the tribunal in the
hereafter redressed wrongs committed in this world, rewarded individuals ac-
cording to their acts, and accorded each one, whatever his social status had been
and whatever burial he had had, the place he deserved after his death. This con-
cept is clearly stated in the parable contained in the story of Setne-Khaemwas:
the rich man who had benefited from a fine funeral was condemned, and (in-
fernal punishment!) his right eye had to serve as the pivot of the door of the west,
while the solitary poor man was to live in the presence of Osiris and be provided
with rich paraphernalia taken from the unjust rich man. A beautiful fable, hope
for the poor: Maat triumphs, down below if not here. Of that, in any case, the
Egyptians had no doubt. The world of the hereafter could not be contrary to
Maat; inversion of values was not compatible with immortality, for the latter did
not belong to the reign of disorder. There existed no absolute doubt.

TERRA INCOGNITA AND ITS PATHS

Triumphant and justified, the deceased crossed the threshold leading to the en-
trance to the west. Where did they go? What did they do? Otherwise put, how
did Egyptians imagine and represent the invisible, unknown world of the here-
after? To do this, their imagination had to draw on the repertoire of known im-
ages, images of this world, with the result that the next world was always
conceived more or less along the lines of the spatial structures of the visible
world, though with somewhat vague outlines, making a precise description of it
nearly impossible. But the question is complex, for various currents, mostly
linked to Heliopolitan and Osirian doctrines, existed side by side with or over-
lapped one another. It is only by following the historical evolution of the idea of
survival or immortality, such as we know it from the funerary texts, that we can
attempt to portray this imaginary, somewhat evanescent landscape. To the no-
tion of space must be added that of time. The king, and then people in general,

19 Book of the Dead, chapter 176.

18 4 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

acquired immortality; they were thus outside time and its ravages, beyond death,
and sheltered from the second death. In their own turn, humans became divine.

THE OLD KINGDOM

In the society of the Old Kingdom, which had only recently been hierarchically
constituted around the royal principle, the postmortem fate of the pharaoh re-
mained radically different from that of common mortals. Our knowledge of the
royal afterlife in this period is derived entirely from the Pyramid Texts, a collec-
tion of allusive and eclectic formulas carved on the walls of the subterranean ar-
eas of the pyramids of Dynasties 5 and 6. Though analysis of its structure is still
far from complete, the corpus does not seem to be organized in a systematic
manner. It must have been put together in the centuries that preceded its first at-
testation, and it was doubtless subject to changes in currents of ideas during the
very period when it was being carved in the individual pyramids. The texts are
devoted entirely to the survival of the king and to the magical and ritual means
of attaining that survival.
As a god and the son of a god, the king was by that very fact guaranteed im-
mortality in the company of the gods, his peers. Still, he was not safe from the
dangers and risks inherent in the moment of death. As to his destiny after his tri-
umph over these dangers, these texts present a variety of concepts reflecting the
different theologies that were in the process of being formulated in Egypt. This
destiny was first and foremost celestial: the king reached the sky by various
means, assuming the form of a bird or a scarab, or climbing a ladder or a sun-
beam. Certain passages assimilate him to the circumpolar stars, the "indestruc-
tible" ones that always remain visible. But most of the time, he shared in the glory
of Re, accompanying him in his daily voyage in the diurnal and nocturnal bar-
ques. This journey took him through the "Field of Reeds" in the west of the sky,
a mythic place in the celestial topography that cannot be understood as "Par-
adise," as certain commentators have proposed. We know only that the king lived
like a god, while his corpse was preserved, and that he continued to enjoy his
royal prerogatives.
Other passages offer a completely different vision of the pharaoh's destiny,
one that the Egyptians did not regard as incompatible with the one just de-
scribed. In this vision, the king is called Osiris so-and-so and participates in the
eternal life enjoyed by Osiris, after his death, in his subterranean kingdom.
Along with the king, dignitaries enjoyed a tomb that in principle offered its
protection to their mummy. They were imakh in the estimation of the living and
the dead, assured of a survival regarding which the texts of this period are miserly
in details. It has too often been said that the representations of daily life on the
walls of the mastabas, as later on the walls of tombs of the New Kingdom, depict
the deceased's existence in the afterlife, similar in all respects to what he had
"DEATH WILL COME" 185

known during life, though perhaps more beautiful and more enviable. These
tomb scenes, however, played an entirely different, magical role, which was ba-
sically to assure that the deceased would be provided with offerings. It was in no
way imaginable that the dignitary would become a god on the model of the
pharaoh. Some passages from the Pyramid Texts, however, seem to mention an
existence that "glorified" mortals shared with the indestructible stars, a stellar
destiny that would soon cease to be current in Egyptian thought. This destiny
was no doubt inspired by royal immortality, while later, Egyptians would see the
emblematic image of their survival in a god, Osiris. This god was already present
in the offering formulas that were recited on behalf of the deceased, and men-
tions of the god became more and more frequent toward the end of the Old
Kingdom. The dead walked on the roads of the west, we are told in the texts of
the mastabas, but we know nothing further about their perambulations.

THE "DEMOTIZATION" OF THE FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD

AND THE MIDDLE KINGDOM

While pyramids continued to be constructed down through Dynasty 12, the cus-
tom of carving texts linked to the royal destiny in them disappeared around the
end of the Old Kingdom. The Pyramid Texts themselves, however, did not en-
tirely disappear. At first reserved for the pharaoh alone, they were later put to the
use of private persons in the form of the Coffin Texts. This sudden change meant
that ordinary mortals enjoyed not just a pale survival, but immortality in the
company of the gods. The reasons for this development were the political, social,
and conceptual changes that occurred during the First Intermediate Period, af-
ter the fall of the Old Kingdom, and the doubts cast on the principle of kingship
that had served as its basis. When the kingship was reestablished under Dynasty
ii, and especially under Dynasty 12, at the price of political and ideological ef-
fort, the "demotization" of the funerary texts remained firmly anchored in the
apparatus of the funerary ritual. The term demotization is borrowed from J. Ass-
mann, replacing the more widely used "democratization," whose common
meaning introduces a highly anachronistic notion.
The Coffin Texts have received this modern designation from the simple fact
that they are written in ink in cursive hieroglyphs, no longer on the walls of pyra-
mids, but on the interiors of wooden coffins that were in use during the First In-
termediate Period and the Middle Kingdom, particularly in the cemeteries of
Middle Egypt, such as Beni Hasan and el-Bersha, but also further south, at Aby-
dos and Gebelein, as well as in cemeteries still in use at Dahshur and Saqqara in
the north. These texts were directly inspired by the Pyramid Texts, to which a
goodly number of supplementary chapters were added. The redactors of these
texts, who grouped the rubrics into chapters and also introduced glosses, made
an obvious effort at coherence, suggesting critical reflection on the content of
1 86 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

the formulas. For the most part, the texts deal with the deceased's travels in a ce-
lestial hereafter in the company of the god Re, and with magical means intended
to ward off his enemies. Other chapters are devoted to the integrity of the body,
which was more necessary than ever in order to benefit from immortality, and
to the never-ending offering ritual that was assured by the family. As in the Pyra-
mid Texts, along with the Heliopolitan doctrine of celestial survival, the idea of
an immortality in the west in the company of Osiris plays a certain role, though
without yet having triumphed. Moreover, in certain passages, we already note
that a connection is established between Re and Osiris, one that would have its
culmination in the texts of the New Kingdom.
On the coffins that come from the necropolis of el-Bersha and date to the be-
ginning of the Middle Kingdom, there appears another funerary composition,
the Book of Two Ways, which is accompanied by a vignette. It is a map of the
world of the hereafter with its two pathways of land and water leading to Ra-
Setau, a mythical place belonging, par excellence, to the domain of Osiris. In this
world, we encounter monsters, born of the imagination, that threaten the de-
ceased, who possesses a formula appropriate to each circumstance so as to pass
victoriously by the obstacle. This book is the ancestor of the major cosmogonies
of the New Kingdom.
While the Coffin Texts remain solidly anchored in the idea of a celestial im-
mortality, doubtless because they were conceived as a simple expansion of the
Pyramid Texts, representations in tombs and texts on stelae reveal another as-
pect of the funerary beliefs: the spread of Osirian fervor that reached its apogee
in the Middle Kingdom. On the walls of tombs, we see the deceased, accompa-
nied by his wife, departing on pilgrimage in a boat, a posthumous pilgrimage ef-
fected magically in the hereafter. From the Middle Kingdom on, Egyptians no
longer went to Buto and Sais, but rather to Busiris and Abydos, the prestige of
the latter quickly surpassing that of Busiris, the older city of Osiris.
At Abydos, beginning in Dynasty 12, Osiris, the god who had suffered the pas-
sion, supplanted Khentamentiu, the local funerary deity, and Osiris's head was
kept in a reliquary there. Egyptians flocked to this holy city, particularly on the
occasion of the major festivals commemorating the death and resurrection of
the god, whose tomb or cenotaph was located in a place called Poqer. Numerous
private stelae and cenotaphs were erected near the temple of Osiris, with the goal
of participating in his immortality:

Offerings are presented to him in the presence of the great god, when the spirit of
the latter has been sated. The great ones of Busiris and the dignitaries who are in
Abydos glorify him. He opens for himself the roads that he loves, in peace, in peace.
Those who are in Tawer (i.e., Abydos) exalt him, along with the priests of the great
god. One stretches out the arm to him (so that he might climb) onto the Neshmet-
barque on the path of the west. He plies the oars in the barque of the night and
"DEATH WILL COME" 187

navigates in the barque of the day. He travels in the company of the great god dur-
ing the divine crossing of the great Neshmet towards Poqer, step by step.20

Such was the happy fate that one devotee of Osiris shared in the presence of the
god. On these stelae, the name of the deceased is followed by a highly revealing
epithet that would afterward be constantly used. Translated either "justified" or
"true of voice;" the epithet indicates that the deceased has conducted himself in
conformity with Maat, and the idea of the judgment of the divine tribunal and
its scale, which would be expanded on in the Book of the Dead, had already made
its appearance. But at the same time, the deceased had triumphed over his ene-
mies thanks to the powers of magic, a triumph we find again in Ptolemaic tem-
ples scenes depicting the offering of the "crown of justification," the very crown
that adorned the deceased. Provided with what he needed in his tomb, the de-
ceased would go and enjoy immortality in the land of the west, where Osiris
reigned. He was himself "an Osiris," justified before his god, the name of the god
having become in some sense common property.

THE MAJOR BOOKS OF THE NEW KINGDOM

In the New Kingdom, while traditional ritual was maintained and even codified,
as was the case with the Opening of the Mouth ritual, new funerary composi-
tions were compiled and reproduced on papyrus for private persons and carved
on tomb walls for kings. They became the indispensable vade mecum that was
furnished to the dead for his passage into the hereafter, containing all the neces-
sary formulas for effectively thwarting the pitfalls and the enemies that loomed
before him.

The Book of the Dead

The best known, and also the most widespread, of the Egyptian funerary texts
appeared at the beginning of the New Kingdom and then continued in use down
to the end of Egyptian civilization, experiencing some modifications along the
way. In Dynasty 26, it was reorganized and given the form of a nearly canonical
text, though copies of it contain numerous errors, a sign that its formulas must
have been rather obscure to many of the scribes of this period.
The Book of the Dead replaced the Coffin Texts, and it included many chap-
ters from the latter corpus. It was no longer reproduced on coffins, but written
on papyrus rolls that were slipped between the legs of the deceased person or be-
tween the bandages of his shroud, or enclosed in a hollow wooden statuette in

20 Stela from Abydos, Middle Kingdom; translation based on that of J. Yoyotte, Les Pèlerinages, Sources

orientales 3 (Paris, 1960), pp. 35-36.

188 PART II. THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

the form of Osiris or Sokar. It was in common use and benefited more people
than the Coffin Texts, even middle-class persons. For the latter, there were copies
prepared in advance, and when the moment came, the name of the deceased man
or woman for whom the copy was intended was simply inserted wherever
needed, though sometimes, a scribe omitted to do so, and a space remained
blank. There are thousands of Book of the Dead papyri in museums throughout
the world.
The modern name for this work, richly illustrated with "vignettes" that mark
a departure from the Coffin Texts, is incorrect. The text, which is divided into
rubrics into which the redactors attempted to put some order, often bears the ti-
tle Book of Going Forth by Day, which immediately sheds light on a major as-
pect of the role assigned to these formulas. The deceased was supposed to be able
to come and go freely, to move about without hindrance, to leave and return to
his tomb. After his death and the judgment from which he emerged victoriously
at the weighing of the heart before the tribunal of forty-two gods (chap. 125), he
lived in the west with Osiris, the ruler of the hereafter. It is even specified in chap-
ter 110 that life in the "Field of Offerings" resembles life in this world; in it, peo-
ple cultivate fields, eat and drink, and enjoy sexual potency. A beautiful rural
vignette accompanies these formulae. Chapter 6 calls on the shawabti of the de-
ceased, his guarantor or replacement, which took the form of a mummified stat-
uette, usually of wood or faience, to perform any work that the deceased might
be required to do in the afterlife. This notion was doubtless a projection into the
next world of activities in this one, for lack of ability to imagine other activities.
But recourse to shawabtis entrusted with carrying out daily tasks is a sign that
such tasks were not necessarily considered an enviable activity, one that persons
desired to pursue beyond death. The deceased also participated daily in Re's noc-
turnal voyage in his barque. The solar doctrine was never abandoned, but far
from being irreconcilable, Re and Osiris, both lords of Maat, were considered to
be two aspects of one and the same divine entity, in whose destiny the deceased
was able to share.

The Cosmographies
While the tombs of private persons were decorated with representations of life
in this world, to which were progressively added more strictly religious scenes,
and while a copy of the Book of the Dead was also placed in these tombs, the
royal tombs saw the flourishing of another text genre that had its origin in the
Book of Two Ways of the Middle Kingdom. The tombs of the pharaohs were de-
void of scenes of daily life, which were unsuited to the royal office and its divine
essence. The cosmogonies were carved or painted directly on the walls of the
tombs, which assumed the appearance of huge papyri, as in the tomb of Tuth-
cc »
DEATH WILL COME 18 9

mosis III, and sometimes on the sarcophagus. A single tomb could include sev-
eral funerary compositions, entirely or partially reproduced.
These works are cosmographies, for they minutely describe the nocturnal
voyage of Re through the twelve hours of the night. These hours are organized
as regions with a subterranean river, a counterpart of the Nile, running through
them; the barque of the god sails on this river. The oldest composition, and the
one most often represented, is the Amduat, or Book of What Is in the Duat (i.e.,
the netherworld; see figure ii). Deceased persons thronging the riverbanks greet
Re, with the king accompanying him, and he encounters obstacles to his navi-
gation, in particular, his enemy par excellence, the serpent Apopis. Then the god,
with the king still at his side, appears triumphantly in the form of Khepri at day-
break. The Book of Gates is a rather similar composition, in which gates guarded
by serpents separate the various regions of the hereafter.
Later compositions include the Book of Caverns, or Book of Qererets, and the
Book of the Day and the Night, which correspond to the same model of a sub-
terranean world in the image of this one, divided into the nocturnal fractions of
the solar journey. In these books, the deceased king is conveyed toward the re-
birth of the morning after passing before the Osirian tribunal that judged the
purity of his heart. Finally, we may add the Book of the Heavenly Cow, with its
myth of the destruction of humankind, which is known from several versions in
the tombs of the Valley of the Kings. Notwithstanding its different content, its
presence in the royal tombs connects it to the funerary compositions.

THE FINAL BOOKS

During the first millennium BCE and in the Roman Period, the Egyptians re-
doubled their manifestations of devotion, displaying a marked attachment to the
god Osiris, and certainly more anxiety than ever regarding death and its after-
math. Marking a return to the past, all the earlier funerary texts were used si-
multaneously in the tombs of private persons. The deceased still had a Book of
the Dead, but at the same time, the walls of their tombs were decorated with pas-
sages borrowed from the Pyramid Texts or from the books of royal origin from
the New Kingdom. There are two sides to this phenomenon: a taste for the past
and a certain fondness for archaism, but also the permanence of these texts,
which were handed down through the millennia. Certain creations that were
supposed to accompany the dead in their voyage in the hereafter date to the end
of the epoch. These are the Books of Breathing, which did not appear until the
Ptolemaic Period, and which continued into the second century of our own era.
They are known only in the Theban region, and they reflect the evolution of the-
ology there. Attributed to Isis and Thoth, who were supposedly their divine au-
thors, they were used as a "document" or "passport" that enabled the dead not
FI GURE 11. The fourthhour of t he Book of Amduat. From E. Hornu ng, Das Am duat, Ägyptologische Ab-
han d lungen 7/I: Text (Wiesbaden, 1963), 4thfoldout.
"DEATH WILL COME" 191

to be deprived of the breath of life in the hereafter, as indicated by their name.

Taking up themes from the Pyramid Texts, such as the preservation of the name,
but especially themes from the Book of the Dead, they convey perfectly, notwith-
standing the fact that their use was limited, the state of funerary beliefs at the
end of Egyptian civilization:

The document of breathing of Thoth is your protection, you will not be chased
from the hall of Osiris. Amentit stretches out her arms to welcome you as mes-
senger of the first royal wife (i.e., Isis), and you will be in peace in the west of
Thebes, without dying a second time.
Your tomb is perfect; it will endure above your bones, it will persist above your
flesh, without decay. Your bandages are well secured and will never come loose, just
like the sky on its supports. Your ba remains above your regenerated body for eter-
nity, without ceasing to take care, for you, that your name be enduring on earth
each day, and that your ka not be forgotten in the course of eternity.21

The Egyptians never renounced the necessity of constructing a durable tomb

for the best possible preservation of the cadaver-mummy. Together with his ba,
his ka, and his name, the deceased would gain immortality in an afterlife that
Egyptians were sometimes pleased to represent, in the image of their own world
but haunted by threatening beings. On the model of Re, the sun god, the de-
ceased would sail on the nocturnal river, and like Osiris, he would inhabit the
west. Not content just to erect ostentatious monuments that would inevitably be
one day destroyed, and to provide their dead with offerings, they constructed a
veritable textual monument that was supposed to aid the dead in their perilous
journey. This multiplication of texts, this almost absolute value conferred on
writing, is undoubtedly the clearest sign of the change that slowly, over a long
period of time, took place in the concept of immortality. It was also, and espe-
cially, necessary to provide the deceased person with these written formulas
whose incantory power was supposed to enable the triumph of one who had
conducted himself as a guarantor of Maat during his lifetime. Whether or not
these texts were believed is in no way the question that needs to be asked. We
know that doubt did not cease to arise. But there was always the effort, never be-
lied and always renewed, to seek a response to the absolute denial cast by death
against life, to attempt to catch sight of and overcome the radical alterity of
death.

21 Second Book of Breathings; translation based on that of J. -C. Goyon, Rituels funéraires de l'Anci-

enne Égypte, Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient 4 (Paris, 1972), pp. 262-63.

 BOOK II

PTOLEMAIC AND
ROMAN EGYPT

FRANÇOISE DUNAND
 PART I

RELIGION AND POWER

 CHAPTER 1

FROM THE LAGIDES TO THE

ROMAN EMPERORS

The New Pharaohs and Their

Politico-Religious Ideology

The religious system of ancient Egypt, which was in existence and functioning
at the beginning of the third millennium BCE, would have an exceptionally long
life: at least three and a half millennia. Over the course of time, this system ex-
perienced changes, modifications that nevertheless did not deeply alter it; but
during the first millennium, there were major changes in the life of the country,
and inevitably, despite its attachment to tradition and its capacity for resistance,
the religion was also affected.
The history of Egypt in the first millennium was a troubled one; invasions
and foreign occupations succeeded one another (Assyrians, Persians, Graeco-
Macedonians, Romans). The two Persian occupations (525-404 and 343-332
BCE) do not seem to have disturbed the life of the temples and their clergy:
though a tradition that is at least partly of Greek origin attributed all sorts of
atrocities to Cambyses (he supposedly attacked a sacred Apis bull), the exercise
of the traditional religion, along with its very foundations, remained unchanged.
The entry of Alexander into Egypt in 332 BCE, however, had rather different
consequences: a new society was put in place, that of the Graeco-Macedonian
immigrants, who took the reins of command; a new governmental organization
was set up, along with a new society, the "court society"; and new techniques of
administration, production, control, and collection of revenues were intro-
duced. The language of the conquerors, Greek, was imposed as the official lan-
guage, and in the new capital, Alexandria, intellectual and artistic life was in the
hands of Greeks (foundation of the Museum and Library) . Pockets of Greek
population settled in the chora (countryside), where they introduced their own
198 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

system of education and life- style. In such a context, traditional religion ran the
risk of being diluted, if not even extinguished, and it is significant that for many
students of ancient Egypt, the history of Egyptian civilization ended with the ar-
rival of the Greeks. Recent studies, however, have shown that in the immediate
wake of the conquest (and undoubtedly later), there was indeed an "encounter"
between Egyptians and Greeks. A multicultural society was established,' and
there were contacts and exchanges between the cultures.
With the Roman conquest of Egypt in 3o BCE, a new phase was opened in the
life of the religious institutions and their beliefs and practices. Despite manifest
continuities, new problems arose. Though few of them were present in Egypt (in
the second century, a single legion sufficed to "hold" the land), the Romans
reinforced the rigid structures of the society by favoring individuals of Greek de-
scent or education over Egyptians; they introduced new administrative tech-
niques (the "liturgies") and undertook a systematic exploitation of the land for
the benefit of Rome. This new transformation of the structures of society and
the exercise of governance necessarily impacted on the religious level.
Still, though some aspects of the situation of Egypt conquered by the Mace-
donians and then by the Romans can in certain respects be compared to that of
lands that were colonized much later Mexico and Peru, for example, in the era
of Spanish conquest the very notion of religious colonization is out of the
question. The conquerors had no intention of imposing a new and exclusive re-
ligion on the conquered land, and there were no missionaries in the train of the
Greek and Roman soldiers.

THE SACRALIZATION OF POWER

We have seen how for the Egyptians, the royal power was a sacred power, one of
divine origin; this was a very old idea, for it is already attested in the Pyramid
Texts and in the royal titularies of the kings of the earliest dynasties. Son and suc-
cessor of the gods, the king was invested by them with his power; during his life-
time, he was a new Horus, and after death, he was identified with Osiris. In this
somewhat intermediary position between the human realm and that of the gods,
he had the task of seeing to it that order and justice (Maat) reigned, not only in
human society but throughout the cosmos. This highly particular relationship
between the king and the gods resulted in his being considered their only ser-
vant on earth: others, in theory at least, exercised the priestly function only by
delegation. We must recall, however, that although the royal office was sacral-
ized, along with, to a certain extent, the person of the king, the latter was not,
with only a few exceptions, the object of a cult during his lifetime.

' See J. H. Johnson, ed., Life in a Multicultural Society (Chicago, 1992).

FROM THE LAGIDES TO THE ROMAN EMPERORS 1 99

It was thus critically important that the king be recognized as legitimate at the
outset of his reign, because from this legitimacy flowed not only the political sta-
bility of the land, but also the equilibrium of a cosmos that was incessantly men-
aced by chaos. Those who were in a position to testify to this legitimacy, which
was both political and religious, were those in charge of the sacred traditions,
that is to say, the priests. It was they who lent credence to the divine character of
the pharaonic power by means of the myths they elaborated and the liturgies
they celebrated.
In the past, when their legitimacy risked being contested, as often happened,
sovereigns had been obliged to have themselves recognized by the Egyptian
clergy as authentic successors of the gods, as in the case of Tuthmosis III in the
New Kingdom. The problem of recognition was perhaps more delicate when
those who acceded to power were of foreign origin; yet we have any number of
examples of such cases in the first millennium, with kings of Libyan or Kushite
origin. What seems more astonishing is that the Persian kings, conquerors of
Egypt, were "legitimized" in the same manner, though they ruled from Persia
and were merely represented in the land by a satrap; note, for instance, the statue
of Darius found at Susa, with its inscriptions in several languages, including
Egyptian.
The Egyptian clergy thus had a well-established tradition of legitimizing
power, whatever its origin, when Alexander and his troops entered Egypt in 332
BCE, seemingly without encountering much resistance. The clergy of Memphis,
the ancient religious capital where the coronation of kings was traditionally cel-
ebrated, must have played an especially important role in the official recognition
of Alexander as "king of Upper and Lower Egypt." He was perhaps crowned ac-
cording to Egyptian ritual, but that has not been definitively proven. In any case,
when Alexander, some months after his visit to Memphis and before leaving
Egypt, went to consult the famous oracle of Amun in Siwa Oasis, it was as "son
of Amun," the legitimate king of the Two Lands, that he was greeted by the priests
of the god and admitted into the temple and the presence of Amun, which was,
of course, forbidden to ordinary consulters of the divine oracle, for it was a pre-
rogative only of the king. Later, the Romance of Alexander, whose first versions
must have been elaborated at Alexandria, perhaps in the Ptolemaic Period,
would make the king the son, not of Philip of Macedonia, but of the last Egyp-
tian pharaoh, Nectanebo, thus affirming his legitimacy by attaching him to the
old pharaonic line.
In the years that followed the Macedonian conquest, Alexander, and then his
young son, were officially considered as legitimate sovereigns, which meant that
the cult was carried out in their name, and that they were deemed to be the foun-
dations of the stability and the prosperity of Egypt. The same was true of their
Lagide successors.
When he was still only satrap of Egypt on behalf of Alexander's son, Ptolemy,
200 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

son of Lagos, the future Ptolemy I, was already praised by the Egyptian clergy for
his generosity towards the gods of Egypt:

And this great satrap (i.e., Ptolemy) searched for the best (thing to do) for the gods
of Upper and Lower Egypt... .
(Text of the decree) I, Ptolemy the satrap, restore the territory of Patanut to the
god Horus, avenger of his father, lord of Pe, and to Buto, mistress of Pe and of Dep,
from this day forward and in perpetuity, with all its villages, all its towns, all its in-
habitants, all its fields, all its waterways, all its quadrupeds, all its birds, all its herds
of cattle, and all that is engendered and produced, as it was before and with all that
was added by the donation of King Khababash... .
(Response of the priests) The entire extent of this land that King Khababash, the
lord of the Two Lands, image of Tanen, chosen of Ptah, son of the Sun granted, the
governor of Egypt, Ptolemy, has renewed the donation to the gods of Pe and Dep
in perpetuity. As reward for what he has done, may victory and strength be granted
him to the satisfaction of his heart, that the foreign peoples who exist today might
tremble before him.2

When Ptolemy assumed the title of king in 305 BCE and founded a new dy-
nasty (the last one of "independent" Egypt), he was obviously considered by the
clergy to be the holder of legitimate authority, and the same would be the case
with all his descendants, notwithstanding the power struggles that occurred in
the bosom of the Lagide dynasty after the beginning of the second century BCE.
It does not seem that the first Lagides benefited from a coronation ceremony at
Memphis, though this was very likely in the case of Ptolemy II. But after the end
of the third century, it became the rule: it was a means for the kings to have the
legitimacy of their power proclaimed in an entirely official manner, while at the
same time, the practice conveyed an "Egyptianization" of that power. In this pe-
riod, immigration declined steeply and the kings had to rely more on their Egyp-
tian subjects, and in particular on that large and influential group among them,
the clergy.
Moreover, in the first half of the third century, statues of the sovereigns were
placed in Egyptian temples, where they received a cult. We learn of these cults
from the Canopus and Memphis decrees.
In Egyptian priestly circles, there were sporadic instances of resistance and
disaffection with the new masters. In the first century BCE, the biographical in-
scription of a high priest of Ptah of Memphis designates King Ptolemy XII as the
"king of the Ionians," whose "residence is on the shore of the Greek sea,"3 which
seems to indicate a certain "distance" with regard to the sovereign; yet just after-
ward, in the same text, Ptolemy is called "king of Upper and Lower Egypt" and

2 Satrap Stela; translation based on that of E. Bevan, A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty
(London, 1927), pp. 47-49.
Harris Stela, BM 886.
FROM THE LAGIDES TO THE ROMAN EMPERORS 201

"lord of the Two Lands," in conformity with tradition. The Demotic Chronicle
and the Potter's Oracle, texts of a prophetic nature that were probably written in
the priestly circles of Middle and Upper Egypt in the Hellenistic Period, bear the
trace of genuine hostility toward the "impious" Greeks and their kings; but they
do not seem to have succeeded in undermining the traditional image of the god-
king.
The Roman conquest brought scarcely any change to this image. Just as it had
backed the power of the Lagides, the clergy legitimated that of the emperor,
deeming him to be a new Horus, heir of Osiris, responsible for the order of the
cosmos and of society. The texts of temples built in honor of Egyptian deities in
the Hellenistic and Roman Periods glorified the Lagide king or the Roman em-
peror in nearly the same terms as those once used for the pharaohs. At Philae,
Augustus is called "son of Re, lord of crowns, Caesar, living forever, beloved of
Ptah and Isis," and "the good god, the son of Shu, the true heir of the lord of the
gods:' This fiction, according to which the emperor played the double, both ter-
restrial and cosmic, role of a pharaoh, would be continued under Augustus's suc-
cessors, as witnessed by a text from the temple of Esna:

Khnum-Re, lord of Esna, says:

"My arms are vigorous in modeling you on my wheel,
o my beloved son, Pharaoh, living forever!
How beautiful is your peaceful coming,
king of the south and the north, lord of the Two Lands,
Autokrator Kaisaros,
son of Re, lord of crowns,
Trajan the protected!
You shine among the (other) houses,
for your house is great at the head of the land,
like Re when he emerges from Nut.
And you take power over the entire land
at your appearance,
thanks to the prestige I have granted you,
you, among all whom I have modeled.4

As had been the case in preceding epochs, there were changes in the royal titu-
laries elaborated by the clergy, which constituted "programs of government" of
a sort. A significant novelty was the introduction into the titularies of the Ro-
man pharaohs of the formula, "he whose power is incomparable in the City
par excellence that he loves, Rome."5 This expression signals the difference be-
tween the new pharaoh and his predecessors: he reigned over Egypt, but from

4 Translation based on that of S. Sauneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna aux derniers siècles du pagan-
isme, Esna 5 (Cairo, 1962), p. 194.
S See J. C. Grenier, "L'Empereur et le Pharaon," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, 2 (Berlin,
1995), 18, 5, pp. 3181-94.
202 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

Rome. But otherwise, the official ideology continued to function in its broad
outlines.
Because Egyptian religion sacralized power, rendering it incontestable, it
could only have been well treated by the new masters of Egypt. This is obvious
in the case of the Lagides, who were otherwise obliged to deal carefully with a
clergy that constituted their principal support. The situation is less clear in the
case of the emperors, who cared more about exploiting the resources of the land
than about taking its traditions into account and conciliating its inhabitants.
Still, the sacralization of power seems to have remained an effective ideolog-
ical instrument. While a number of insurrectional movements broke out in the
third and second centuries BCE, and then again beginning in the reign of Mar-
cus Aurelius, it was not the nature of the state's power that was called into ques-
tion. The royal office itself was never challenged, and the rebels saw themselves
collectively condemned as "sacrilegious" and "impious."

THEMES AND INSTRUMENTS OF ROYAL PROPAGANDA

In the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, just as in the pharaonic era, Egyptian re-
ligion invested the sovereign with the task of maintaining the order of the cos-
mos. Forces were perpetually in conflict in a universe incessantly threatened by
a return to chaos. This vision of the cosmos as an equilibrium of antagonistic
forces was expressed in a series of myths, including that of the battle of Re against
Apopis or that of the conflict of Horus and Seth.
The king had an essential role to play in this power game: he was the guaran-
tor of Maat. When he offered Maat to the gods, that is to say, when he assured
their daily cult in the temples, he in turn received Maat (order and justice) from
them, which he caused to reign on earth and which was the source of all pros-
perity. But if he failed in his task, if there was any default in the cult rendered to
the gods, the latter might abandon their homes, the temples, and turn away from
Egypt, where disorder would set in, while at the same time, the cosmos lapsed
into chaos.
This ideology, which functioned on many levels (cosmic/local, symbolic/
concrete, etc.), remained essentially unchanged. It required the king to take
charge of the cult, for the objective of the cult was to guarantee the presence of
the gods in their temples, and this presence was indispensable to the order of the
cosmos. It also required the king to exercise his capacity of "lord of Maat" to as-
sure the protection of his realm and the subsistence of its inhabitants: thus, the
representatives of the clergy who gathered in a synod at Canopus in 238 BCE
thanked Ptolemy III Euergetes for having furnished grain to the population in a
period of famine, an act that could not be viewed just as a sign of the king's fore-
sight and good administration, but as a manifestation of his divinity. Some two
FROM THE LAGIDES TO THE ROMAN EMPERORS 203

centuries later, at Philae, the emperor Augustus was designated as "the Nile of
Egypt, who inundates the land with food."
But onto this old doctrine, according to which the king was the guarantor of
both the order of the cosmos and the stability and prosperity of his realm, there
was superimposed a new ideology, this one of Greek origin. At the time when
the Hellenistic kingdoms were formed, a new image of kingship was elaborated
in Greek philosophical circles, under the influence of Stoic thought. This new
image, which was far removed from the "classical" Greek tradition of distrust
in absolute power, was obviously influenced by the personality and career of
Alexander.
From that time on, the ideal to which the kings were expected to conform
(with greater or less success) was an ideal of the virtues that alone rendered a
sovereign worthy to govern: the king had to incarnate justice (he was the nomos
empsuchos, the living law, the unique source of all legislation), valor (thanks to
him, the kingdom was sheltered from enemies and its inhabitants lived in secu-
rity), philanthropia (that is, the benevolence and generosity that assured the well-
being of his subjects; it was, in a sense, the good use of his riches), and piety (piety
toward the gods, his ancestors and protectors, whose cult the king was obliged
to assure so as to receive their favors in return). This ensemble of virtues indi-
cated that the sovereign was of divine origin and thus especially qualified to as-
sume the royal power. From Alexander on down, a whole series of Hellenistic
kings saw these justificatory powers attributed to them, or claimed them for
themselves in general, quite undeservedly and it was on these justificatory
virtues that royal propaganda was based.
Thus, in Lagide Egypt from the third century BCE on, we can see two ideolo-
gies at work, ideologies that did not compete, but rather were complementary:
the Egyptian ideology of the king as guarantor of the equilibrium of the world
and the indispensable linchpin of society, and the Greek ideal of the king as in-
carnation of all virtues. The first was an integral part of the religious system; it
was principally expressed in the texts in the temples, which, of course, does not
mean that it was confined to the priestly milieu: it was undoubtedly part of a
"worldview" that was widespread among Egyptians of all classes in every period
of history. It is clear that the latter also had a religious component: it found its
culmination and its most vigorous expression in the institution, under Ptolemy
II, of the royal cult (discussed in Book II, chapter 5) . This second ideology also
served as the basis for the entire propaganda campaign orchestrated by the state.
This propaganda assumed various forms. It was expressed in the official epi-
thets adopted by the sovereigns Soter, the Savior; Euergetes, the Beneficent;
Epiphanes, the One (= the god) Who Manifests Himself epithets that assim-
ilated them to the Greek gods Zeus and Dionysos. Assimilations of the same sort
appear in the coinage of the Lagide kings: the eagle and the thunderbolt of Zeus
are depicted on the reverse of their coins from Ptolemy I Soter down to Cleopa-
204 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

tra VII; the horn of plenty, the emblem of deities of fecundity, accompanies the
effigy of the queens Arsinoe II, Berenike II, and Cleopatra I; and Ptolemy III Eu-
ergetes had himself represented wearing the crown of the sun god Helios, which
was adorned with rays. It is clear that these coins, which were widely circulated
both within Egypt (bronze coins) and abroad (gold and silver coins) were an ex-
cellent tool for the diffusion of the royal ideology. The ideology was also con-
veyed by images, both official and unofficial, of the sovereigns; a typical example
is that of the many faience vases decorated with the effigy of a queen carrying
the horn of plenty, symbol of the prosperity she dispensed to her subjects.
Eulogies of royal virtues also appear in texts whose propagandistic nature is
not subject to doubt. This is the case with the encomium to Philadelphos writ-
ten by Theokritos during the period when he lived in Alexandria, protected by a
king who patronized and paid writers and scientists, for whom he had founded
the Museum; the themes developed in the poem the power of the king, his
courage, his riches and generosity, his piety correspond, and not just by
chance, to the traits that constituted the ideal of a Hellenistic king:

Countless lands and tribes of mankind without number

Raise crops that ripen under Zeus' beneficent rain,
But no land is as fertile as the lowland of Egypt,
Where the Nile, overflowing, soaks and breaks up the clods.
Nor is there a country with so many cities of men skilled in labor;

And Ptolemy rules as king over them all.

... His are the best ships

Sailing the ocean, and all the sea and the land
And the rushing rivers acknowledge Ptolemy's rule.
And about him gather multitudes of spirited horsemen
And hosts of shield-bearing warriors in flashing bronze armor.
His wealth would outweigh the riches of all other kings,
So much comes to his opulent household each day from all quarters.
His people attend in peace to their various trades.

Yet in that rich house gold is not heaped up to lie useless,

As if the wealth of ever industrious ants;
Much is lavished on the shrines of the gods—
First fruits ever and other offerings besides.6

These are the same traits that are stressed in official texts, such as directives ad-
dressed to functionaries and the decrees of synods, texts that were to a greater or

6 Theokritos, Idyll 17; see T. Sargent, The Idylls of Theocritus: A Verse Translation (New York, 1982),

PP. 71-72.
FROM THE LAGIDES TO THE ROMAN EMPERORS 205

lesser degree inspired by the central power. All this propaganda could be put on
display in public ceremonies intended to glorify both the person of the sover-
eign and the royal office; an example is the great festival celebrated by Ptolemy
II at Alexandria in the 27os BCE in honor of his deceased and deified parents (see
below, chapter 7 of Book II) .
There was less need for propaganda in the Roman Period than in the Ptole-
maic era: the center of power was no longer in Egypt, where emperors made only
rare appearances, and the administrative system that was put in place seems
scarcely to have preoccupied itself with obtaining the consent of the governed.
Yet the ideology of a peace and prosperity guaranteed by a god-king remained
alive, both in the texts of the Egyptian temples constructed during the Roman
Period and on the coins, one of whose favored motifs was a depiction of the Nile,
symbol of good harvests and thus of the riches of the land, associated with that
of the emperor. In 68 CE, T. Julius Alexander, the prefect of Egypt, proclaimed
in an edict that the inhabitants of Egypt were to expect with confidence "the sal-
vation and the material well-being of the beneficent and august emperor Galba,
who has shone down on us for the salvation of the human race."
Over time, the cult of the emperor as "living god" spread throughout Egypt,
sometimes as a result of official initiatives, but also sometimes as a "sponta-
neous" movement (see a discussion of this in chapter 5 of Book II), without any
directives from the central authority.
 CHAPTER 2

REACTIONS OF THE PRIESTS

THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD: AN AMBIGUOUS GAME

OF OPPOSITION/COLLABORATION

At the time of the Macedonian conquest, the Egyptian clergy constituted a

strictly hierarchic caste that disposed of knowledge and power. The occupation
of the country by the Persians does not seem to have changed the material situ-
ation of the temples; thus, the donation texts of Edfu, which were written at the
beginning of the Ptolemaic Period, tell us that many fields had been granted to
the god Horus of Edfu by the Persian kings. It was members of the clergy who
administered the domains of the temples, whose revenues in good part escaped
royal control. Certain temples thus seem to have been quasi-autonomous en-
claves, and their clergies played an extremely important role: they administered
sometimes considerable goods, and as a consequence, they enjoyed a material
situation that was enviable in comparison with the mass of the population.
Moreover, their cultic functions and the knowledge they possessed in various ar-
eas also made them a privileged and influential class.
At the end of the fourth century BCE, the organization and the functions of
the clergy remained what they had been in the pharaonic period; it is probable,
however, that its tendency to constitute a professional caste was increasing. In
the middle of the fifth century, Herodotus had stressed the "closed" aspect of the
sacerdotal class, within which offices were handed down from father to son (but
without women being excluded), and the genealogies of priests that we are able
to reconstruct thanks to papyri and inscriptions of the Ptolemaic Period abun-
REACTIONS OF THE PRIESTS 207

dantly confirm the testimony of the historian. The family of the high priests of
Memphis, known from the first half of the third century down to the end of the
first century, is a striking example of this phenomenon. But even in this period,
it might still have been possible to combine priestly offices with administrative
or even military positions.
Of course, as in the past, there certainly were considerable differences in sta-
tus and life-style between the man responsible for a major sanctuary, living in a
nome capital (e.g., Petosiris, high priest of Thoth at Hermopolis during the fi-
nal decades of the fourth century, whose sumptuous tomb is indicative of his
high position) and the priest of a small local temple, sometimes the proprietor
and sole clergyman in his cult place; and there was a whole series of intermedi-
ate degrees. As to their knowledge and competencies, the diversity was probably
also as great, especially given the specialization of functions that characterized
the priestly class.
Alexander and his successors adopted an attitude of tolerance, and even of
generosity, toward this Egyptian clergy, whose role in society remained consid-
erable and who were in a position to furnish considerable ideological support
for their rule. The Satrap Stela, as well as the decrees of the synods of the third
and the beginning of the second centuries, evoke the benevolence of the new
masters of Egypt toward the traditional religion. Nor was this mere flattery: the
many temples whose construction was undertaken in the third century and con-
tinued into the following centuries testify to the tolerance of the Lagides, who,
moreover, undoubtedly contributed to their financing.
Still, the economic power of certain temples, and consequently of their clergy,
must have been perceived as a danger by the first Lagides. Because they were
"fields of the gods," large domains to a greater or lesser extent escaped royal con-
trol; they were sources of revenue, revenue from the fields, but also from the
workshops and the various enterprises associated with the temples, which di-
rectly benefited the cult and the clergy, and from which the treasury doubtless
collected little. The essential objective of the Lagide administration was to ex-
ploit the realm as profitably as possible, drawing a maximum of profit from it,
by all the more or less empirical means at its disposal. Undoubtedly, the crown
could not just confiscate the "fields of the gods" for its own profit, but at the be-
ginning of the third century, the administration of these domains was entrusted
to royal officials, though it is not always clear whether they substituted for priests
or were their "doubles"; in any case, they represented the interests of the state.
The economic independence of the clergy was thus diminished, though its ma-
terial situation remained a privileged one, for from that time on we see it paid
by the king, who gave its members a remuneration called syntaxis, or parcels of
land to rent (priests thus became royal tenant-farmers), in exchange for their
services.
It thus seems that while the conquest was not detrimental to Egyptian reli-
208 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

gion, it entailed, at least at first, a reduction in the privileges of the clergy. Their
reaction, however, was neither hostility nor resistance. Throughout the third
century, the clergy, or in any event, its representatives who gathered in synods,
played the power game. Manetho, a high priest of Sebennytos, served as a coun-
selor of Ptolemy II Philadelphos (see the following chapter), and he wrote a trea-
tise on Egyptian religion in the Greek language. The members of the clergy who
assembled in a synod at Canopus in 238 BCE composed an overblown eulogy of
the king and inaugurated a cult in honor of his deceased daughter, Berenike, who
was assimilated to an Egyptian goddess; the decree of the priests who assembled
at Memphis in 196 BCE (the text of this decree is carved on the Rosetta Stone)
stipulated that a statue of the sovereign be placed in all the temples of Egypt and
receive an Egyptian-style cult, and it did not hesitate to qualify as "impious" the
inhabitants of Lykopolis in the delta, who rose up against the young King Ptol-
emy V.
Can we say, then, that the Egyptian clergy "rallied around" the political power?
To use this term would imply that the interests of this clergy were opposed to
those of the king, on both the political and the economic level. But it is now be-
coming clearer that even in the reign of the first Lagide, Greeks of high rank who
held important administrative (and other) offices at court were at the same time
invested with high priestly offices,' and that native Egyptians could hold high
administrative offices in addition to their priestly ones. It is thus difficult to de-
fine the Egyptian clergy as a homogeneous "class." The authors of these decrees
in honor of the king might have belonged to this category of Egyptian priests
who were "Hellenized" enough to be integrated into the system of the Ptolemaic
monarchy.
At the beginning of the second century, however, signs of tension between the
clergy and the state began to appear, and the latter made important concessions
to the personnel of the temples. The decree of Memphis already showed that the
king forgave the temples for payments they had not made for a number of years,
probably during the period of disturbances that followed the death of Ptolemy
IV and the accession of his young son. The interpretation of these measures has
recently been the subject of debate. According to some historians, rather than in-
dicating a weakening of royal power, they reveal a strengthening of that power
and an increased dependence of the clergy on it.2 Concessions of this sort were
repeated during the second century: the king often declined to collect various
imposts and taxes due to him, and between 121 and 118 BCE, in the reign of
Ptolemy VIII, a series of ordinances freed the temples from their arrears in the

' P. Derchain, Les Impondérables de l'hellénisation (Brepols, 2000).

2 W. Clarysse, "Ptolémées et temples," in D. Valbelle and J. Leclant, eds., Le Décret de Memphis (Paris,
1999).
REACTIONS OF THE PRIESTS 209

payment of imposts and also guaranteed their right to administer the "sacred
arouras" and collect their revenues directly:

They (i.e., Ptolemy VIII and his two wives, Cleopatra II and Cleopatra III) have de-
creed that the sacred land and the other sources of sacred revenue that belong to
the temples will remain theirs, and that they will also collect the revenue of the
apomoira (a property tax) that they collect from the vineyards, the orchards, and
the other plantations. Likewise, the sums that are allotted to them, along with those
which the treasury pays as subventions to the temples, and the other allocations
which have been granted to them down to year 51 (i.e., of the reign of Ptolemy
VIII), will be paid regularly, as in the other cases, and it will not be permitted to
anyone to appropriate any of these revenues. No one will seize by violence that
which is consecrated to the gods, or apply torture to those in charge of the sacred
revenues, or appropriate lands or other sacred revenues from the villages, or col-
lect taxes on associations, or "crowns" (a special impost), or the artabieia (a form
of property tax) on the fields consecrated to the gods, or administer the sacred
arouras under any pretext; rather, the priests themselves will be given the right to
administer them.3

This policy of concessions is explained by the fact that insurrections began to

occur in the final years of the third century. In 205 BCE, the Thebais essentially
seceded, and for twenty years, it would remain in the hands of indigenous kings
of Nubian origin, until PtolemyV succeeded in reconquering it. Throughout this
period, the attitude of the clergy of the major sanctuaries of Upper Egypt was
ambiguous, to say the least. In 186 BCE, a decree of the priests of Philae con-
gratulated Ptolemy V on having ended the uprising, but the Theban clergy had
undoubtedly sided with the rebels. The king had need of the clergy's support, to
the extent that the latter held the trump card of the legitimation of power; and
by the same token, he probably had to make concessions to their requirements,
or give in to their pressures.
Another example of these concessions to the clergy is the king's granting of
the right of asylum to a number of temples that requested it during the first cen-
tury. The documentation on this subject is uneven, but we know that between
93 and 57/56 BCE, the town of Theadelphia in the Faiyum received the privilege
of asylia for four of its seven temples. This privilege increased the prestige of the
temples and the influence of their priests, for the police could not pursue per-
sons who took refuge in a temple that had the right of asylum:

King Ptolemy X, who is also Alexander.

Whereas Ptolemaios, our relative and dioketes ("minister of finances") has re-

3 M.-T. Lenger, Corpus des ordonnances des Ptolémées, no. 53.

210 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

ported to us that our ancestors already accorded considerable privileges to all the
temples of Egypt, and that some of the most notable even became places of asy-
lum, while the temple of Harkhentekhtai (a form of Horus) at Athribis, a first-class
and remarkable temple, one of the most ancient and most famous, has obtained
other favors, but remains below (the rank of) a place of asylum.
We have decreed the granting to this temple as well, within the very boundaries
of its enclosure, of the right of asylum, as is the case at Memphis and Busiris, along
with others among the other temples.
Let it be so.4

In sum, the Egyptian clergy does not seem to have suffered from its relation-
ship with the Lagide monarchy, to the extent that, once past the initial phase of
the conquest, it acquired a certain number of advantages and privileges, as well
as a quasi-autonomous administrative and financial status. While a religious and
political opposition is to be found in prophetic texts written in the second cen-
tury BCE or earlier, this opposition was apparently limited to certain local cir-
cles and presented itself as a sort of "refuge into the imagination" rather than a
stimulus to violent action. The excellent relationship between the Lagides and
the high priests of Ptah of Memphis is perhaps indicative of the attitudes of the
clergy and the state toward one another.

THE ROMAN PERIOD: A MUZZLED AND RESIGNED CLERGY

We are poorly informed about the material situation of the temples and the
clergy at the time of the Roman conquest. Cleopatra VII seems to have imposed
a policy of mandatory loans that might have impoverished them. According to
Diodorus Siculus, who wrote toward the end of the first century BCE, a third of
the soil of Egypt was in their hands, but this affirmation is not reliable, at least
for this period.
In any case, one of the first actions of the Roman administration was the con-
fiscation of the temple lands for the benefit of the state (20 BCE), with the result
that the clergy lost, this time definitively, its financial autonomy. At the same
time, a much stricter control of the clergy was imposed, under the supervision
of an official who bore the title of "high priest of Alexandria and all Egypt;'
though his duties were purely civil; each year, the temples had to present him
with an inventory of their personnel and their goods, and they were subject to
periodic visits by inspectors who examined their books.
An official text, known to us from a papyrus of the period of Antoninus, the
Gnomon of the Idios Logos (the administrator of the imperial property; in this

4 Ibid., no. 64, 96 BCE.

REACTIONS OF THE PRIESTS 211

period, this office was combined with that of high priest of Alexandria and all
Egypt), contained a detailed list of the obligations of the various categories of
priests and the interdictions to which they were subjected:

It is not permitted for the priests to have any office other than the service of the
gods, or to go about in garments of wool, or to have long hair, even when they are
not in divine service.
It is not permitted to sacrifice calves that do not bear the seal; those who have
sacrificed contrary to this rule are condemned to [pay] 50o drachmas.
A priest who abandons the divine service is condemned to 200 drachmas; if he
wears a woolen garment, 200 drachmas; if he is a flutist, ioo drachmas; if he is a
pastophoros, loo drachmas.
For those who bury the sacred animals, it is not permitted to be a prophet, to
carry a naos in procession, or to feed the sacred animals.
For the pastophoroi, it is not permitted to participate in priestly duties.
A priestly office cannot be held by laymen.5

To apply for an office, a candidate had to prove that he belonged to a priestly

family and request authorization to be circumcised, for circumcision, which was
the rule for the Egyptian clergy, was forbidden throughout the empire.
Otherwise, a certain number of privileges that the clergy still enjoyed in the
Ptolemaic Period are supposed to have been done away with, or in any case,
strictly curtailed. The right of asylum was reduced, and the same seems to have
been true of "freedom of assembly": there is no trace of synods in the Roman Pe-
riod. The personal status of the members of the clergy was definitely lowered.
While the "upper clergy" was in principle exempt from the laographia (a head
tax that all Egyptians above the age of fourteen had to pay), this privilege was
not always respected. The same was true for corvée labor, to which priests often
complained that they had been subjected illegally, so they said by overzeal-
ous officials:

To Potamon, strategos of the meris (administrative division) of Herakleides of the

Arsinoite nome, from Peteuris, son of Peteuris, and from Sisois, son of Orse-
nouphis, and from the other priests of the temple that is in the village of Bacchias.
The custom has been established that we are not taken out to work on the dikes in
places other than the canal called Patsontis, from which comes the water that serves
to irrigate the fields of the village and to fill the basins located below; but now, the
officials force us, contrary to custom, to work in other places far from the village.
We pray you, if it seems good to you, to order them to put a stop to this outrage
towards us, so that, working in the usual places near the village, we can daily cele-

5 Gnomon of the Idios Logos, Ägyptische Urkunden aus den Staatliche Museum zu Berlin, Griechische
Urkunden, vol. 5 (Berlin, 1919), 1.
212 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

brate the ceremonies of the cult of the gods, for the preservation of our lord, the
emperor Aurelius Antoninus Caesar, and for the realization of the inundation of
the very sacred Nile, so that we may obtain assistance.6

To this complaint Ulpius Serenianus, high priest in charge of the cult, re-
sponded: "The strategos will see to it that force is not used."7
A double concern, both economic and political, seems to have inspired the
Roman administration to exercise supervision over the clergy. The Roman state
assumed control of the vast domains the temples possessed at the time of the
conquest, and as it was not forbidden to them, in the Roman Period, to receive
donations and even acquire goods, the state got something out of it by collect-
ing imposts on the fields and artisanal activities linked to the cult and on the rais-
ing of sacred animals and animals intended for offerings. For the state, priestly
office itself constituted a source of revenue, for the members of the clergy were
obliged to purchase their right to assume office, and certain sacerdotal offices
were put up for bidding, to the profit of the treasury. And insofar as they supply
pretexts for fines, the multitude of infractions codified in the Gnomon of the
Idios Logos was undoubtedly inspired less by moral and religious concerns than
by financial ones.
But there was probably also a political motive for this oversight over the
clergy. The provisions of the Gnomon reveal a manifest concern with isolating
the clergy vis-à-vis the rest of the population, and perhaps also with dividing it.
The Roman administrators were certainly conscious of the role the clergy could
play as a moving force behind "nationalist" movements.
But while the temples did not play as important a role in the Roman Period
as they had in the Ptolemaic era, especially in the economic life of the country,
the clergy retained a relatively privileged position; at least, this was true of the
uppermost echelons of the hierarchy. Partially exempt from certain taxes and
corvées, they received a certain "special handling" even when, as stipulated in
the Gnomon, they were absent from their duties because of an incurable illness.
As in the past, they had a right to a share in the offerings made to the gods, prob-
ably calculated according to their rank in the hierarchy. In this way alone, their
standard of living was obviously far better than that of the peasant masses: in the
year 147 CE, the prophet of the main temple at Tebtunis had a revenue of 500
drachmas, partly in cash, and partly in-kind, while in the same period, in the
Faiyum, an agricultural worker earned about 170 drachmas a year, just enough
to feed a family of four. Even in the small local temples, the priests, whose pa-
pyrus documents make mention of their many activities, seem to have enjoyed
a relative ease. They had houses, parcels of land, animals, and sometimes slaves;

6
R Yale 349, dated June 14, 171 CE.
7 R Yale 351, dated September 26, 171 CE.
REACTIONS OF THE PRIESTS 213

they bought and sold goods; they borrowed and lent. In a society in which most
lived from day to day, they had a minimum of reserves.
It was perhaps this preservation of a modestly privileged status and relative
material well-being that accounts for the absence of a reaction by the clergy to
imperial policy. Signs of discontent and a fall in recruitment made their ap-
pearance on an extremely localized basis in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, and it
was in his reign that for the first time in more than a century and a half of Ro-
man occupation, there was a violent revolt against Rome, that of the boukoloi
of the eastern delta, supposedly headed, according to Dio Cassius, by a priest
named Isidoros.
It is clear that the Egyptian clergy played the game of allegiance to Rome. The
texts in the temples are indicative: the doctrine of divine birth was applied to the
emperors, as it had been to the Lagides, and their role as guarantors of the order
of the cosmos and source of prosperity for the land and of "salvation" for its in-
habitants was constantly and clearly proclaimed. We may imagine that in a so-
ciety filled with change, the clergy had all the more need to cling to its old
certitudes, to its traditional vision of the world. In the Roman Period, though
the temples had lost their economic role, they remained the refuge and the "con-
servatory" of religious and cultural traditions. Their "houses of life" were func-
tioning, and theological activity was lively (see Book II, chapter 4). No longer
having an essential role to play in "civil" society, the priests could fall back on the
closed world of the temples and on cultic activity, which at least continued to
supply a justification for their existence.
 CHAPTER 3

A NEW GOD

The "Creation" of Sarapis

THE GREEK CONTRIBUTION AND THE EGYPTIAN CONTRIBUTION

When the Lagides began to rule Egypt, they conducted a rather "liberal" religious
policy with regard to the traditional religion. Nonetheless, they were involved in
the origin of a religious creation whose impact was perhaps not considerable at
the outset, but which later became major, both within and outside Egypt: the cult
of Sarapis.
This creation seems to have been surrounded by legends at a very early date.
The most widespread and the most coherent is that which tells of a dream of
Ptolemy I Soter,1 in which there appeared to him the "colossal statue" of a god
residing at Sinope, a Greek colony on the Black Sea; this god, "whom he had
never before seen," supposedly commanded Ptolemy to transport his image to
Alexandria. When the statue arrived at Alexandria, it was recognized by the
counselors of Ptolemy, Timotheos the Eleusinian, who was an interpreter of
dreams, and the priest Manetho of Sebennytos, as an image of Pluto, the Greek
god of the netherworld. From that moment on, it was called Sarapis, "which is
the name of Pluto among the Egyptians." Other accounts differ from that of
Plutarch in certain details (the king was Ptolemy II; the statue was the work of
the sculptor Bryaxis, etc.), but most agree on the broad outlines. As it stands,
however, the account raises a whole series of problems.
The first problem has to do with chronology. Was the introduction of Sara-

' The account is in Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 361 F-362 E.

A NEW GOD 215

pis at Alexandria due to the Lagides (Ptolemy I or Ptolemy II), or had the god
already been in existence? There are traditions that attribute the foundation of
the cult of Sarapis to Alexander himself, in the city he had just founded, while
others assert the existence of this cult in the Egyptian settlement that is supposed
to have existed before the founding of Alexandria (the name Rakotis, which has
been thought to be that of this settlement, can be translated as "the construction
site" and would thus be the Egyptian designation of the new city under con-
struction) .
The name of the god has given rise to lengthy debates; even in antiquity, many
different etymologies were proposed to explain it. It is clear, though, that the
name is of Egyptian origin. Deliberating on the "nature" of the god, Plutarch
wrote, "Most of the priests say that Osiris and Apis were mixed together into a
single entity."Sarapis appears to be the Greek transcription of the Egyptian name
Osor-Hapi, which is that of a deity worshiped at Memphis in the Late Period,
and which is none other that the deceased Apis bull, which became an Osiris (in
this period, every deceased person was "Osirified"). The Egyptians celebrated the
cult of this dead Apis, but also, so it would seem, did the Greeks who had settled
in Memphis before the conquest. His name appears in its earliest Greek form in
a papyrus from the end of the fourth century BCE, the "Oath of Artemisia," in
which a woman of Memphis calls on the god "Oserapis" as witness. This was thus
indeed the name of an Egyptian god (probably not widely recognized beyond
Memphis), which was given to the god who "came from Sinope."
And what of the city of Sinope, which had neither a particular relationship
with Egypt nor any special devotion to the cult of Pluto? Might this connection
be an etymological fantasy born of a confusion between the Egyptian name of
the "house of Apis" and the Greek name Sinope?
But the most difficult problem is that of the image of the god. The deity who
appeared to Ptolemy was supposed to have been identified as Pluto because of
the presence at his side of Kerberos (in Greek mythology, the dog of the nether-
world) and a serpent; he was thus supposed to have had the appearance of a
bearded, seated old man, with Kerberos at his feet, like the traditional Greek rep-
resentations of Hades-Pluto, which would become the canonical image of the
Egyptian Sarapis. Yet the image of the Memphite god Osor-Hapi, as it appears
on stelae and bas-reliefs, is that of a mummified man with a bull's head, bearing
between its horns the solar disk surmounted by two feathers. It is difficult to see
how Ptolemy's counselors could have "recognized" the image of the hybrid god
of Memphis in that of a purely anthropomorphic being whose appearance was
comparable to that of classical Greek gods Zeus, Asklepios, and Hades.
The accounts of the origin of Sarapis thus contain a number of obscure de-
tails. We can, however, discern certain essential points in them.
The god who made his appearance under the name Sarapis in papyri and in-
scriptions from Egypt at the beginning of the third century BCE was not, prop-
21 6 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

erly speaking, a "creation." An old Memphite deity, one already known to the
Greeks who had settled in that region, now received a new, purely Greek, image,
and a new name, a Hellenized version of his Egyptian name. Did the new figure
thus "created" retain any of the traits of his Egyptian prototype? When the im-
age of the god was transformed, was his very nature transformed? That is the en-
tire question.
The story about the dream of Ptolemy and the arrival of the god of Sinope
can be considered as a pious fiction that more or less masks what must have been
a conscious and deliberate undertaking on the part of the theologians in the en-
tourage of Ptolemy I. The fact remains that it was accepted as the official version
of the arrival of Sarapis at Alexandria. Later, a whole series of stories about the
foundation of cult places in honor of the god would mention his appearance in
a dream as a decisive element: it was the god himself who manifested his will.
It is indeed probable that things were deliberately done to legitimate the "cre-
ation" of Sarapis, and later, to legitimate the construction of his temples, sup-
posedly based on an incontestable divine authority. But it is also clear that no
one contested the ability of the gods to appear to humans, whether dreaming or
awake, to reveal their will or to respond to their queries (see Book II, chapter 5) .
We cannot resolve the question of whether it was the counselors of the king
or the king himself who initiated the "creation." But there is reason to think that
there was royal intervention. From the outset, the cult of Sarapis was an official
one, supported by the state; the god was manifestly close to the center of power.

WHO WAS SARAPIS?

The image of Sarapis, which was supposedly brought to Alexandria from a Greek
city, was that of a Greek god. The oldest image, the one that is supposed to have
been placed in the first temple built in honor of Sarapis at Alexandria, is not pre-
served to us, but we can deduce its appearance from innumerable depictions
from the Hellenistic, and especially the Roman, eras (see figure 12). The god is
seated on a throne, clothed in Greek style in a tunic and a mantle, sandals on his
feet, and holding a scepter. His bearded face, his curly hair, and his often-severe
expression are those of a Zeus or an Asklepios, but his crown, the kalathos (that
is, bushel or grain measure), which is sometimes decorated with an olive branch,
identifies him. In some rare instances, the kalathos is replaced by the atef crown
of Osiris. It indeed seems that this was the "canonical" image of the god. There
are variants Sarapis can be standing, or he can have the dog Kerberos with him,
or even the child god Harpokrates—but the essential features remain un-
changed.
The characteristic and constant element of these depictions is their anthro-
pomorphic character. Though he was related to the bull of Memphis, Sarapis was
A NEW GOD 217

FIGURE 12.. Sarapis enthroned. Central motif of a golden crown from the treasure of the temple of Dush,
second century CE. Drawing prepared from a photo by J.-F. Gout, Institut Français d'Archéologie Ori-
entale du Caire.

never represented in bovine or hybrid form; in the Roman Period, there were
images of Sarapis with a serpent's body, stressing his function of agathos daimon,
guarantor of the fertility of the fields and good harvests, but these representa-
tions were limited in number, and they were apparently not cult images. While
the basic image of Sarapis could seem familiar to the Greeks, we might well won-
der how the Egyptians received it. A partial answer is furnished by recent dis-
coveries at Dush in el-Kharga Oasis. In the temple there, which was constructed
between the reign of Domitian and that of Hadrian and dedicated to Osiris-
Sarapis and Isis, the recently excavated "treasure" included classical, anthropo-
morphic images of Sarapis, but even more images of the sacred bull Apis. We
must thus acknowledge that the same divine entity could be depicted in very dif-
ferent ways.
As for the nature and functions of the new god, they are clear from the im-
ages and texts dedicated to him. First of all, in conformity with his origin, he was
a god of the dead, though it is uncertain whether this aspect of the god became
218 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

very widespread: Egypt already had a god of the dead, Osiris, who remained
broadly predominant. Sarapis scarcely appears in this function other than as a
double or Hellenized substitute for Osiris.
Like Osiris, he was also a god of the fertility of the fields. His crown was a grain
measure, and he was sometimes depicted holding a horn of plenty. In the Ro-
man Period, peasants consulted him to find out when to sow a field. His pres-
ence on Roman imperial coins made him the guarantor of the provisioning of
Rome with wheat wheat that came principally from Egypt.
While this double funerary and agrarian function had already characterized
Osiris, the healing function, which was a vital aspect of Sarapis, appears to be
something entirely new (in the pharaonic era, healing power could be ascribed
to various gods, with no particular "specialization"). From the beginning of the
third century on, miraculous cures were effected by the god in his sanctuary at
Canopus, near Alexandria. Later, the practice of incubation to obtain a cure be-
came one of the specialties of the temples of Sarapis: the faithful would come
and spend the night in the Serapeum to obtain a vision and an oracle from the
god, and the oracle had to be deciphered by an interpreter of dreams, after which
the miracle was "registered" in the archives of the temple. In private letters, we
often find mention of thankful prayers and deeds addressed to Sarapis in return
for a cure. His popularity as a healing god was comparable to that enjoyed by
Asklepios in Greece from the fourth century on, with analogous therapeutic pro-
cedures. Magico-religious medicine became widespread in this period and was
used in parallelism with the "learned" Hippocratic medicine that was practiced
at Alexandria and in the major Greek cities.
From the very beginning, Sarapis was a god closely linked to the royal office.
Throughout the third century, and later as well, the Lagides manifested a con-
stant interest in him. Ptolemy III built a new, grand Serapeum at Alexandria.
Ptolemy IV had the effigy of Sarapis and Isis depicted on his coins; at a very early
date, Sarapis was brought into connection with Isis, and this new divine couple
was frequently associated with the royal couple in prayers, dedications, and even
official oath formulas. Sarapis was thus the protector of the new dynasty and per-
haps also of the new capital city. In the Roman Period, Vespasian, who was pro-
claimed emperor by the legions of Egypt, went to the temple of Sarapis at
Alexandria to ask for assurances as to the solidity of his power.

SARAPIS: DYNASTIC GOD, GOD OF THE POLIS,

GOD "FOR THE GREEKS"?

The introduction of a new god and a new cult in the years following the Mace-
donian conquest of Egypt poses a problem. Egypt had a rich pantheon, one with
which the Greeks had long been familiar, as testified by Herodotus, and the new
A NEW GOD 219

immigrants often brought their own gods and cults with them (see Book II,
chapter 5) . What did it mean, this "creation" of a new god, whose functions
resembled both those of an Egyptian god (Osiris) and those of a Greek god
(Asklepios)?
One widely accepted thesis attributes the creation of Sarapis to the Lagides'
desire to unite their subjects around a "syncretistic" divine figure, which would
have favored the fusion of the heterogeneous ethnic groups. This interpretation
does not seem sustainable. Quite the contrary, nothing indicates that the first
Lagides had an objective of fusing the populations. In third century Egypt, a sep-
arate status devolved on the Greeks, who, besides their dominant role in a series
of domains (administrative, economic, military, cultural, etc.), enjoyed all sorts
of privileges, for example, that of having their own jurisdiction. While the
Lagides integrated some of the conquered population into their system of gov-
ernment, they seem to have been in no way preoccupied with promoting ethnic
mingling. At the beginning of the third century, a few Egyptians belonging to
old, prominent families occupied important offices, but a good hundred years
would pass before an "Egyptianization" occurred, especially in the administra-
tion. It is true that at this time (second century), it is often difficult to distinguish
who was of Greek origin and who was of Egyptian origin, and this matter of de-
scent was less important than it had been in the past. In the early phase of the
conquest, it is clear that the central power wanted to reserve for the Greeks the
privileged position they had enjoyed from the beginning. One of the signs of this
policy was the forbidding of mixed marriages, an interdiction that was part of
the charter of Naukratis and was doubtless applied in the other "Greek" cities of
Egypt, Alexandria and Ptolemais.
It is thus unlikely that the first Lagides had sought to realize, on the religious
level, an integration that they denied on all other levels. But there are other pos-
sible answers to the question posed by the creation of Sarapis.
Sarapis and Isis were linked to the royal couple at a very early date. The
Lagides, like many of the leading families in the Greek world, claimed divine an-
cestors; these ancestors and this was obviously no accident were the same as
those claimed by Alexander, that is, Heraides and Dionysos. This double origin
was in itself a program: the descendants were thus placed under the symbol of
valor and exploits on the one hand, and on the other, that of riches and the "good
life" ( tryphe). But while the Lagides had prestigious ancestors, they had founded
a new government and a dynasty in a land "conquered by the spear" (though the
conquest had been relatively peaceful) and thus could have felt a need for a di-
vine patronage that was less specifically Greek and more rooted in their new
realm. Though Sarapis's image was Greek, he incontestably had Egyptian roots,
and this double aspect undoubtedly enabled him, more so than a purely Greek
god, to play the role of patron and guarantor of power.
Moreover, the new capital, Alexandria, did not have a polis god, and we do not
220 PART I. RELIGION AND POWER

know what the intentions of its founder had been in this regard. For the Greeks,
the founding of a city could not take place without the founding of a cult. Vari-
ous Greek cults would be introduced into Alexandria, and the Egyptian inhabi-
tants would have their own cults. But it was Sarapis, a new god, who incarnated
the new city. The Potter's Oracle, a strongly anti-Greek text with imprecations
against the "newly built city" and the "city on the shore of the sea," reproaches it
for having fabricated "new gods of metal" and an "image proper to it," that is,
Sarapis, whose cult statue was supposedly made of all sorts of metals and pre-
cious stones. From the third century on, Sarapis, together with Isis, whose im-
age was strongly Hellenized, and the infant god Harpokrates, would constitute
the Alexandrian triad par excellence, whose image would spread beyond Egypt.
Dynastic god and guarantor of the Lagide power, he was probably also god of
the polis, protector of the city of Alexandria.
This god, so Greek in his appearance, seems at first to have spread in the Greek
community. Most of the dedicatory inscriptions addressed to him are from in-
habitants of Alexandria, when they are not from the royal entourage, and the
temples erected in his honor were in cities with a Greek population: Alexandria,
Canopus, Philadelphia in the Faiyum, and so forth. A special case is the Ser-
apeum of Memphis, which was frequented by Egyptians as well as by Greeks (see
Book II, chapter 8); but in this case, the cult of Sarapis took over that of Apis,
and probably in a form that was more Egyptian than Greek. We have otherwise
little information on the nature of this cult; there are texts mentioning "sacri-
fices and libations" in his honor, which is a Greek formulation. But we know
that at a later point in time, a ceremony clearly analogous to that of the Egyp-
tian ritual of "uniting with the (sun) disk" was practiced in the Serapeum of
Alexandria.2
The cult of Sarapis spread progressively in the chora, where it experienced a
considerable expansion, but scarcely before the Roman Period. The god is rather
often mentioned in the pious formulas of private letters, and many private per-
sons, both men and women, had names derived from his (theophoric names
such as Sarapion, Sarapias, Sarapiodoros, Sarapammon). The image of the god
appears on a number of objects for private use in homes, and on votive objects
intended to be deposited in the temples: medallions, cups, statuettes of molded
terra cotta or of bronze, and jewelry. It could also be painted on wooden panels
or frescos on walls in the houses of private persons, where they were used in do-
mestic cults. It is always the canonical image, that of the god on his throne, wear-
ing the kalathos on his abundant, curly hair. We learn from Rufinus (see footnote
2 in this chapter) how widespread these representations became; according to

him, in the period of the persecution of the "pagan" cults in the last years of the

2 Cf. a text of Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History, II, 23, who wrote at the beginning of the fifth century of

our own era, when the Serapeum had just been destroyed by Christians.
A NEW GOD 221

fourth century CE, every house in Alexandria had busts of Sarapis on its walls,
in its entryways, and on the jambs of its doors and windows; but all these images
were then systematically torn away or defaced by the Christians.
Along with this "popular" diffusion of Sarapis, there was an extension of his
official image. We find it on the imperial coins of Alexandria, where it incarnated
the prosperity enjoyed by the land thanks to the good government of the em-
perors, in particular under Hadrian, an Egyptophilic emperor. Coins commem-
orated Hadrian's journey to Egypt, associating the imperial couple with the
divine couple Sarapis and Isis; as in the Ptolemaic Period, official propaganda
made Sarapis the protector and the guarantor of the power of the state. A chapel
in honor of Hadrian was built in the enclosure of the Serapeum of Alexandria;
several small temples dedicated to Sarapis were constructed or restored in Egypt
during these same years.
During the Roman Period, Sarapis took on a more and more universal aspect;
associated with Zeus and with Helios, he became an omnipotent solar god. But
at the same time, he remained a god in whom one could take recourse, a god
"who hears" and responds to the questions of humble people whose vision
scarcely extended beyond the horizon of their daily lives:

He alone is honored by kings as well as ordinary citizens, by both sages and sim-
ple people, by both great and small, by those who are successful and by those whose
life is hard, granting to some the enjoyment of their well-being, and being for oth-
ers the sole recourse against their woes. Besides health of the body, what men seek
most ardently is the possession of riches; that, too, Sarapis grants, without wars or
battles or dangers. Thus, in every circumstance in life, he comes to our aid; and
there is no place that escapes the action of the god. Rather, all that humanity cares
about, he interests himself in it and he accomplishes all sorts of good works, be-
ginning with what concerns the soul, and ending with material goods.3

Outside Egypt, in Greece, where his cult spread in the Hellenistic Period, and
throughout the empire in the Roman Period, this god so Greek in appearance
(and so "recent"), along with his companion, Isis, paradoxically incarnated, in
the eyes of non-Egyptians, the ancient religion of Egypt.

Aelius Aristides, Sacred Discourses, XLV, 10-2o; second century CE.

 PART II

THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

 CHAPTER 4

THE VITALITY OF THE

TRADITIONAL RELIGION

THE SANCTUARIES

Between the third century BCE and the second century CE, a series of major
sanctuaries to the principal deities of the land (Hathor, Horus, Khnum, Isis, etc.)
was erected, testifying not only to the persistence, but also to the vitality of the
traditional religion under Greek and then Roman domination. Furthermore, it
is these temples that today give us the best idea of what an Egyptian sanctuary
was supposed to be, for those of earlier periods often experienced transforma-
tions or depredations, or have entirely disappeared. Respect for tradition in the
matter of constructing and decorating cultic edifices was such that the plan of a
temple built under Augustus or Trajan scarcely differs from that of one built un-
der Amenophis III or Ramesses II.
Moreover, these monumental constructions testify to the benevolence of
kings and emperors toward Egyptian religion, from Ptolemy I down to Decius
in the middle of the third century CE. Even if we concede that this construction
was essentially financed by the coffers of the temple, augmented by the revenues
from its domains and by private donations, it is probable that the king or the em-
peror also participated in the financing when it was a matter of a huge, long-
drawn-out undertaking (the construction of the temple of Edfu extended over
two centuries) .
The temple was the dwelling of the god, who "inhabited" his cult statue by
virtue of daily rituals. The plan of the temple was believed to go back to the ori-
gins of the world: to found a temple was to create the world anew. As a result,
226 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

the plans of all the temples scarcely varied, though there were modifications due
to local cultic particularities.

DENDARA

On the west bank of the Nile between Abydos and Luxor, Dendara was an ex-
tremely old cult place of Hathor. The monumental ensemble that can be seen to-
day, which replaced a temple built in the New Kingdom, was mostly constructed
between the reign of Ptolemy XII (8o-51 BCE) and Antoninus Pius (135-161 CE).
The main temple is dedicated to Hathor; there are other cult buildings within
the vast enclosure wall of unbaked bricks, including the small "temple of the
birth of Isis," constructed by Augustus behind the temple of Hathor. Within this
enclosure wall is also the oldest known mammisi in Egypt; this building, which
is present in most Ptolemaic and Roman temples, represents the "place of the
birth of the divine child," in which the delivery of the goddess and the birth of
the young god (at Dendara called Harsomtus, "Horus who unites the Two
Lands," or Ihy) was commemorated by special rituals. The construction of the
mammisi at Dendara goes back to the reign of Nectanebo I; a second mammisi
replaced it between the first and second centuries CE. In the sacred enclosure,
we can still see the building called "sanitarium" (though this interpretation is to-
day contested), which was perhaps intended to shelter sick persons who came to
consult Isis-Hathor, as well as the sacred lake intended for ritual ablutions.
Dendara presents some peculiarities: the Hathoric kiosk on the roof of the
temple, intended for the "uniting with the sun disk" ritual; and the crypts
arranged on three levels in the thickness of the south wall, which were supposed
to serve as storage areas for the most precious cult objects and perhaps also for
the archives. Otherwise, its plan is entirely traditional.
Among the numerous liturgical texts (the festival calendar of Dendara has
been preserved, as is also true of those of Edfu and Esna), the most interesting
are those dedicated to the commemoration of the death and resurrection of
Osiris. This festival, which was celebrated for several days in the autumn ("fes-
tivals of Khoiak"), included a complex ritual involving the fabrication of "Osiris
gardens," the burial of the statue of the god, and the erection of the djed pillar
that symbolized his rebirth.

ESNA

Esna was Greek Latopolis, from the name of the lates fish that received a cult
there; a necropolis of mummified fish has even been found. It is located south
of Luxor, on the west bank of the Nile. In the Ptolemaic Period, it became capi-
tal of the third nome of Upper Egypt; there are few archaeological traces from
before this period. Several temples were built there in the Graeco-Roman period,
THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 227

including a temple dedicated to Hathor on the east bank, which was still extant
at the time of Bonaparte's expedition to Egypt. At present, nearly everything has
disappeared, with the exception of the great temple dedicated to Khnum, though
only its hypostyle hall has been preserved. Begun under Ptolemy VI Philometor
(180-145 BCE), the construction of the edifice continued down into the Roman
Period. While the hypostyle hall dates to the second half of the first century
(Claudius and Vespasian), work continued throughout the second and into the
third century CE; the cartouche of Decius is still to be seen there.
Khnum, the ram god to whom the temple was dedicated, had a series of cult
places in Upper Egypt, in particular at Elephantine, where he was "lord of the
cataract"; lord of the waters and god of reproductive power, he appears at Esna
as a creator god who "gives form" to gods and men on his potter's wheel and is
invoked as "father of fathers, mother of mothers." He is associated with several
goddesses, in particular Neith, the very ancient goddess of Sais, who at Esna was
also a creative power and bisexual. Heqa, their divine child, received a cult in the
mammisi, which is mentioned in the texts but has not been found.
Though it is incomplete, the temple of Esna presents us with mythological
and liturgical texts of great interest, though the language and writing system are
particularly difficult; Serge Sauneron has published the texts of the temple. At
Esna, the theme of creation is quite important and includes the "raising of the
sky," the modeling of humanity by the potter god, and the formation of the world
by means of the "seven creative words" of Neith. Festivals commemorated these
events and underscored the importance of the royal office, which was to preserve
the created world. Other festivals invoke the perpetuation of life on earth and
the fertility of the fields.

EDFU

Edfu, whose Greek name was Apollinopolis, is located on the west bank of the
Nile, south of Esna. It was long a major cult center of Horus, whom the Greeks
identified with Apollo; reused blocks from a temple dating to Tuthmosis III were
recently discovered there. The foundation ceremony of the temple took place on
August 23, 237 BCE, in the reign of Ptolemy III Euergetes, and the edifice was
completed in 57 BCE. It is the best-preserved and perhaps the most impressive
temple in Egypt.
The plan of the temple of Edfu is entirely classical. A colonnaded court pre-
cedes the hypostyle hall with its characteristic screen walls, and beyond it, a se-
ries of rooms gives access to the "holy of holies," a small, entirely dark room that
contained the statue of the god in its tabernacle. A whole series of side rooms
served to store objects used in the cult (the "chamber of fabrics;' the "labora-
tory," on whose walls are inscribed the recipes for perfumes, etc.), while others
were chapels consecrated to various gods associated with Horus, the lord of the
228 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

temple. The temple had a library; we have only its inventory, inscribed on one
of the walls of the hypostyle hall (see below).
The decoration of the temple is no less remarkable than its architecture. Texts
and reliefs present the entire sequence of events of the major ceremonial litur-
gies, yielding a wealth of information on cultic practices. One of the most inter-
esting of these texts, which is on the wall of one of the interior corridors, outlines
the entirety of the "festival of the victory of Horus," one of the most important
festivals at Edfu, in the form of both a mythological account and a liturgical sce-
nario, with stage directions necessary for carrying out the ritual.
This monumental ensemble and the ceremonies that took place in it are the
most spectacular expression of Egyptian royal ideology. From the earliest dy-
nasties on, Horus was the tutelary god of the pharaoh, who was his living incar-
nation; his victory over Seth was a metaphor for the king's triumph over the
forces of chaos, and the young god Harsomtus, whose birth was celebrated in the
mammisi, was like the king in his capacity of "he who unites the Two Lands."1

KOM OMB O

Located in a curve of the Nile, on the east bank north of Aswan, the site of Om-
bos preserves a monumental ensemble of an unusual character: the dedication
of the temple to two gods, the falcon Haroeris (Horus the Great or the Elder Ho-
rus) and the crocodile Sobek, is conveyed by the choice of a double plan. In the
New Kingdom, under Tuthmosis III, a temple was already built in their honor,
and traces of it have been discovered. In the Ptolemaic Period, the site increased
in importance. Ombos became the capital of the first nome of Upper Egypt, and
under Ptolemy VI, the construction of the present-day temple began; work on it
continued during the Roman Period, down to the Severans in the first decades
of the third century CE.
The temple conforms to the traditional plan, but everything is doubled: the
court, the hypostyle hall, the festival hall, the hall of offerings, and the hall of the
Ennead are all crossed by two median axes, and each room opens on the follow-
ing one via two doors; the sanctuary consists of two rooms, side by side, that are
identical in every respect. The entirety is enclosed in a double stone wall.
The two gods who were lords of the temple each had his own divine "family;'
made up of a mother goddess and a child god: to the triad Sobek-Hathor-Khons
corresponded the triad Haroeris-Tasenetneferet ("the Good Sister")-Panebtawy
("the Lord of the Two Lands"). The young god Panebtawy had a mammisi de-
voted to the ceremonies of his divine birth.
The theological system of Kom Ombo is extremely complex.2 The texts and

' See S. Cauville, Essai sur la théologie du temple d'Horus à Edfou (Cairo, 1987).
2 It has been studied by A. Gutbub, Textes fondamentaux de la théologie de Korn Ombo (Cairo, 1973).
THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 229

reliefs that cover the walls of the temple refer, in part, to the cultic liturgies: their
rituals differed little from those of the other temples of the same period. But the
compositions of a mythological character (dubbed "monographs" in the schol-
arly literature), which invoke the gods of Ombos and their legend, present orig-
inal doctrines that constitute the specific "theology" of the temple, in which two
themes, one universalist and the other local, are juxtaposed to and combined
with one another.

PHILAE

The beautiful monumental ensemble of Philae (figure 13), dedicated to Isis, was
built between the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphos and that of Hadrian; there are
also vestiges dating to the last indigenous dynasty (Nectanebo I). While these
monuments are relatively late, the area of the First Cataract, to which the island
of Philae belongs, was both a very ancient cult place and a site of considerable
strategic importance. At Elephantine, which was long the capital of the nome,
there was a temple to Khnum, lord of the cataract, and on the neighboring is-
land of Biga, one of the most famous tombs of Osiris (see below).
Unlike the other temples of this period, the pier and the main access porticos
of the temple of Philae have been preserved; these constituted an important el-
ement of the sacred architecture, for the divine statues would embark on the Nile
to travel from one sanctuary to another. The axis of the temple itself is doubly
shifted with regard to both the court and the porticos. While the traditional
structure thus seems somewhat modified, the essential elements are nonetheless
present: hypostyle hall, hall of offerings, holy of holies. In addition to the main
temple, which was dedicated to Isis, the enclosure of Philae contained a whole
series of edifices consecrated to various other deities: a temple of Hathor, a tem-
ple of Imuthes (a healing god assimilated to the Greek Asklepios), a temple of
the Nubian god Arensnuphis, and of course, the mammisi where the birth of
Harpokrates, the son of Isis, was celebrated. One of the most beautiful elements
in this ensemble is the "kiosk" (actually, a barque shrine) built under Trajan.
Holy place par excellence of the cult of Isis, the temple of Philae was especially
representative of the permanence of religious traditions in conquered Egypt.
The texts inscribed on the walls of the temple and the mammisi furnish a clear
image of the powers attributed to the goddess, who was recognized in this pe-
riod as a universal deity (see below in this chapter). In the Ptolemaic and Roman
Periods, "pilgrims" and travelers of all sorts frequently visited the temple and left
a trace of their passage in the form of inscriptions and graffiti:

I, Ptolemaios, son of Herakleides, epistrategos of the Thebaid, I have come and

adored the very great goddess Isis; year ii of Caesar, [day ... of] Hathyr.3

3 E. Bernand, Les Inscriptions grecques de Philae, vol. 2 (Paris, 1969), no. 135 (2o CE).
FIGURE 13. Plan of the sacred ensemble of Philae. 1. Portico of Nectanebo. 2. Temple of Arensnuphis.
3. Chapel of Mandulis. 4. Temple of Imhotep. 5. First eastern colonnade. 6. Eastern colonnade. 7. Gate of
Ptolemy II. 8. Kiosk. 9. Birthing chapel. io. Second eastern colonnade. ii. Temple of Isis. 12. Temple of
Hathor. 13. Gate of Hadrian. l4. Temple of Harendotes. 15. Coptic church. 16. Temple of Augustus. 17. Gate
of Diocletian. From K. Michalowski, L'Art de l'Ancienne Égypte (Paris, 1968), p. 550, fig. 945.
THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 231

I, Theomnestos, son of Ptolemaios, strategos of Philae, I have come and adored Isis
of the ten thousand names and the gods who are in the Abaton, and I have per-
formed the act of adoration for Apollonios and Dionysios of the Epiphaneios
deme, my epistates, and for their children and their wives, and for all of ours; year
5 of Emperor Caesar Domitian Augustus.4

Act of adoration of Eutychos, son of Eutychos, second collector of the rights of the
imperial customs of Syene, and of Eutychianos, also called Theodotos, his son, and
of all his relatives, before the sovereign Isis of Philae and of the Abaton, and before
all the gods worshiped in the same temple.5

Philae was also the last Egyptian temple, and cultic activity continued there
long after triumphant Christianity had otherwise eliminated the "pagan" cults.
According to the terms of a treaty concluded with Rome in 453, the tribes of the
Blemmyes and Nobadai were authorized to gather at Philae and even to "bor-
row" the statue of Isis. It was only in 535-37 that the temple, closed by order of
the emperor Justinian, was "Christianized" under the patronage of the martyr
Stephen.

LOCAL SANCTUARIES

Major sanctuaries such as Dendara, Edfu, and Philae played a preponderant role
in religious life; centers of intense theological and cultic activity, they attracted
numerous visitors, and their influence extended far beyond the boundaries of
the region in which they were located. But in a way, they were exceptions. As in
earlier periods, the great majority of the temples in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt
were small local sanctuaries with a small clergy and a clientele that was proba-
bly restricted in number. We must imagine an Egyptian chora covered with tem-
ples that were, as Libanius wrote in the fourth century of our own era, "the soul
of the countryside"; a contemporary of Libanius, Rufinus of Aquilaea, also in-
voked the innumerable sanctuaries that dotted "all the countryside, the river-
banks, and even the desert" of Egypt.6 The mosaic of Praeneste, which was
created in the second century BCE by artisans who no doubt came from Egypt,
presents a beautiful picture of a half inundated Nile valley, with traditional sanc-
tuaries side by side with temples of Greek style, and little kiosks and chapels;
among the latter, many must have been private sanctuaries, whose priest was also
their owner.
Greek papyri supply a great deal of interesting information concerning these
temples and their diffusion in the chora. We thus learn that in the third century

4 Ibid., no. 162 (85/6 CE).

5 Ibid., no. 171 (end of the second century CE).
6 Ecclesiastical History, book 2, chapter 26.
232 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

BCE, the small town of Philadelphia (a Ptolemaic foundation, as its name indi-
cates) had no fewer than ten temples. These temples were dedicated to Greek or
Hellenized deities, as was normal in a Greek foundation, including Sarapis, the
Dioskouroi, deities of Samothrace, Demeter, and also the deified Arsinoe Phila-
delphos. Yet there were also some Egyptian deities there: Isis, the hippopotamus
goddess Taweret, and Poremanres (that is, King Amenemhet III, who developed
the Faiyum in the Middle Kingdom). A temple called Hermaion might have been
dedicated to Hermes, or to his Egyptian equivalent, Thoth.
Philadelphia was not a unique case. In the first century BCE, Theadelphia, a
town of middling size in the Faiyum, had seven sanctuaries, four of which re-
ceived the right of asylum from the king, which denotes a certain importance;
they were dedicated respectively to two forms of Isis, to Herakles, and to the croc-
odile god Pneferos. In the second century BCE, Kerkeosiris, also in the Faiyum,
with a population of about fifteen hundred people, had fifteen temples, thirteen
of which were consecrated to Egyptian deities. At Oxyrhynchos, which was a
nome capital and which ever since the conquest had a large population of for-
eign origin, there were no fewer than thirty temples in the Roman Period; these
included temples dedicated to Greek deities (Thesmophorion, Heroon, temple
of Kore, temple of Zeus, etc.) or to the imperial cult (Sebasteion, Hadrianeion),
as well as temples consecrated to native deities, in particular, Taweret, Isis, and
Osiris.? Archaeology, however, does not always confirm the testimony of the
texts, and a goodly number of these temples have left no trace. At Dush (Kysis)
in el-Kharga oasis, the administrative center of a toparchy (district), whose pop-
ulation can be estimated at about five thousand, a single stone temple dating to
the first to second centuries CE has been found; it has, on a reduced scale, an en-
tirely traditional plan.
These village temples did not, of course, have either the dimensions or the ar-
chitectural quality of the major sanctuaries. Some of them had rather original
plans, as was the case with the temples of crocodile gods at Karanis and Nar-
mouthis in the Faiyum. Built of stone, such temples included, as a general rule,
one or two courts giving access to the sanctuary properly speaking, which con-
tained the image of the god, as well as rooms where the cult objects must have
been stored. The building was always surrounded by an enclosure wall, within
which other buildings could have served as lodgings for the priests or as work-
shops for the preparation of products bread, beer, fabrics needed for the
cult. Temples, which were centers of both religious and economic activity, played
an essential role in the life of villages.

7 See J. Whitehorne, "The Pagan Cults of Roman Oxyrhynchus," Aufstieg und Niedergang der römis-

chen Welt vol. 2 (Berlin, 1995), 18, 5, PP. 3050-91.

THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 2 33

UPSURGE IN THEOLOGICAL ACTIVITY

The flourishing of cult centers during a period of more than five centuries is an
undeniable sign of religious vitality. At the same time, activity in the "houses of
life" associated with the temples does not seem to have subsided, indeed, quite
the contrary.
The inventory of the library of the temple of Edfu gives us a good idea of what
the varied areas of knowledge and activity of its clergy could have been. This li-
brary contained liturgical texts (Book of Conducting the Cult) and theological
texts (Knowing all the Inventories of the Secret Forms of the God), but also tech-
nical manuals (Instructions for Decorating a Wall), astronomical texts (Know-
ing the Periodic Returns of the Stars), as well as numerous books of magic (Book
of Driving Back the Demon and Repelling the Crocodile, Book of Magical Pro-
tection of the King in his Palace, Formulas for Repelling the Evil Eye). In temple
libraries, there could also be medical treatises, along with geographical lists such
as Papyrus Jumilhac; the latter, which was copied on papyrus at the end of the
Ptolemaic Period, contains a list, with some geographical indications, of the
sanctuaries of the eighteenth nome of Upper Egypt. There were also literary
texts; we have stories written in Demotic and a book of wisdom literature from
a temple at Tebtunis. As in the past, priestly circles remained the principal repos-
itory of knowledge.
After the Greek conquest, places other than temples functioned as centers of
elaboration and diffusion of knowledge: this was especially true of the great in-
stitutions of Alexandria, the Museum and the Library. Moreover, in the capital
cities of the chora, and perhaps in villages where a large Greek population was
settled, schools and gymnasia were created to assure the permanence of Greek-
style education. Egyptians also had access to Greek language and culture: the
archives of Narmouthis, recently published by Edda Bresciani, attest to bilingual
education in postconquest Egypt (these texts, which are instructional in charac-
ter, are divided almost equally between Demotic and Greek). It even happened
that Egyptian priests used Greek to address their gods: this is the case with four
hymns from the temple of Narmouthis, that were written in the first century
BCE in honor of Isis and her consorts, the crocodile god Sokonopis and the child
god Anchoes. The intent of the writer, probably a priest of the temple, was clearly
proselytizing: it had to do with "making known to the Greeks" the names and
the beneficent deeds of Egyptian deities.
But a case of this sort is relatively isolated. Whether it was a matter of rituals,
of formulas of invocation or praise, or of theological or mythological texts, for
Egyptian cults the normal means of expression remained the Egyptian language,
though when the devotee was a Greek or a Hellenized Egyptian, Greek was used
in many formulations of dedication, prayer, or acts of thanksgiving. That is to
2 34 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

say, that more than ever, temples played the role of centers where religious and
cultural traditions were preserved in the face of a dominant Greek culture with
which the temples generally had few contacts.8
In the Graeco-Roman Period, as earlier, scribes continued to copy old texts in
the houses of life. Many mythological accounts and theological exposés are
known to us only from copies made in the later states of Egyptian history; this
is true of the Myth of the Solar Eye, which is preserved in several Demotic ver-
sions (and one Greek version) and of the Book of Knowing the Modes of Exis-
tence of Re (Papyrus Bremner-Rhind), which was copied in the fourth century
BCE over an older text.
But this priestly activity did not consist solely of copying; contrary to what
was once claimed, knowledge was not fossilized in this period. A great deal of
theological activity was carried out in the temples, activity that entailed re-
flection on myths and on the nature of the gods and goddesses, along with the
elaboration of new syntheses. Already in the pharaonic era, the clergy of the ma-
jor sanctuaries had been carrying out this work of theological synthesis, which
included attempts at reconciling different traditions and heaping the multiplic-
ity of the aspects of the divine onto deities who were called "unique." In the
Graeco-Roman Period, the same effort was pursued and renewed. Thus, in a pa-
pyrus now in Berlin, written in Demotic at the end of the first century CE, we
find an astonishing cosmogonic synthesis that accords the central role in cre-
ation to Ptah, while linking the Memphite tradition to the Hermopolitan tradi-
tion of eight primordial gods, and with various other doctrines as well. The
cosmogonic texts of Esna present a complex image of the creation of the world
by Neith and by Khnum: the goddess, who "appeared by herself in the bosom of
the primordial waters;' created the world and the gods by means of her speech,
the "words that generated being," and then transformed herself into a cow in or-
der to give birth to the sun, who would engender humankind, which then re-
ceived light and life from him. Along with these accounts, others depict Khnum
in the form of a solar creator god, assimilated to Mum-Re, who "illumines the
Two Lands with his eye," according to Heliopolitan doctrine, and also to Shu,
who "supports the sky" and separates the elements. But in particular, Khnum is
presented in his specific aspect of potter god who fashions humans on his wheel
and "gives life to those who have left (it)." These heterogeneous images were ob-
viously not contradictory from the Egyptian perspective.
At Kom Ombo, the "monograph" texts are extremely subtle. Their object is
often to explain the names of the gods, the temple, or its various parts; to do this,
they make use of many mythic traditions foreign to Ombos and its deities, which
they combine and transpose with virtuosity. Thus the theologians could affirm

8 There were, of course, exceptions, such as the case of the priests of Edfu studied by J. Yoyotte,
"Bakhthis," in Religions en Égypte hellénistique et romaine (Paris, 1969), pp. 127-41.
THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 2 35

that "Shu is there (i.e., at Ombos) in his form of Haroeris," or that "Re is there
as Sobek," thus incorporating the gods of Ombos into the Heliopolitan system.
When they write, "this city, it is the seat where Tefnut sits," we must understand
that Tasenetneferet, the consort of Haroeris, is none other than Tefnut, that is,
that she is also the "distant goddess," the daughter of Re, who, angry at hu-
mankind, transformed herself into a lioness and fled to Nubia, and then, having
returned to Egypt with her anger appeased, came to rest at Ombos. These texts
should not be considered as speculative fantasies or mere plays on language,
though plays on words and sounds occur constantly; rather, they testify incon-
testably to a reflection on the structure of the divine and the multiplicity of its
forms, and to an effort to combine regional mythic traditions with what Adolphe
Gutbub has called the "universalist tradition," an ensemble of themes and no-
tions accepted everywhere, themes that are found in the principal sanctuaries
(especially in ritual texts) and which could well correspond to a "general struc-
ture of Egyptian religion."
This theological effort not only perpetuated but also renewed mythic thought,
and it was especially in the Roman Period, and in particular at the end of the first
century and the beginning of the second century CE, in the reigns of Domitian
and Trajan, that it seems to have been in full bloom (though a learned theology
had been developed at Edfu in the Ptolemaic Period). We might be tempted to
interpret this flowering of religious thought in an Egypt reduced to the status of
a Roman province as a defensive reaction on the part of the Egyptian clergy. Its
role in society had been depreciated, its powers and privileges greatly reduced:
it was as though it had taken refuge in the closed, protected world of the tem-
ples, where it could at least engage in an undisturbed pursuit of its ritual activ-
ity and its effort at doctrinal elaboration. Deprived in good part of social
"recognition" (see Book II, chapter 5), the priests nonetheless continued to play
an essential role on the symbolic level, for thanks to their cultic practices, the
presence of the gods was maintained on Egyptian soil. More concretely, they
contributed effectively to the enduring of language, knowledge, and traditions,
in sum, of all that constituted Egyptian cultural identity.

"ALL THE EGYPTIANS RENDER A CULT TO THEM": ISIS AND OSIRIS

As early as the middle of the fifth century BCE, Herodotus had noted that Isis
and Osiris were the only deities worshiped everywhere in Egypt.9 This trend in-
creased in the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods.
Of course, throughout this period, Egypt remained fundamentally polythe-

9 Histories, book 2, chapter 42; see A. de Sélincourt, Herodotus: The Histories rev. ed. (Harmondsworth,

1972), p. 145.
236 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

istic; side by side with major deities such as Hathor, Horus, Thoth, and Sobek,
who had important sanctuaries that attracted a numerous "clientele" of the
faithful, there was an abundance of minor deities who could often be identified
as the local "aspect" of a great god, but whose cult usually did not extend beyond
the village or the territory on which their temple stood. A characteristic exam-
ple is that of the crocodile god Sobek, who, independently of major sanctuaries
such as that at Korn Ombo, received a cult in many local temples in the Faiyum,
under various names that often had a simple geographical connotation: Pneferos
("He of the beautiful face") at Theadelphia and Karanis, Soknopaios ("Sobek
lord of the island") at Soknopaiou Nesos, Soknebtunis ("Sobek lord of Tebtu-
nis") at Tebtunis, and so forth. We also find Sokonopis at Narmouthis, Sokanob-
konnis at Bacchias, and even various associated forms of the god, at Euhemeria,
under the names of Psonaus, Soxis, and Pneferos. These names all refer to a sin-
gle entity, the crocodile god; but they reveal the attachment of the faithful to a
particular form of this god, that of the god in their town.
The abundance of local cults did not prevent the emergence of major divine
figures who in and of themselves incarnated the totality of the powers attributed
to gods and goddesses. Isis was incontestably one of these essential figures.
Isis was an ancient goddess. From the Old Kingdom on, she was known in
Egypt in her capacity of "mother of the god," which seems to have been her orig-
inal function. At first, her place in the religious universe was far from prepon-
derant; she was scarcely more than a local goddess of the delta. But she was soon
incorporated into religious "systems" that played a major role in Egypt: the
Osirian cycle (she was believed to be the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus)
and the Ennead of Heliopolis.
It was especially in the first millennium and later that the image of Isis and
her powers became widespread. This happened through various processes of
combining deities, with the result that she assumed the functions of nearly all
the major female deities in Egypt, and eventually, outside Egypt as well.
From the beginning of the Ptolemaic Period on, great sanctuaries were
erected in her honor: Behbeit el-Hagar in the delta (called Isieion in Greek; it was
perhaps Isis's oldest cult place), where work began under the last native king,
Nectanebo II, and Philae, at the southern border of Egypt, where the earliest con-
struction work also goes back to the period of independence; but in each case, it
was under the Lagides that the buildings assumed their monumental dimen-
sions. The goddess also had larger or smaller cult places throughout the valley:
Aswan, where she had a sanctuary that was constructed under Ptolemy III and
Ptolemy IV; Deir el-Shelwit, near Medinet Habu, decorated under Hadrian and
Antoninus Pius; Koptos, where she was present in the temple of Min as his di-
vine wife; and Dendara, where she had a temple of her own in the enclosure of
Hathor. Hermopolis, Oxyrhynchos, and Memphis also had temples that were
dedicated to her, as there were in nearly all the towns of the Faiyum and all the
THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 237

centers of the delta, as attested by papyri and inscriptions. Some of these cult
places seem to have been simple chapels in the countryside, with only a few
priests; sometimes a single priest who was also the owner of his little isieion as-
sured the cultic service. Of course, besides the temples specifically dedicated to
her, Isis was present in a many sanctuaries as a synnaos (literally, "associated in
the sanctuary" or "who makes a common sanctuary with").
The progressive expansion of Isis's "functions," her assimilation to a whole se-
ries of goddesses (especially Hathor, but also Neith, Selkis, Satis, Opet, Sakhmet,
etc.) made her into a universal goddess in the Ptolemaic and then the Roman Pe-
riods. Mother of Horus, whom she protected from the traps of his enemy Seth,
she was the incarnation par excellence of the maternal function; wife of Osiris,
whose resurrection she succeeded in effecting, she was a goddess of the dead,
protectress of life in the hereafter; assimilated to Renenutet, goddess of the har-
vests, she incarnated the fertility of the fields; she was also the protectress of the
royal office, she of whom it was said that "no king ascends the throne without
her command." She was guarantor of royal power because she herself was "sov-
ereign of all the gods;' "mistress of her kingdom in the sky and on earth"; not
only Egypt, but all the lands "bow before her power," as the texts at Philae pro-
claim:

Isis the Great, Mother of the god, who dispenses life, Mistress of Philae,
Sovereign of Biga, (the Mourner) who cares for her brother, the Great one, the
Powerful, Sovereign of the gods, whose name is elevated over the goddesses,
Magician with excellent counsels, who repels Apopis with her magic formulas,
without whom no one accedes to the palace,
it is at her command that the king ascends the throne. She is called Mistress of life,
because she dispenses life, men live by the command of her ka.
Mistress of the Abaton,
who seals with her seal all that is to be sealed,
no plan is executed without her willing it,
from the sky down to the earth and in the hereafter. ")

This universalist vision of the goddess occurs in Greek as well as in Egyptian

texts. The first hymn of Narmouthis, whose character is highly propagandistic,
affirms that she is known to all peoples under various names, but that the Egyp-
tians call her "unique," because she incarnates in herself all the other goddesses.
A little later, in the second century of our own era, the Greek "litany" of Oxy-
rhynchos gives a list of her "names" in all the localities of Egypt and in all the
countries of the world known to the Egyptians, a way of underscoring her uni-
versality. And it was precisely because she was one of the most popular deities in

10 H. Junker, Der grosse Pylon des Tempels der Isis in Philä (Vienna, 1958), p. 169; inscription on the
east gate, reign of Ptolemy VIII Philometor.
238 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

Egypt in the Late Period that her cult was able to spread beyond Egypt at the end
of the fourth century CE and to symbolize, in and of itself, all the old Egyptian
religion in the eyes of non-Egyptians.
The case of Osiris was somewhat different. More prestigious than Isis, he was
linked to the royal office at a very early date, with ancient traditions making him
a god who had reigned over Egypt. He was also linked to the fertility of the fields,
and he was incarnate in the fertilizing water of the Nile, just as he was present in
the grain that grew. He was especially the god who presided over survival; from
the time of the Pyramid Texts (Dynasty 5) on, his legend made him a god who
experienced death and rebirth; later versions of the myth endowed his wife Isis
with an essential role in his "resurrection."
The earliest of his cult places was probably the city of Busiris in the delta; from
the Middle Kingdom on, Abydos in Upper Egypt played an especially important
role in his cult, because it was there that his tomb was located in reality, only
one of his tombs, but the most famous. From the fact that he was supposed to
have been dismembered after his death by his brother and adversary, Seth, sev-
eral cities in Egypt claimed to possess a relic of the god's corpse, and for this rea-
son, each of them had a "tomb of Osiris." Few temples specifically dedicated to
him have been preserved, but he was present in many sanctuaries consecrated to
other deities, as at Philae, where he was the consort of Isis, or at Dendara, where
he was associated with Hathor. In the Ptolemaic Period, a temple was built in
honor of Osiris and Opet (a hippopotamus goddess, also called Taweret, who
was a goddess of female fecundity and of birth) in the enclosure of Karnak. In
the Roman Period, at Dush in el-Kharga oasis, the hieroglyphic texts of the tem-
ple inform us that it was dedicated to "Osiris of the goodly arrival" and to Isis,
which is the unequivocal sign of an importance that was recognized as far as the
extreme confines of Egypt (though the Greek dedication inscription of the tem-
ple, inscribed on the lintel of the pylon, designates the god under the name of
Sarapis) .
In the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, one of the most important religious fes-
tivals in Egypt was the one that celebrated the death and resurrection of Osiris.
Herodotus already mentions (though in veiled form, for clearly, his informants
could not or would not tell him everything about it) the "representations of his
passion, which the Egyptians call mysteries." One episode of the festival he was
able to attend at Sais was a nocturnal ceremony during the course of which peo-
ple lit lamps around their house; these were burned, he wrote, not only at Sais,
but everywhere in Egypt; I I this was the Festival of the Burning Lamps or the
"night of sacrifice," which commemorated the quest of Isis, who went in search
of the dismembered remains of her husband Osiris. In Egyptian texts, this festi-
val was called the "festival of Khoiak," for it took place in the fourth month of

11 Histories, book 2, chapter 62; see de Sélincourt, Herodotus, p. 153.

THE VITALITY OF THE TRADITIONAL RELIGION 239

the inundation season; we are well informed about its details, thanks to texts
from the temple of Dendara. This festival was certainly related to the royal power
and its transmission, via the myth of Osiris's death and the contesting of the di-
vine son Horus's "inheritance" by Seth; but there is also an obvious relationship
with the agricultural calendar. The "plowing of the earth" was celebrated, paste
or earthen statuettes of Osiris were ritually fabricated, and especially, "Osiris gar-
dens": molds in the form of Osiris' body were filled with soil, and then seeds were
sown in them to produce a fresh vegetation after several days.
What testifies even more clearly to the universality of the cult of Osiris in
Egypt during the Graeco-Roman Period is its role in funerary beliefs and cults.
From the New Kingdom on, these practices became widespread; every dead per-
son could become "an Osiris," provided that the Osirian rites (those which Isis
was believed to have practiced on the dead body of Osiris) were carried out on
his person. These rites were still celebrated down into the Roman Period, and the
texts of the Book of the Dead continued to be copied, and statuettes of Osiris
were placed in the tomb to protect the deceased (see Book II, chapter 9). The
painted decoration of sarcophagi, mummy cartonnages, and funerary furnish-
ings in general always gave a preponderant place to Osiris, who was represented
enthroned, presiding over the Judgment of the Dead.
Osiris's specific function as guarantor of survival can account in great part for
his popularity. But the diffusion of beliefs about Osiris and Isis throughout
Egypt in no way signified a trend in the direction of monotheism. During this
period in Egypt, no cult was exclusive of the others; the "fluidity" particular to
Egyptian gods and goddesses permitted them to loan themselves to all sorts of
syncretistic "formulas" without losing their identity, and the concentration of
images and powers could act in favor of Hathor or Neith just as well as Isis or
Amun, or in favor of Horus just as well as Osiris.
 CHAPTER 5

NEW GODS AND CULTS

GREEK GODS AND CULTS

Long before Alexander's expedition, Greek cults had already penetrated into
Egypt. From the second half of the seventh century BCE, Greeks settled in
"colonies" in the delta, the Memphite region, and even further south, in the Nile
valley.
According to a tradition reported by Herodotus, Psammetichus, the first king
of Dynasty 26, called on Greek mercenaries to drive out the Assyrians and
reestablish unity in Egypt for his own profit; later, he settled these Greeks in
strategic locations, in particular in the eastern delta, a region that was open to
invasions. The presence of Greek mercenaries in Egypt at that time is no legend;
certain of them, mostly from Asia Minor, inscribed their names on the legs of
the colossal statues of Abu Simbel as they returned from an expedition to Nubia
led by the Egyptian general Potasimto under Psammetichus II (595-589). These
Greeks from Asia were numerous enough to "colonize" several quarters of Mem-
phis, whose inhabitants were called Hellenomemphites and Caromemphites.
Merchants must have followed closely on the soldiers; at the beginning of the
sixth century, they occupied the city of Naukratis in the delta, which was "given"
to them by the pharaoh Amasis, according to Herodotus, as a sign of his benev-
olence—but more likely better to control their commercial activities. The ce-
ramics found in great quantities during the excavations at Naukratis reveal an
intense activity in exchanges with the Greek cities and islands of Asia Minor
(Rhodes, Chios, Samos, Klazomenai, etc.) and of continental Greece (Sparta,
NEW GODS AND CULTS 241

Corinth, Athens). Though Greek magistrates administered the city whose

name corresponds to an indigenous toponym it cannot be considered simply
as a Greek "colony"; in any case, side by side with the Greek city, there was an
Egyptian establishment, endowed in particular with a large temple of Amun,
whose cult was supposed to go back to Dynasty 26. The Greek colonists imported
the cults of their home cities. Indeed, vestiges of temples of Aphrodite (whose cult
statue was supposedly brought from Cyprus), Hera of Samos, Apollo of Miletos,
and the Dioskouroi have been found at Naukratis. The remains of a vast sanctu-
ary there might be those of the Hellenion mentioned by Herodotus, which ac-
cording to him was founded in common by ten Greek cities of Asia; an inscription
found there is addressed "to the gods of the Greeks;' which indeed seems to im-
ply a common cult of the city gods of the cities that founded the temple. Herodo-
tus also mentions the presence of a temple dedicated to Zeus of Aigina.
Obviously, the Greek cults of Naukratis were a concern only to the Greek pop-
ulation of the city. Greek colonists who settled in other centers of the valley must
also have had cult places of their own, but scarcely any traces of them have been
preserved. In any event, the Hellenomemphites also had their Hellenion, that is,
a Greek temple probably consecrated to Zeus Basileus; it is mentioned in a pa-
pyrus of the third century BCE, but it was probably built before the conquest; in
the same period, the Caromemphites had their own temple, that of the Carian
Zeus of Labraunda.
Were these Greek cults open to persons other than Greeks? It is probable, but
it cannot be confirmed. In any case, it seems that before the conquest, Egyptians
were rather well informed regarding Greek deities.
What Herodotus has to say about this point is quite interesting, though it
raises problems. Each time he visited a site or a monument, he was informed
about the gods of the place, their legend, and the meaning of their rituals; he
sometimes designates these gods by their Egyptian names, and sometimes by the
names of Greek gods who seemed to be their equivalents. It is not likely that
Herodotus himself invented these equivalences in the hope of helping his Greek
readers understand what the nature of the foreign gods of whom he was speak-
ing might have been; it was apparently his Egyptian informants (or perhaps
Greeks who had long been settled in Egypt) who furnished these "keys" to him.
Thus, he could write, "Osiris, who, they (i.e., the Egyptians) say, is Dionysos"1 or
"in the Egyptian language, Apollo is called Horus."2 But he often used Greek
names to designate Egyptian deities, without explanation, which seems to mean
that in his day, the correspondences between these deities were well known and
unequivocal. The table of these correspondences is as follows:

1 Herodotus, Histories, book 2, chapter 42; see A. de Sélincourt, Herodotus: The Histories, rev. ed. (Har-
mondsworth, 1972), p. 145.
2 Histories, book 2, chapter 156; see de Sélincourt, Herodotus, p. 192.
242 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

Dionysos = Osiris Demeter = Isis Apollo = Horus

Artemis = Bastet Zeus = Amun Athena = Neith
Aphrodite = Hathor Hermes = Thoth Hephaistos = Ptah
Leto = Wadjit Pan = god of Mendes Typhon = Seth

But, according to Herodotus, the Egyptians knew neither Poseidon nor the
Dioskouroi; the cult of the latter was introduced into Egypt after the conquest.
This system of correspondences remained in use throughout the Hellenistic
and Roman Periods, leading to a problem of interpreting the Greek documents:
when the name of a Greek god or goddess occurs, it is not always easy to tell
whether we are indeed dealing with a Greek deity or with his or her Egyptian
equivalent. Thus a Greek dedication to "Aphrodite" from an Egyptian site could
refer either to a Greek cult of Aphrodite introduced there or to the Egyptian cult
of Hathor; only knowledge of the context enables the scholar to decide.
There was a massive influx of Greeks into Egypt in the final years of the fourth
century and the beginning of the third century BCE. It was then that Greek cults
spread, in particular in the cities (Alexandria, Ptolemais) and the regions
(Faiyum) where Greek population was concentrated.
At Alexandria (see figure 14), the principal cult was that of Sarapis (see Book
II, chapter 3), who possessed a famous temple in the city and another one, nearly
as famous, in the nearby city of Canopus, not to mention other, probably pri-
vate sanctuaries. Isis also seems to have had several temples, including one at the
point of Cape Lochias and another on the island of Pharos, where, under the
name of Isis Pharia, she was honored as protectress of sailors and navigation. On
the whole, excavations at Alexandria have not enabled scholars to recover traces
of the many sanctuaries mentioned in literary and documentary texts: the mod-
ern city is exactly superimposed on the ancient one, which itself experienced
numerous destructions, a situation that poses problems for archeological ex-
ploration.
Strabo, who visited Alexandria in the reign of Augustus, mentions the temple
of Poseidon, which was located on the seashore, and the Paneion in the middle of
the city, an artificial hill "in the form of a pine cone;' at the top of which was sup-
posed to be an open air sanctuary dedicated to Pan; the latter was in the present-
day quarter of Korn el-Dik, where Polish excavations have uncovered a beautiful
theater of the third century CE and a large residential area. Strabo otherwise
notes, "in short, the city is full of public and sacred structures";3 unfortunately,
he has little to say about them. We know, however, that in the city there was a tem-
ple of Hermes, built, according to Coptic tradition, by Cleopatra, and a temple of
Hephaistos, which is depicted on coins of Antoninus, as well as temples of Neme-

3 Strabo, Geography, book 17,chapter 1, section 10; see H. L. Jones, The Geography of Strabo, vol.8 (Lon-
don,1932), p. 41.
FIGU RE14. Alexandria: 1. Temple of Neptune. 2. Tombs. 3. Necropolis of Anfushy 4. Temple of Isis Pharia.
5. Lighthouse. 6. Temple. 7. Church of St. Theonas. 8. Temple. 9. Museum. io. Temple of Sarapis. i l. Palace
of Hadrian. 12. Great palace of Cleopatra. 13. Royal palace. 14. Theater. 15. Maiandros. i6. Palaistra. 17. Royal
port. i8. Palace. 19. Temple o f Isis Lochias. 20. Jewish q uarter. 21. Barracks. 22. Gymnasium. 23. Site of the
martyrdom of St. Mark. 24. "Pompey's Pillar." 25. Christian cemetery. From K. Michalowski, L'Art de l 'An-
cienne Égyp te ( Paris, 1968), p. 502, fig. 865.
244 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

sis, Kronos, and Tyche mentioned by various authors, most of whom are of late
date; we do not know if their construction goes back to the Ptolemaic Period. It
seems that the entire traditional Greek pantheon was represented at Alexandria.
Moreover, other foreign deities were probably introduced by immigrants: the
Thracian goddess Bendis and the Persian god Mithra, whose presence in Egypt is
already attested by a papyrus of the third century BCE.
A special cult was devoted to Agathos Daimon, the "Good Spirit" of the city.
In the Roman Period, he was represented on stelae and on coins in the form of
a bearded serpent, often accompanied by Isis, who was also in serpent form, the
uraeus (cobra). This "Good Spirit" had a Greek equivalent in the person of Zeus
Ktesios, protector of the home, who was also represented in the form of a ser-
pent; it is probable, however, that Agathos Daimon was related to an Egyptian
god, the serpent god Shai, whose character as a protector (of homes, harvests,
etc.) was widespread in the Late Period.
The most popular Greek cults in Hellenistic Alexandria were probably those
of Demeter and Dionysos. Unfortunately, no trace of their temples has been
found.
The festivals of Demeter were celebrated in the first half of the third century
BCE under the names Thesmophoria and Demetria. There was probably also a
celebration of mysteries modeled on those of Eleusis: was there not a quarter
named Eleusis in Alexandria? The Thesmophorion of the goddess must have
been located there.
The Lagide kings especially honored Dionysos (see figure 15) and made him,
along with Herakles, one of the ancestors of their dynasty. From the reign of
Ptolemy II Philadelphos on, sumptuous festivals were celebrated in his honor;
the description of one of them, which must have taken place at Alexandria in
271/270 BCE, has been preserved to us. Royal favor was lavished on this god es-
pecially in the reign of Ptolemy IV. This king inaugurated festivals in his honor
and bestowed the god's name on one of the "tribes" (administrative districts) of
Alexandria. In an edict whose text has been preserved, he commanded all who
celebrated the cult of Dionysos to come and register themselves at Alexandria,
which can be interpreted as a desire to encourage the practice of this cult and at
the same time to oversee its exercise; it is also an indication that at this time (end
of the third century BCE), it was not only celebrated at Alexandria, but had
spread throughout the chora, probably via cultic associations.
In addition to the clergy properly speaking, such associations seem to have
played an important role in the organization of the ceremonies of this god. The
best known is that of the Technitai, which, in the third century BCE, drew to-
gether playwrights, musicians, and actors of Greek origin, whose professional
activity brought them into direct contact with Dionysos and his cult.
In addition to official liturgies and private cult, mysteries were probably also
celebrated in Egypt in honor of Dionysos. Ptolemy IV himself is thought to have
been initiated during one of them.
NEW GODS AND CULTS 2 45

FIGURE 15. Dionysos. Tapestry, fourth century CE. Abegg Foundation, Riggisberg. From La Tenture de
Dionysos de la Fondation Abegg (Riggisberg, 1987).

Another cult well attested at Alexandria in the Hellenistic Period, and also in
the chora, is that of the Dioskouroi. It was long thought that these twin gods,
protectors of sailors, were purely Greek gods with no Egyptian equivalent.4 A re-
cent study by Jan Quaegebeur, however, has shown that behind the image of the

4 This point was already affirmed by Herodotus, Histories, book 2, chapter 5o; see de Sélincourt,
Herodotus, p. 150.
246 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

Dioskouroi, there is sometimes that of two Egyptian crocodile gods who were
brothers.
In towns with a high ratio of Greek population, especially in the Faiyum, we
find the entire array of Greek cults celebrated at Alexandria scattered here and
there: those of Demeter, Dionysos, the Dioskouroi, and Zeus (often identified
with Amun) were among the most widespread. We must also add the divine
Thracian horseman Heron (figure i6), who was a soldier god (with a solar as-
pect, as shown by his crown of rays); not surprisingly, we find his cult in the
villages of the Faiyum Magdola, Tebtunis, Theadelphia, Karanis—whose pop-
ulation included a large contingent of cleruchs, that is, former soldiers settled on
land granted to them by the crown.

~,rffrrm.

Heron. Mural painting, second century CE. Theadelphia, temple of Preferos. From E. Breccia,
FIGURE 16.
Monuments de l'Égypte gréco-romaine, vol. 1 (Bergame, 1926), pl. 57.

The Roman conquest did not change this picture. The Greek cults continued
in force, and certain specifically Roman cults appear sporadically in the docu-
ments: Jupiter, Hercules, Mercury, and so forth. With the exception of Jupiter
Capitolinus, who had a temple at Arsinoe, Romans (either natives or persons
who had acquired Roman citizenship) settled in Egypt, such as the Roman army
veteran who privately celebrated the Saturnalia, might have carried out these
cults unofficially.
NEW GODS AND CULTS 247

The only truly new cult was that of Antinoos, the favorite of Hadrian, who,
after drowning in the Nile during the emperor's stay in Egypt in 130, was deified
and became the object of a cult well attested in the second half of the second cen-
tury and in the third century CE; several papyri mention a festival in his honor
called the Antinoeia. The center of this cult was, of course, the city of Anti-
noopolis, or Antinoe, which was founded in his honor on the east bank of the
Nile, opposite Hermopolis. It otherwise seems that the deification of Antinoos
was inspired by an Egyptian tradition regarding Osiris, who was sometimes
called the "drowned one," because his body or certain of his members had sup-
posedly been cast into the Nile.
Equivalences between Roman and Egyptian deities are relatively rare, how-
ever. A dedicatory inscription from the region of Philae, dating to the era of the
Severans, is addressed to a "Jupiter Hammon Chnoubis (that is, to Khnum, the
ram god of the cataract)." But this is an isolated example that in any case is based
on older assimilations: Zeus had already been identified with Amun, with whom
Khnum could also be identified.
The widespread diffusion of Greek deities in Egypt in the Ptolemaic Period,
in contrast to the rarity of Roman deities, is most of all explained by the density
of the Greek population. During the third century BCE, large contingents of for-
eigners came to settle in Egypt, while the Roman conquest did not lead to a com-
parable wave of immigration, and the "Roman presence" in Egypt remained
relatively limited; it was the Greek and Hellenized portion of the population that
furnished the members of the Roman administration. Under these conditions,
the introduction of Roman cults into Egypt could not have been considered a
necessity on either the religious or the political level.
A question to which it is difficult to respond is that of the diffusion of foreign
cults in the Egyptian community. Greeks and Romans were not excluded from
Egyptian cults, and they did not hesitate to practice them. But it does not seem
that the opposite was true, and the Egyptians, whose religious universe remained
rich and vibrant, were probably scarcely attracted by the deities of their con-
querors. Still, specifically Greek styles of representing deities were not without
influence on Egyptian representations.

ROYAL CULT AND IMPERIAL CULT

Accepted as god-kings by their Egyptian subjects, the Lagides early felt the need
to sacralize their power in the eyes of their Greek subjects. This need led to the
founding, in the 28os BCE, of a royal cult of the Greek type, which owed noth-
ing to Egyptian tradition or practice.
In the course of the fourth century BCE, the idea that "superior men" were in
possession of a divine nature had made its way into Greek political thought; in
the second half of the century, cities had bestowed divine honors on great per-
248 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

sonages, beginning with Alexander. A typical case was that of the Athenians, who
in 291/290 welcomed the Macedonian general Demetrios Poliorketes, son of
Antigonos Monophthalmos as a living god who had come to "save" their city;
they instituted an eponymous priesthood (the name of an eponymous priest,
who held office for one year, served to date official documents) in his honor, con-
secrated an altar to him, and honored him with a hymn that clearly expresses
this new concept of divinity: "For other gods are either far away, or have not ears,
or are not, or heed us not at all; but thee we can see in very presence, not in wood
and not in stone, but in truth."5 From that time on, it seems that the Greeks, who
had long considered the distance between men and gods to be insurmountable
(to equate oneself with the gods was the supreme expression of hubris), no
longer hesitated to view a man, though only an exceptional one, as the terrestrial
manifestation of a god.
The institution in Egypt of a royal cult in Greek form took place in steps. First,
there was the cult of Alexander. After Alexander's death, Ptolemy arranged to di-
vert his body, which was on its way to Macedonia, to Alexandria. In the city it-
self (though its location has never been found), Ptolemy had a sumptuous tomb,
the Sema, built, and he instituted sacrifices and games in Alexander's honor.
Next, an eponymous priesthood of Alexander, which was responsible for his cult,
was established. In doing these things, Ptolemy secured, for himself and for his
successors, the prestige of the "civilizing hero" and founder that Alexander had
become in the eyes of the Greeks.
The next step was the institution by Ptolemy II Philadelphos, probably in 280
BCE, of a cult in honor of his deceased parents, Ptolemy I and Berenike, which
included the Ptolemaia festival, of which a description by Callixenes has been
preserved. Though a primary place in it was reserved for Dionysos (see above in
this chapter), one procession was specially dedicated to the deceased royal cou-
ple. During the games that followed the procession, gold crowns and statues were
offered to them, and statues of Ptolemy I and Alexander also rode in a chariot
during the Dionysiac procession.
Ptolemy II took a new step when he founded a cult for himself, in association
with that of his sister-wife Arsinoe II, who had already been deified by assimila-
tion to various goddesses, such as Aphrodite, Nike, and Isis. In 272/271, that is,
before the death of Arsinoe II in 270, a priest of the Theoi Adelphoi (brother and
sister gods) was mentioned in a papyrus.
From that time on, the dynastic cult that associated the living king with his
deceased ancestors was in place. All the Lagide kings would be its object during
their lifetimes, as well as their wives, beginning with the reign of Ptolemy VI. Dy-
nastic quarrels, though, sometimes led to their temporary exclusion from the
cult, as befell Cleopatra II.

5 Text cited by Athenaios, Deipnosophistai, book 6, chapter 253; see C. B. Gulick, Athenaeus: The Deip-
nosophists, vol. 3 (London, 1929), p. 143.
NEW GODS AND CULTS 2 49

The royal cult was manifestly in the Greek style. Its priests were eponymous
priests who were possibly appointed by the king; the same was true of the priest-
esses attached to the cult of the queens, who were designated by the Greek terms
kanephore, "she who carries the basket" (containing ritual objects) and athlo-
phore, "she who bears the prize" (of a competition). All these men and women,
without exception, belonged to Greek families and usually to the milieu of the
high officials and dignitaries of the Lagide court. We note a clear tendency to-
ward the inheritance of office (as otherwise in Egyptian priestly circles), but their
function, analogously to that of the priest-magistrates of Greek cities, rather
than that of Egyptian priests, did not exclude the holding of civil offices; some
of them were strategoi, navarchs, and directors of the Library of Alexandria.
We have few details regarding the cult itself. A number of texts, however, men-
tion "the sacrifices and libations" that the priests carried out in honor of the king
and his family, and we may imagine that these were sacrifices of the Greek type,
with immolation of the victims. These sacrifices often took place in the gymna-
sia. Festivals were also celebrated in honor of the sovereigns, in particular an-
niversary festivals commemorating their birth or their coronation, for these were
joyous days for the country, the "origin of good things without number."6
Over the course of the years, the burden the royal cult placed on the state must
have become heavy. New "gods" and "goddesses" took their places in this pan-
theon, and temples were built in their honor.
It was necessary to find resources to finance the cult and pay its priests, and
this generally entailed royal foundations. Thus, Ptolemy II assigned to the cult
of his wife, Arsinoe, the revenue of the apomoira, the impost on vineyards, which
was already received by the clergy; it was thus merely a reassignment, for the
profit of the new cult.
It is difficult to estimate the scope of the royal cult and its impact on the pop-
ulation. In addition to the priests and priestesses, there existed private associa-
tions devoted to the cult of the sovereigns; their members, called basilistes or
philobasilistes, were often recruited among the soldiers or former soldiers. Thus,
under Ptolemy VI, an officer originally from Pergamon, Herodes, commandant
of the garrison of Syene (Aswan) founded, in common with several priests, "the
association [ ... ] that has as its object to celebrate the annual festival in honor
of the king, the queen, and their children."7 An association similar to that of the
Dionysiac Technitai also participated in the conduct of the royal cult. All this was
obviously quite official, and it is difficult to distinguish, in the activity of these
cultic associations, what stemmed from the"spontaneous" initiative of the faith-
ful and what was more or less directly instigated by the state.
The royal cult was a powerful means of securing the loyalty of the Greek sub-
jects. It was, apparently at least, an instrument for uniting a heterogeneous pop-

6 Memphis Decree, Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae (Leipzig, 1903-1905), 9o, line 47.
Ibid., 111.
250 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

ulation, for the Greeks who settled in Egypt came from highly diverse horizons,
from continental Greece as well as the islands and from Greek Asia. It was also a
means of sacralizing, and thus legitimizing, a power that at the beginning, after
all, had been only that of a general who was luckier than others.
It cannot be excluded that this cult also had an authentic religious dimension.
A desire to behold divinity incarnate in a visible and tangible form, an all-pow-
erful being from whom one could concretely anticipate protection and largesse,
seems indeed to have characterized the new forms of religiosity that sprang up
in the Greek world during the Hellenistic Period. The cult of the Lagides was
clearly intended for the Greek community in Egypt, though it could be practiced
outside the land, as well; we do not know to what extent Egyptians had access to
it, but their traditional religion already integrated the deification of the king into
its system. Moreover, in the very interior of the Egyptian temples, a place was re-
served for images of the sovereigns, who received an Egyptian-style cult there;
this became a systematic practice at the time of the Memphis Decree, in 196 BCE,
which included detailed prescriptions in this regard:

It has seemed suitable to the priests ... that an image of King Ptolemy, living for-
ever, the god Epiphanes Eucharistos, be erected in every temple, in the most visi-
ble place, which will bear the name of "Ptolemy-the-one-who-has-avenged-
Egypt"; that next to it be placed the principal god of the temple, standing and pre-
senting to him a weapon of victory, all arranged in the Egyptian manner; that the
priests thrice daily conduct the religious service before the images and place a sa-
cred ornament on them, and carry out the other prescribed ceremonies, as (they
do) for the other gods, in the panegyries that are celebrated in Egypt; that they
erect for King Ptolemy Epiphanes Eucharistos, born of King Ptolemy and Queen
Arsinoe, the gods Philopator, a statue of wood and a small gilded chapel, in each
of the temples; that they place them in the sanctuaries and that, at the time of the
great processions, when (statues) leave their chapels, that of the god Epiphanes Eu-
charistos leave at the same time.8

Already in 238 BCE, little princess Berenike, who died young, had been asso-
ciated by decree with the gods of the land. Earlier still, under Ptolemy II, the cult
of Arsinoe Philadelphos had been introduced into all the temples of Egypt.
The royal cult disappeared, of course, with the last representative of the La-
gide dynasty, Cleopatra VII. But in the years that followed the Roman conquest,
the Romans inaugurated a cult centered on the person of Octavian-Augustus in
Egypt, and it seems that between these two cults, there was a continuity that was
wanted by the central power and willingly accepted by the subjects.
In the year 13/12 BCE, a temple in honor of Augustus was erected at Philae,
probably at the instigation of the prefect of Egypt, P. Rubrius Barbarus. In it, the

8 Memphis Decree, ibid., 9o;196 BCE.

NEW GODS AND CULTS 251

emperor was greeted with the epithets soter kai euergetes, "savior and benefac-
tor;' and these terms were certainly not chosen at random: soter and euergetes
had been official appellations of the Lagides, and they clearly refer to the royal
ideology of the peace and prosperity guaranteed to his subjects by the sovereign.
The application of these epithets to the new emperor affirmed both the conti-
nuity of royal power (and thus its legitimacy) and its sacred character.
In the same year 13/12 BCE, an obelisk brought from Heliopolis was dedi-
cated to Augustus by order of the prefect. Around the same time, the temple at
Alexandria that Cleopatra had probably intended for the cult of her husband,
Mark Antony, was completed and dedicated to the cult of Augustus; from that
time on, it was called the Kaisareion, "temple of Caesar" or Sebasteion, "temple
of Augustus."
Contrary to what occurred at that time in the other provinces of the empire,
in Egypt, Augustus was manifestly considered to be, and designated, a "living
god." As early as 24 BCE, an inscription in the temple of the crocodile god Sok-
nopaios at Neiloupolis called him theos ek theou, "god, son of a god"; this
expression became a common formulation. A petition by priests of the Herakle-
opolitan Busiris, addressed to the prefect in the last years of the first century
BCE, designated the emperor as "the god and lord Autokrator Caesar." In the year
6 BCE, there was an association devoted to the cult of the "god Autokrator Cae-
sar" at Alexandria.
There was a great difference, however, between the cult of the Lagides and the
new cult of the emperor. While the Lagides had personally established their cult,
the Roman power, once the first years after the conquest were over, does not seem
to have concerned itself with organizing the imperial cult. Temples intended for
this cult were constructed in several cities in the chora (Arsinoe, Oxyrhynchos,
Hermopolis, Elephantine), but these were local initiatives. The organization of
the cult was neither directed nor regulated by imperial officials; rather, it was left
in the hands of municipal authorities and even ordinary private persons. The
imperial cult had its clergy, of course, many of whose members also held im-
portant civil offices, but there was no official corresponding to the eponymous
priest of the cult of the Lagides. For this reason, the documentation concerning
the cult is relatively uneven; cultic events and dedications of temples are well at-
tested for certain emperors, such as Nero, Vespasian, and Hadrian, but they are
practically nonexistent for others. Of course, it is likely that the (relatively rare)
visits to Egypt by emperors rekindled zeal with regard to their cult.
An interesting case is that of Claudius. In a letter addressed to the Alexandri-
ans, who had asked him to intervene in the conflict between Greeks and Jews, he
accepted the honors they wished to accord him (erection of statues, celebration
of his anniversary, etc.), but he categorically refused to have a high priest ap-
pointed for his cult or temples erected to him, because these "have always been
accorded only to gods." Other emperors would not have the same scruples; after
252 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

Hadrian's visit to Egypt in 130, a chapel was erected in his honor in the very en-
closure of the Serapeum, which was at that time the principal and most vener-
ated sanctuary of Alexandria.
We have little information about how the cult was conducted. It must have
included regular sacrifices, as well as festival liturgies on the birthdays of the em-
peror and the members of his family, and on the anniversaries of his accession
to power and of his victories. Preserved extracts from the accounts of the tem-
ple of Jupiter Capitolinus at Arsinoe, dating to 215 CE,9 inform us that festivals
were celebrated there "for the tenth anniversary and the victory of our lord, Em-
peror Severus Alexander (Caracalla),""for the health and eternal duration of the
lord emperor," "for the erection of the statue of the lord emperor," and so forth.
Some of these festivals were accompanied by processions, and all of them in-
cluded a ritual of crowning "all the statues that are in the temple," as well as a
nocturnal illumination. The association of the cult of the emperor with that of
Jupiter Capitolinus in one and the same temple is not surprising; but we other-
wise learn that in this temple festivals were also celebrated in honor of the Nile
and of the crocodile god Suchos, the principal god of the Faiyum, of which Ar-
sinoe was the capital.
It seems that in Roman Egypt, the imperial cult did not have the same reli-
gious and political importance as did the cult of the Lagides during the Hel-
lenistic Period. It undoubtedly had less impact than it did in the other provinces
of the empire, where representatives of the Roman government officially orga-
nized it. There is a basic reason for this fact. At the time of the conquest, there
existed in Egypt a living, omnipresent religion that had always sacralized royal
power. This sacralization was a remarkable instrument for stabilizing social re-
lationships and for securing acceptance of dependence and economic exploita-
tion. The moment the emperors were recognized by the clergy, and consequently
by the subjects, as legitimate holders of this sacred power and the place ac-
corded them, at least theoretically, in the rituals of the traditional religion dem-
onstrates this well they could leave the old religion to work in their favor,
without troubling themselves to assure the conduct of their cult. Moreover, while
the Lagides had early been obliged to have recourse to religious ideology as an
instrument of consolidating their power in the minds of both Greeks and Egyp-
tians, the Romans seem to have preoccupied themselves more with "holding"
Egypt and effectively assuring its exploitation than with gaining the loyalty of its
inhabitants by virtue of politico-religious propaganda.

9
BGU362.
NEW GODS AND CULTS 2 53

JUDAISM IN EGYPT

As in the case of the Greek cults, the introduction of Judaism into Egypt was
above all due to the presence of a large community and the important role that
it played in the life of the country. 10
The presence of Jewish communities in Egypt is attested at an early date. From
the third millennium on, Asiatic nomads or seminomads infiltrated into the
eastern delta and as far as the Nile valley. We know that "Israel" is mentioned for
the first time in an Egyptian document on a stela of Merneptah, the son and suc-
cessor of Ramesses II, who commemorated his victory over a Libyan coalition
that was aided by "Sea Peoples" around 1220 BCE. In this document, the name
Israel apparently designates tribes (rather than a country) that were expelled and
pursued by the king of Egypt; but what became the "departure from Egypt,"
or Exodus, in Jewish memory, a founding event in the life of the Jewish people
and the object of commemoration from generation to generation, was doubt-
less only one episode among others in the history of Egypt's relations with its
neighbors.
It was probably at the time of the capture of Jerusalem and the conquest of
the state of Judah by the Babylonians under Nebuchadrezzar II in 587 BCE that
Jewish colonies settled permanently in Egypt. A text of the prophet Jeremiah
himself an émigré mentions the "Judeans who inhabit the land of Egypt ... at
Migdol, at Takhpankhes (that is, Daphnae), at Memphis, and in the land of Pa-
tros (Upper Egypt)." In any case, we can note the existence of a large contingent
of Jewish soldiers at Elephantine, apparently by the beginning of the sixth cen-
tury; they joined other mercenaries of Syrian and Aramaean origin who were al-
ready settled there. At that time, Elephantine and neighboring Syene each had a
fortress intended to defend the southern boundary of Egypt against attacks by
nomads from the desert; the fortresses also played an important administrative
and economic role, for they were transit points for products from Africa that
were indispensable to the Egyptian economy.
The dossier of Aramaic papyri from Elephantine, which dates to the fifth cen-
tury BCE, informs us of the life and the activities of the military colony (Ara-
maic was the official language used in the Persian empire, of which Egypt was
then a part)." The Jews of Elephantine had a temple of their own, though this
was contrary to the Law, which forbade temples other than at Jerusalem. There,
they rendered a cult to their god Yaho, who was in principle a sole god, though
it seems that they associated a goddess called "queen of the sky" with him as con-

10 The Jewish community in Egypt has been studied by J. Mélèze-Modrzejewski, Les Juifs en Égypte

(Paris, 1991).
See P. Grelot (trans.), Documents araméens d'Égypt (Paris, 1972).
254 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

sort (note the anathemas launched by the prophet Jeremiah against the "idola-
trous" practices of the Jews settled in Egypt); their beliefs were clearly syncretis-
tic, rather than strictly monotheistic. In a private letter, a member of the colony
blesses his correspondent "by Yaho and by Khnum," that is, by the ram god
whom the Egyptians regarded as "Lord of Elephantine."' 2
Otherwise, the Jews celebrated the Sabbath and the traditional festivals. In a
letter addressed to "his brothers" of the Jewish garrison on the occasion of
Passover, a man named Hananyah reminded them, "from the fifteenth day to the
twenty-first day (of the month of Nisan), be pure and take care: do not do work
(on the fifteenth or the twenty-first day) ... do not drink (beer), and eat noth-
ing leavened."' 3
Difficulties must have arisen at some point between the priests of Khnum and
the members of the Jewish community; in any case, the temple of Yaho was badly
damaged. But it was rebuilt, it seems, at the end of the fifth century, and after
that, we know nothing further about the Jews of Elephantine.
At the beginning of the third century, a large Jewish community came to-
gether at Alexandria and settled in various sites in the chora. Its members were
descendants of the émigrés of 587, and in particular, newly arrived individuals,
for the Lagides, who controlled Palestine throughout the third century, favored
Jewish immigration. Alexandria became one of the most important centers of
the Diaspora, with two out of its five quarters inhabited mostly by Jews; around
the beginning of our own era, out of the million immigrants we can count in
Egypt (the total population is estimated at about 8 million), there might have
been 150,000 to 200,000 Jews. In the middle of the second century BCE, a com-
munity was established at Leontopolis (Tell el-Yahudiya) in the delta, under the
direction of the high priest Onias, who had taken refuge in Egypt; a temple was
built there. Jewish soldiers received plots of land in several villages of the Faiyum,
while others settled in the Heliopolite nome and in Upper Egypt.
These Jews of Egypt, who were especially sought-after as soldiers, could also
be officials, policemen, artisans, or agricultural workers. They were well inte-
grated into the society of Lagide Egypt; they adopted the Greek language, and
their names were often Hellenized, though they maintained their religious
identity.
Cases of conversion (or should we say apostasy?) were rare. In the second half
of the third century BCE, a certain Dositheos became the eponymous priest of
the cult of the Lagides. Much later, in the first century CE, a famous, though
highly exceptional, case of conversion was that of the high official T. Julius
Alexander, nephew of the philosopher Philo, who later was prefect of Egypt from
the reign of Nero to that of Vespasian. Generally speaking, however, the com-

12 Ibid., no. 87.

13 Ibid., no. 96.
NEW GODS AND CULTS 255

munities preserved their traditions and practices, though they conformed more
to the regulations of Hellenistic law than to those of Jewish law, and mixed mar-
riages between Jews and "gentiles" are rarely attested. The communities had their
synagogues or proseuchai (places of prayer), the oldest of which, at Schedia near
Alexandria and at Krokodilopolis-Arsinoe in the Faiyum, go back to the reign of
Ptolemy III. Significantly, the names of the king, the queen, and their children
appear in the Greek dedicatory inscriptions of these synagogues, testifying to
Lagide patronage of the Jewish cult.
In the third century BCE, there was a major religious innovation: the sacred
books (the Torah, or Pentateuch) were translated into Greek. According to the
legend reported in the anonymous text entitled Letter of Aristaios to Philokratos,
which was probably written by an Alexandrian Jew in the second half of the sec-
ond century BCE, Ptolemy II summoned seventy-two elders from Jerusalem to
Alexandria to make this translation, hence the name Septuagint, which remains
that of the Greek Bible:

King Ptolemy to Eleazar the high priest, sendeth greeting. There are many Jews
who now dwell in my kingdom, whom the Persians, when they were in power, car-
ried captives. They were honored by my father; some of them he placed in the
army, and gave them greater pay than ordinary; to others of them, when they came
with him into Egypt, he committed his garrisons, and the guarding of them, that
they might be a terror to the Egyptians. And when I had taken the government, I
treated all men with humanity, and especially those that are thy fellow citizens, of
whom I have set free above a hundred thousand that were slaves, and paid the price
of their redemption to their masters out of my own revenues.... And as I am de-
sirous to do what will be grateful to these, and to all the other Jews in the habit-
able earth, I have determined to procure an interpretation of your law, and to have
it translated out of Hebrew into Greek, and to be deposited into my library. Thou
wilt therefore do well to choose out and send to me men of a good character, who
are now elders in age, and six in number out of every tribe. These, by their age,
must be skilful in the laws, and of abilities to make an accurate interpretation of
them; and when this shall be finished, I shall think that I have done a work glori-
ous to myself.14

Did the king actually intervene to have the "Jewish Law" translated? That is
not impossible; at this point in time, a Demotic collection of various juridical
precepts and formulas was translated into Greek for the use of Egyptian tri-
bunals;'S knowledge of the laws that regulated the diverse communities could
only have been useful to the Lagide administration. It is likely, however, that the

14
Letter of Aristaios to Philokrates, cited by Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 12, 2, 5; see W. Whiston,
The Life and Works of Flavius Josephus (Philadelphia, n.d.), p. 349.
15 P. Oxy. 3285.
256 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

translation of the Torah was necessitated by the fact that Greek had become the
lingua franca of the Jewish communities settled in Egypt. The use of Greek was
thus established in the liturgical practices of the synagogues of the Jewish Dias-
pora as indicated by fragments of the Greek Bible preserved on papyrus, certain
of which go back to the second century BCE. Contrary to legend, there was no
single translation effort, but rather, a number of them, which yielded slightly dif-
ferent versions; one of them, which dates to the first century BCE, preserves in
its Greek text the Hebrew writing of the divine name —a name considered too
sacred to be translated into a foreign, profane language.
In the long run, these attempts had a considerable impact, for they enabled
non-Jews to have access to the sacred Hebrew texts. Alexandrian Judaism was
clearly interested in spreading into the "pagan" milieu, and we thus see, at the
margin of the communities, the appearance of persons called "proselytes," who
could be integrated into the Jewish community if they submitted to complete
observance of the Law, along with "God fearing" individuals who obeyed its ba-
sic imperatives and a minimum of ritual observances, though we are perhaps not
to envision complete conversion. An example of a proselytizing text from the
Alexandrian milieu is the curious tale of Joseph and Asenath, which is thought
to have been written, in Greek, during the Ptolemaic Period. Embroidering on
the biblical story of Joseph, the text relates the conversion to Judaism of the
Egyptian Asenath, daughter of Pentephres, the high priest of Heliopolis, and her
marriage to Joseph is a veritable apology for conversion and mixed marriage and
a means of attracting pagans to Judaism. Asenath confesses:

Spare me Lord, spare, for that I committed many sins against thee, I did lawless-
ness and ungodliness, I have spoken things not to be uttered, and wicked in thy
sight; my mouth, Lord, hath been polluted from the sacrifices of the idols of the
Egyptians, and from the table of their gods: I sinned, Lord, I sinned in thy sight,
both in knowledge and in ignorance in that I worshipped dead and deaf idols, and
I am not worthy to open my mouth unto thee, Lord, I the miserable Asenath
daughter of Pentephres the priest, the virgin and queen, who was once proud and
haughty.... For lo! the ancient and savage and cruel lion pursueth me, for that he
is father of the gods of the Egyptians, and the gods of the idol-maniacs are his chil-
dren, I have come to hate them, and I made away with them, because they are a
lion's children, and I cast all the gods of the Egyptians from me and did them away,
and the lion, or their father the devil, in wrath against me is trying to swallow me
up. 16

At that time, a whole Judaeo-Hellenistic literature, known from Greek texts,

but often also in versions in Coptic, Syriac, Armenian, and Slavic and other Ian-

16 Joseph and Asenath, 12, 5-9; E. W. Brooks, Joseph and Asenath: The Confession and Prayer of Asen-

ath, Daughter of Pentephres the Priest (London, 1918), pp. 40-41.

NEW GODS AND CULTS 257

guages, developed around the margins of the Old Testament. Some of these texts
were integrated into the Christian canon of scriptures, such as the beautiful
Greek text that bears the title Wisdom of Solomon; others remained at the mar-
gin of the canon, the so-called apocrypha and pseudepigraphia: Testaments of
the Twelve Patriarchs, Apocalypse of Baruch, Apocalypse of Elijah, Book of the
Secrets of Enoch, and so forth.
The most brilliant representative of this Alexandrian Judaism, which was Hel-
lenized but steeped in Jewish tradition, was Philo of Alexandria, who lived and
wrote around the turn of the Christian era, and whose output was considerable.
He was a Jew of strict observance, but much affected by Greek culture. All his
philosophical and exegetical reflection was aimed at demonstrating that Scrip-
ture, in particular the Pentateuch, is the source of all true knowledge, but he af-
firmed the convergence between biblical tradition and Platonic doctrine. The
principle of his exegesis was the allegorical method, which sought to discover a
hidden, spiritual meaning behind the literal one. Those whom Philo called Ther-
apeutai devoted themselves to study based on this allegorical interpretation of
the Law; he described their life-style in his treatise On the Contemplative Life.
This was, it seems, a sort of precursor of a monastic community who, having re-
treated into the neighborhood of Lake Mariut west of Alexandria, lived in pro-
found poverty and abandoned themselves to contemplation, meditation, and
study.
While Judaism's assimilation of Greek culture in the Alexandrian milieu
seems to have been successful, though without entailing a loss of the religious
tradition, signs of a conflict between Jews and Greeks appeared in the second
century BCE; certain historians consider these as the first manifestations of anti-
Semitism (or anti-Judaism), partly Greek and partly Egyptian in origin.17 There
were already traces of this attitude in Manetho, according to a tradition reported
by Flavius Josephus in his Contra Apion, where he reports that Manetho claimed
the Jews were descended from lepers whom a pharaoh chased out of Egypt.
But it was with the Roman conquest of Egypt that the situation of the Jews
deteriorated and their relations with their fellow citizens of Alexandria became
strained. During the first century CE, serious incidents erupted in 38, in 41, and
in 66, and delegations from the Jewish and Greek communities went to address
their grievances to the emperor. Two of Philo's treatises were devoted to the af-
fair of 38, the In Flaccum and the Legatio ad Gaium; a little later, on the occasion
of a conflict that broke out under Trajan, the Greek point of view was recorded
in a text whose polemical character and whose bias are manifest, the Acts of the
Pagan Martyrs of Alexandria.18 The Greeks evidently suspected that the Romans

17 See J. Mélèze-Modrzejewski, "Sur l'antisémitisme païen," in Le Racisme: Mythes et sciences (Brus-

sels, 1981), pp. 411-41.

18 H. A. Musurillo, The Acts of the Pagan/Christian Martyrs, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2000).
258 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

were supporting the Jews against them; but the actual nature of the conflict is
not absolutely clear. It is possible that there were religious issues: the pretext for
the affair that broke out in 38 and entailed the destruction of synagogues and
persecutions of the Jewish community was the fact that the Jews refused to erect
statues of the emperor Caligula in their synagogues, despite the latter's orders.
But we might rightly wonder about this Greek zeal regarding the imperial will.
The basis of the problem could well have been political and social in nature.
The Roman conquest resulted in a diminution of the status of the Jews. In the
Ptolemaic Period, their language and their culture had made them part of the
community of "Hellenes," with the advantages that such status brought them.
The Romans imposed a strict definition of citizenship: whoever was not a "Ro-
man citizen" (and there were few of them in Egypt) or a citizen of a Greek city
was considered to be "Egyptian," whatever their language and culture, and that
entailed all sorts of inconveniences, including submission to the laographia, a
head tax, and to corvée labor. A very small number of Jews had Alexandrian, or
even Roman citizenship, but the great majority of them found themselves
lumped in with the Aegyptii. It is likely that what the Jews of Alexandria were
seeking in the first century CE was their recognition as citizens or their as-
similation to the citizens of Alexandria, which was probably impossible under
Roman law and unacceptable to the Greeks. The letter of Claudius to the Alexan-
drians provisionally settled the problem. The Jews were not to demand citizen-
ship, for they were foreigners "in a city that is not theirs," but they would
maintain, with their council of elders (gerousia), a certain internal autonomy,
and in particular, they would preserve full religious freedom, with certain ac-
commodations to Roman law: they would not be required to appear before tri-
bunals on the Sabbath, and they would receive public distributions of cash rather
than oil, which was not kosher. The problem of their nonparticipation in the cult
of the emperor does not seem to have been solved ... but then, Claudius de-
clined this cult on his behalf.
The serious events that took place in Judea between 66 and 7o CE, culminat-
ing in the taking of Jerusalem by Titus and the destruction of the Temple,
scarcely seem to have had echoes in Egypt; but we note that Titus's chief of staff,
T. Julius Alexander, came from a Jewish family of Alexandria. From that time on,
though, the Jews of Egypt were subject to an additional payment, because a
ioudaikon telesma (Jewish impost) was imposed by Vespasian on all the Jews of
the empire; moreover, the fall of the Temple of Jerusalem led to the closing of
that of Leontopolis.
In 115 CE, under Trajan, a revolt broke out in Cyrene. At first a simple conflict
between Jews and Greeks, it would seem, it then spread to Egypt, Cyprus, and
even Mesopotamia, assuming from that time on a nationalistic and messianic
character (the head of the revolt in Cyrene, Loukios-Andreas, seems to have been
considered a messiah). The disturbances were soon put down at Alexandria, but
NEW GODS AND CULTS 2 59

they intensified in the chora and became a veritable war in which the Roman
army in Egypt was involved. The war would last for two years, entailing de-
struction and ruin in various places; a letter from the strategos Apollonios, dated
to the autumn of 117, informs us that the Hermopolite nome was devastated by
"impious Jews." In 117, the revolt ended. The Jewish communities of Egypt were
nearly annihilated; the property of the conquered was confiscated, and a special
fund, the ioudaikos logos, was established to assure its administration.
It was only at the end of the third century CE, when Egypt was invaded by
Palmyra, that Jews reappeared in Egypt. But these were new communities: their
language was Hebrew, not Greek, and they had biblical, not Hellenized, names.
New problems arose in the fourth century, due to the growing size and then the
triumph of the Christian community. In 415 CE, Bishop Cyril of Alexandria in-
cited the Christians to destroy the synagogues and the homes of the Jews, and to
drive them out of the city. Despite these persecutions, they succeeded in re-
maining there, and even in prospering; when he took Alexandria in 642, General
Amr ibn-el-As found, it seems, "40,000 Jews subject to tribute."
The fact remains that for at least four centuries, from the beginning of the
third century BCE to the beginning of the second century CE, the Diaspora in
Egypt, by virtue of its vitality and its capacity to integrate Greek culture into its
experience while retaining its attachment to traditional religious values and
practices, succeeded in creating a new current within Judaism and in establish-
ing a dialogue with "pagan" culture, prior to the reversals that were rendered in-
evitable by the persecutions that followed.

BIRTH AND SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY IN EGYPT

The beginnings of Christianity in Egypt are obscure. There is nothing to con-

firm the tradition that attributes the first efforts at evangelizing the country to
the apostle Mark, and during the first two centuries of our own era, there are few
traces of Christian presence in Egypt.
The Alexandrian school of catechesis, which is distinguished by several illus-
trious names (Pantenos, Clement of Alexandria, Origen), is not known to us un-
til the very end of the second century. Places of worship must still have been few
in number and of modest size: at Alexandria itself, we must await the middle of
the fourth century before a church was built whose dimensions were adapted to
the growing number of the faithful and to do this, the Kaisareion, the old tem-
ple of the imperial cult, was reused. It was probably in the course of the third
century, and especially in its second half, that Christian ecclesiastical institutions
were put in place; but on this point, too, we have little evidence. In 32o-21, at the
initiative of Bishop Alexander, a synod of a hundred bishops gathered at Alexan-
dria, but not all of them came from Egypt; recent research has succeeded in iden-
2 60 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

tifying only fifty-one episcopal sees in Egypt in the first half of the fourth cen-
tury, and the names of sixty-five bishops during the same period. From then on,
we see an increase in the number of "parishes," which often comprised several
villages and were endowed with relative autonomy. But their heads, the pres-
byters, were under the control of the bishop, with whom they were required to
meet three times a year, and the bishops themselves were under the strict con-
trol of the patriarch of Alexandria.
It must thus be acknowledged that the establishment of Christianity in Egypt
occurred rather slowly and unevenly, and that it did not begin to spread before
the fourth century. Research based on onomastics has not yet allowed firm con-
clusions to be drawn as to its spread in the chora in the third and fourth cen-
turies. But we must note that unlike what happened elsewhere, in Syria-Palestine
and Asia Minor, it was not the Jewish communities that served as the "recruit-
ment base" of Christianity; from 117 to 270 CE, there were hardly any Jews in
Egypt (see above). While it could have been introduced into the Jewish com-
munity toward the end of the first century, it was in the "pagan" whether Egyp-
tian or Hellenized—community that Christianity actually spread.
The fact remains that the quasi-nonexistence of Christianity in the docu-
mentation of the first centuries constitutes a problem. Relatively recently (1945),
a discovery shed an entirely new light on this problem: the discovery of the
"gnostic library" of Nag Hammadi. In 1945, in a rocky shelter at the foot of the
cliff of Gebel el-Tarif, not far from Sohag in Upper Egypt, an Egyptian peasant
discovered a jar containing thirteen leather-bound codices containing texts writ-
ten on papyrus in Coptic; some texts were burned or lost, but the majority ended
up in the Coptic Museum of Cairo, where nearly sixty years later, their publica-
tion and study continues. These texts, fifty-two in number, are of inestimable
value for our knowledge of primitive Christianity and of religious movements
in Egypt in the first centuries of our own era; a complete English translation of
these texts has been published under the direction of J. M. Robinson. '9 They
contain a collection of mostly unknown gospels (Gospel according to Thomas,
according to Philip, according to Mary, Gospel of the Egyptians, Gospel of Truth,
etc.), apocalypses (Apocalypse of Paul, of James, of Adam, of Peter, etc.), theo-
logical exposés (Exegesis of the Soul, Sophia of Jesus Christ, etc.), and treatises
on the sacraments (Baptism, Eucharist, etc.). All this was manifestly the library
of a Christian community, and we do not know the circumstances that resulted
in its sacred texts being hidden in this manner. But it is abundantly clear that
these were not "orthodox" Christians; these texts, whose characters (Christ, the
apostles, etc.) appear in the canonical gospels, express doctrines that were part
of the diverse currents of gnosticism.
The religious and philosophical movement called gnosticism, or gnosis (the

19 The Nag Hammadi Library (New York, 1977).

NEW GODS AND CULTS 261

Greek word for "knowledge"), which was particularly widespread in Egypt in the
first centuries of our own era, incorporated a number of intellectual trends. Al-
most always, however, there were two key ideas: the notion of dualism, which
implies the condemnation and rejection of matter, an opposition between the
transcendent God and creation, which could only be the work of an inferior
demiurge, and the notion of sophia, wisdom, an emanation of the supreme God,
a portion of which is in every human being; having fallen into matter, sophia as-
pires to reascend to God and unite with him.
Self-knowledge is extremely important in gnosticism, for it leads to knowl-
edge of God and brings about the transformation of man. Thus, in the Gospel
of Philip, we read, "You have seen the spirit, you have become the spirit. You have
seen Christ, you have become Christ. What you see, you become."
Previously, gnostic doctrines had been known from the writings of the "here-
siologues" and from Christian polemicists such as Irenaeus (Adversus haereses),
Epiphanius, and Hippolytus of Rome. But with the texts from Nag Hammadi,
we have direct access to these doctrines, and what is more, these texts are clearly
the sacred books of a community, vehicles of its beliefs and practices.
It must thus be acknowledged that the writings and doctrines of certain
Christian communities in Egypt were scarcely in conformity with what was later
imposed as the scriptural canon and the official doctrine of the church. In the
early centuries of Christianity, orthodoxy was not yet fixed, and what emerges
from the gnostic writings of Egypt is that Christianity could have developed
along radically different lines. The triumph of "Roman" orthodoxy was perhaps
due to the effectiveness of its organization, that is, to the doctrinal and liturgical
framework it was able to establish: everything that did not conform was then de-
clared heretical. It was doubtless for this reason that the library of Nag Hammadi
had to be hidden: while certain of the originals must date back to the second cen-
tury, the texts we have were copied between 35o and 40o CE, that is to say, at the
time when the official doctrine of the church was put in place and the battle
against "heresies" began. It is perhaps also for this reason that we know so little
about early Christianity in Egypt; the representatives of the official church might
have deliberately imposed a silence on this period when religious effervescence
and doctrinal freedom had been remarkable and thus all the more disturbing
and worthy of condemnation in the eyes of the doctrine that had overcome
them. As one scholar has written, "It is the winners who write history their
way."zo
While the chora remained little Christianized in third-century Egypt, theo-
logical activity began to increase at Alexandria. The Didaskaleion does not seem
to have pursued its activities beyond the middle of the third century, but it ex-
ercised a strong influence, and a certain number of personalities, in particular

20 E. Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York, 1979) , p. 142.

262 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

bishops of Asia Minor, were educated there. And it was at this time that theo-
logical conflicts arose, conflicts that the councils of the following centuries
would attempt to resolve.
In the middle of the century, Bishop Denys of Alexandria endeavored to lead
the bishops of Cyrene, adepts of the doctrine of Sabellius, which had been con-
demned in 217 by Pope Callixtus, back to orthodoxy; but the Cyreneans appealed
to Rome and accused Denys in their own turn. The controversy bore on the def-
inition of the nature of the Son of God: the Cyreneans professed that he had no
substance of his own which amounted to confusing the Father and the Son
and they accused Denys of teaching that he was not consubstantial with the Fa-
ther, that is to say, that he was subordinate to him. Both "errors" were con-
demned, and Denys declared himself in agreement with Rome; but differences
of formulation remained, and the quarrel broke out again in the following cen-
tury with Arianism. In the meanwhile, other conflicts arose: the church of Egypt,
which had already been attacked by the measures of Decius (247), suffered bit-
terly from those ordained by Diocletian (303-304). The principal objective of
the imperial decrees was to verify the loyalty of the subjects to the emperor and
the religion of the empire; without their being, in the beginning, specifically di-
rected at Christians, they were felt and experienced by the latter as persecutions.
There were victims, but many abjured and agreed to sacrifice to the "pagan" gods.
When the persecution ended, some of them requested reintegration into the
church, which was the beginning of the quarrel regarding the lapsi (literally, "the
fallen ones"). In 306, Bishop Melitios of Lykopolis (Asyut in Middle Egypt) op-
posed Bishop Peter of Alexandria, whom he reproached for indulgence toward
the lapsi; this disagreement, along with Melitios's ill-timed initiatives, led to the
latter's excommunication; he then became the head of a schismatic church, the
"church of the martyrs;" which survived until the eighth century.
But the gravest crisis, that which would perturb the church not only in Egypt
but throughout the empire during the entire fourth century and even beyond,
was the quarrel with Arianism. In the 32os, Arius, a priest of the Alexandrian
church, violently opposed his bishop on the subject of the definition of trinitar-
ian dogma. Arius's position seems to have been close to the thesis previously sup-
ported by Bishop Denys (but condemned by the bishop of Rome), which
suggested the subordination of the Son to the Father; he went further still, hold-
ing that the latter is eternal, uncreated, and the sole principle of all things. Con-
demned by a synod of Egyptian and Cyrenean bishops, Arius did not accept this
censure and found support among the bishops of Asia Minor and Palestine;
soon, there was a general conflagration, and the emperor Constantine was
obliged to intervene, with the result that a council that met at Nicaea in 325 (the
first "ecumenical" council) provisionally restored peace in the church. The ma-
jority of the council were anti-Arian; the "errors" of Arius were thus reproved,
and a profession of faith was adopted that declared that the Son was the "true
NEW GODS AND CULTS 263

God issued from the true God," "consubstantial (homoousios) with the Father"
(Nicene Creed) .
But the quarrel started up again; throughout the century, we see emperors
taking up the cause for or against Arianism, and pro- and anti-Arian bishops
succeeding one another on the episcopal thrones. This is what happened at
Alexandria under Bishop Athanasius: a determined adversary of Arianism, he
was deposed and exiled five times between 335 and 366 (he became bishop in
328), leaving room for pro-Arian bishops. The quarrel ended only in the very last
years of the century, thanks to the solid support of the emperor Theodosius for
what could at that time be called Christian orthodoxy, as defined at Nicaea.
In the following century, with the Arian crisis at an end, new Christological
quarrels saw the light of day, with the controversy over the unity or the duality
of the nature of Christ. In the middle of the century, Bishop Dioskoros of
Alexandria was an adherent of the so-called "monophysite" theses, which insist-
ed on the unity of the divine nature of Christ, to the detriment of his human na-
ture; though this doctrine was condemned at the Council of Chalcedon in 451,
Dioskoros held out, and nearly all his flock, bishops and faithful alike, stood be-
hind him. In the years that followed, the battles continued, but in the sixth cen-
tury, the schism was consecrated: the church of Egypt, that of Ethiopia, and part
of that of Syria were monophysite, and this is the faith professed to this day by
the Copts of Egypt.
A characteristic of Egyptian Christianity was monachism. The practice of re-
treating into the desert to lead a holy life far from the temptations of the world
arose at the end of the third century and became widespread in the fourth cen-
tury, when the persecutions were over and Christianity was just establishing it-
self in Egypt.
At first, the phenomenon was a solitary retreat, that of the eremite (hermit)
or anchorite, from the Greek term anachoresis, which in Egypt had long desig-
nated the "flight into the desert" of all those who for one reason or another
needed to escape the tax collector, the police, and so forth, and to make them-
selves forgotten for a time. The eremite chose a place outside the villages (but
not too far away, for he needed them for his subsistence), generally at the mar-
gin of the desert, under the shelter of a rock or in an abandoned tomb. There, he
devoted himself to prayer and meditation and practiced an extreme asceticism:
deprivation of food and sleep, and self-inflicted corporal punishments. To as-
sure his meager subsistence, the eremite worked with his hands, generally braid-
ing ropes and baskets out of reeds and palm fibers; he sold them in the nearest
village, from which he brought back the bit of food he needed.
The "model" of the eremites was Anthony, who was born in the middle of the
third century in an environment that was already Christian. At the age of twenty,
he abandoned his family and his goods to follow the call of God. He spent the
rest of his long life "in the desert," where he sank into an ever more rigorous re-
264 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

treat, at first not far from his native village, and then in the eastern desert, not
far from the Red Sea. The Life of Saint Anthony, attributed to Bishop Athanasius
of Alexandria, provides a detailed account of Anthony's acts of asceticism and
penitence and his battles against incessant demonic temptations. In the world of
the anchorite, demons were always present, in the form of monstrous beings, but
also in human form, and they were incarnated in the "evil desires" that constantly
tormented him:

Anthony went out to the tombs that were at some distance from the village. Hav-
ing requested an acquaintance to bring him bread at long intervals, he entered one
of the tombs and, when the acquaintance had closed the door on him, he remained
within alone. Now, the Enemy could not endure this. Fearing that in a short time
Anthony would fill the desert with his asceticism, he came one night with a throng
of demons.... During the night, therefore, the demons made such a din that the
whole place seemed to be shaken to its foundations. They seemed to break the four
walls of the room and to come in through them in the shape of beasts and reptiles;
and suddenly the place was filled with the forms of lions, bears, leopards, bulls, ser-
pents, asps, scorpions, and wolves.... The noises of all the apparitions together in
the same place were terrible, and their outbursts of fury ferocious. Anthony felt
bodily pains even more severe, as they scourged and goaded him, yet he lay there
unshaken, more vigilant in spirit than before. He groaned because of the pain of
his body but his mind was clear.21

With the many privations and acts of penitence that he imposed on himself,
he aimed to repress the "evil" instincts that sprang from the carnal body and to
reach the state of purity and perfection that would enable him to draw close to
God. But the eremite was not completely cut off from the world. In all his life,
Anthony went only twice to Alexandria, once to support the bishop in his battle
against Arianism, but many visitors came to him seeking prayers, advice, and
model behavior. During Anthony's lifetime, the practice of eremitism spread; of-
ten, the beginner "apprenticed" himself to an eremite until he was hardened
enough to become one in his own turn. Moreover, rather than absolute solitude,
certain eremites chose a semicommunal life; they gathered for prayers and litur-
gical ceremonies, but each one lived in his own cell, as was the case with the her-
mitages of the deserts of the Wadi Natrun west of Alexandria.
But another form of monachism began to spread in the first half of the fourth
century. In 323, Pachomius, who had at first lived in solitude at Khenoboskion
in Upper Egypt, founded the first monastic community not far from there, at
Tabennesis. For the first time, there was a need to define and apply the princi-
ples of a communal religious life:

21 Athanasius, Life of Anthony, see M. E. Keenan, trans., "Life of St. Anthony by St. Athanasius," in The
Fathers of the Church: A New Translation, vol. 15 (New York, 1952), pp. 142-44.
NEW GODS AND CULTS 265

Once, journeying on that desert for a good distance, he came to a deserted village
called Tabennesis. There he prayed with God's love in his mind. And after a long
prayer a voice came to him—he had not had a vision yet until that time—and told
him, "Stay here and build a monastery, and many will come to you to become
monks."22

A rule determined the rhythm of life and the activities of the monks (work,
prayer, discipline). Within an enclosure, around a chapel, several buildings shel-
tered groups of monks, while others accommodated communal activities (bak-
ery, kitchen, infirmary, etc.). The entirety was placed under the authority of a
superior, who was aided by an assistant and by "heads of houses." Pachomius's
initiative was so successful that he was obliged to found several other monaster-
ies, two of them for women (the first had been established near Tabennesis
around 34o by his sister Mary); afterward, thousands of monks would inhabit
Pachomian monasteries, whose religious and economic importance would be
considerable. In the fifth and sixth centuries, the monasteries, which possessed
fields and employed peasants and artisans, became economic powers.
The principles guiding the existence of anchorites were the same in a monas-
tic community. They were always to lead an ascetic life and to assure their sub-
sistence by the work of their hands. The objective was to attain perfect purity,
and thus union with God, but in a collective framework rather than individual
retreat.
This search for a different life was an entirely new phenomenon. Scholars have
attempted to establish a relationship between eremitism and monasticism and
earlier practices, but these new life-styles had little to do with the anachoresis of
Egyptians peasants who fled their village, often taking refuge in a temple that
had the right of asylum, to escape financial difficulties. They were also quite dif-
ferent from the practice of katoche, voluntary reclusion in a temple, which is well
attested in particular at the Serapeum of Memphis in the Ptolemaic Period and
which enabled individuals to place themselves "under the protection" of a god
in exchange for a fee or for services rendered to the temple. While the latter case
indeed involved a sort of "search for salvation," both material and psychological,
the notion of an asceticism that was necessary in order to draw close to God
seems to have been entirely absent.
The quest for solitude, with all the fears and frustrations it entailed, the will
to mortify the flesh, which often led to mad excesses, the attempts at annihilat-
ing desires, and the obsessive desire for purity all these constituted a new im-
age, one that was offered as an ideal to Christians. The era of the martyrs was
over, and these new practices spread only after the last great persecution, that of

22 Apostolos B. Athanassakis (trans.) The Life of Pachomius (Vita Prima Graeca), Society of Biblical
Literature Early Christian Literature Series 2 (Missoula, Mont., 1975), pp. 15-17.
266 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

Diocletian. The model of the ascetic, who was also a hero of the faith, succeeded
the model of the martyr. These practices reveal a contempt for and a fear of the
body, and at the same time, a contempt for and fear of society, which were char-
acteristic aspects of the evolution of mentalities in this period, and perhaps not
only in the Christian community. 23
Yet even for a monk, it was not always possible to remain outside society. The
hagiographic Lives of the Fathers portray them beset by the faithful, who came
to implore a prediction or a cure. For from that time on, they were the obliga-
tory intermediaries between human society and the sphere of the supernatural,
to which their sanctity gave them access.

23 See, in general, E. R. Dodds, Pagans and Christians in an Age of Anxiety (Cambridge, 1965).
 CHAPTER 6

PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES

CHANGES IN THE IMAGE OF THE GODS

Given that traditional Egyptian religion retained its vitality until the third cen-
tury of our own era and even beyond, does this mean that the introduction of
new gods and cults had no influence on it? Such an idea would suppose the ex-
istence of impenetrable boundaries between the various communities, which is
patently absurd; the process of assimilating Greek and Egyptian gods had already
begun in the era of Herodotus.
The thesis of a "cultural mingling" as the product of the settling of Greeks in
Egypt beginning at the end of the fourth century BCE cannot be seriously up-
held. Recent studies have shown that in all areas, whether language, the arts, in-
stitutions, or law, the two cultures, Egyptian and Greek, coexisted without ever
producing a "mixed civilization"; in the artistic domain in particular, the persis-
tence and vitality of traditions going back to the pharaonic era, even at the height
of the Ptolemaic Period, have been clearly demonstrated, to the point that his-
torians today question the very existence of an "Alexandrian art" envisioned as
a "mixed art."1
Nor can the existence of a "middle class" of mixed Egyptians and Greeks be
demonstrated. In the Ptolemaic Period, each of the communities maintained its
own status due to the difference in the styles of education, while in the Roman

1 R. Bianchi, "The Pharaonic Art of Ptolemaic Egypt," in Cleopatra's Egypt (New York, 1988), pp. 55-
80.
268 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

Period, differences in status, in particular tax status, between "Greeks" and

"Egyptians" were reinforced by the Roman administration, the category
"Greeks" evidently including native Egyptians from families that had long been
"Hellenized."
But it is clear that at least minimum contact between the two dominant cul-
tures was inevitable, and even indispensable, and linguistic communication was
the essential means for such contacts to occur. Well before the conquest, many
Egyptians must have learned Greek; there were interpreters in Egypt in the time
of Herodotus. The learning of Greek became even more important after the con-
quest; to communicate with the administration and fit in with it, learning the
language was imperative. All levels of competence in the language of the con-
querors seem to have coexisted in Egypt; we even encounter professional scribes
who knew it rather badly. Yet certain Egyptian groups gained access to classical
Greek culture in the Hellenistic Period: at Edfu, a hymn written in Greek in
honor of Horus, the falcon god, includes an invocation to Apollo (the Greek
"equivalent" of Horus) borrowed from a tragedy of Euripides, The Phoenicians;
some centuries later, a hymn inscribed on the pylon of the Egyptian temple of
Kysis (Dush), addressed in Greek to Isis, uses formulas borrowed from the po-
etry of Homer. There was no gap between the two worlds, the two cultures; in
the Roman Period, and undoubtedly earlier still, an Egypto-Greek culture was
able to develop. The so-called Hermetic literature (the treatises of a philosoph-
ical and religious character attributed to "Hermes Trismegistos," see below in this
chapter) owes much to Egyptian traditions, with Greek reinterpretations and
formulations, and among the last great representatives of Greek culture were the
poet Nonnos, from Panopolis (Akhmim), and the philosopher Plotinus, who
was from Lykopolis (Asyut).
The knowledge that certain groups of Egyptians had of Greek language and
culture; the presence in Egypt (at Alexandria, but also in the chora) of many
Greek temples, with the specific ceremonies that took place in them; and the in-
numerable images of Greek gods that not only were placed in the temples, but
could also be seen in private homes did all this change, in one way or another,
the beliefs and practices of the Egyptians, their ways of representing the gods,
and their ideas about their nature?
At first glance, the answer is negative. The domain of religion is generally care-
ful about tradition, and this was perhaps especially true in Egypt, where, because
of a nonlinear concept of time, everything that happened in the world was the
constant repetition of what took place on the "first occasion": the victorious com-
bat of Re against Apopis, which enabled the sun to reappear in the morning, was
repeated each day. The temple, the house of the god, saw its plan fixed "in the be-
ginning," and each new edifice was referenced to an archetypal scheme (bearing
in mind, of course, that there were variations due to different mythological tra-
PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 269

ditions and changes in construction techniques).2 The decoration of cultic build-

ings conformed to rules; since each temple had its own mythology and liturgies,
decorative themes could vary considerably, but always within set frameworks
(offering scenes, barque processions, presentation of the king to the gods, etc.) .
The images of deities were also fixed by tradition; though divine figures in Egypt
seem relatively "fluid," capable of receiving many names and being described by
various "formulas:' their material images were generally identifiable by means of
traits (morphology, crowns, attributes) that did not change.
In Graeco-Roman Egypt, the perception of the gods and the world was not
immutable and fixed, for theological reflection was pursued intensively through-
out this period, leading to many transformations in the written myths and their
pictorial expression. But these transformations took place within the framework
of Egyptian thought and its specific manner of conceiving the world. In the texts
and representations in the temples, we discern no change due to the introduc-
tion of Greek ideas or ways of representing deities.
A special and problematic case is that of the tomb of Petosiris, high priest of
Thoth at Hermopolis in the last decades of the fourth century BCE, or perhaps
during the reign of Ptolemy Soter. His tomb at Tuna el-Gebel, the necropolis of
Hermopolis, has the appearance of a temple rather than that of a tomb, and part
of the decoration is entirely traditional. But in addition to the traditional ele-
ments, there are scenes that are unusual, not so much in the choice of themes as
in their treatment: friezes of offering bearers (figure 17) stand out against a back-
ground laden with plant motifs comparable to that on "orientalizing" Greek
vases; the individuals are often depicted frontally, and their costume, a short
tunic and pointed cap for the men, are in no way Egyptian; and a mourning
woman, seated in an armchair and surrounded by servants, closely resembles
those we see on Attic funerary stelae of the fourth century. It is uncertain whether
these depictions predate the conquest; in any case, it seems they had no succes-
sors in the Ptolemaic Period. Perhaps we are to regard them as the culmination
of an artistic current whose origin might have gone back to the Saite Period; in
any event, the use of Greek "models;' at least for some of the scenes, seems in-
contestable.
We might think that the rules for representing deities continued to be strictly
observed (this is quite clear in the decoration of temples and the design of cult
statues), while new styles of representing human beings were introduced. This
is what seems to have happened in funerary art in the Ptolemaic, and especially
in the Roman, Period.3 The painted decoration of a tomb at el-Muzawwaqa in

On these problems, see J. -L. de Cenival, Égypte: Époque pharaonique (Freiburg, 1980).
2
See L. Castiglione, "Dualité du style dans l'art sépulcral égyptien à l'époque romaine," Acta Antiqua
3

Hungarica 9, no. 1-2 (1961), pp. 209-30.

270 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

FIGURE 17. Offering bearers, Tuna el-Gebel, tomb of Petosiris (end of the fourth century BCE). From G.
Lefebvre, Le Tombeau de Pétosiris (Cairo, 1924), pl. 46.

el-Dakhla oasis, which dates to the second century CE, offers a striking example.
The funerary deities and scenes from the Book of the Dead (Anubis as embalmer,
the deceased before Osiris, the Judgment of the Dead, etc.) are the expression of
a local craft industry, to judge by the style and technique, and are entirely tradi-
tional in appearance, while the representation of the deceased, depicted frontally
and dressed in a toga, and that of the members of his family, who are represented
as busts and in Roman costume, clearly stem from a different artistic tradition.
In the same vein, on painted shrouds of the Roman Period, we can often see a
very "Graeco-Roman" image of the deceased (bearded, in a toga, the body in
motion, etc.), along with images of gods (Osiris, Anubis) that are in total con-
formity with pharaonic models.
But new ways of representing Egyptian deities also appeared, probably in the
milieu of Alexandria and certainly, at least at first, for the use of Greeks. A typi-
cal case is that of the Nile. In the Egyptian tradition, the inundation was depicted
as an apparently androgynous being with a male face, pendulous breasts, and an
obese body, painted green or blue (the colors of vegetation and water). Rather
than a god in the strict sense of the word, this was a creative power of life, and
thus bisexual. But in Alexandrian art, the Nile was represented on the model of
Greek and Roman river gods, that is, as a bearded old man bearing a horn of
plenty, the Greek symbol of fertility, stretched out on a bed of reeds; around him
play little children whose number, sixteen, corresponds to the number of cubits
considered ideal for the height of the inundation. This Greek type (figure i8) was
widespread in statuary, and we find it on the imperial coins of Alexandria, where
the Nile incarnates the prosperity of the land as guaranteed by the return of the
inundation and the wise governance of the emperors.
PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 271

FIGURE 18.The Nile as god, (third century CE), tapestry in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow. From M. H.
Rutschowscaya, Tissus coptes (Paris, 1990), p. 67.

Another example of these changes is one that affected the figure of Osiris. He
had long been represented in an almost immutable way, dressed in a sort of white
shroud (in the Late Period, sometimes colored), with the atef crown on his head,
holding a whisk and the heqa scepter, which had the form of a crook. Usually an-
thropomorphic, he could also be represented by one of his emblems, the djed
pillar that symbolized his resurrection. While these images endured until a very
late date (in the funerary material, at least until the fourth century CE), an en-
tirely new image appeared in the Roman Period, the so-called "canopic Osiris"
(figure 19). The head of the god, with its usual crown, seems to emerge from a
vase (improperly called "canopic"; it is a water jar) that constitutes his body, its
paunch decorated with all sorts of figures: Anubis, Harpokrates, winged falcon,
and so forth. The meaning of this object is clear: at an early date, Osiris was as-
sociated with the water of the Nile, whose fertilizing power he incarnated; they
were the "humors" that emerged from his body. But this idea was not translated
into images prior to the first century of our own era.
One of the most notable transformations was that which affected the image
272 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

FIGURE 19. Canopic Osiris, marble from the temple of Ras el-Soda (ca.140-150 CE). From the catalog of
the exhibition Götter Pharaonen (Mainz, 1978), no. 15o.

of an extremely "popular" deity in Egypt, Isis. In the Ptolemaic Period, in statu-

ary, stelae, bronze figurines, and terra cottas, we see the spread of an image rather
different from the one that continued to appear on temple walls and in the "mi-
nor" arts. This new image was characterized by a different, more "realistic," treat-
ment of the body and a search for variety and naturalism in its poses. The style
of the hair and the clothing was also new: tiers of curled hair instead of an Egyp-
tian wig, and tunic and mantle draped in Greek style. Her crown was still
Hathoric, with cow's horns flanking the sun disk, but flowers, leaves, and ears of
wheat often surrounded it. Also, in a radical departure from Egyptian tradition,
this "Hellenized" Isis, recognizable by her crown, was sometimes represented
naked, often wearing jewelry, on the model of an orientalizing Aphrodite (fig-
ure 20).
PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 2 73

FIGURE 20. Isis-Aphrodite (second century CE), molded terra cotta figurine in the Louvre. From F.
Dunand, Terres cuites gréco-romaines d'Égypte (Paris, 1990), no. 338.

Harpokrates, the son of Isis, was also the object of new artistic interpretations.
He is often represented as a chubby little child, with his hair in curls in an en-
tirely Greek style. Most often, he wears the pharaonic double crown, for he is
"Horus the child," the heir of his father Osiris, but he was also depicted in all
sorts of childish poses, plunging his hand into a container of baby food, playing
with an animal such as a dog or a bird, traveling in a barque, and so forth. He is
often depicted as a horseman (figure 21) with spear and shield, a representation
that does not correspond to any Egyptian figurative type. All this iconography
refers to religious symbolism, but these images often belong to the "genre scenes"
that we see in Hellenistic art.
The basic problem is that of determining for whom these images were in-
274 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

FIGURE 21. Horus as horseman triumphing over the forces of evil (fifth to sixth century CE), sandstone,
Louvre. From K. Michalowski, L'Art de l'Ancienne Égypte (Paris, 1968), p. 431, fig. 718.

tended: for Greeks, or possibly for Egyptians? We find them principally among
the molded terra cotta figurines, manufacture of which was widespread in the
chora; since they included many "profane" figurines, this production was prob-
ably entirely independent of the temples. Moreover, these statuettes have been
found in private houses, in the rubbish heaps on the boundaries of ancient cities,
and possibly in tombs, but never in temples. The artisans who made them must
have taken the tastes of their clientele into account: the large quantities of Har-
pokrates figurines were certainly in response to a demand, while in the official
cult of the temples, this god had a relatively minor place. The depiction of Har-
pokrates as horseman, which is at first glance surprising, could thus have been
intended for a clientele of soldiers, many of whom are known to have settled in
the chora when their term of service was over.
These "popular" images of Egyptian deities in Hellenized form were wide-
spread in Egypt. They were made of a cheap material, clay, and the use of a mold
PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 2 75

enabled them to be mass-produced: they can be compared, in our own time and
in a French Catholic context, to the mass production of images of the Virgin of
Lourdes. That they were so widespread leads us to think that they were not re-
served for a Greek clientele, and thus that a portion of the Egyptian population
of the chora was increasingly led to adopt a new image of its gods. These changes
must have occurred quite slowly, for these "Hellenized" images were scarcely dif-
fused in the chora until the Roman Period, about four centuries after their mod-
els were created in the Greek circles of Alexandria.
But to alter his or her image, was this not to alter the identity of a deity? The
Greeks of Egypt, who quickly adopted the cult of Isis and even spread it beyond
Egypt, not only transformed her image, they also reinterpreted her personality
in terms of their own needs and expectations. Thus, under the name Isis-Tyche,
they developed her aspect as "Fortune," mistress of destiny; in the Greek com-
munities of the Hellenistic Period, Fortune became an all-powerful goddess. Un-
der the name of Isis Pelagia or Pharia, they made her the protectress of sailors;
Egypt had never had a specific deity who performed this function. The result of
these choices, or these imports, was a new figure, the "Alexandrian" Isis, who
maintained all the aspects and powers she had in the Egyptian milieu, but who
became ever more universalist, as proclaimed in a Greek hymn from her temple
of Narmouthis:

All mortals who live on the boundless earth,

Thracians and Greeks, and barbarians as well,
pronounce your beautiful name, which all honor,
each in his language, each in his country.
The Syrians call you Astarte, Artemis, Nanaia,
and the peoples of Lycia, sovereign Leto,
the men of Thrace call you Mother of the Gods,
the Greeks, Hera on the high throne, or even Aphrodite,
Hestia the benevolent, Rhea, Demeter.
But the Egyptians call you Thiwi, because you, you alone,
are all the goddesses that the peoples call by other names.4

Another Egyptian deity benefited from this effort at reinterpretation, and

without his losing his Egyptian identity, specifically Greek ideas developed
around him: this was Thoth, the god of knowledge, inventor of writing, and pa-
tron of scribes, who became the Hermes Trismegistos of late Greek literature
(the Greek epithet trismegistos, "thrice great," corresponds to an Egyptian epi-
thet used of Thoth). The texts of the Corpus Hermeticum might have precedents
in Egyptian "instructions" attributed to Thoth, but the Greek texts are specula-
tive in character, very much influenced by gnosis, and they accord a large place

4 First Hymn of Medinet Madi (Narmouthis), 11. 14-24.

276 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

to syncretistic magic, all of which distances them considerably from the doc-
trines and practices of the traditional religion.

POLYTHEISMS AND MONOTHEISMS:

FROM COEXISTENCE TO CONFLICT

In the Hellenistic Period, the coexistence of diverse religions does not seem to
have posed problems in Egypt. Like many polytheistic religions, traditional
Egyptian religion was tolerant and integrative; within the system itself, the pre-
ponderance accorded at any given moment to one particular deity (Re, Amun,
etc.) never entailed the exclusion of the others, for the diversity of forms that the
divine could assume was never denied. It seems that Egyptian tradition was not
exclusive of foreign religions; foreigners coming to Egypt could practice their
cults there, and ongoing contacts with certain neighboring lands, especially
Syria-Palestine, led the Egyptians to introduce foreign deities into their pan-
theon. In the New Kingdom, at least, two deities, Astarte and Reshep, were in-
troduced from Syria; they seem to have been integrated with no problem into
the world of the Egyptian gods. Astarte in particular, with the epithet "daughter
of Ptah," had her own temple at Memphis, the temple of the "foreign Aphrodite"
mentioned by Herodotus. The Egyptians recognized the powers of foreign gods:
fallen ill, Amenophis III asked the king of Mitanni to "loan" him the statue of
Ishtar of Nineveh, whose healing power must have been renowned.
It is thus not surprising that a place was made in Egypt for Greek, Thracian
(Heron, Bendis), Persian (Mithra), and Asiatic (Kybele, Attis) deities. These gods
and goddesses retained their identities and the specifics of their cult, but they
could also easily be assimilated to Egyptian deities. An interesting example of the
coexistence of Egyptian and Greek gods, both in the concrete "reality" of the doc-
uments and, we may suppose, in the imaginary realm of the faithful, is the fu-
nerary stela, found at Abydos, of a man from Lykopolis who lived in the first to
second century CE: in the upper part of the stela, he is represented in Egyptian
style, led by Anubis into the presence of Osiris, a thoroughly traditional depic-
tion on funerary stelae; the epitaph on the lower part, written in Greek, has him
say that he will from that time on be "a servant of the throne of Osiris of Aby-
dos," and that he has been conducted "into the Elysian field" by the "Kyllenian
Hermes." Here, there is a juxtaposition of two languages and two ways of repre-
senting deities: the god who conducts the deceased into the hereafter is, at one
and the same time, the jackal-headed Egyptian Anubis and the Greek Hermes of
Kyllene, the mountain in Arcadia where the god was believed to have been born.
This monument attests to the existence of a double culture in Egypt in the Ro-
man Period, while at the same time illustrating the coexistence of the religions.
We do not know to what extent the Egyptians were able to practice Greek cults
PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 2 77

(this was certainly not forbidden to them), but it seems that they were able to
adopt Greek images and formulations for their own deities.
For the Greeks, as for the Romans, the coexistence of cults posed no prob-
lems; they recognized the "gods of others" and did not hesitate to adopt them
when they found themselves abroad. Besides the "ancestral cults" that they
brought with them to Egypt, they practiced the cults of Egypt, as attested by nu-
merous dedicatory inscriptions addressed in Greek, as early as the first century
after the conquest, to Egyptian deities.
One problem could have posed itself, though, that of the animal cults. In the
first millennium BCE and throughout the Roman Period, there was an upsurge
in the popularity of these cults, and the major cemeteries of sacred animals are
almost all from these periods. The representation of deities in animal or hybrid
form, or the incarnation of a god in a living animal, seem to indicate that in
Egyptian thought, the divine could manifest itself in multiple forms, whether
animal, vegetal, or human, with no hierarchical distinction between the differ-
ent orders of creation. This attitude was the opposite of Greek ideas regarding
man and the world, which postulated a radical difference between the nature of
humans, animals, and deities. In the classical era, there was almost no trace of
animality in Greek religion; hybrid half-man, half-animal forms were reserved
for marginal creatures, such as satyrs or centaurs, that received no cult, with the
sole exception of Pan. The animals associated with certain deities (the eagle of
Zeus, the owl of Athena, etc.) were hardly more than "heraldic figures."5 The
practice of blood sacrifice might indicate a sort of equivalence between animal
and man; but while the practice could in some way have placed them in the same
sphere, this sphere was radically distanced from that of the gods.
Still, the animal character of Egyptian deities was no absolute obstacle to their
adoption by the Greeks. Especially striking is the example of the cult of the croc-
odile gods of the Faiyum: at Theadelphia in 137 BCE, an Alexandrian, Agath-
odoros, and his wife Isidora dedicated the propylon of the temple of the
crocodile god Pneferos; a little later, a Macedonian, a local notable named He-
liodoros, made a dedication to the same Pneferos. Elsewhere in the Faiyum, at
the beginning of the first century BCE, an association of former ephebes (thus,
Greeks of status and education) dedicated land to the crocodile god Suchos, the
"twice great:' These are not isolated examples, and many other deities with ani-
mal form were the object of a cult on the part of Greeks. In 175/170 BCE, in the
Faiyum, two Greeks, daughters of a strategos, one of whom had been priestess of
the cult of the Lagides, left a dedicatory text to the cat goddess Bastet; other texts
are addressed to Taweret, the hippopotamus goddess, protectress of births, and
to Hermuthis or Thermuthis, a serpent goddess and protectress of harvests, who
was an "aspect" of Isis.

5 See W. Burkert, Greek Religion (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), pp. 64-65.

278 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

The attitude of the Romans with regard to deities with animal form was per-
haps more reticent than that of the Greeks. In any event, we know that when Oc-
tavian was in Egypt, he declined to visit the Apis bull, and Latin literature has
only scorn for this sort of cult, from Virgil, who opposed the venerable gods of
the Romans to the strange, hybrid creatures the Egyptians worshiped (Aeneid,
book 8), to Juvenal, who mocked the "monsters to whom the Egyptian addresses
his insane cult" (Satire 15). But it is likely that Romans settled in Egypt followed
their rule of "venerating the gods of the land where one is." An emperor like
Hadrian displayed more understanding with regard to the cult of Apis than Oc-
tavian had, and the emperor's attitude was surely a model for his subordinates.
There was apparently no conflict among the polytheistic religions that coex-
isted in Egypt, despite the differences in their visions of the world and the gods.
But problems could arise with the appearance of monotheistic religions, which
by definition are exclusive of any other form of belief. Nevertheless, Jewish
monotheism does not seem to have posed any problems.
The cult of the Jews of Elephantine was clearly somewhat syncretistic, while
that of the communities who settled in Egypt in the Ptolemaic Period was defi-
nitely orthodox. But curiously, the antagonism that grew between Jews and
Egyptians, as well as between Judaeo-Aramaeans and Greeks, does not seem to
have had a fundamentally religious basis. The incidents at Elephantine could
have had their origin in the Jewish ritual of immolating the paschal lamb, which
would have been difficult to accept in a region where the principal cult was that
of a ram god, entailing a dietary prohibition with regard to mutton. Later, how-
ever, Jews were reproached not so much for practices that were incompatible
with Egyptian beliefs as for their separatist attitude, what was called their amixia:
they were those who would not mingle with others. This was in part true because
of the many prescriptions that regulated Jewish existence and forbade them to
share the customs (dietary, matrimonial, festive, etc.) of the "pagans." Of course,
the bases of this life-style were religious, which meant, when all was said and
done, that to reproach Jews for their "difference" was to refuse to recognize their
religious identity. Moreover, they could also be reproached for their "atheism,"
that is, their refusal to admit that the Egyptian deities were gods. It is true that
for adherents of a strictly monotheistic religion, one that also respected the pro-
hibition of images, the world of Egyptian religion, with its plurality of deities
and multiplicity of images, must have appeared strange and scandalous.
And what of Christian monotheism? We are ill informed regarding the earli-
est Christian communities (see book II, chapter 5), but it seems that for a long
time, there was no major conflict between the dominant traditional religion and
Christian worship. There were, to be sure, phases of persecution, under Decius
in the middle of the third century, and under Diocletian in the first years of the
fourth. But these followed on directives of the imperial government, applicable
throughout the empire, and they had nothing to do with local religious antago-
PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 279

nisms. There was no question of a conflict between traditional gods and the new
God, but rather, an essentially political problem: the Christians, whose religion,
just because it was new, was not "respectable" (unlike the Jewish religion, which
had its antiquity in its favor), seemed like a foreign body in Roman society, all
the more so in that they rejected the imperial cult, which was a unifying factor
in that society.
At Alexandria, especially in the fourth century, a number of incidents set the
two communities against one another. But in the chora, we clearly see a lengthy
period of "peaceful coexistence" between the religions, one that probably lasted
until the end of the fourth century. There is both archaeological and textual ev-
idence for this coexistence.
The example of Kysis (Dush), a large town in el-Kharga oasis that flourished
in the Roman Period, seems indicative. In the final years of the third century, a
Christian priest at Kysis received a letter from one of his "brothers in the Lord"
announcing the arrival of the mummy of a woman who was to be buried in the
village; clearly, this presupposes the existence of a Christian community at Ky-
sis. About a century later, there were many Christian names among those of the
inhabitants of the village and the soldiers of the garrison. Archaeological inves-
tigation of the cemeteries of Kysis has shown that throughout this period, and
down to the fourth century, at least, traditional customs and beliefs were very
much alive there: the painted decoration of mummy cartonnages and funerary
beds reproduces scenes from the Book of the Dead, statuettes of Osiris and Anu-
bis were deposited in tombs, and the deceased were abundantly provided with
offerings of food and objects of daily life, all of which testifies to belief in the
continuation of life after death. It is thus obvious that in a small provincial city
far from the agitation at Alexandria, those who professed the traditional religion
and the adherents of the new Christian religion could practice their respective
forms of worship with no apparent problems.
The same conclusion can be drawn from the investigation of the large necrop-
olis of Bagawat, located near Hibis, the capital of the same oasis, which has
revealed the presence of "pagan" tombs in the midst of the more numerous
Christian ones (the necropolis was used between the fourth and the seventh cen-
turies of our own era). We note the same phenomenon in the necropolis of
Hawara in the Faiyum, leading us to think that this was a widespread practice
throughout Egypt. Moreover, it is not always easy to distinguish Christian tombs
from "pagan" ones, for in funerary matters, as in others, the Christians followed
the customs of the surrounding environment.
The abundant literature about the monks and the eremites of the Egyptian
deserts offers a series of highly interesting testimonies regarding the coexistence
of the religions. This literature is obviously both hagiographic and polemical and
as such, subject to caution; but the very malevolence of this literature toward the
traditional religion enables us to consider its information regarding good rela-
2 80 PART II. THE RELIGIOUS UNIVERSE

dons between Christians and non-Christians as trustworthy. Thus, an eremite of

the Thebais recounts that he was the son of a "pagan priest," and that in his youth,
he was accustomed to sit (in the temple) to watch his father carry out the sacri-
fices. Another recounts how a monk he knew encountered the daughter of a "pa-
gan priest" in a village, fell in love, and asked her father for permission to marry
her. The latter agreed on condition that the suitor renounce his God, which our
monk immediately promised to do; but later, he became conscious of his sin and
went to do penance in the desert. Another of these accounts tells of one more
"pagan priest" who went to visit an eremite in his cell, spent the night there, and
conversed at length with him on the theme of divine visions:

Abba Olympios said this, "One of the pagan priests came down from Scetis one
day and came to my cell and slept there. Having reflected on the monks' way of
life, he said to me, `Since you live like this, do you not receive any visions from your
God?' I said to him 'No.' Then the priest said to me, 'Yet when we make a sacrifice
to our God, he hides nothing from us, but discloses his mysteries; and you, giving
yourselves so much hardship, vigils, prayer and asceticism, say that you see noth-
ing? Truly, if you see nothing, then it is because you have impure thoughts in your
hearts, which separate you from your God, and for this reason his mysteries are
not revealed to you.' So I went to report the priest's words to the old men. They
were filled with admiration and said that this was true. For impure thoughts sep-
arate God from man."6

Although these stories obey a manifest apologetic will, the situations they evoke
must have been plausible, or they would have lost all credibility, which would
have been contrary to their desired objective. Once again, the conclusion we can
draw from them is that which imposed itself on one of the archaeologists dig-
ging at Bagawat: "The adherents of the old and the new religion worked and lived
side by side."
In the course of the fourth century, however, the religious confrontations at
Alexandria became more serious; they opposed not only Christians and "pa-
gans," but also Christians and Christians. Thus, in 339 CE, serious incidents oc-
curred between pro- and anti-Arians; "pagans" and Jews took advantage of them,
it was claimed, to sack a church in the city, that of Theonas. In 356, there was a
new conflict between anti- and pro-Arians; this time, "pagans" invaded what was
called the "great church," which was located in the former temple of the imper-
ial cult, the Kaisareion: this act can be interpreted as an attempt to reclaim it. The
most serious affair occurred in 361. The death of the pro-Arian emperor Con-
stantius enabled a non-Christian emperor, Julian, to come to power; Georgos,
the Arian bishop of Alexandria, had clearly made himself odious to a good part

6 Sayings of the Desert Fathers, "Olympios," 1; see B. Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Al-

phabetical Collection (London, 1975), p. 135.

PROBLEMS AND CONTROVERSIES 281

of the population, who at that time seized him, submitted him to all sorts of mal-
treatment, and finished by putting him to death, along with two high Christian
officials who were reproached, like the bishop, for their provocative attitude with
regard to the traditional religion.
The outcome of these conflicts was the systematic destruction of the temples
and the extirpation of the traditional religion under the leadership of Bishop
Theophilos of Alexandria, who based his actions on the edicts of interdiction of
the "pagan" cults promulgated by the emperor Theodosius in 391/392:

When the trouble had ceased, Theophilus and the eparch assisted each other in
burning the altars; the idols they melted down into vessels for the needs of the
church. This they arranged according to the emperor's wish. But one image, a
statue, they left unmelted; for mockery they put it in an inappropriate place for
their admonition.'

But after the fall of Sarapis, who never lived, were there sanctuaries of any other
demon that could remain standing? It is too little to say that all the chapels of
Alexandria devoted to any demon whatsoever were destroyed almost column by
column. But in all the cities of Egypt, in the fortified posts, in the villages, in all the
countryside, along the banks of the river and even in the desert, all the sanctuar-
ies, or rather, all the sepulchers that could be discovered were, thanks to the zeal of
every bishop, knocked down and razed, with the result that the countryside, which
had been wrongfully given over to demons, was again restored to cultivation.8

It is clear, however, that throughout the fourth century, the religious conflicts
embroiled not only Christians and "pagans," but also Christians among them-
selves, and that the "pagans" took advantage of these dissensions. It is also clear
that the conflicts always had a political dimension, and that the decisions made
by emperors regarding religious policy had repercussions on the faithful, ac-
cording to whether they felt themselves to be supported by the central power or,
on the contrary, suspect or even susceptible of being treated as "rebels."

' Robert W. Thomson (trans.), The Armenian Adaptation of the Ecclesiastical History of Socrates
Scholasticus, Hebrew University Armenian Studies 3 (Louvain, 2001), p. 152.
8 Rufinus, Ecclesiatical History, book 2, chapter 25.
 PART III

HUMAN BEHAVIORS
 CHAPTER 7

OFFICIAL LITURGIES

The World of the Temples and Its Activities

A GREEK FESTIVAL: THE PTOLEMAIA OF ALEXANDRIA

In 28o BCE, Ptolemy II Philadelphos honored his deceased parents, Ptolemy I and
Berenike, by instituting a festival called Ptolemaia. This became a prestigious fes-
tival. On the model of the major festivals of the Greek world, it was to be celebrated
every four years; it was otherwise qualified as "isolympic" to indicate that it was on
a par with the famous festivals celebrated at Olympia in honor of Zeus. Represen-
tatives of the Greek cities and the Hellenistic kingdoms and states were invited to
attend. Callixenes of Rhodes wrote a description of one of these festivals (either
the one celebrated in 271-270, after the First Syrian War, or the one celebrated in
275-274) toward the end of the third century BCE; it is the well-documented ac-
count of someone who was still able to interview eyewitnesses to the ceremony.'
Though the festival took place in the city of Alexandria (and part of the cer-
emony in the stadium), the outline of the festival was of the Greek type. It be-
gan with a procession, the pompe, which lasted two days; then came the sacrifice,
thusia, for which the two thousand bulls that were part of the procession were
undoubtedly destined, and after that was the contest, the agon, which lasted one
whole day and included all sorts of competitions: athletic, musical, and eques-
trian. At the end, the festival was crowned by a banquet, hestiasis, or rather, two
banquets, one reserved for the privileged guests and the other for soldiers, mem-

1 The text is preserved by a writer of the second to third century CE, Athenaios of Naukratis, Deip-

nosophistai, book 5, chapters 196-203.

28 6 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

bers of cultic associations, and visitors. The festival was evidently paid for and
organized by the Lagide government; royal functionaries, the oikonomoi, as-
sumed financial responsibility for it, with the help of a fund that was fueled by
a special impost.
What is immediately apparent is that this was not a "popular;' spontaneous
festival, but rather a spectacle offered to the people of Alexandria and invited for-
eign guests. The participants were groups chosen because of their profession or
their age to play a given role in the procession: members of the clergy and of the
Dionysiac cultic associations (Callixenes devoted most of his description to the
Dionysiac procession, which was only one of its elements), troops of adolescents
and children, both boys and girls, carrying vases and precious objects, and con-
tingents of soldiers whose number and armament were impressive and who
closed the procession (the festival commemorated a victory). All of this was
manifestly quite disciplined: neither ages nor sexes were mixed together, and at
the head of the procession, men dressed as silenuses prevented the crowd from
mingling with those who participated in the ceremony.
In this festival/spectacle, primacy was accorded to visual language, while mu-
sic and song, which were characteristic elements in Egyptian festivals, scarcely
came into play. There were, to be sure, "satyrs" who sang a "harvest song" and a
chorus of men accompanied by zither players: but this was a sort of concert, and
the public did not take part in the songs. The festival was thus above all a suc-
cession of images, and these images were arranged in a meaningful manner, with
high points intended to underscore the important themes. Among these high
points was the appearance of the chariot of Dionysos, surrounded by members
of the clergy and the cultic associations, in hierarchical order:

After these came a four-wheeled cart, twenty-one feet long and twelve feet wide,
drawn by one hundred and eighty men; in this stood a statue of Dionysus fifteen
feet tall, pouring a libation from a gold goblet, and wearing a purple tunic ex-
tending to the feet, over which was a transparent saffron coat; but round his shoul-
ders was thrown a purple mantle spangled with gold. In front of him lay a gold
Laconian mixing-bowl holding one hundred and fifty gallons; also a gold tripod,
on which lay a gold censer and two saucers of gold full of cassia and saffron. Over
him stretched a canopy decorated with ivy, grape-vine, and the other cultivated
fruits, and hanging to it also were wreaths, ribbons, Bacchic wands, tambourines,
fillets, and satyric, comic, and tragic masks. The cart (was followed) by priests and
priestesses, and those who had charge of the sacred vestments, sacred guilds of
every description, and women carrying the winnowing-fans.2

Next came chariots bearing scenes from the myth of Dionysos, "crèches" of a sort
in which the spectators could see the loves of Semele, Dionysos's mother, the

2 Callixenes of Rhodes, apud Athenaios, Deipnosophistai, book 5, chapter 198; see C. B. Gulick, Athe-

naeus: The Deipnosophists, vol. 2 (London, 1928), p. 399.

OFFICIAL LITURGIES 287

birth of the little god in the grotto of the Nymphs, and his triumphal return from
his expedition to India. Another highlight was the arrival of the royal chariot,
with the statues of Ptolemy and Alexander, followed by women personifying the
cities of Asia that were subject to the Lagide king. The spectacle was obviously
laden with symbolism and ideology. Interspersed with them were picturesque
and pleasant tableaux: men got up as satyrs and silenuses, youths bearing vases
filled with wine or aromatics, young boys and girls drawing carriages, and troops
of exotic animals, among them a white bear, a giraffe, and a Nubian rhinoceros.
All this was to please the eyes. But at the same time, it was intended to impress
the spectator with the wealth and power of the king: the richness of the cos-
tumes, which were dominated by purple, vermillion, and gold, the richness of
the jewelry and the armor, the gleaming of the colors, the beams of light that
shone from the gems and the precious metals, and the richness of the gold and
silver vessels heaped in profusion on chariots and display racks (four hundred
chariots bore objects of silver, twenty bore objects of gold, etc.). The exhibition
of precious and rare commodities aromatics, elephant tusks, ebony wood,
gold dust testified to the wealth of the king and the extent of his power, which
reached as far as Arabia, India, and deepest Africa. The processions of "captives:'
"tribute bearers," and soldiers were also signs of his power.
The propagandistic character of the festival emerges clearly from Callixenes'
description. First of all, it was a festival of victory and a demonstration of force:
it was clearly intended to impress the Greek "allies;' whose representatives were
in attendance, and perhaps also subjects whose loyalty was not entirely above
suspicion. It was a display for the glory of the Lagide dynasty: the parents of the
king were promoted to the rank of gods and associated with Alexander, enabling
them to profit from his enormous prestige (their statues were in a chariot dur-
ing the Dionysiac procession, but in addition to this, there were processions es-
pecially devoted to them that were not described by Callixenes). The honors
accorded them were evidence of their son's piety toward them, his eusebeia, an
eminently royal virtue; moreover, these honors reflected back on him, for as son
of a divine couple, he himself was assured deification.
The symbolic apparatus of the festival underscored the essential virtues of the
sovereign: his valor in war, his piety towards his parents and the gods, his gen-
erosity, and the prosperity he dispensed to his subjects; the latter was symbol-
ized by the sweet wine distributed to the crowd, by the banquets that closed the
festival, and also by the horn of plenty that was solemnly carried in the proces-
sion. The horn of plenty also accompanied the effigy of Arsinoe II on coins; in
the Hellenistic Period, it was the attribute of deities who were guarantors of fer-
tility and wealth.
But all that does not mean that the festival was nothing more than a vehicle
of royal policy. Dionysos, who played an essential role in it, was not just the sup-
posed ancestor of the Lagide dynasty; he was a very popular god with the Greeks
in the Hellenistic Period, and he was indeed introduced into third century BCE
2só PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

Egypt, where he had his clergy, his cult places, and his associations; the latter
played an important role in the festival. Strikingly, in this festival that was so or-
ganized, so "controlled," we sense the more or less masked presence of ancient
practices characteristic of Dionysiac festivals: rites of masquerade and rites of in-
version. There was a masquerade of masked silenuses and satyrs, their bodies
painted purple and vermillion, and a masquerade of female bacchants with their
hair undone and crowned with serpents and wild plants, brandishing daggers
and serpents. But the savagery and violence incarnate in these servants of Dio-
nysos was entirely contained; they proceeded in an orderly fashion, and they
were only one element of the spectacle offered to the people of Alexandria. As to
the rites of inversion, there was an exhibition of little boys dressed as chariot
drivers and little girls disguised as warriors, with arms at their waist; these prac-
tices, expressions of a "topsy-turvy world" (children playing the role of adults),
were typical of carnival festivals. The Ptolemaia festival took place in the middle
of winter, that is to say, at the time when the principal Dionysiac festivals were
celebrated, and when, according to the Greek calendar, a new year would soon
appear and it was necessary to conjure the hostile forces that threatened it, the
forces that the masked beings incarnated, the "chthonic demons" who were the
silenuses and the satyrs.
It thus seems that the festival described by Callixenes included practices with
an ancient content well known to the Greeks; but these appeared only in a veiled
manner. What predominated in the Ptolemaia was the will of the state to make
the festival a demonstration, a manifestation of power.
A demonstration, but for whom? The ceremony made no reference to Egyp-
tian religion or traditions; it was the world of Greek gods and myths that was
evoked by the statues and tableaux in the chariots. Moreover, the sacred objects
borne in the procession stem from Greek symbolism: horns of plenty; Dionysiac
thyrsoi, tambourines, and winnowing baskets; and crowns of ivy or vine, and of
pine or olive branches, but of gold (these had nothing to do with Egyptian
crowns). Though Dionysos was indeed assimilated to Osiris in Egypt, nothing
in the decor or the rites of the festival recalled this assimilation. The language of
the festival was a Greek language. In these early years after the conquest, there
were certainly few Egyptians to whom the images of the spectacle (legendary and
cultic scenes, the symbolism of the objects, etc.) could have been entirely acces-
sible. It was thus for the king's Greek subjects and his invited guests that this great
politico-religious scenario was designed. This was the first phase of the Lagide
domination, and it was important for the king to assure the loyalty and support
of the Greek element of the population, which played a dominant role in all sec-
tors and constituted his best source of support. The royal ideology, such as it was
expressed in the festival with all the force of imagery, was used as a means of ob-
taining the consent of the Greek subjects (combined, of course, with an effective
policy of distributing honors, privileges, and material advantages).
OFFICIAL LITURGIES 28 9

As for the Egyptian subjects, they were clearly excluded from a festival whose
language would have been, in any case, at least partly incomprehensible to them.
At this time, either the royal power was not yet desirous of obtaining their ad-
hesion to its system, or rather, other means of propaganda were directed at them.
An example of the latter occurred some decades later, at the time of the Cano-
pus Decree (238 BCE), with the festival instituted in the month of Tybi in honor
of little princess Berenike, daughter of Ptolemy III. This was a manifestly Egyp-
tian festival, integrated into the Egyptian liturgical calendar and centered on a
highly Egyptianized image of the new goddess. The festival, which was organized
entirely by the Egyptian clergy, evidently at the instigation of the state, was also
a means of expressing royal ideology; but in this case, the ideology borrowed
Egyptian forms of expression, using the old to make the new more acceptable:

It has seemed appropriate to render eternal honors to Queen Berenike, born of

the gods Euergetes (i.e., Ptolemy III and his wife Berenike II), in all the temples of
the land; and since she went to the gods in the month of Tybi, in which the daugh-
ter of the Sun (a goddess) once also passed away, she whom, out of affection, her
father sometimes called his crown and sometimes his eye, and since a festival and
a journey by boat are made for her in most of the premier temples in this month,
when her apotheosis took place, there will also be consecrated to Queen Berenike,
born of the gods Euergetes, in all the temples of the land, in the month of Tybi, a
festival with a journey by boat, which will last four days, beginning with the 17th,
the day on which the journey by boat and the end of the mourning took place for
her the first time; and a statue will be made for her of gold decorated with gems
in every temple of the first and second rank, and in the sanctuary will be placed
this statue, which the prophet or one of the priests having access to the sanctuary
will bear in his arms when the processions and panegyrics of the other gods take
place.3

But if we acknowledge that any festival exhibits the cohesion of a society, both
in its own eyes and those of outsiders, then it was the cohesion and strength of
one group, that of the Greek immigrants, that were expressed in the Alexandrian
Ptolemaia.

AN EGYPTIAN FESTIVAL: THE "FESTIVAL OF THE UPLIFTING OF THE

SKY AND THE CREATION OF THE POTTER'S WHEEL" AT ESNA

At Esna, as in the other Ptolemaic and Roman temples of Egypt, the myths did
not have only a narrative or speculative value; they were incarnated in rituals,
and that is what gave them their "incantative force," as Serge Sauneron has called

3 Canopus Decree, OGIS 56; 238 BCE.

290 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

it. In the course of the festivals, the deeds accomplished by the gods in primor-
dial times were not only commemorated, but reproduced, relived by the clergy
of the temple, who were joined in certain parts of the ritual action by the in-
habitants of the city and the region, for the staging of festivals presupposed com-
munal participation.
The official calendar of the festival of Esna has been preserved, carved on the
inside face of the antae of the hypostyle hall. It contains a month-by-month list
of the festival days, with indications of the gods in whose honor the festivals were
celebrated, and sometimes a summary of the ceremonies. The people of Esna
would undoubtedly have been able to say, like La Fontaine's cobbler, "They are
ruining us with festivals" (though we do not know whether these festival days
were days when no work was done in Egypt, as was often the case in Greece). In
the month of Thoth alone, the first month of the season of inundation and at
the same time the first month of the year, there were no fewer than eight festi-
vals, and the month of Khoiak, the fourth of the season of inundation, began
with a six day festival and ended with the great festival in honor of Osiris, which
also lasted several days.
The Festival of the Uplifting of the Sky and the Creation of the Potter's Wheel
took place on the first day of Phamenoth, the third month of the winter season.
The calendar offers a brief summary of its events:

The first of Phamenoth: Festival of Nah; festival of "uplifting the sky"; festival of
Khnum-Re, lord of Esna. Causing this god and his divine company to appear in
procession at the moment of dawn. Uniting with the disk, after having halted in the
court, under the kiosk of clothing (the statue); elevating the offerings and carrying
out all the rituals according to what is in the ritual of "introduction of the wheel."

This is only an outline; but the festival is described in detail in texts carved on
the columns of the hypostyle hall between the reigns of Domitian and Hadrian,
probably from a text on papyrus that was kept in the temple library.
The festival took place not only in the temple, but also in the city. The cere-
monies began in the early hours of the morning, in the sanctuary. Then, after a
series of rituals in front of the gates of the temple, in the city, and probably on
the sacred lake (or on the Nile), the festival ended with a nocturnal ceremony in
the temple. All the clergy participated in the offering liturgy and in the singing
and the rituals during which masked priests played the role of Khnum and the
gods associated with him. It seems that the population of the city was present at
certain of these rituals and took part in the afternoon procession.

THE MORNING CEREMONIES

The morning ceremonies were celebrated each day in all the temples of Egypt
(toilette of the god, dressing him, his meal, etc.), but since this was a festival day,
OFFICIAL LITURGIES 291

the offering was much larger and included "every good thing, bread, beer, oxen,
fowl, wine, honey, milk, fruits, vegetables, all kinds of flowering branches, in un-
limited number." The morning song was sung by a choir assembled in the "hall
of the Ennead," while the chief priest entered the sanctuary to fulfill his duty of
"waking" the god; each of the twenty-six verses, which began with the same for-
mula, "Awake in peace ..." was addressed to Khnum under one of his different
names and aspects. The god was now "alive" and present in his image; while the
rites were carried out, hymns were sung in his honor and in honor of the god-
desses associated with him, Menhyt and Neith.

THE RITUAL OF UNITING WITH THE DISK

Then the festival itself began. After purifying themselves yet one more time, the
priests went to remove an image of Khnum from a crypt or a storeroom of the
temple and organized the god's "exit"; at that moment, he was still hidden in his
tabernacle, which was resting in a barque. The procession marched around the
city and then returned to the temple. The god, who was still in his chapel, was
placed in a kiosk that was set up in front of the gate; then, in his presence, there
began the great procession of offerings brought by all the members of the tem-
ple personnel, from the gardeners and the bucket carriers to the chief lector
priest and the high priest, who brought up the rear.
When the procession was over, it was time for the ceremony of "uniting with
the disk," a solemn ritual that was not specific to Esna and whose objective was
to "recharge" the statue of the god with energy: the potential for life that was as-
sured it by the daily cult ritual ran the risk of weakening. Exposed to the rays of
the sun at an especially propitious time of the year (end of the year, beginning
of the new year, or, as at Esna, the anniversary of the creation of the world), the
statue received a new influx of life and energy. The statue of Khnum was taken
out of its tabernacle: this was the "revelation of the face," which was then visible
to all who were gathered in the courtyard of the temple, and hymns of praise
were sung to the creative powers of the god, whose "beautiful visage" was cele-
brated, while all of creation rejoiced before his benefactions.
It was during this ritual that the lector priest would recite the Book of De-
stroying Apopis. This text related the victorious combat of the sun god against
the serpent Apopis, who incarnated the hostile forces that ceaselessly threatened
to destroy the world.
This phase of the festival probably lasted all morning. It evoked Khnum's cre-
ative activity, and in particular, the creative act of "uplifting the sky," which was
originally attached to the earth (the act of"lifting the sky" was usually attributed
to the god Shu; at Esna, it is clear that in this role, Khnum was assimilated to
Shu). The second part of the festival was dedicated to the institution of the of-
fice of kingship, for the existence of the latter was the very condition of main-
292 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

taining creation. One text clearly establishes the link between the creative func-
tion of Khnum and the royal office:

How beautiful is all you have done, Khnum Tanen, father of the gods. ...You lifted
the sky by force of your arms, you organized the earth. You distinguished a king
who was master among them (i.e., humankind) and who imposed organization
on them. You magnified his prestige, that they might conform to his prescriptions.

THE "MYSTERY OF THE ROYAL BIRTH"

The royal birth was normally celebrated in the mammisis. At Esna, however, the
ritual seems to have been somewhat different from those of the mammisis, per-
haps because in this case, what was celebrated was not the birth of the god-king
who was to reign over Egypt, but rather that of the birth of the first king at the
dawn of the world. As Sauneron has put it, the ritual celebrated a "pretemporal"
nativity.
The term mystery, which scholars commenting on these rituals have often
used, is somewhat equivocal; in any case, the ritual was not a mystery in the
Greek sense of the term, but rather in the medieval sense, that of a dramatic per-
formance intended to represent, for the edification of the faithful, an episode
from the life of Christ or the saints. But was there such a presentation at Esna, a
"drama" of the divine birth staged by the priests, and possibly with the partici-
pation of the audience? We cannot be certain; Sauneron acknowledges that there
was undoubtedly "liturgical action," but it was not necessarily a "performance."
In the festival, what counted was the repetition of the actions and the formulas
that would relive this essential event in the perpetuation of the world, that is, the
birth of the king. Whether or not there were spectators present is a secondary
matter. And the fact that the representations and the texts evoking the ritual were
carved in the temple in itself assured its perpetuity.
In this phase of the ceremony, the various deities of Esna (incarnated by their
statues, or more likely by the priests) spoke in turn, explaining their part in the
creation of the royal infant; according to Sauneron, part of the ritual took place
"in secret," behind the intercolumnal walls of the hypostyle hall, and part of it in
the presence of an audience. Unlike what happened in the mammisis, there were
no rites of theogamy (sacred marriage) or divine childbirth; the young god-king
was born "on the wheel," which was the creative instrument of Khnum, the pot-
ter god. The liturgy consisted of words rather than gestures or actions; one after
another, the deities spoke to the infant like "fairies who come to bend over the
cradle of a prince," as Sauneron has written. There was, however, a little stage
business; the deities presented themselves before beginning their speeches ("I am
Neith, the mother of the god ... I am Nebtu, mistress of the countryside ... I
am Thoth, the heart of Re;' etc.), somewhat like the actors in ancient Greek the-
OFFICIAL LITURGIES 293

ater, who presented themselves as they came on stage so as to be sure of being

identified. Moreover, some of the speeches seem to contain indications of ges-
tures to be performed. Thus Khnum says, "I strike the flywheel with my feet, to
create you on it"; Osiris says, "Yours is the white crown ... yours are the two
crowns as king of the south and the north"; Heqa says, "Yours is the throne as
lord of the throne"; and Thoth says, "I have taken my palette, I have seized my
pen, and I am writing down jubilee festivals for you." Such speeches probably re-
fer to ritual acts: the deities present themselves before the young king and give
him each of his attributes. Neith, who says to him, "I have kept you in good con-
dition in your mother's womb, I have nourished you when you left it," perhaps
imitated the act of nursing. And the last words of Khnum, "I place my arms
around you, I protect your body," were certainly translated into a gesture.
At this point, it was the middle of the afternoon. There was one rite left to
carry out, one that guaranteed that the creative power of Khnum would be trans-
mitted to humankind and to all animate beings, so that creation could perpetu-
ate itself.

THE RITES OF THE END OF THE AFTERNOON

What followed was essentially a new "exit" of the god, with navigation "according
to the ancient ritual"; the purifications, the offerings on the altars, the singing, and
the lighting of torches "in the evening, until dawn" were part of traditional rituals
and offered nothing special. But among the ceremonies was one entirely excep-
tional rite, "the placing of the (potter's) wheel in the belly of all female beings." It
was believed that Khnum, the modeler of living beings, transferred his power into
female beings; for this reason, he was addressed with explicit formulas:

O god of the wheel, who create the egg on your wheel, may you fix the creative ac-
tivity of the wheel within the female organs ... nourish the chick from beginning
to end ... , keep watch over the matrix and break it when the day comes, to free
the one whose throat is stifled, at the proper time.

And all the gods were to watch over the process of transmitting life:

O gods and goddesses of this city, all-powerful lords of this district, who seek to
multiply births as a goodly deed capable of making our hearts rejoice, fix the egg
in the belly of women, to provide the land with young generations, for the benefit
of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt, Pharaoh, living forever, beloved of Khnum.

The ritual that accompanied these formulas probably consisted of tying a band
on the forehead of a young woman (possibly a sign presaging maternity). A fi-
nal hymn then closed the festival; it again associated the king with the god, while
singing the praise of Khnum and calling his benediction down on the king.
294 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

Complex though it is in its juxtaposition of rites and formulas borrowed from

various traditions, this festival at Esna nonetheless has a strong unity, for it is
centered on the theme of the creation of the world by a beneficent god. This cre-
ation is viewed above all as a creation of life and of "living forms" (humans and
all other species), as well as of a universal order, of which the king is the guar-
antor. The other essential aspect of the festival is the importance given the royal
office, thus referring back to an extremely ancient ideology: the existence of the
universe depends on the king, who is the "heir" of the god, the one who "does
what he (the god) desires." And what is striking in these texts of Esna, which are
so strongly rooted in the religious tradition, so "Egyptian" in their phraseology
and their ideology, is that they are applied to a Roman emperor, who is consid-
ered the maintainer of the order of the world created by Khnum. The festival was
thus an act necessary to the perpetuation of the world and, at the same time, a
manifestation of loyalism vis-à-vis a pharaoh who was far distant from his
subjects.

IN THE WORLD OF THE TEMPLES: THE DAILY LIFE

OF AN EGYPTIAN TEMPLE

While a festival occupied a central place in the life of a temple and its personnel,
in that it commemorated and brought back to life a founding event in the com-
munity, it was, to a certain degree, an exceptional act, a day different from other
days. Daily life in a temple, which was centered on the "service of the god," con-
sisted of multiple, repetitive activities. The functioning of the temple of Sokneb-
tunis at Tebtunis in the Graeco-Roman Period affords us a good example of this
point.4 This was a sanctuary of relatively modest size, and thus more represen-
tative of the average temple than was a great sanctuary such as Esna or Edfu;
moreover, the papyrological documentation concerning it is particularly abun-
dant. We must note, however, that these documents tell us almost nothing about
cultic activity per se; but by way of allusions and overlapping of content, we can
determine that it in no way differed from that of other Egyptian temples of the
period, or even earlier. The current excavations at Tebtunis, conducted for some
years now by an Italian mission in collaboration with the Institut Français
d'Archéologie Orientale, has uncovered archaeological and textual material that
will considerably improve our knowledge of this site.
Tebtunis, whose Egyptian name was Tep-deben, was a large village located in
the southern part of the Faiyum; archaeological investigation has shown that the
site was already occupied at the beginning of the first millennium BCE. In the
reign of Ptolemy I, a temple was built in honor of the local crocodile god Sokneb-
tunis, "Sobek, lord of Tebtunis"; it was still active in the fourth century of our

4 See J. A. S. Evans, in Yale Classical Studies 17 (1971): 143-283.

OFFICIAL LITURGIES 295

own era. It was a relatively large building. A long "sacred way," paved in lime-
stone and bordered by lions, sphinxes, and various edifices, led to a "court-
vestibule" whose walls were decorated with bas-reliefs. This structure gave access
to the main gateway (pylon) of the sanctuary, which was in the northern wall of
the enclosure. This very thick wall of unbaked bricks, 123 yards long by 66 yards
wide, enclosed the temenos, within which, besides the temple itself in the cen-
ter, were various structures of stone or brick that served as chapels, lodgings for
the priests, refectories, and storehouses; even ovens have been found. The tem-
ple, built of limestone, seems to have been carefully designed, but nothing re-
mains of its painted decoration; it was ravaged in antiquity, and its stones were
used to build a church.
Papyrus documents written in Greek and Demotic inform us of the economic
life of the temple and the activities of its priests; these papyri were found in the
Ptolemaic necropolis (which included a crocodile cemetery) and in the houses
of the village, which date to the first three centuries of our own era. The temple
definitely prospered in the Ptolemaic Period, when the limestone temple re-
placed an older, smaller building of unbaked brick. In the second century BCE,
it had at least 630.25 arouras (about 427 acres) of fields; but these were doubtless
only a part of its domain, and we can estimate its entire holdings at about 1,000
arouras (or 68o acres, which was large in Egypt). The Roman conquest, however,
deprived it of its goods; the priests of Soknebtunis were obliged, like many oth-
ers in the same period, to choose between accepting a subvention from the state
(syntaxis) and renting 500.25 arouras of fields that had formerly belonged to the
temple; the terms of the lease were evidently favorable, for they chose the latter
alternative.
The temple had other sources of revenue, however, in particular, the yield
from certain imposts: a tax on pigeon houses, a tax on vineyards and orchards
(apomoira, reserved in principle, from 264 BCE on, for the cult of Arsinoe
Philadelphos), a tax on sales, a tax on baths, and so forth. Most of these imposts
are attested for the Ptolemaic Period, but we do not always know whether the
temple still derived revenue from them in the Roman Period. In any case, in the
middle of the second century CE, we can estimate its annual revenue not
counting certain small, complementary bits of income at 25o artabas of wheat
(a little more than 367 bushels), 49 artabas of lentils (8 bushels), and 30o drach-
mas of silver (in this period, the average daily wage of a worker was one drachma
of bronze; the price of an aroura of land could range, according to its quality,
from 20 to more than 600 drachmas). This was a relatively modest income; of
course, the priests drew a benefice from former temple lands that they rented for
cultivation, and they could have had resources of their own. The documents
show that in the Roman Period, the financial situation of the members of the
clergy was generally better than that of their compatriots who also lived in the
chora: they had property (houses, animals, and sometimes slaves), and they had
reserves.
296 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

The temple had large expenses. First of all, there were the expenses of the cult,
for which, in the Ptolemaic Period, it had received royal subventions, in partic-
ular to finance the funerals of the sacred animals. But we find no trace of these
subventions in the Roman Period; quite the contrary, it was the temple of Teb-
tunis that was obliged to furnish a contribution, in the form of fine linen, for the
burial of the sacred Mnevis bull of Heliopolis. The faithful contributed to the
expenses of the cult, for example, by donating animals for sacrifice; and all that
was offered for the nourishment of the god evidently went to the priests on duty,
"after the god is satisfied," as stated in a text from Edfu. It was also necessary to
assure the feeding of the sacred animals that were raised near the temple, if not
within its enclosure wall (the archaeologists believe they have found a "crocodile
pen" in the enclosure); among the personnel of the temple were sauretai, "croc-
odile keepers," and a huge necropolis, where thousands of crocodiles of all sizes
have been found, was established for them near the village.
The temple also had to pay multiple imposts, which certainly represented the
bulk of its expenditures: a real estate tax (artabieia), imposts on the animals des-
tined for sacrifice, imposts on assuming a priestly office, and so forth. In the Ro-
man Period, all Egyptians had to pay a head tax (laographia), except for the
priests, who were in principle exempt from it. In the second century, however,
we note that this rule was no longer followed: at Tebtunis, in 107/108 CE, the tem-
ple personnel included fifty priests who were exempt from the capitation, while
others paid a lower, "privileged" tax. We may note that at the sanctuary of an-
other crocodile god, Soknobraisis, at Bacchias, which was probably smaller, not
one priest was exempt.
There seems to have been a relatively large number of priests on duty in the
sanctuary of Soknebtunis. They were divided into five groups, following the rule
that was in force since the reform of 238 BCE, each of which accomplished its
service in turn. At their head were bouleutai hiereis (literally, "priest councilors")
in the Hellenistic Period, and in the Roman Period, presbuteroi (elders). All the
priestly offices attested in earlier periods were to be found at Tebtunis:

• the prophet, "servant of the god," who had a major responsibility in the
cult; the office, which was sold at auction, was financially interesting: in
the second century CE, the prophet is said to have had a right to one-
fifth of the revenues of the temple; in 146 CE, a certain Pakebkis, who be-
longed to a priestly family, offered 2,200 drachmas to obtain hereditary
ownership of it;
• the lesonis, whose function seems to have been as much administrative
as sacerdotal;
• the stolists, who dressed the statue of the god; there were three of them
at Tebtunis in the beginning of the second century CE;
OFFICIAL LITURGIES 297

• the pterophoros, who was probably a sacred scribe;

• the horologos, whose function was to establish the festival calendars and
the calendars of unlucky days; and
• the pastophoroi, who were auxiliary members of the clergy; their duties
were to carry the "reliquaries" of the gods in the processions, and prob-
ably also to assure the security of the temple, in whose enclosure they
had their lodgings (pastophoria)

In the documents from Tebtunis, there is no mention of other categories, such

as musicians and singers, though such people must certainly have participated in
the cult. There is attestation, however, of weavers and bakers, who must have la-
bored in workshops adjacent to the temple, and for its benefit. It also seems that
papyrus was manufactured there: in 174 CE, a priest of Tebtunis bought 20,000
papyrus stalks, which could scarcely have been used for any other purpose.
What emerges from these documents regarding the temple of Soknebtunis is
thus an impression of a great deal of activity in areas that were not solely cultic,
and of a relative independence, administrative controls notwithstanding. As in
all the temples of Egypt, the priests there engaged in ritual and scholarly activ-
ity; hieratic and Demotic papyri found in the temple, which must have been part
of its library, contained ritual texts and also texts dealing with "sacred geogra-
phy." There were also literary texts in Demotic (stories, a book of wisdom), and
a medical treatise in Greek, accompanied by medical prescriptions. The priests
of Tebtunis were thus in possession of knowledge that was probably shared by
few in this village environment, and they must therefore have played an impor-
tant role there.
In the Ptolemaic Period especially, but undoubtedly still in the Roman Period,
the temple of Soknebtunis, like most temples of this type, must have functioned
as the center of local life. Suppliants would come to address the god, and some-
times even to devote themselves entirely to his service (see Book 2, chapter 8);
priests would serve as scribes and put themselves at the disposal of the villagers
(note the Egyptian expression "scribe of the forecourt"); and others effected
cures or transmitted the oracles of the god. An entire "lot" of questions addressed
to the oracle was recently found in the course of excavations carried out in the
buildings adjacent to the temple of Soknebtunis. It was also there that the local
judges (laokritai) dispensed justice, and there were markets in front of the tem-
ple, on the dromos.5 Moreover, the priests employed workers on the temple lands
and in its workshops.

On the economic function of temples in the Hellenistic Period, see J. Quaegebeur, in E. Lipinski, ed.,
State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East, vol. 2, Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta (Leuven, 1979),
pp. 707-29.
298 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

At the beginning of the third century, the administrative reform of Septim-

ius Severus, which placed responsibility for temple administration in the hands
of the boulai, the councils established in the nome capitals, perhaps drastically
reduced the functions of the clergy and diminished their prestige, as well. But re-
pairs and reconstruction work were still being carried out at the temple of
Soknebtunis at the beginning of the fourth century CE, a sign that it still had a
certain vitality on the religious level, and perhaps in other areas as well.
 CHAPTER 8

FROM "LEARNED" RELIGION

TO "POPULAR" RELIGION

OUTSIDE THE WORLD OF THE TEMPLES:

PRIVATE RELIGIOUS PRACTICE

The expression "popular religion" is an ambiguous one; it often relies on pre-

suppositions associating "popular" with "magic," "superstition," the "irra-
tional." It is clear that in a religion as learned and elaborate as Egyptian religion,
magic occupied an important place, and in an entirely official manner. Notions
such as that of the power of the name (to know the true name of a god was to
have power over him), or that of the life present in an image (to represent some-
thing was to make it exist) are typically magical; the morning ritual of "awaken-
ing the god;' practiced in all the temples, can be considered a magico-religious
process: the breath of life was induced into the statue by virtue of the symbolic
gesture of the "laying on of hands" carried out by the priests, and by the offer-
ing of the "eye of Horus," which "opened his mouth"; the effectiveness of the ges-
tures was reinforced by incantation formulas sung by the chorus, who called on
the god to "wake in peace." Moreover, the knowledge of formulas and magical
practices in the strict sense of the term, that is, exorcisms, and of everything that
made it possible to ward off evil (or bring it down on the head of an adversary),
was the province of the clergy: in the library of the temple of Edfu, there were
books such as Warding Off the Demon, Warding Off the Crocodile, Warding off
Reptiles, and Warding off the Evil Eye. It would thus be absurd to attempt to de-
fine "nonlearned" religion by invoking magic. As for the notion of superstition,
it is also equivocal; this is a handy term, used by a dominant religion (in our cul-
300 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

ture, usually Christianity) to discredit its rivals, rather than a precise designation
of a certain type of beliefs and behaviors.
Rather than a "popular religion" that is difficult to distinguish, it would be
better to speak of "private religious practices," that is, those which occurred out-
side the temples. At first glance, Egyptian religion seems like a religion of the
temple; the latter was the center of ritual practices, on festival days and on ordi-
nary days; it was the place of learning, where there were gathered all those who
in traditional Egyptian society possessed knowledge in any and all areas. The
temple, the house of the god, was by definition inaccessible to the faithful, who
could enter it only on the occasion of festivals, and then only as far as the hy-
postyle hall; the closed rooms of the temple were accessible only to the members
of the priestly personnel. The "service of the god" in the strict sense of the ex-
pression (the rites carried out around the cult statue) was also a matter only for
the clergy, who celebrated it concealed from the eyes of the faithful. In the daily
liturgies, the prophet was alone in the presence of the god within the holy of
holies. It thus seems that lay people, without being entirely excluded from the
cult, participated in it only occasionally, on the occasion of festivals, and in a very
minor role.
Yet in a society in which temples and clergy had such a visible presence, in
which the realm of the imagination was entirely imbued with a religious vision
of the world, men and women, even those without specific "religious obliga-
tions," were inevitably connected to the sacred. Moreover, the presence of
Greeks, whose religious behaviors were different from those of the Egyptians,
could have spurred modifications in the practices of the latter. In their own land,
and certainly in Egypt as well, Greeks frequented the temples, where they could
pray in the presence of the divine images; they participated in the sacrifices; the
cult of their gods was not the affair of specialists, but of the entire community.
We may wonder whether practices of this sort did not influence certain sectors
of religious life in Egypt.
An interesting example is that of the little temple built in the forecourt of the
temple of Luxor in the Roman Period. Dedicated to Sarapis in the reign of
Hadrian, in 126 CE, according to an inscription that commemorates its recon-
struction, it was perhaps previously dedicated to Isis, whose monumental statue,
in a "Hellenized" style, was found in situ. This was a Greek-style statue, erected
on a podium that was accessed by some steps; the unique cella, which was quite
small, included a bench intended for statues of deities; a side door enabled the
priest to enter and open the main door from the inside, exposing the sacred im-
ages to the eyes of the faithful. We also find this layout in the Isieion of Ras el-
Soda, near Alexandria, which is also of the Roman Period, and in the Isieion of
Pompeii, which was rebuilt after the earthquake of 62 CE. It is clear that such
buildings were intended for a cult of the Greek type, in which the image of the
god was supposed to be visible to the faithful gathered in the forecourt, and not
FROM " LEARNED " RELIGION TO " POPULAR " RELIGION 30I

for an Egyptian cult, which presumed that the divine image, hidden in its taber-
nacle at the back of the sanctuary, was visible only to the priest.
But in the same period the end of the first century to the first half of the
second century CE another small temple was built in the same region in honor
of Isis at Deir el-Shelwit, between Medinet Habu and Armant. This building con-
forms to the traditional layout of an Egyptian temple, and the cult was certainly
celebrated in it in the usual Egyptian manner, without the presence of the faith-
ful. Are we to think that the small temple of Luxor was intended for Greeks, and
that of Deir el-Shelwit for Egyptians? That would be an oversimplification. It is
not impossible that the same believers went to pray in front of the image of Isis
of Luxor and at the gates of the temple of Isis of Deir el-Shelwit.
It seems that the custom of prayer was widespread in Egypt in the Late Pe-
riod, as it had been in the New Kingdom. Many private letters of the Graeco-
Roman Period begin with a formula indicating that the writer of the letter is
praying to the gods on behalf of his correspondent: "I implore Sarapis and Isis
that you are well."' Often, among the reliefs that decorated the courtyards and
the corridors that encircled the temples, the faithful chose certain figures whom
they preferred to address: the traces of the fingers that they rubbed on the im-
ages in a gesture of supplication are still quite visible on walls where they left
deep imprints; there are many examples at Dendara and Philae, and in nearly all
the temples of Egypt.
Many people went on pilgrimage to temples; those who could write left their
name, and sometimes a formula of adoration or thanksgiving on the walls or the
roof of the building. We have many examples of this phenomenon in Demotic
and Greek, among which the most frequent formula is to proskunema, the "act
of adoration," followed by the name of the individual. Others left a sign of their
visit to the sacred spot in the form of a footprint carved in the stone. A more col-
lective display of piety was participation in public festivals, when the images of
the gods were borne in procession from one temple to another, or in the streets
of the city; not only were the faithful present at these processions, it seems that
they were permitted to sing and dance in honor of the god.
Pious practices could also be carried out in private. Many people wore amu-
lets representing their favorite deities, often in animal form (Bastet cat, Apis bull,
Thoth baboon, Sobek crocodile), or sacred objects highly charged with symbolic
and protective value (udjat eye, Isis knot, djed pillar of Osiris). These amulets
were usually made of faïence, a cheap material; that is to say, everyone could af-
ford them, though amulets were also made of precious metal and semiprecious
stones for the wealthy. In any case, they have been found in quantity, most often
in tombs, among the shrouds of the deceased.

1 See F. Preisigke and F. Bilabel, Sammelbuch griechischer Urkunden aus Ägypten, no. 7618; Roman Pe-
riod.
302 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

Many people must also have had images of deities in their homes. Down to
the Ptolemaic Period, studios created quantities of little bronzes depicting Egyp-
tian gods in their traditional form; but at that time, there were also images of
the "Hellenized" Isis and images of Sarapis. In the Hellenistic and Roman Peri-
ods, the production of molded terra cotta figurines spread in Alexandria and
throughout the chora; while Alexandrian terra cottas were especially of profane
subjects and imitated the Greek models of Tanagra and Myrina, those produced
by the studios of the chora were more typically Egyptian, often representing
deities or persons performing a cultic activity, and figurines of Egyptian deities
were far more numerous than those of Greek gods and goddesses.
Such figurines were clearly intended to be kept in private homes: they have
never been found in temples, and they come from houses, from rubbish heaps
at the edges of villages, or from tombs. We may imagine that people prayed be-
fore these images in their homes; they often have a hook or a hole that enabled
them to be hung on a wall. In homes, there were also altars on which offerings
were placed; in a private letter from the Ptolemaic Period, two girls remind their
sisters not to forget to "light a lamp for the altars."
More rarely no doubt, a divine image could be part of the very decor of a
house. In several private homes in the village of Karanis in the Faiyum, frescos
were found depicting Isis nursing, Sarapis, Harpokrates, the horseman god
Heron, the pantheistic sphinx called Tithoes in the later stages of Egyptian his-
tory, and so forth. These paintings date to the third century CE; the choice of the
deities represented and the "Hellenized" style of their images seem to indicate
we are dealing with a stratum of the population that had access to both cultures.
To this stratum belonged the couple who, as we learn from papyri of the begin-
ning of the second century CE, had a chapel in honor of the Dioskouroi built in
their home, in response to a command from the gods themselves.
To the dismay of the historian, private religious practice left few traces. Still,
by putting together the little that has survived graffiti, proskunemata, amulets,
pious images we can discern some of the trends in this private piety. It is clear
that we must not oppose two types of religion, a "learned" religion of the tem-
ples, and a "popular" religion; the latter clearly drew its nourishment from the
images of the temples and the traditions elaborated in priestly circles. To be sure,
Egyptian priests did not, strictly speaking, have a duty to teach the faithful. But
stories about the gods and their legends were written in Demotic (e.g., the Myth
of the Solar Eye) and thus accessible to a relatively large public. Moreover, on the
occasion of festivals, the faithful could listen to hymns in praise of the deeds and
the powers of the gods, and they could contemplate the divine images that were
part of the decoration of the exterior parts of the temples.
The influence of the "learned" tradition elaborated in priestly circles is some-
times quite perceptible in the images and texts relating to private piety. This is
the case with the depiction of Harpokrates on the lotus flower (figure 22), which
FROM "LEARNED" RELIGION TO "POPULAR" RELIGION 303

is frequent in the terra cottas of the Roman Period; these images are rather dif-
ferent from the "canonical" image, as we can see it, for example, in the Roman
mammisi of Dendara. In the terra cottas, the god is represented in varied and
quite unofficial poses, holding a pot or a horn of plenty under his arm, and the
lotus looks like a huge capsule ready to burst. Yet these images can be understood
only by making reference to an old and typically priestly doctrine, the Her-
mopolitan cosmogonic myth of the young god born from a lotus flower emerg-
ing from the primordial waters. This god, whose creative activity gave birth to
all the manifestations of life, was a solar being; that is why, on certain terra cot-
tas, the head of Harpokrates on the lotus flower is surrounded by rays, a typi-
cally Graeco-Roman way of rendering the solar nature of an Egyptian god.

FIGURE 22. Harpokrates on a lotus flower (Roman Period), molded terra cotta in the Louvre. From F.
Dunand, Terres cuites gréco-romaines d'Égypte (Paris, 1990), no. 210.

As for religious texts, it is rare for scholars to be able to identify texts as non-
priestly in origin, unlike images, which could be produced in workshops that
were entirely independent of temples, as in the case of terra cotta figurines. A
Greek papyrus of the second century CE, however, preserves the text of an in-
vocation to the healing god Imuthes (Imhotep), identified with Asklepios, which
might not have been written by a priest. The man recounts how, when he was
304 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

sick and "burning with fever;' he and his mother were privileged with a vision in
a dream, after which his illness vanished. But the text, which is well written, with
a sense of literary "effect," is clearly of a learned character; in its tone, the invo-
cation to the god is rather like the hymns to Isis from the temple of Narmouthis,
and the writer even employs the theme of the eternity of the written word, which
might have been borrowed from the scribes of the New Kingdom:

A high fever burned me, I was in agitation, prey to breathlessness and coughing,
because of the pain coming from my side. My head heavy with fatigue, I fell into a
lethargic sleep. My mother was seated, grieving over my suffering, and without en-
joying the least sleep; suddenly, she saw and she neither dreamed nor slept, her
eyes were open and fixed, but they did not see clearly, for a divine and terrifying
vision came to her, preventing her from observing whether it was the god himself
or his servants. In any case, it was someone of more than human stature, dressed
in brilliant vestments and holding a book in his left hand; after simply looking at
me from head to toe two or three times, he disappeared. Recovering her senses,
and still trembling, she forced herself to wake me; finding me without fever, but
quite sweaty, she at once gave thanks for the apparition of the god.... The pains
in my side having ceased, and the god having granted me a cure, I proclaimed his
good deeds.2

On a Ptolemaic Period ostracon that probably comes from Deir el-Bahari, where
there was at that time a healing sanctuary, another man who had been sick
thanks, using pompous, overblown formulas that are again clearly borrowed
from learned models, the gods who cured him.
Prayer and invocation formulas inscribed in temples by pilgrims, and those
that sometimes appear in the course of a private letter, are usually brief and not
very explicit. At Deir el-Bahari, one of the faithful wrote soberly: "I ask that my
uncle return quickly to good health. Good luck to all who write." Another man,
who called himself a "salaried worker," contented himself with stating that he
"had fallen ill, and the god cured him the same day." Yet another, addressing the
three deities who were associated in the sanctuary, simply says to them, "Re-
member us, and grant us a cure."3 All these graffiti left by pilgrims or visitors ex-
press the same unfailing confidence in the beneficent intervention of the gods
and in the protection they accord to humankind. Entirely analogous formulas
occur in private letters. Expressions like "if the gods wish it" or "with the help of
the gods" are often employed, but these are perhaps only clichés. Others are more
explicit: a soldier wrote, "I give thanks to Lord Sarapis for saving me instantly
when I was in danger at sea."4 In another letter, also of the Roman Period, a man

2 P. Oxyrhynchus 1381, second century CE; see B. P. Grenfell, A. S. Hunt et al., The Oxyrhynchus Pa-
pyri, vol. i1 (London, 1915), no. 1381.
3 A. Bataille, Les Inscriptions grecques du temple de Hatshepsout à Deir el-Bahari (Cairo, 1951).

4 Ägyptische Urkunden aus den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Griechische Urkunden, vol. 2 (Berlin,
1898), no. 423.
FROM "LEARNED " RELIGION TO " POPULAR" RELIGION 305

affirms his confidence even more clearly: "With the aid of the gods, our sister is
better, and our brother Harpokration is in good health, for our ancestral gods
continually assist us, granting us health and security."5
In letters, it also happens, though much more rarely, that we find expressions
of defiance of, or even hostility toward, deities considered responsible for a
calamity. "You know that I will pay no attention with regard to the god, so long
as my son is not restored to me," wrote the mother of Apollonios, the strategos
of the Apollopolitan nome when he was engaged in the "Jewish war" in 115 CE.6
Some centuries earlier, another Apollonios, the younger brother of Ptolemaios,
the "recluse" of the Serapeum of Memphis (see below), felt no hesitation in writ-
ing, in a letter to his brother, that the gods had "lied" and "deceived" them by
sending them dreams in which they placed their trust.'
The practices and beliefs expressive of private piety are closely related to the
"official" religion of the temples. Despite everything, it seems that in this official
religion, the faithful made choices; this much emerges in particular from the
analysis of iconographic material. Among the images intended for noncultic use
(amulets, terra cotta figurines, etc.), certain divine figures were the object of a
manifest preference. Among the amulets, these were perhaps the figures of ani-
mal gods or sacred animals; among the terra cottas, they were images of Har-
pokrates, whose preponderance is overwhelming, of Isis, which are also quite
numerous, and of Bes, which are a little less frequent. Other deities, whether
Greek or Egyptian, are far less frequently represented. The preponderance of
Harpokrates in these unofficial images does not seem to correspond to his ac-
tual place in the cult of the temples; he was present there, to be sure, in particu-
lar in the ceremonies of the mammisis, but he had no major role. The images
privileged by private piety, such as it emerges from this type of evidence, would
thus be those of motherhood (Isis, along with Bes in his role of protector of
childbirth) and of childhood (Harpokrates), images that invoke not only human
fecundity but also animal and vegetal fecundity, for Isis was associated with the
growth of wheat, and Hapokrates had all sorts of animals for companions, and
both had the horn of plenty as an attribute.
Also important in private piety were divine images to which healing power
was attributed. This was the case with stelae depicting the young Horus stand-
ing on crocodiles; certain of these, which are quite small, could have been worn
as protective amulets.
When all is said and done, though they did not participate in the cult of the
temples, the faithful had many ways to display their adherence to the religious
system within which they led their lives. They seem to have been convinced of
the presence of the gods in their daily life and confident of their beneficent in-

5 P. Oxyrhynchus 935; third century CE.

6 P. Bremen 63; U. Wilcken, Die Bremer Papyri (Berlin, 1936), no. 63.
U. Wilcken, Urkunden der Ptolemäerzeit (ältere Funde), vol. 1 (Berlin, 1927), no. 7o; 152 BCE.
306 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

tervention, and little interested in the knowledge of the world and of the gods
that we find expressed in the major theological texts. The great mass of those
who lived outside the world of the temples did not necessarily have the same pre-
occupations and the same interests as those who lived within them. But it is clear
that there was no gulf between the two groups.

A FORM OF CONSECRATION: RECLUSION IN THE TEMPLES

There was no gulf between the world of the temples and that of the laity. That
this was the case is well demonstrated by a practice attested in the Ptolemaic Pe-
riod, that in which individuals who were not part of the priestly class engaged
themselves vis-à-vis a god.
The most interesting dossier in this regard is that of the "recluses" of the Ser-
apeum of Memphis. A group of Greek and Demotic papyri from the first half of
the second century BCE informs us of the presence in this sanctuary of a group
of people who lived there in very particular circumstances. This was the "great
Serapeum," that is, the sanctuary located in the necropolis of Saqqara, where the
burial chambers of the Apis bulls are to be found, the oldest ones dating back to
the New Kingdom, along with buildings dedicated to their cult. Near the enclo-
sure wall, to the south of it, a temple to "Osorapis" had been built under Nec-
tanebo II. Early in the Ptolemaic Period, a series of constructions had been added
to this ensemble: a great dromos (processional avenue), one of whose walls was
decorated with Dionysiac motifs; two chapels, one in Greek style, which was the
lychnaption, the place where those responsible for lighting the sanctuary were
stationed, and the other in Egyptian style, which contained a large, painted lime-
stone statue of Apis. Near the temple built by Nectanebo was a curious monu-
ment, the exedra, which included eleven statues arranged in a semicircle and
depicted the great poets and sages of Greece: Homer, Pindar, Pythagoras, and so
forth. The juxtaposition of the two cultures is quite striking here; it seems that
in this monumental complex, all the faithful, Greek as well as Egyptian, could
find something with which to nourish their piety. There were other temples and
chapels in the enclosure of the Serapeum, one of them a temple of Astarte, and
probably chapels of Sakhmet and of Isis. The enclosure must also have included
lodgings for the priests and storerooms for the cultic objects and the offerings,
and outside it, there would have been shops selling foodstuffs intended for of-
ferings, along with divine images and souvenirs; a quantity of bronze statuettes
was found under the pavement of the dromos, remains of the ex-votos offered
by visitors to the temple.
It was here that a Greek named Ptolemaios came to live in 172 BCE. He was a
son of Glaukias, a Macedonian cleruch who had received fields at Psichis, in the
Herakleopolite nome south of Memphis, along with the designation "relative of
FROM "LEARNED" RELIGION TO "POPULAR" RELIGION 307

the king," which was the highest of the honorary titles. Ptolemaios thus belonged
to a highly regarded class of Greeks, and he often made mention of his descent;
he had received a Greek education and knew how to write, though we note that
his spelling was phonetic and his grammar shaky. After entering into reclusion
(the Greek term was katoche) in the Serepeum of Memphis, he spent twenty or
so years there, and he probably ended his days in that place. He had found a place
to live near the little temple of Astarte within the enclosure, but the god he served
and incessantly invoked was indeed Sarapis.8
The motives for and implications of refuge in a temple are sometimes uncer-
tain, and in any case, they were quite diverse. From the third century BCE on,
the practice was widespread in Lagide Egypt; perhaps there were Egyptian prece-
dents, but this has not been proven. What made it possible was the right of asy-
lum (asulia), which many temples had and which made it possible for them to
shelter refugees. There were indeed reasons for requesting shelter from a temple.
It could be a form of going on strike on the part of workers seeking to put pres-
sure on their employer,9 and it was often an expression of despair in the face of
an irresolvable cause of misery, that of peasants unable to pay their taxes or
workers who did not receive their wages. It could also be a temporary solution
to personal problems such as conflicts between neighbors or family quarrels. In
other cases, there were sick people who came to spend some time in a temple to
obtain a cure there. But in all these cases, refuge in a temple was temporary: it
was a matter of waiting for some calm, or of making oneself forgotten (by the
tax collector, by the property owner, by the police), or of waiting for a cure.
Voluntary reclusion, katoche, was different; it implied a long stay (or defini-
tive residence) in the temple, and obligations to its god or gods. The katochos had
a particular status: it is likely (though the texts do not say it explicitly) that he
personally committed himself to serve the god, who in turn accorded him pro-
tection, and that he could not be "absolved, " except for a payment or a dispen-
sation from the god himself. It is possible that at first, a katochos entered the
temple for ordinary reasons, such as financial or familial difficulties, and then,
finding the life-style there convenient, he decided to commit himself to serving
the god. In the case of Ptolemaios, there was perhaps originally a financial prob-
lem (debt), but it seems that he received a command from Sarapis in a dream,
and that one time, when he wished to leave the temple, he felt himself obliged to
await a "release order" from Sarapis, one that apparently never came.
Among the katochoi in the Serapeum, there were persons of Greek descent,
like Ptolemaios, but also Egyptians, who otherwise constituted the majority of
the personnel of the sanctuary. The relations between the two groups were some-
8 Ptolemaios's archives have been published by Wilcken,
Die Bremer Papyri. See also N. Lewis, Greeks
in Ptolemaic Egypt (Oxford, 1986), pp. 69-87.
9 Such a situation is clear in a papyrus from the archives of Zenon, G. Vitelli et al. (eds.), Papyri greci
e latini, vol. 5 (Florence, 1917), no. 502.
308 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

times conflictual, as we learn from Ptolemaios's correspondence. In a letter dated

to 163, he complained to the strategos Dionysios that he had been assaulted by
temple bakers who wanted to drive him out of the sanctuary, "as they had tried
to do some years earlier," and that, he said, "despite the fact that I am Greek:'
Ptolemaios escaped his attackers, but they got hold of his companion Harmais,
an Egyptian, and beat him up. Two years later, he lodged a new complaint, this
time against those who cleansed the temple, who tried to break into the temple
of Astarte and rob it, and who wanted to "kill" Ptolemaios. Once again, he es-
caped, but another recluse, Diphilos, was maltreated and beaten. The names
Ptolemaios listed in his accusation were nearly all Egyptian: Mys, the second-
hand clothing salesman; Psosnaus, the porter; Imuthes, the washerman; Harem-
basnis, the wheat seller; Stotoetis, the porter; and so forth. We must not deduce
from this fact, however, that relations between Greeks and Egyptians were always
strained, as is made clear by the story of the "Serapeum Twins."
This story concerns two Egyptian girls, Thaues and Taus, who, after a terrible
home life, found refuge in the Serapeum: their mother left their father to live
with a Greek soldier, their father died "of shame," and they found themselves "in
the street," entirely without resources. But Ptolemaios the recluse was a friend of
their father, and from that time on, he took care of them and acted in their name,
writing documents for them, for they did not know Greek. Thanks to him, they
found shelter in the Serapeum, and they were appointed to a minor cultic role:
they played the role of the sister goddesses Isis and Nephthys, the two mourning
women, in the burial ceremonies of Apis. When this job was over, they remained
in the service of the new Apis. For Ptolemaios, however, these two girls were a
constant preoccupation. This fact is apparent in his dreams, which he minutely
described in writing, and which offer extremely interesting material for the
interpreter.
The milieu of the recluses in the Serapeum of Memphis was thus a mixed one.
Greeks and Egyptians lived side by side, with all the problems such a situation
presupposed, and which entailed extremely affectionate relationships, as well as
conflicts.
The material conditions of existence in katoche do not seem to have been al-
together enviable. The recluse Harmais and his lady companion Tathemis lived
on alms given to them by visitors, and perhaps also on subsidies they received
from the priests. Ptolemaios himself declared that he was "without resources";
in 157 BCE, he presented a petition to the king and queen, for the purpose of hav-
ing his younger brother, Apollonios, inducted into the army. The avowed objec-
tive of this appointment was that it would enable Apollonios to "assist" his
brother to "live decently." Ptolemaios did, however, receive an allowance from
the temple: wo drachmas a month, plus a ration of wheat and oil. If he received
a salary, it was undoubtedly for services he rendered to the priests, but we do not
know what they were.
FROM "LEARNED " RELIGION TO " POPULAR" RELIGION 309

We must note, though, that the life of a katochos did not necessarily entail a
break with the outside world. Ptolemaios went to the marriage of his brother
Sarapion, he received visits from his brother Apollonios, and he corresponded
with officials.
But what did the practice of katoche mean for those who chose to live it? And
to what extent can we speak of a choice? Ptolemaios, who, happily for us, had
much to say about himself and his state of mind, leaves us to understand that he
experienced his reclusion as a sort of constraint, on the psychic and perhaps also
on the material level: if he left, how would he live? The answer to this question
is not to be found in the Serapeum papyri, but in another series of documents
written in Demotic.
One Demotic papyrus of 270/269 BCE contains a sort of contract by means
of which men and women devoted themselves voluntarily to Anubis, making a
monthly payment in exchange for which they would receive the protection of
the god. But the most interesting texts are those that stem from the sanctuary of
Soknebtunis at Tebtunis; there are fifty of them. Those that are dated go back to
the first half of the second century BCE and are thus contemporary with the pa-
pyri from the Serapeum of Memphis. From the formal point of view, these texts
are part petition and part contract. The man or woman concerned obligates
himself or herself to become Soknebtunis's servant (bak in Egyptian), never to
leave the temple, and to pay the priests a monthly cash rent for ninety-nine years;
these contracts obligated not only the individual, but also his or her children and
grandchildren. In return, the god accorded them his protection against all sorts
of dangers, as enumerated in the following text:

Year 33, Mechir 27 of the Kings Ptolemy and Cleopatra, the gods Euergetai ... Hath
said the female servant Tanebtynis the daughter of Sokmenis, her mother being Es-
oeris, before my lord Soknebtynis the great god; I am thy servant together with my
children and my children's children; I shall not be able to be free in thy temple for
ever and ever. Thou shalt protect me, thou shalt keep me safe, thou shalt guard me,
thou shalt keep me sound, thou shalt protect me from every male spirit, every female
spirit, sleeping man, epileptic (?), every drowned man, every ... , every incubus (?),
every dead man, every man of the river, every raging man (?), every demon, every
red thing, every monster, every ... whatsoever. I will give thee 11/4 kite, its half 5/6,
making 1 1/4 kite again for my rent of service in each month from year 33, Mechir,
till the completion of 99 years = 12041/2 months = 99 years again; and I will pay it
to thy priests monthly, I not altering the silver of one month to its fellow. 1°

Obviously, we can imagine that behind the hostile forces thus enumerated
lurked more concrete beings, such as tax collectors or police officers. But the texts

10 BMEg. 10622; translation based on that of H. Thompson, "Self-Dedications," in Actes du Ve Con-

grès International de Papyrologie (Oxford, 1938), pp. 497-504.

310 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

are highly revelatory of mental attitudes that "official" religious texts do not al-
ways allow to show through.
The mental universe inhabited by the Egyptians and Greeks of Egypt was not
uniformly harmonious and optimistic. Neither Egyptian nor Greek religion
knew an obsession with sin, culpability, or human misery. But we may wonder
whether it did not entail a feeling of permanent insecurity: the existence of the
world was conceived of as ceaselessly threatened, and the combat of Re against
his adversaries was renewed each day. On a more everyday level, evil forces were
felt to be everywhere present and menacing, in the realm of the living and in
that of the dead. Texts going back to the New Kingdom make a catalogue of
these fears, some of which were quite specific, and others more vague, and it is
uncertain whether they changed very much between the beginning and the end
of the first millennium. Oracular decrees ascribed to the Theban god Montu,
who was assimilated to Re, enumerate in great detail all of the areas in which
the intervention of the god was hoped for: each part of the body of the faith-
ful is mentioned, with the formula, "I shall keep ... in health"; these are fol-
lowed by an enumeration of all the demons (of the sky, the earth, the well, the
marsh, etc.) the god will exorcize; and then there is a list of the bites of ser-
pents, scorpions, and "every reptile that bites," against which the god will
provide protection.I I
The god present in his temple seems to have been a recourse for all who had
to confront clearly defined dangers, and also, if not more so, when it was a mat-
ter of dangers whose origin remained obscure. The practice of katoche can be
interpreted in this sense. The temple, a place of asylum, represented a guaran-
tee of physical and psychological security for those who sought refuge in it; in
exchange for his freedom, the katochos obtained the protection of Sarapis, the
"magic succorer." We thus understand how the recluse Ptolemaios felt impris-
oned by an anguishing choice: his desire for "freedom," on the one hand, and
on the other, fear of being abandoned by the god if he violated the commit-
ment, which was at least a moral one, that he must have made to Sarapis. Only
the express will of the god (or in any case, felt as such by the faithful) could put
an end to his katoche.
The documents relating to voluntary reclusion in a temple or to consecration
to a deity all date back to the Ptolemaic Period. Did the custom disappear in the
Roman Period? Would this have been due to the fact that the right of asylum,
while it did not entirely disappear in this period, was nevertheless restricted? At
that time, the temples perhaps did not represent the reliable asylum they had
been in the preceding centuries.

11 Cf. P. British Museum 10321; see I. E. S. Edwards, Oracular Amuletic Decrees of the Late New King-
dom (London, 1960), no. 10321.
FROM "LEARNED" RELIGION TO "POPULAR" RELIGION 311

FROM EVERYDAY CARES TO ANGUISH BEFORE

THE UNKNOWN: ORACLES AND MAGIC

Refuge in temples was one way of expressing life's difficulties and the search for
a solution to them. There was a less radical but much more widespread practice
in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, one that seems to have had a comparable im-
plication: that of consulting oracles.
Oracular consultation was an old practice in Egypt, attested at least as early
as the New Kingdom. On the occasion of divine processions on festival days, the
faithful could approach the barque on which the tabernacle containing the di-
vine statue rested and pose questions to the god. The movement of the statue in-
dicated the meaning of the answer: the statue could become so heavy that it
forced the bearers to stop; or it could drive them forward or force them to step
backward. These practices are well attested in the cult of Amun at Thebes. Other
consultation procedures were possible: for example, depositing a written re-
quest before the god, which probably received a written response. A whole se-
ries of questions addressed to oracles stems from the workmen's village of Deir
el-Medina, dating to Dynasties 19 and 2o; an ostracon bearing only the word "no"
can be interpreted as a response from the god. It also happened, though proba-
bly more rarely, that the god "spoke" directly through a "medium"; in the Report
of Wenamun (beginning of the first millennium BCE), the god Amun "seized"
a priest and put him into an ecstatic state in order to communicate his will.
At an early date, there seem to have been no "specialists" in oracular consul-
tations; but we may note that the questions were often addressed by preference
to minor deities, or to local forms of a major deity. Thus a man named Amen-
emwia successively consulted "Amun of Pekhenty;' then "Amun of Tashenyt,"
and then "Amun of Bakenen," that is to say, it seems, a series of local forms of the
great Amun of Thebes, in an affair concerning theft that seems to have been a
rather tangled one. The voice of the god was often used to settle a case at law.
Most of the older practices remained in use in the Ptolemaic and Roman Pe-
riods, but new practices also made their appearance. The procedure involving
submission of a written question to the god was very much in favor. We have a
series of questions written on papyri in Demotic and Greek, dating from the sec-
ond century BCE to the third to fourth centuries CE, from various sanctuaries
in the Faiyum: Tebtunis, Soknopaiou Nesos, Bacchias, and also Oxyrhynchos;
the gods to whom they are addressed are often the crocodile gods of the Faiyum,
but also Amun, Sarapis, and the Dioskouroi (in whom, perhaps, we are to rec-
ognize two crocodile gods).
The written question was the procedure employed in the small, Ptolemaic Pe-
riod oracular sanctuary of Osiris-Sarapis and Bes within the funerary temple of
Sethos I at Abydos, called Memnonion by the Greeks, which by that time had
312 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

fallen into disuse. The oracle there continued in use at least until the middle of
the fourth century of our own era, according to the historian Ammianus Mar-
cellinus, who relates that "the questions are written in precise and detailed form,
by means of certificates on papyrus or parchment, which sometimes remain in
the temple after the responses have been obtained."
There were also manuals containing lists of questions, with several kinds of
response (attributed to various deities) to each question, which could be accessed
by means of a system of drawing lots. One of these collections, the Astrampsychos
Lots, is partially preserved on papyri of the third century CE;12 while the proce-
dure was different (it seems to have been something related to divination), the
questions collected in the list are of the same type as those posed to the oracle.
Direct consultation of the god was also practiced. This was what happened in
the oracular sanctuary set up, probably in the first half of the third century BCE,
in a chapel in the unused funerary temple of Queen Hatshepsut at Deir el-Ba-
hari. A triad of healing gods was at "work" there: Imhotep, the architect of King
Djoser of Dynasty 3, who was called Imuthes by the Greeks and assimilated to
Asklepios; Amenhotpe, son of Hapu, the architect and favorite of Amenophis III,
who was called Amenothes in Greek; and Hygieia, a Greek goddess, daughter of
Asklepios. It seems that people who came to consult them entered the first room
of the little chapel and then heard the voice of the gods coming to them from the
back of the sanctuary through an opening in the wall that separated the two
rooms (clearly, there was a priest speaking for the gods). A curious text written
on one of the walls in Greek in the first or second century CE relates how a sol-
dier named Athenodoros, garrisoned at Koptos, came to consult the oracle and
wanted to know the source of the voice that he heard through the opening;
but his curiosity does not seem to have been punished, nor his faith diminished,
for the text is brimming with thanks and praise for the three deities. The same
sort of procedure was undoubtedly in use at Kysis, where at the back of the tem-
ple of Osiris-Sarapis and Isis, which was perhaps no longer in use at the time,
there was a sort of open-air "chapel." A small opening in the back wall connected
with the naos of the temple; we may imagine that the voice of the god was heard
through it.
Visions in dreams were another widely employed oracular procedure, prob-
ably of Greek origin; in the fourth century BCE, many faithful went to spend the
night in the temple of Asklepios at Epidauros to obtain a vision of the god in a
dream and a promise of a cure, often accompanied by an indication of the "pre-
scription" to follow so as to be cured. The same procedure was used at the Ser-
apeum of Canopus, where healing incubation was practiced, and undoubtedly

12 P. Oxyrhynchos 1477, see Grenfell, Hunt et al., Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. 12 (London,1916), no. 1477;

P. Oxyrhynchos 2832-33, see Grenfell, Hunt et al., Oxyrhynchus Papyri, vol. 38 (London, 1971), nos. 2832
and 2833.
FROM "LEARNED " RELIGION TO "POPULAR" RELIGION 3 13

also at the Serapeum of Memphis, near which was found the "insignia" of an in-
terpreter of dreams, who declared that he was a Cretan and that he held his of-
fice "by order of the god." Dreams expressed the will of the gods and conveyed
their commands, but often in imaged, metaphorical form; they thus had to be
explained to those who had them, and this was the job of the priests themselves,
or of professional dream interpreters, whom the Greeks called oneirokriteis (Ptol-
emaios, the recluse of the Serapeum, who himself dreamed a great deal, might
have carried out this function on behalf of his companions). Oracles delivered
in dreams were often healing oracles; the practice presupposed lodgings to shel-
ter the sick, as there were in the sanctuaries of Asklepios, and as there would be
much later in Christian healing sanctuaries, such as that of Abu Mina (Saint
Menas) southwest of Alexandria.
While the practice of incubation was Greek in origin, it in any case became
widespread in the Egyptian community. The Story of Setne and His Son Si-
Osire, a Demotic tale known from a version of the second half of the first cen-
tury CE (though other chapters from the story of Setne date back to the
Ptolemaic Period), relates how Mehetweskhet, the wife of Setne, a priest of Mem-
phis, unable to have a child, went to spend the night in the temple of a god who
must have been Ptah or Imhotep. In a dream, she heard a voice say to her, "Are
you not Mehetweskhet, the wife of Setne, who are sleeping in the temple to re-
ceive a cure from the hand of the god? When morning comes, go to the fountain
of Setne, your husband, and there you will find the bottom of a qulqas-plant."
The god directed her to make a remedy with the leaves of this plant and to give
it to her husband; that done, Mehetweskhet soon found herself pregnant. We
may note, moreover, that according to the old Arabic pharmacopoeia of Egypt,
men "often chew this root (that of the qulgas) raw or cooked, for they believe
that it produces a great deal of sperm and that it is a powerful aphrodisiac.""
The story of Mehetweskhet is characteristic of what persons could ask an or-
acle. The questions addressed to deities reveal the preoccupations of the inhab-
itants of the Egyptian chora, their fears for the future, and their family and
professional worries. Health was clearly a major preoccupation; it was on this ac-
count that questions were posed to Sarapis at Canopus and Memphis, and prob-
ably at Kysis, to Sarapis again and to Bes at Abydos, to Amenhotpe and Hygieia
at Deir el-Bahari, and to Imhotep again at Memphis. But other deities who were
not specifically healers could also be consulted; at Soknopaiou Nesos in the first
century CE, a man named Stotoetis consulted "Soknopaios and Sokonpieios, the
great, great gods" (two crocodile gods) to learn whether he would be "delivered
from the illness" that had stricken him.14
13 See P. Alpin, Histoire naturelle de l'Égypte, 1581-1584, translated by R. de Fenoyl (Cairo,1979), chap-
ter 33
14 Ägyptische Urkunden aus den Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin, Griechische Urkunden, vol. 1 (Berlin,

1895), nos. 229 and 23o.

314 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

Private life and the family were central preoccupations. In the year 6 CE, a
man named Asklepiades asked the oracle of Sokonopis at Soknopaiou Nesos
whether he would "be allowed to marry Tapetheus, daughter of Manes," and he
specified (perhaps so that there would be no error regarding whom he meant),
"formerly, Tapetheus was the wife of Horion. I 5 Others simply asked whether
they "would be allowed to marry a woman"; in the list of questions in the Lots,
there is the question,"Will I have the woman I want?" to which four answers were
possible, according to the hazards of drawing lots: "You will have the woman you
want," "You will have the woman you want, to your sorrow," "You will not have
the woman you want," and "You will not have the woman you want, it is for your
own good." Still other questions allude to family quarrels, such as "Will I be rec-
onciled with my progeny?"
Problems concerning professional life were also very much present. Ques-
tioners wanted to know whether "the nomarch will be angry" at them, whether
their books would be examined, whether they would receive their salary, whether
they would be able to get a contract, whether they would have time off from
work, and even, though this was undoubtedly rather rare, whether they would
become a "councilor" (this is in the third century CE, when there were councils,
boulai, in the nome capitals) or an "ambassador." There could also be problems
of an entirely technical nature: "Consult the god to learn when we can sow at
Psothis," wrote a cultivator of the Hermopolite nome to his son.16 Demotic texts
from Soknopaiou Nesos in the second century CE ask Soknopaios whether it was
suitable to work a certain field.
A question that came up quite often was that of travel. It was often only a
question of going from a village to the nearby city, or from one village to an-
other; but these people did so often, and that clearly caused them problems. Peo-
ple from Soknopaiou Nesos asked Soknopaios whether it was good for them to
go to Tebtunis or Neiloupolis; a man from Bacchias asked whether he should "re-
main in Bacchias"; and another, from an unspecified village in the Faiyum, asked
whether he had to "go to the city." These worries and perplexities are under-
standable, to the extent that all travel could entail a risk, for the countryside was
not safe from brigands; moreover, leaving the village could involve a change of
life-style, and fear of the unknown was clearly strong in the minds of the people
who posed these questions.
It was thus not major existential problems that lay at the heart of the preoc-
cupations of those who consulted oracles, but rather the thousand difficulties
and cares of everyday life. The same was also true in earlier periods; the ques-
tions addressed to the oracle of Deir el-Medina in Dynasty 19 were of the type

'' U. Wilcken, Grundzüge und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, vol. 1 (Leipzig,1912), no. 122.
16 J. Schwartz, Les Archives de Sarapion, Bibliothèque d'Étude 29 (Cairo, 1961), pp. 219-2o, second cen-

tury CE; the god must have been Sarapis.

FROM "LEARNED " RELIGION TO "POPULAR" RELIGION 315

"will I become foreman;" "will I be rebuked," or "my goodly lord, is one of my

goats with Ptahmose?" Neither the introduction of Greek cults nor even the
spread of Christianity changed these behaviors. At the time when Christianity
was becoming the dominant religion, people in search of an answer to their
problems turned to "holy men," monks or ascetics of the Egyptian desert, all the
more so in that certain of these men had received, as it was called, the "gift of
prophecy." An example is the eremite John of Lykopolis: on behalf of the inhab-
itants of the region, who "continually came to him;' he "prognosticated and an-
nounced in advance what was to come; he gave predictions regarding the Nile
and the abundance of the harvests."' 7 In the Christian community, persons even
took up the practice of bringing questions written on a piece of papyrus or
parchment and placing them in front of the god in expectation of his response.
But now, the questions, written in Greek or Coptic, were addressed to a saint or
to God himself; thus, a man asked whether he should "take Anup to the hospi-
tal"; another invoked "all-powerful God ... father of our lord and savior, Jesus
Christ" to learn whether he should undertake a trip; another, using a technique
already known in the New Kingdom, deposited two slips, each containing a dif-
ferent possibility ("go to Antinoopolis and stay there," "remain under the roof of
the monastery Apa Thomas") and waited for "all-powerful God" to let him know
his will.
What the practice of oracular consultation reveals in the faithful, in both the
Christian and the traditional communities, was not so much a desire to know
the future as to relieve oneself of the burden of responsibility. By putting their
life decisions, whether important or not, in the hands of a deity, they rendered
the weight less heavy. But, of course, it was the priests who assumed this re-
sponsibility, for they were the spokesmen of the gods, the interpreters of the or-
acle. That is to say, their contacts with the faithful and the influence they exerted
on their lives were much more important than might otherwise seem. The re-
sponse to a question addressed to an oracle is preserved on a papyrus of the first
to second century of our own era:

You are in good health; what you aspire to night and day will be yours; the gods
will show you the way to obtain what you desire; your life will be better, and you
will have the means to lead a happy life.

This is clearly a careful response, for it does not go into much detail; but it is
"gratifying" enough to have comforted and encouraged the person who con-
sulted the god.
Did the interpreters of oracles acquire too much power over people, or did

17 "Jean de Lycopolis," chapter ii, in A. J. Festugière, trans., Historia monachorum in Aegypto (Brus-
sels, 1971).
316 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

the latters' questions run the risk of posing dangers? In any event, in 198-199 CE,
an edict of the prefect of Egypt, Q. Aemilius Saturninus, forbade recourse to or-
acles, whether by means of "written documents" or on the occasion of a "pro-
cession of images" (in conformity with traditional Egyptian custom: when the
statues of the gods and goddesses were borne in procession, either in the temple
enclosure or in the streets of the city, it was possible to approach them and pose
questions, and the "movements" of the statue would indicate the response).18
The edict seems to have been ineffective. In the middle of the fourth century, a
scandal broke out, followed by a sensational trial, regarding consultations of the
oracle of Bes at Abydos: evidently, imprudent individuals had consulted the or-
acle to learn when the emperor would die.I 9
Recourse to magic entailed a different mental attitude; this was no longer a
matter of placing the responsibility for one's life in the hands of the gods, but
rather of putting pressure on them to obtain from life what one desired. The
"magician" sometimes identified himself with the god whose power he wanted
to turn to his own benefit, and sometimes he did not hesitate to threaten the gods
if they did not comply with his demands. We have seen that it is impossible to
consider the use of magic as a "popular" behavior; it was the priests who knew
the formulas and carried out the prescriptions intended to repel the evil eye and
all other hostile forces. The "Egyptian sorcerers" invoked in Latin and Greek lit-
erature (Apuleius, Lucian) during the Roman Period are always presented as
priests instructed in the traditional branches of knowledge: the magician Pan-
hates, who was capable of working a "quantity of miracles" (sitting astride croco-
diles, swimming amidst ferocious beasts, etc.) was a "holy scribe from Memphis,
an incredibly wise man who'd mastered all the mystic lore of Egypt"; he had
spent "twenty-three years in an underground shrine, receiving instruction in
magic from Isis."20 The Egyptian priest Harnuphis, who lived among the en-
tourage of Marcus Aurelius, supposedly caused the miraculous rainfall that was
believed to have struck down the barbarians and saved the Roman army in 172
CE, during the war against the Quadi. It is difficult to know whether at this late
date, there existed in Egyptian society a magic that was not linked to the tem-
ples, or persons who would have been the equivalent of the male and female sor-
cerers of medieval societies.
It is in any case certain that magic was used a great deal in everyday life in all
periods of history; what was new in the Hellenistic and Roman Period was that,
in addition to the formulas and practices of the old Egyptian magic, there were
prescriptions and invocations borrowed from Greece and even other cultural ar-
eas, such as the Near East and Persia. The books of magic preserved in Demotic

18 P.Yale Inv. 299.

19
Ammianus Marcellinus, book 19, chapter 12.
20
Lucian, Philopseudes, 34; see P. Turner, Luican: Satirical Sketches (Baltimore,1961), p. 215.
FROM "LEARNED" RELIGION TO "POPULAR" RELIGION 3 17

and Greek are generally late compilations; they contain rather heterogeneous
lists of names to be invoked, among which Egyptian, Babylonian, and even Jew-
ish divine names occur side by side with onomatopoeic, meaningless syllables.
There are also fairly clear allusions to Egyptian myths, among which the myth
of Osiris looms large. Rites generally accompanied the formulas. It seems that in
the later periods of history, the rites became more and more complicated and in-
volved the use of organic products, plants, stones, and other substances in highly
varied and complex combinations. A detailed ritual to "prepare" the place where
it was carried out, and the person of the magician as well, often preceded the
magical act.
Magic was applied in quite diverse areas. The Magical Papyrus of London and
Leiden, a compilation written in Demotic, probably in the third century of our
own era, gives a fairly good idea of what these areas were. In a number of cases,
it was a matter of making a god appear and compelling him to "tell his name"
(knowledge of the name of a god conferred power over him); then, it remained
only to ask him "all one wishes to know." But the objective could be much more
specific: to acquire praise and honors, to turn away the wrath of a superior, to
enjoy success, to cause everything to prosper in one's hands, to extract the poi-
son from the heart of a man who had fallen victim to a philter, to cure a dog bite
or a scorpion's sting, to expel a bone from a throat, to make a man or a woman
amorous, and so forth. There were also blacker intentions: to separate a man
from a woman, to provoke catalepsy and death, or to make a man or woman in-
sane. Here is a recipe for erotic magic:

You take a little shaving of the head of a man who has died a violent death, together
with seven grains of barley that has been buried in a grave of a dead (?) man; you
pound them with ten oipe, otherwise nine, (of) apple-seeds (?); you add blood of
a worm (?) of a black dog to them, with a little blood of your second finger, (that)
of the heart (?), of your left hand, and with your semen (?), and you pound them
together and put them into a cup of wine and add three uteh to it of the first-fruits
of the vintage, before you have tasted it and before they have poured out from it;
and you pronounce this invocation to it seven times and you make the woman
drink it. 21

And here, an invocation formula:

I am he of Abydos ... I am this figure of the sun ... I am this figure of Horus .. .
I am this figure of One Drowned (i.e., Osiris) ... Give it, blood of Osiris (that?) he
(?) gave to Isis to make her feel love in her heart for him night and day at any
time.... Give it, the blood of N. born of N. to give it to N. born of N. in this cup,

21 E Li. Griffith and H. Thompson, The Demotic Magical Papyrus of London and Leiden (London,
1904), p. 105.
318 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

this bowl of wine to-day, to cause her to feel a love for him in her heart, the love
that Isis felt for Osiris, when she was seeking after him everywhere, let N. the
daughter of N. feel it, she seeking after N. the son of N. everywhere; the longing
that Isis felt for Horus of Edfu, let N. born of N. feel it, she loving him, mad after
him, inflamed by him, seeking him everywhere, there being a flame of fire in her
heart in her moment of not seeing him. 22

Whether white or black, late Egyptian magic seems to have been an attempt to
master the problems of existence. Like oracular consultation, it reveals the spe-
cific fears of the men and women of that time, and the objects of their desire.

22 Ibid., pp. 105-7.

 CHAPTER 9

FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS

IMAGES OF THE HEREAFTER: EGYPTIAN VISION

AND GREEK VISION

To this point, human behaviors have appeared to us as much more centered on

the present the cares, desires, and hopes attached to everyday life than on
the perspective of a future life. The major festival celebrations accented the
power of the beneficent gods, the happiness and prosperity they accorded to
their faithful; when the latter consulted an oracle or used a magical prescription,
what they asked for in their prayer was health, the love of the man or the woman
whom they loved, "goodly progeny,"1 good harvests, and so forth. Even in a sac-
erdotal context, the texts from the tomb of Petosiris and the exhortations ad-
dressed to the priests of Edfu evoke the terrestrial happiness of the one who lives
"in the hand of the god."
Yet one of the most important festivals of the liturgical calendar, apparently
celebrated everywhere in Egypt, was the festival in the month of Khoiak, during
which the priests relived the "passion" and death of Osiris. The faithful gathered
for this somber commemoration; Herodotus noted that at Busiris, on the occa-
sion of the festival, "the men and women all beat their breasts, in tens of thou-
sands," as a sign of mourning.2 Moreover, the importance attached to the tomb

' Second hymn to Isis from the temple of Narmouthis.

2Histories, book 2, chap. 6i; see A. de Sélincourt, trans., Herodotus: The Histories, rev. ed. (Har-
mondsworth,1972), p. 153.
320 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

and the funerary rites demonstrates the preoccupation with death that was pre-
sent in the minds of the Egyptians. Even so, notwithstanding the efforts and the
funds that were expended to procure a beautiful tomb, it would be incorrect to
view Egyptian civilization as single-mindedly oriented toward death, either in
the Late Period or in earlier periods.
The representations of the hereafter employed in the New Kingdom contin-
ued in use in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods. These representations were am-
biguous: the land of the dead, the "field of reeds," was both the land where
persons lived in peace in the company of Osiris, provided with all sorts of goods,
and also the dark and dangerous land from which no one ever returned. The im-
ages that prevailed, however, were those of the Book of the Dead and the other
funerary texts that continued to be placed with the deceased in their tombs down
through the Roman Period. The hereafter was seen as a subterranean land criss-
crossed by roads and canals and lined with gates through which the deceased had
to pass; it was therefore necessary to know the correct formulas to appease the
terrifying genies who guarded the world below. The motif of the Judgment of
the Dead, that is, the weighing of the heart in the presence of Osiris, was always
part of the vision of what awaited a person after death. Anubis remained the
guide of the dead during this subterranean itinerary, after assuring the preser-
vation of their body by means of the embalming ritual.
These powerful images continued to fill the Egyptian religious imagination
down to a very late period. They constituted the decoration of "cartonnages;'
boxes of a sort, made of papyri or cloths that were glued together and covered
with painted stucco, that served to contain mummies after the beginning of the
first millennium BCE; cartonnages became common in the Ptolemaic and Ro-
man Periods, while the use of wooden coffins perhaps became less frequent. The
scenes reproduced on cartonnages were most often vignettes from the Book of
the Dead: Anubis bending over the deceased lying on the embalming table, the
deceased in prayer before Osiris, the weighing of the heart under the supervision
of Thoth, Isis and Nephthys in mourning, the gods of the Judgment, and so
forth. Sometimes, especially in the Roman Period, a painted shroud that de-
picted the deceased in everyday clothing (often Roman garb) and surrounded
by funerary deities replaced the cartonnage. The symbols of the regeneration of
the deceased and the protection that the gods accorded him in the hereafter were
also part of this decoration: the died pillar, an image of the resurrection of Osiris;
the Isis knot, which assured "the magical protection of the limbs" of the de-
ceased; and the ansate (looped) cross (ankh) that symbolized the perpetuation
of life. Changes could occur in the way the gods were represented: Osiris was of-
ten represented frontally, which was much rarer in earlier periods; beginning
with the second century CE, Anubis, in his canine form, was depicted with a large
key hanging around his neck (the key to the portal of the netherworld), which
was not an element of Egyptian symbolism, but rather was borrowed from
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 321

Graeco-Roman images of the realm of the dead. But these innovations in detail
do not seem to have changed the meaning of the images.
The traditional representation of the land of the dead was also to be found,
though much more rarely than in the past, in the painted decoration of certain
tombs. Tomb 21 at Tuna el-Gebel, the cemetery of Hermopolis, which dates to
the second century CE, furnishes a good example; the walls of the tomb are dec-
orated with two registers of traditional scenes (Anubis as embalmer, Isis and
Nephthys mourning, Osiris enthroned). The deceased woman, however, is some-
times represented frontally, dressed in Greek style and her hair undone, while an
ibis-headed Thoth and a falcon-headed Horus pour regenerating water on her
head, and sometimes in profile, dressed in Egyptian style and wearing a wig. Be-
side her, there is a black, skeletal figure that must be her cadaver, or perhaps her
"shadow"; thus, by means of a curious doubling, we see the woman in what must
have been her form at the moment she was wrapped, a black mummy, and in the
regenerated, fully human form that she was supposed to have regained in the
hereafter.
More recently discovered, the two painted tombs at Muzzawaqa in el-Dakhla
oasis, one of which might date back to the first century, and the other to the sec-
ond century CE, are perhaps even more representative of the perpetuation of be-
liefs regarding the hereafter. On the walls of the funerary chambers, there are still
the same scenes depicting the funeral (the deceased led to the tomb on a wheeled
vehicle), the welcoming of the deceased outside the tomb (the tree goddess of-
fers him water, while others pour water on his head), the weighing of the heart,
and the presentation of the "justified" deceased to Osiris. Osiris's fellow divine
assessors are present, as well as all sorts of more or less terrifying funerary genies
(crowned serpents, monkeys wielding knives, beings with two faces, and the "De-
vouress" in the form of a lioness). But many of the figures are protective and re-
assuring: Horus trampling a tortoise and chaining other maleficent creatures
(serpents and fish); Taweret and Bes, who were benevolent deities despite their
somewhat terrifying appearance, protectors of women; and all the symbols of
life (died pillar, Isis knot, udjat eye). In the second tomb, there is a depiction of
a beautiful, lush garden with palm trees covered with dates, a field of wheat with
swollen ears, and a vine laden with grapes; birds fly overhead, and on either side,
a Nile god and a goddess who incarnates the fields present a tray covered with
offerings: an image of the prosperity that will be enjoyed by the deceased in the
hereafter? But the depiction also refers to concrete images, those of the beauti-
ful countryside of the oases, which were well irrigated and fertile in this period.
In contrast to these images and this symbolism, which are entirely Egyptian,
the ceilings of the funerary chambers are decorated with zodiacs of the Graeco-
Roman type. In the second tomb, that of Petosiris, the members of the family
of the deceased are represented, in the form of busts draped in Roman costume,
as deceased persons who have received apotheosis. On one wall of the tomb,
322 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

Petosiris himself is depicted standing, frontally and with a beard, wearing a Ro-
man tunic and toga. But at his feet, a funerary priest, his head shaved and wear-
ing an Egyptian loincloth, pours a libation onto an offering table; he is followed
by a Nile figure carrying an offering tray, and on either side of Petosiris, there are
lengthy hieroglyphic inscriptions. Here, too, we are witness to a "bicultural" phe-
nomenon: Petosiris is Egyptian, but he is represented as a Roman; and the dec-
oration of his tomb is filled with Egyptian images of the hereafter, depicting
traditional concepts of the afterlife, while the presence of the zodiac reveals the
influence of astral doctrines whose images and symbols stem from Graeco-
Roman culture.
The idea of punishment in the hereafter for conduct in this life, which was
present at an early date, was perhaps clarified and reinforced in the Late Period.
In any case, it is clearly affirmed in the Story of Setne, preserved on a Demotic
papyrus of the first century CE, which offers a precise description of the realm
of the dead and the deities who preside over it:

[They entered the fourth hall, and Setne saw] people who were [plaiting ropes,
while donkeys were chewing them up]. There were others whose provisions of wa-
ter and bread were hung above them, and while they scrambled to bring them
down, other people were digging pits at their feet, to prevent them from getting at
them.
They entered the fifth hall, and Setne saw the noble spirits standing in their
ranks. But those who were accused of crimes were standing at the door pleading,
and the pivot of the door of the fifth hall was fixed in the right eye of a man who
was pleading and lamenting loudly.
... They entered the seventh hall, and Setne saw the mysterious form of Osiris,
the great god, seated on his throne of fine gold, crowned with the atef-crown. Anu-
bis, the great god, was on his left, the great god Thoth was on his right, and the
gods of the tribunal of the inhabitants of the netherworld stood on his left and
right. The balance stood in the center before them, and they weighed the good
deeds against the misdeeds, Thoth, the great god, writing, while Anubis gave the
information to his colleague.3

A rich man, whom Setne had seen buried with great pomp, with many mourn-
ing women, was condemned for his bad deeds; it was he who had the pivot of
the door of Amenti fixed in his eye. A poor man who had been taken to the grave
rolled humbly in a mat, with no one to mourn him, was dressed in "royal linen"
in the company of Osiris, because his good deeds outweighed the bad ones. Some
centuries earlier, the texts from the tomb of Petosiris had already proclaimed:

3 P. British Museum 604, 1, 3o-2, 6; see M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature: A Book of Read-

ings, vol. 3: The Late Period (Berkeley, 198o), pp. 139-40.

FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 323

Amenti is the home of the one without sin; happy is the man who arrives there!
... There, there is no distinction between poor and rich, but in favor of the one
who is found without sin, when the balance and the weight are before the lord of
eternity.

Considering the persistence of this vision of the fate of man after death, it is
difficult to make out the role played by Greek ideas and beliefs about the here-
after. Yet it is in no way surprising that Greek practices are often attested in the
many cemeteries of Alexandria: Suk el-Wardian, Gabbari, Mafrusa, and Mex in
the western part of the city; Ras el-Tin and Anfushy on the island of Pharos; and
to the east, Chatby, one of the oldest, Ibrahimiya, Sidi-Gaber, Mustafa Pasha, and
especially Hadra, which is probably the richest. But the later necropolis of Korn
el-Shuqafa, in the quarter of the Serapeum, has preserved many Egyptian ele-
ments, at least in its decoration.
In these Alexandrian cemeteries (those in the open air, and especially the
rock-cut tombs), which date from the beginning of the third century BCE to the
fourth century CE, the deceased were at first incinerated, which was the most
widespread custom in Greece; gradually, the practice of burial became predom-
inant, often accompanied, especially at the end of the Ptolemaic Period, by
mummification (though the poor preservation of the bodies, which is due to the
dampness of the Alexandrian cemeteries, renders their study difficult). The tombs
sometimes had a painted decoration, and often funerary stelae, in bas-relief or
painted, depicting the deceased; many vases, generally of Greek style (thus, the
"hydras of Hadra," vases decorated with garlands of flowers and leaves, some-
times gilded, in relief) have been found there, along with molded terra cotta stat-
uettes, most of them imitating contemporary statuettes from Tanagra and
Myrina; jewels, coins, and sometimes small objects of everyday life were also
placed in these tombs.
Some elements of the decoration refer to Egyptian beliefs: in one tomb at An-
fushy, a fresco depicts the deceased, dressed in a long white robe, in the company
of Osiris, Isis, and Horus, while a Roman Period tomb in the quarter of Cleopa-
tra, near Sidi-Gaber, is decorated with Osirian scenes. The latter tomb otherwise
includes decorative motifs (garlands, tracery, grotesque animals) borrowed from
Graeco-Roman art. The latter style of art evidently predominated at Alexandria:
in a tomb at Ras el-Tin, Herakles is depicted with his club and lion's skin, tying
a crown around his forehead. But motifs from Greek mythology could also be
found in the chora; a fresco from tomb i6 at Tuna el-Gebel presents episodes
from the legend of Thebes: Oedipus killing Laios, Oedipus and the sphinx, the
city of Thebes. Greek motifs and style also predominated in the decoration of
funerary stelae of the Ptolemaic Period, whose motifs and presentation are en-
tirely comparable to those of Attic stelae: we see ladies seated in a melancholy
mood, giving their hand to a friend; a little servant girl fans them or brings them
324 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

a toilette object or a musical instrument; or a horseman dressed in Greek style

is followed by his squire, who is carrying his weapons.
Expression of Greek beliefs about the hereafter is especially to be found in the
funerary inscriptions. The phraseology and the themes are most often purely
Greek: they evoke Hades and the Fates with their shears; they speak of missing
the life that has been left, and of a vision of death as a sort of definitive night,
and they lament over "those who remain," all of which stems from traditional
Greek ideology. Common formulas attest to the ineluctable character of the end
("no mortal has found a parry against death," says the epitaph of an athlete at
Tuna el-Gebel) or the equality of all before death ("Hades takes into account nei-
ther the bad nor the virtuous," according to the epitaph of a young woman at
Hadra). In these texts, there is no indication of a belief in immortality or the pos-
sibility of a happy life beyond the tomb.
Yet in certain epitaphs, we see different ideas, some of which clearly stem from
Egyptian beliefs regarding the hereafter. The Greek epitaph of a girl named
Isidora at Tuna el-Gebel (second century CE) demonstrates that for this girl, at
least, immortality had become a certainty:

In the future, I shall make you no more sacrifices while weeping, my daughter, for
I have acquired the conviction that you have become a goddess. With libations and
prayers, celebrate Isidora, the nymph whom the nymphs have carried off. Greet-
ings, o you, my daughter. Nymph is your name, and the seasons pour you the li-
bations of Isis each year: winter, white milk and olive oil, and he crowns you with
delicate-flowered narcissus; spring sends you the natural product of the bee and
rose buds, flowers dear to Love; blazing summer offers you the drink that emerges
from the Bacchic presses; for you, he ties the grapes together and out of them, he
makes a crown for you. May these offerings all be made for you here each year! The
same ritual as for the Immortals: and that is why I shall make you no more sacri-
fices while weeping, my daughter.4

In the Greek epitaph of a woman named Sarapias, from Mex, we find the for-
mula, "Keep the crown you have braided, and may Isis give you the holy water
of Osiris." This is perhaps an allusion to the "crown of justification" that was
placed on the head of the deceased, and above all an evocation of the regenera-
tive water that would bring him back to life. The formula "may Osiris give you
fresh water" appears on a number of Greek funerary inscriptions, in Egypt and
even abroad (Rome, Carthage).
It indeed seems that many of the Greeks settled in Egypt adopted Egyptian
funerary beliefs, and this should not be a cause for surprise: these beliefs were
incontestably more "stimulating" and more hopeful than the Greek ideas. Thus,

4 Epigraph of Isidora; translation based on that of A. Bernand, Alexandrie la grande (Paris, 1966),
p.161.
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 3 25

in the third to the second centuries BCE, we can see a Greek, originally from
Magnesia, acquire a funerary stela in the Egyptian style, on which he is depicted
mummified and lying on a funerary bed, surrounded by two mourning women,
and also, by virtue of a doubling of representation that is quite frequent, seated
before an offering table laden with food and receiving a fumigation of incense
from two men (funerary priests?) .
The "Romans" of Egypt also adopted Egyptian funerary customs and beliefs.
Among the funerary stelae in the necropolis of Terenuthis, in the western part
of the delta, which was used from the Ptolemaic Period down to the fourth cen-
tury of our own era, there is that of a young girl of ten, Aelia Pompeia, also called
Juliana, whose name indicates that she had Roman citizenship (which was rare
in this period; the stela must date to the second century CE). She is represented
inside a small temple, holding a sistrum (the musical instrument of Hathor and
Isis), while next to her is Anubis in the form of a seated dog and Horus in the
form of a falcon perched on a column.
In certain cases, we witness a juxtaposition of Egyptian and Greek images and
formulas; such is the case with the funerary stela of Apollos of Lykopolis, who is
depicted in Egyptian costume, conducted by Anubis into the presence of Osiris,
but whose Greek inscription proclaims that he has reached the "throne of the
Abydene Osiris," conducted by the "Kyllenian Hermes." Stranger still is the third
century CE funerary inscription of a little boy who died at the age of one and a
half years, stung by a scorpion: "In the sand lies his body, but his soul has gone
to its own land." The name of the boy, Sois, and that of his father, Horus, are in-
deed Egyptian, but the idea of a separate existence of the soul apart from its
fleshly "envelope" was perhaps not incompatible with the Egyptian image of the
bird-soul that fluttered around the tomb. A sort of "doubling" of the person of
the deceased already appears in the New Kingdom Book of the Dead; the mum-
mified body remained in the tomb, while the ba could leave it to return to the
realm of the living. Their separation was only temporary, however: for a person
to continue to "live," all the material and immaterial elements that constituted
him had to be reunited.
Generally speaking, while a rather negative vision of the hereafter was still
widespread in the Greek communities of Egypt, especially in the Ptolemaic Pe-
riod, the dominant vision remained the more optimistic and serene Egyptian vi-
sion of the hereafter, which represented, whatever its dangers and terrors, a
promise of life.

THE PERSISTENCE OF TRADITIONAL PRACTICES

Because they expressed belief in survival, Egyptian funerary practices must have
seemed, to foreigners living in Egypt, more hopeful and effective than their own
326 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

customs. That is doubtless why the most typical practice, mummification, was
widespread in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt.
Greek writers have left us precious information regarding this ritual, which
was an essential one, for in Egyptian belief, the various elements that constituted
the human person had to be reunited so that the deceased could have the bene-
fit of survival. The text of Herodotus5 minutely describes the course of the pro-
cedures necessary to obtain the best results in presenting and preserving the dead
body; but this highly elaborate technique, which, he says, "repeats what was done
for the one whose name I have scruples about stating" (that is to say, Osiris, for
whom Anubis supposedly invented the embalming ritual), was available only to
persons who disposed of considerable financial means. For those who wished to
"avoid great expense," there was a second class of embalming, more expeditious
and, according to him, less "efficient"; "nothing is left of the dead person but skin
and bones." For the poorest, there was a "third class" mummification that en-
tailed neither difficult procedures nor the use of luxury products. The existence
of three classes of embalming is affirmed by Diodorus,6 who also supplies in-
teresting information regarding the different categories of personnel who car-
ried out the procedures.
The Ptolemaic and Roman cemeteries of Egypt that have been the object of
archaeological exploration (the Alexandrian cemeteries; Tebtunis, Karanis, and
Hawara in the Faiyum; Tuna el-Gebel and Antinoe in Middle Egypt; Akhmim
and the diverse cemeteries of the Theban region; the cemeteries of the oases, etc.)
have yielded great quantities of human remains. Unfortunately, even before the
beginning of such explorations, a great number of mummies had served as raw
material for the famous mummiya (mummy reduced to a powder used in phar-
maceutical preparations). Afterward, the first excavations were conducted at a
time when scholars were often more interested in finding objects and texts than
in making a complete study of the funerary material in its context; many ar-
chaeologists scarcely bothered to study or even preserve the human material,
with the result that precious evidence disappeared without leaving a trace. We
must add that the cemeteries were shamelessly pillaged in the nineteenth cen-
tury, and that many mummies ended up in the museums of Europe and the
United States, a circumstance that saved them but diminished the scientific value
of the information that can be drawn from them, for we often have no knowl-
edge of their provenance and their context.
Thus, only a limited number of mummies from the Ptolemaic and Roman
periods have been studied in situ, and most often, even these studies have been
superficial, for lack of modern means of investigation. This situation has led ar-
chaeologists, in the presence of mummies that are relatively badly preserved and

5 Histories, book 2, chapters 85-9o; see de Sélincourt, Herodotus, pp. 16o-61.

6
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, book „ chapters 91-93.
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 327

present no external signs of human intervention, to write that in this period,

mummification had become negligent and hasty, or even nonexistent,' and this
opinion is still repeated everywhere. The opinion seems, however, to be an error.
Radiological and anthropological study of the mummies in several Ptolemaic
and Roman cemeteries in el-Kharga oasis (Dush, Ain el-Labakha, el-Deir), car-
ried out on the spot since the early 198os, led to entirely different conclusions.
Most of the deceased had undergone treatment, as testified by the frequency of
removal of the brain followed by filling the cranial cavity with a "resinous" prod-
uct (which is detectable only by radiography, if we exclude autopsy, which alters
bodies); but few of them exhibited a trace of abdominal evisceration, which
means either that the viscera were extracted via the rectum (this was Herodotus'
"second class" embalming) or that an antiseptic product was injected (Herod-
otus' "third class"). In total, a small number of individuals had benefited from a
high quality mummification: removal of the brain, abdominal evisceration, and
gilding of the body; the latter practice, which consisted of applying small pieces
of gold foil to the face, the hands, and the feet, and sometimes to other parts of
the body of the deceased, is seldom attested prior to the Roman Period, and it
was apparently carried out on the notables of a community. The practice con-
ferred divinity, for gold was the "flesh of the gods" (note also the use of gilded
masks). Certain faces, perfectly preserved with their hair, their eyelashes, and
their beard, have a gripping "personality." Moreover, it is a fact that many mum-
mies look more or less like a bag of bones, or rather, that corpses in bad condi-
tion were strengthened with palm stalks that were passed through the vertebral
column. When we study the entire population of a cemetery, we thus note con-
siderable differences in the quality of the embalming, which is in agreement with
Herodotus's information; mummification is thus an indication of social differ-
entiation. When the result is negligent and slapdash, it is not a question of pe-
riod, but of social class, which must have been the case in all periods.
This body, on which such effort was lavished to preserve it, was supposed to
be sheltered from contact with the ground and with possible agents of destruc-
tion (predatory animals, infiltration of water into the tombs). But here, too, so-
cial differentiation was reflected in the practices: the poor contented themselves
with placing the deceased, enveloped in his shrouds, around which a humble mat
was rolled, into the tomb;$ or, he was placed, in the form of a package of tissues
and bandages, on brick or stone supports. At another social level, the more or
less carefully bandaged mummy was placed in a richly decorated cartonnage that
was adorned with a painted and gilded stucco mask, all of which was placed in
a wooden coffin or laid on a bed in the funerary chamber.

See A. Bataille, Les Memnonia: Recherches de papyrologie et d'épigraphie grecques sur la nécropole de
Thébe d'Égypte aux époques hellénistique et romaine (Cairo, 1952), pp. 216-17.
8 See P. British Museum 604,1,18; Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature:
A Book of Readings, vol. 3,
p. 139.
328 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

In the Roman Period, there were changes in the presentation of the dead. In-
stead of being decorated with vignettes from the Book of the Dead, certain car-
tonnages depict the deceased in his everyday clothing; the gilded masks were
sometimes replaced by masks with vivid colors and eyes of glass paste, whose
straight Egyptian wigs were replaced, in the case of women, by elaborate coif-
fures, and in the case of men, by hair that was represented "au naturel." These in-
novations gave the image of the deceased person a more expressive, "lively"
appearance. Moreover, a new usage was introduced in the Roman Period; instead
of placing a mask over the face of a mummy, there was a painted wooden por-
trait, which was inserted either in the shroud or in the cartonnage. These por-
traits, which are called "Faiyum portraits" because the first ones to be discovered
came from that region (they have since been found elsewhere in the valley, in
particular at Antinoe in Middle Egypt), are executed either in tempera or in en-
caustic (a mix of colors and melted wax), according to a technique of Graeco-
Roman origin that until then had been unknown in Egypt. Often mass produced
and rather stereotyped, these portraits could also be entirely individualized and
expressive; in certain cases, we may imagine that, because they were made dur-
ing their owner's lifetime, they were kept at home before decorating his carton-
nage or his shroud. The small number of the portraits that have been found
(about a thousand), the richness of the clothing and the jewels of the persons
represented, and their assured, sometimes haughty appearance, all seem to in-
dicate that most often, these were notables, or in any case, persons who enjoyed
a better than average standard of living.
The use of painted shrouds was another practice that spread in the Ptolemaic
and Roman Periods. There had been shrouds in the pharaonic era, but the later
examples are more ornately decorated, and their colors are richer and more gar-
ish. On them, the deceased is depicted standing, flanked by Osiris and Anubis,
or against a background of small depictions of funerary scenes.
On the cartonnages and the shrouds, there are often hieroglyphic or Greek
inscriptions containing the name of the deceased, sometimes his age, and pious
formulas. Moreover, since mummies "traveled" (persons were preferably buried
in the town or village they came from), a custom arose in the Ptolemaic Period
of attaching a wooden label to their neck, inscribed in Greek or Demotic (and
sometimes in both languages); the label gave their name, sometimes their pro-
fession and their age, and their destination.
We may thus affirm that many of the Greeks settled in Egypt abandoned the
Greek practice of cremation and had themselves mummified, undoubtedly be-
ginning with those who lived in the chora. There might have been reluctance re-
garding this Egyptian usage, but it was rare. That this was the case is indicated
by a lengthy Greek funerary inscription from the necropolis of Tuna el-Gebel,
which must date to the second century CE.9 It is that of a young boy who died

9 See E. Bernand, Inscriptions métriques de l'Égypte gréco-romaine (Paris, 1969), no. 97.
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 329

at the age of eleven, probably of a pulmonary illness (the text mentions cough-
ing); the text has him say that he refused to have mourning women called and
to have the traditional embalming products used for him: he did not want
passers-by to be "disturbed by the disagreeable odor of cade oil"; one will be able
to pause near his tomb because, since he was not mummified, he will be "a de-
ceased person who smells good" (nekros euôdès). This boy belonged to a Greek
community, or one that had long since been Hellenized. His father, who raised
horses, had participated in chariot races, which was evidently not an Egyptian
custom, and his father and grandfather were magistrates. This family, with its
Greek cultural tradition, thus deliberately and even obstinately marked its "dis-
tance" from commonly accepted funerary practices. But it is clear that few shared
this attitude.
Another feature that conformed to traditional rituals was the continued prac-
tice, down to the Roman Period and beyond it, of placing offerings in the tomb,
offerings intended to perpetuate the life of the deceased. Despite the pillaging to
which almost all of them have been subjected, Ptolemaic and Roman tombs have
yielded a great deal of funerary material. The pottery, which was probably of lit-
tle interest to the pillagers, is generally quite abundant: bottles, pots, bowls, and
dishes offer a complete sampling of the utensils employed in everyday life. Peo-
ple did not hesitate to place well-used objects in the tombs: some of them are en-
tirely blackened by smoke. This was especially true of receptacles intended to
store foodstuffs, in particular wine, of which deposits sometimes remain; fruits
(dates, pomegranates, sycamore figs) were also part of the food offerings. All
these things indicate that it was above all necessary to assure food for the de-
ceased.
Incense and aromatic products were also included in the traditional offerings,
and many perfume burners have been found in tombs of late date. The many oil
lamps could have served a ritual purpose, to assure that light accompanied the
deceased in his movements beyond the grave. They also had a practical use, how-
ever: making light for the living when they returned to the tomb to renew the
offerings, or even to deposit still other mummies, for tombs were often collec-
tive and familial. Flowers, in the form of bouquets and crowns, were habitually
part of the tomb "decoration. Other offerings were rarer: for example, that
of the hair cuttings found in several tombs in the Roman necropolis of Dush
(Kysis).
Other items in the funerary equipment were more specifically intended for
the protection of the dead. Statuettes of painted wood represented funerary
deities (Osiris, Anubis). Others, in molded terra cotta, depicted nude young
women with exaggerated sexual organs, their hands open in a gesture of prayer
or their arms stuck to their bodies; though they are often quite Hellenized in ap-
pearance, their models are to be sought in ancient Egypt, where figurines of nude
women were already placed in tombs in the Middle Kingdom; they are frequently
called "concubines of the deceased" but this is certainly incorrect, for they have
33 0 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

been found in women's tombs. Shawabtis, servants of the deceased, were also
present, though sporadically, in the Ptolemaic Period; the custom seems to have
disappeared in the Roman Period.
In tombs, archaeologists often find objects that served the deceased in their
daily life. This is especially true of toilette objects and objects of personal adorn-
ment, such as jewels, mirrors, combs, kohl sticks, and little jars of perfume or
unguent. There are also tools: needles, spindles, scribal palettes, cobblers' awls,
plowing implements, and even sacks of grain. In a number of the tombs at Dush,
there were small cushions used by women when they carried things on their
head. In the tombs of children, there are little jewels, toys, and sometimes "baby
bottles" (vases of a special type, with a small mouth).
Tombs thus evoke the daily life of the inhabitants of Graeco-Roman Egypt,
rather than their death, all the more so in that there are, in certain cemeteries
such as Tuna el-Gebel, veritable multistoried houses with several rooms entered
through beautiful wooden doors provided with locks. The quality of the tomb
and its furnishings, like that of the mummification process, reflects the standard
of living of its owner. In a rich tomb, we find carefully produced architecture,
sometimes painted decoration, luxurious pottery, and expensive objects of glass
and metal (plunderers, both ancient and modern, have as a rule removed all the
precious metal and jewels); but we must note that even in the poorest tombs,
there are always at least some offering pots.
It is thus clear that at least until the fourth century, traditional Egyptian prac-
tices (mummification, funerary offerings) were kept up by the entire population,
whatever the social level. It is likely that only "marginal" persons, those entirely
without resources and with no relatives, were excluded from the system. But even
if it was summary and expeditious, a funerary ritual was carried out even for the
poorest.
Specialized personnel performed the complex ritual of embalming and fu-
neral practices. Herodotus speaks of only one category of persons, whom he calls
taricheutai, literally "salters," for the main procedure consisted of "salting" the
body by letting it soak for seventy days in natron crystals. Diodorus mentions
other specialists: a scribe who marked the spot for the incision on the left side of
the deceased (he is the only one to mention this), a paraschistes who made the
incision with an obsidian knife, and finally, the taricheutes, who did the actual
embalming. The prepared body was then returned to the family, who entrusted
it to the nekrotaphoi, the men whose job was to transport it to the necropolis for
burial. All these artisans are well known from Greek and Demotic documents.
They were organized into corporations, and they generally handed down their
job from father to son (women could also practice these trades). According to
Diodorus, the taricheutai were "well regarded," and they could associate with
priests and enter the temples; but it seems that they were forbidden to carry out
their activities in town (which is understandable, given the nature of their work),
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 33 1

or even to reside there. It was indeed in the neighborhood of the cemeteries that
the embalmers set up their "pure place," a light construction, either a tent or a
kiosk, that housed their operations.
The embalmers of the necropolis of Memphis in the Ptolemaic Period are the
topic of a recent study. u) They seem to have been a closed, endogamous group
in which offices and goods were handed down within the same family. These
goods consisted of embalming establishments, funerary chapels, and "rights" (to
practice mummification) over specific quarters of towns or segments of popu-
lation, with the profits that attached to them. These rights could be bequeathed,
ceded, divided up, or rented out. Although the places they used for their activi-
ties were scattered throughout the cemetery area, their homes were concentrated
in the enclosure of the temples of Anubis and Imuthes.
In the Roman Period, it seems that there were changes in the offices, and the
term nekrotaphos could serve to designate embalmers in general. While the var-
ious categories of embalmers were responsible for everything that concerned the
preparation and burial of the body, there were priests, the choachytai, whose job,
at least in the Ptolemaic Period, was to carry out the funerary cult. They clearly
had close ties to the embalmers; in the necropolis of Memphis, they worked to-
gether and intermarried, and in certain cases, it seems that they performed du-
ties related to those of the taricheutai. But their proper function was to assure
the offering service of the deceased; their name seems to be related to the rites
of offering water or of purification by water (choai, "libations" in Greek). The
funerary service must have consisted of offerings of food and drink; it doubtless
took place on the anniversaries of deaths, and perhaps more often, but we have
no precise information on this subject.
Bizarrely, we find no mention of the choachytai in the Roman Period, yet it
would be astonishing if the office disappeared. Even in the Ptolemaic Period,
they do not seem to have been present everywhere, and in such cases, it was un-
doubtedly the sons of the deceased who were responsible for the funerary cult.
This was one reason for the importance that the Egyptians attached to having
progeny; to have children (preferably males) assured that the tomb would be
maintained and the offerings renewed as needed.
In the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods, humans were not the only ones to ben-
efit from funerary rituals. Already in earlier periods, sacred animals such as Apis,
the bull of Memphis, were mummified after their death and received a cult; but
now, this practice became more widespread. To this period, or just before it, date
the great animal cemeteries, in particular, the crocodile cemetery of Tebtunis; the
cemeteries of ibises, falcons, monkeys, and sacred cows called "Isis-Mother-of-
Apis" at Saqqara; and the cat cemetery (see figure 23) recently discovered in the
hillside of the Bubasteion (the temple of the cat goddess Bastet or Bubastis), also

1° D. J. Thompson, Memphis under the Ptolemies (Princeton, 1988), pp. 155-89.

33 2 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

FIGURE 23. Cat mummy (Roman Period), stuccoed and painted cloth, Louvre. From C. Ziegler, Le
Louvre: Les Antiquités égyptiennes (Paris, 1990), p. 78.

at the site of Saqqara. While there was a special concentration of animal ceme-
teries at Saqqara, many other sites in Egypt also possessed them, from the delta
to Aswan. This was not a matter of a few living representatives of a god, as had
as had earlier been the case, but of thousands of animals entrusted to breeders
who had charge of an ailourotrophion (cat farm) or an ibiotrophion (ibis farm)
among the outbuildings of a temple; and it is now thought that these animals
were systematically slaughtered to furnish mummies tO pilgrims, who bought
them and dedicated them to the deity whom the animals represented. Nearly all
species of animals could be mummified, though generally in smaller quantity
than the cats and birds; most were in one way or another associated with a god
or goddess. Though it was only beginning in the second half of the first millen-
nium BCE that animal cemeteries were established throughout the land, this was
undoubtedly in part because at that time, simplified, less costly mummification
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 333

procedures were devised, enabling the spread of this technique among animals
as well as human beings.
The case of animals considered to be the "living image," or ba, of a god, and
in this capacity, unique, was an entirely different one. Heaped with honors dur-
ing their lifetime, it was only after their natural death that they were mummified
and buried with great ceremony. This was the case with the sacred bulls, Apis at
Memphis, Buchis at Armant, and Mnevis at Heliopolis, and probably also with
the ram that was the image of Khnum at Elephantine and with the ram of
Mendes, who was a solar entity. The case of the crocodile is less clear. It seems
that a living crocodile was considered the image of Sobek in certain temples
of the Faiyum, such as that at Arsinoe, but it was the mummy of a crocodile
that "represented" the god on the occasion of festivals: carrying a live crocodile
around in procession would doubtless have posed problems. The Lagides did not
hesitate to subvene the animal cults; official texts mention royal gifts on the oc-
casion of the funerals of the sacred bulls Apis and Mnevis. As for the Roman em-
perors, even if they were doubtless more reluctant, they did not shirk their
obligations. Hadrian might have visited Apis during his trip to Egypt; in any case,
a beautiful black granite statue of Apis, dedicated "to the health" of the emperor,
has been found in the Serapeum of Alexandria. A statue from the necropolis of
the Buchis bulls at Armant, dated to 288 CE, depicts Diocletian making an of-
fering to the sacred animal, a huge, well bandaged mummy from which only the
horned head emerges; this emperor undoubtedly never set foot in Armant, but
in this way, the fiction that the pharaoh maintained the gods of the land was
kept up.
A mummified animal was not necessarily a sacred animal. In the tomb of a
human being, it can happen that we find a little mummy of a cat, a dog, or even
a bird; the only justification for their presence is that their master did not want
to part with them.

FROM "PAGAN" FUNERARY RITUALS TO CHRISTIAN CUSTOMS:

A MANIFEST CONTINUITY

The strong attachment of the Egyptians, native or otherwise, to their funerary

rituals becomes all the more clear from the fact that when they converted to a
new religion, Christianity, they nevertheless did not abandon their former prac-
tices.
An initial observation imposes itself: when we are in the presence of a tomb
of the third or fourth century, unless there is a written document, it is not always
easy to know whether or not we are dealing with a Christian tomb. Tombs often
bear clear signs of adherence to the traditional religion (painted cartonnages,
statuettes of deities), but in many cases, the funerary material consists of entirely
334 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

anonymous objects, and Christians did not give up the habit of leaving objects
with their dead. Moreover, it is clear that Christians and "pagans" used cemeter-
ies successively and doubtless even simultaneously. This is the case with the large
Christian cemetery of Bagawat in el-Kharga oasis, which was in use from the
fourth to the seventh century of our own era. This is one of the most beautiful
Christian complexes of Egypt, a veritable "city of the dead," with funerary
chapels arranged in tiers along winding streets on a hillside. The frescos in the
chapels depict holy figures (the apostles, the Virgin, Paul, Thekla, etc.) or refer
to the Old Testament: on the cupola of the "chapel of the Exodus," we see depic-
tions of the crossing of the Red Sea, the burning bush, and the three Hebrews in
the furnace. The "great church" that dominates the necropolis has also preserved
beautiful elements of painted decoration. Moreover, the many undecorated
tombs nevertheless display Christian emblems Greek, Latin, and ansate
crosses that also occur on the garments of the deceased. One sector of the
necropolis was occupied by "pagan" tombs that in their appearance offer few dif-
ferences from the others; but the fact that their occupants adhered to the tradi-
tional religion is attested by the presence, in at least one of them, of several
wooden coffins whose decoration, though in a local style, is entirely traditional:
Anubis, Horus, Thoth, and crowned serpents on one of them; Osiris, mourning
women, and funeral scenes on another.
Proximity of "pagan" and Christian tombs also characterizes other cemeter-
ies, such as that of Hawara, on the edge of the Faiyum, and that of Karara, near
el-Hiba in Middle Egypt. But it is likely that when a Christian community took
on some size, it reserved a separate place to bury its dead.
Even in the layout of the tombs, we perceive no significant differences from
one religion to the other. Collective tombs and individual tombs coexist in both
cases, with a clear preponderance of the former. But Roman Period individual
tombs excavated in the form of sarcophagi have been found at Atfih, in the val-
ley south of Memphis; they still contained their intact mummies, with their
masks and cartonnages. Analogous, but pillaged, tombs have recently been dis-
covered in a necropolis near the temple of Hibis in el-Kharga oasis. Over time,
this custom, which is known from the "pagan" milieu, seems to have become
more widespread in the Christian community; even at Bagawat, along with
chapels with collective tombs, we can see fairly extensive sectors of individual
tombs that are simple, shallow ditches in which the dead were placed with no
protection other than their shrouds.
Moreover, it seems that the most characteristic practice of the Egyptian fu-
nerary ritual, that of embalming, was adopted by the Christians. To this day, few
systematic anthropological studies have been carried out on the human mater-
ial from Christian tombs; thus, in many cases, we cannot affirm that the old tech-
niques of extracting the brain and the viscera were still utilized. But the desire to
preserve the integrity of the body is clear. Thus, in the tombs near the monastery
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 335

of Epiphanes at Thebes (sixth to seventh centuries), the deceased were wrapped

in fabrics between which were spread juniper berries and salt, surely with the in-
tention of effecting a desiccation of the corpse. Near the monastery of St. Mark,
which is also in the Theban region, investigation of several monks' tombs
showed that the bodies (which bear no traces of incision, though that means
nothing) were covered with salt, vegetal fragments, and greasy substances before
being dressed in well-worn garments and then wrapped in ten superimposed
shrouds and finally a leather apron, the whole being held together by bandages.
The occupants of the Christian tombs of Karara seem to have been the object, if
not of mummification in the strict sense of the term, at least of a treatment in-
tended to preserve them from decay. The custom of wrapping the corpse in su-
perimposed layers of shrouds and bandages persisted for a long time in the
Christian community: an early-fifth-century illumination depicting Timothy,
bishop of Alexandria, who died in 385, represents him as a carefully bandaged
mummy. Around 600, Bishop Abraham of Hermonthis left instructions men-
tioning the linens and bandages needed for his burial, and, as had been done in
ancient Egypt, texts intended to protect the deceased were written on these ban-
dages. Thus, on a bandage from Oxyrhynchos (fifth to sixth century), there is a
logion (a phrase attributed to Jesus) that affirms the reality of the resurrection:
"Jesus said, `Nothing is buried that is not to rise again.'"
In Graeco-Roman Egypt, it happened that the mummified deceased were
kept at home for a time, instead of burying them immediately, for example, in
cases where there was no tomb ready; it was apparently this custom that led to
"mummy cupboards," a number of which have been found at Abusir el-Meleq
(the doors opened like cupboard doors, and inside, one could view the mummy
in its cartonnage). Cicero and Diodorus attest to the existence of this custom,
and Diodorus adds that these mummies kept at home could be used to guaran-
tee a loan. A Christian text, the Life of Anthony, attributed to Athanasius, con-
tains an echo of this practice, informing us that it was observed by the Christians
of Egypt to "honor the deceased." At the point of death in his desert hermitage,
Anthony condemned this custom as being "neither legitimate or holy" and com-
manded his disciples not to let anyone "take his body into Egypt (that is to say,
into the valley) to place it in a house"; following this condemnation, we are told,
many people abandoned this practice.
If Christians did not hesitate to mummify their deceased and keep them at
home so as better to honor them, it was doubtless because it was difficult to re-
nounce customs that were so ancient and so widespread. Perhaps they also saw
no contradiction between these practices and the Christian doctrine of resur-
rection; in the Christian community, there were certainly controversies on this
subject, which is already mentioned in Paul's first epistle to the Corinthians:
"How, it will be said, are the dead resurrected? With what body will they return?"
(i Cor. 15, 35). Preservation of the dead body could well have been seen as a guar-
33 6 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

antee of resurrection. It is likely that it was only at the time of the Arab conquest
that the custom was definitively abandoned.
The custom of placing objects the deceased had used during life in tombs was
also practiced in the Christian community. In the tombs of Hawara, Karara, and
Antinoe, clothing and jewelry were found, along with toilette objects, tools (in
particular, weavers' bobbins and shuttles and scribes' pens), musical instruments,
and pieces of furniture. But it seems there were no food offerings at all. It is not
impossible that the idea of a continuity of life beyond the "passage" of death was
perpetuated in the Christian community in conformity with the old Egyptian
ideas; but they might also have thought that the deceased would have need of
everything that had been part of his daily life on the day of resurrection —a res-
urrection that was conceived as entirely bodily, and in the near future.
It was also from the "pagan" community that the Christians of Egypt bor-
rowed the custom of placing lamps in tombs, though they imprinted them with
a Christian stamp: one decorated, frog-shaped lamp, of a type that was quite
widespread in Egypt after the beginning of the second century CE, bears the in-
scription anastasis, "resurrection"; in ancient Egypt, the frog symbolized the per-
petuation of life. Another "pagan" custom taken up by the Christians was that of
commemorating the dead by means of a meal at the tomb; hearths with traces
of soot and ashes have been found in the entrances to tombs of the Ptolemaic
and Roman Periods, and the custom is also attested in texts. Not only did the
Christians celebrate funerary banquets at the tombs, they also had the habit of
celebrating the eucharistic meal there; in the second half of the fourth century,
the Rule of Basil of Caesarea condemned this practice, specifying, "I know full
well that we have taken up this custom from the inhabitants of Egypt."
In the domain of funerary rituals, the use by Christians of practices that had
long been those of the "pagan" community illustrates the continuation of reli-
gious coexistence in Egypt into the third and part of the fourth centuries. But it
seems that the Christian authorities sensed a danger for the new religion in al-
lowing a confusion of practices to set in: this was the problem that arose at an-
other time for the evangelizers of Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru. It is obvious that
sometimes, bizarre juxtapositions occurred: in a Christian period tomb in the
Nubian cemetery of Ballana, a golden cross was discovered, along with a scarab,
and, inscribed on a metal band, a love charm in Greek with an invocation to Isis.
At that time, the desire to mark a radical difference between Christianity and the
ancient religions led necessarily to the rejection of practices that had become
"superstitious."
There is, however, a typical example of Christian "recovery" of a "pagan" prac-
tice, but it is on the level of symbolism; it has to do with the use of an Egyptian
hieroglyph, the ankh, also called the "ansate cross" or "key of life." In traditional
Egyptian symbolism, the ankh, held in the hands of deities, signified the life they
gave to the king, and via him as intermediary, to all humanity. Christians reused
FUNERARY BELIEFS AND RITUALS 337

this sign, charging it with a new symbolism: they interpreted it as Christ's cross,
emblem of resurrection and thus a promise of life for the Christian. The Chris-
tian chronicler Socrates recounts that when the Serapeum was destroyed, "signs
in the form of crosses were discovered carved on the walls: for the Christians, it
was Christ's cross, for the others, that of Sarapis." This double interpretation was
deliberately brought into play to encourage conversions:

When those pagans who remained (after the destruction of the Serapeum of
Alexandria) saw what had been done, they remembered, it is said, something very
important from a tradition that had been confided in them: the sign of the cross
of the Lord; the Egyptians, it is said, possessed it among the letters they call hier-
atic, that is to say, priestly; they claim that the meaning of this letter, or rather of
this term, is "Life to come." Those who were at that time converted to the faith be-
cause they were in admiration of these events thus said that it had been transmit-
ted to them by the ancients that (the religion) they then honored would last until
they saw the coming of the sign that represented life."l

The ankh was constantly used as the equivalent of the cross in Coptic Egypt;
in particular, we encounter it on many funerary monuments. The funerary stela
of Apa Biham (that is, Abraham, sixth to seventh century), now in the Coptic
Museum in Cairo, presents a veritable "exaltation of the cross" in all its forms,
with a Latin cross in a sanctuary in the middle and to either side of it an Egyp-
tian cross, each of whose arms is itself surmounted by a small Greek cross. The
stela of the carpenter Pamountes, probably from the same period, depicts a
Greek cross inscribed on the front wall of an edifice and below it, two Egyptian
crosses, each with a small Greek cross inscribed in the loop they form. The same
association of symbols is found in many buildings, whether in the decoration of
the funerary chapels in the necropolis of Bagawat or in that of the church of
Bawit; the Greek inscription that, under the emperor Justinian, commemorated
the transformation of the temple of Isis at Philae into a holy place under the in-
vocation of the martyr Stephen is framed by two Greek crosses and an ankh.
What is more, the use of the ankh as a Christian symbol might have been laden
with polemical intention, signifying the victory of the Christian God over the
deities of"paganism." In the oracular sanctuary of Deir el-Bahari, above the graf-
fiti written by a pilgrim who had come in search of a cure "from the lord god
Asklepios (also known as Imuthes), Amenothes, and Hygieia," another visitor,
this one a Christian, also wrote in Greek the well-known profession of faith,
"There is only one god who saves us," and surrounded it with two ankhs whose
branches have palms;' 2 thus one of the signs of the old religion was used to pro-
claim the victory of the new one.

11 Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History, book 2, chapter 29.

12 A. Bataille, Les Inscriptions grecques de Deir el-Bahari (Cairo, 1951), nos. 86-89.
33 8 PART III. HUMAN BEHAVIORS

We also note the strong presence in Coptic art, as it developed beginning in

the fifth century of our own era, of "profane" motifs and figures borrowed most
often from the world of Greek deities and myths: Dionysos and his followers,
Apollo and Daphne, Herakles, Orpheus, the Nereids, and so forth. Some of these
figures were probably the object of a Christian "interpretation," while others
doubtless had only a decorative value. But, in their own way, these monuments
testify to a certain form of survival, through images, of what had been the reli-
gious universe of the Greeks of Egypt.
As for the Egyptian religious universe, it perhaps survived in the Christian era
in the form of the hybrid, terrifying, "demonic" beings who, according to the
Lives of the Desert Fathers, ceaselessly assaulted the eremites in their solitude.
Before retreating into the most extreme solitude in the neighborhood of the Red
Sea, Anthony began by shutting himself up in a tomb in an abandoned necrop-
olis. It was there that the demons came to provoke him, "metamorphosed into
beasts and reptiles." In the same vein, in his youth, Pachomius went into "tombs
filled with dead persons" to pray; the history of John of Lykopolis evokes a young
man who, to do penitence, shut himself up alive in a tomb where he spent the
rest of his days tempted by demons. The frightening creatures of the Egyptian
hereafter, such as we still see them represented in the second century CE tomb
paintings of el-Muzzawaqa, could have inspired these demoniacal visions of the
Christians of Egypt, at a time when people began to persuade themselves that
the ancient images were mere "idols" inhabited by demons whose power had
been annulled by the coming of the new God.
 CONCLUSION

In Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, until the end of the fourth century CE, religious
life seems indeed to have been characterized by what we could call a "noncon-
flictual coexistence" of faiths. Foreign, especially Greek, influences impacted on
traditional religion by introducing new styles of representation and thought;
thus an ancient figure such as that of Isis was "packaged" so as better to meet the
expectations of the clientele that consisted of the Greek immigrants. The dis-
tinctive images of the gods elaborated by Egyptian religion remained alive and
well; these were deities who did not have a single nature that could be defined or
captured in a single image or formula, but whose action was perceptible, with
the result that they could assume many forms and enter into multiple combina-
tions.' Even a god like Sarapis, at least in the Roman Period, had some of that
"fluidity" of the Egyptian gods: he maintained an individualized, identifiable im-
age, but in a way, he was without outline, for he was conceived as a power with
diverse aspects, both localized and universal. This concept of an inclusive power
was quite different from a monotheism of the Judaeo-Christian type, which is
by definition exclusive.
As for human behaviors, it is uncertain whether they changed very much dur-
ing the period of seven centuries from the Macedonian conquest to the banning
of the traditional cults. The need for physical and psychological security under
the protection of the gods, and the need to unload the burden of responsibility

I See E. Hornung, Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many (Ithaca, 1982), pp. 91-
99.
340 CONCLUSION

on them, seem indeed to have been constants, down to and including the period
that witnessed the spread of Christianity. What seems to have been a new be-
havior was the need to break with the world, to take flight into the desert to find
(or to lose?) oneself and find God. At that time, there began a new type of rela-
tionship between man and God: familiarity with the supernatural world came
to be more and more reserved for "saints," men whose merits and asceticism, or
the arbitrary and unforeseeable choice of grace, the "gift" they received, rendered
them able to enter into communication with the divine and interpret it to ordi-
nary people.
In Egypt, there had always been intermediaries, the priests, between the realm
of the gods and that of men. But there was no gulf between these two realms; the
gods were present and alive in their temples, and it seems that people felt the re-
ality of this presence, to which they could always have recourse. Perhaps, when
they witnessed the destruction of the traditional temples and cults at the end of
the fourth century, they experienced that feeling of abandonment, of the empti-
ness of a world deserted by its gods, that is so well expressed in a text from the
Corpus Hermeticum: "A time will come when it will seem that the Egyptians in
vain honored their gods in the piety of their heart ... leaving the earth, the gods
will return to the sky, and they will abandon Egypt ... o Egypt, Egypt, nothing
will remain of your cults but fables, and after a time, your children will not even
believe them."2
In any case, when the confrontation of the religions occurred, the great turn-
ing point of the years 391-92, there was total incomprehension on both sides.
On the Christian side, the faithful did not fear to attack the most venerated sanc-
tuaries or the holiest images, which were treated like old, worm-eaten wood: the
statue of Sarapis in the temple of Alexandria, this "decrepit old man," as Rufinus
called it, was incinerated under the eyes of his adorants. The latter certainly felt
this destruction as a grave danger: "Everyone said that Sarapis, resenting the of-
fense done to him, would no longer produce the usual high waters and inunda-
tion";3 otherwise stated, it was the very life of the country that was compromised.
A century later, when, following a denunciation, monks broke into a private
sanctuary at Menuthis, near Canopus, and seized the divine images that had
been hidden there, "the pagans," wrote the chronicler, "thought that it was not
possible for life to be safe if any outrage was inflicted on their idols. They be-
lieved that one would perish on the spot."4
It is likely that in the course of the fourth century, sanctuaries progressively
fell into disuse for lack of financial support, in cases where it had not happened
earlier: for a good part of the third century, the impoverished state, which had

2 Asclepius, chapter 24.

3 Rufinus, Ecclesiastical History, book 2, chapter 30.
4
Zacharias the Rhetorician, "Life of Severus."
GODS AND MEN IN EGYPT 3 41

other problems on its hands, probably devoted little attention or money to the
temples and their cults. But while certain cults declined, it is clear that at Alexan-
dria and in the chora, many sanctuaries were still fully active in the fourth cen-
tury. Their faithful strongly resisted those who "displayed the zeal of quarrymen
for attacking our sanctuaries, as if they were dealing with stones": the "pagan"
philosopher Eunapius, who wrote this statement, well expressed the Christian
authorities' lack of understanding and their will to exclude, a will that saw to it
that from then on, in the eyes of a Christian of Egypt, a temple was just "stones."
GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES

To facilitate the reading of this work, in which the Egyptian deities are not pre-
sented systematically, we have included a relatively complete list of them, along
with basic bibliographic references. It will quickly be noted that recent, general
monographs are sadly lacking for a certain number of deities, and not just the
minor ones. The entries in the Lexikon der Ägyptologie and the Lexikon der ägyp-
tischen Götter and Götterbezeichnungen (see the bibliography) are not men-
tioned; in most cases, they can easily be consulted in order to find substantial
information.
The Greek names of gods and goddesses introduced into Egypt with the
Macedonian conquest (or earlier) are only exceptionally listed here; these names
could serve to designate either Greek deities or their Egyptian "equivalents" (see
the table of equivalences in book II, chapter 5) .

Amaunet. Feminine counterpart of Amun, she is attested from Dynasty 18 on. With him, she
constituted one of the couples of the Ogdoad beginning in Dynasty 26, when the Eight were
differentiated and provided with names.
Amun, the "hidden one." Originally an obscure god of Thebes, he was eventually promoted to
the rank of "king of the gods" and played an important dynastic role. A creator god, anthro-
pomorphic, he was a major figure in the Ramesside pantheon, with Mut and Khons at his side.
From the New Kingdom on, his cult spread widely throughout Egypt; he became the god par
excellence of Tanis, the Thebes of the north, the new capital created at the beginning of the
first millennium in the eastern delta. Amun's symbolic animals were the ram and the goose.
(K. Sethe, Amun and die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis, Berlin, 1929.)
Anat. Goddess of Syro-Palestinian origin, imported into Egypt in the Ramesside Period and
venerated in particular at Pi-Riamsese; frequently associated with Astarte and linked with
horses. (R. Stadelmann, Syrisch-palästinensche Gottheiten in Ägypten, Probleme der Ägyp-
tologie 5, Leiden, 1967; this work should be consulted for all the Canaanite deities listed be-
low.)
Anubis. Jackal god, or anthropomorphic with jackal's head, protector of the necropolis and
embalmer.
Anukis. Anthropomorphic goddess of the First Cataract, associated with Khnum and Satis in
a triad beginning with Dynasty 18. (D. Valbelle, Satis et Anukis, Mainz, 1981.)
344 GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES

Apis. Sacred bull, known from the beginning of history; associated with Ptah at Memphis from
Dynasty 18 on, playing the role of the intermediary of the god on earth, and later also associ-
ated with Osiris. Chosen according to particular markings, he was buried at the Serapeum on
the plateau of Saqqara, where successive cemeteries are known from the New Kingdom on.
(E. Otto, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stierkulte in Ägypten, Leipzig, 1938.)
Apopis. Maleficent serpent incarnating evil and disturbing the order of the cosmos. He had to
be constantly combated and driven back from the solar barque, which he threatened in the
course of its nocturnal voyage.
Ash. God of the western confines of Egypt, frequently called lord of the Libyans. Anthropo-
morphic, with a falcon's head or that of the Seth animal.
Astarte. Syro-Palestinian goddess, introduced into Egypt at the beginning of Dynasty 18.
Linked to horses and chariotry, she had close ties to Anat; their cult lasted until the Ptolemaic
Period.
Aten. The sun disk, which became a deity worshiped under this name in the reign of Akhen-
aten, who made him his exclusive god. Represented in his concrete, physical form, provided
with beams of sunlight that ended in hands. (C. Aldred, Akhenaten, King of Egypt, London,
1988.)
Atum. "The completed one" and "the one who is not," according to the double meaning of the
root of his name. Creator god at Heliopolis, he created Shu and Tefnut, who, with their suc-
cessors, constituted the Ennead. Anthropomorphic, he was also associated with the sun god
and was the manifestation of the setting sun in the divine combination Khepri-Re-Atum. (K.
Mysliwiec, Studien zum Gott Atum, 2 vols., Hildesheimer ägyptologische Beiträge 5 and 8,
Hildesheim, 1978-1979.)
Baal. God who played an important role in West Semitic cultures. In Egypt from Dynasty 18
on, especially in Peru-Nefer, the port area of Memphis, he enjoyed a certain notoriety in the
Ramesside Period, when he had close relations with the god Seth.
Bastet. Cat or cat-headed goddess, the appeased counterpart of the dangerous goddess
Sakhmet; worshiped especially at Bubastis, present-day Zagazig, and also at Saqqara, where
statuettes of bronze or wood depicting her have been found, as well as thousands of cat mum-
mies.
Bes. Dwarf god, monstrous in appearance but possessing apotropaic qualities, especially for
pregnant women. (J. Romano, "Notes on the Historiography and History of the Bes-Image in
Ancient Egypt," Bulletin of Australian Center for Egyptology 9,1998, pp. 89-105 and pls. 17-21. )
Buchis. Sacred bull, linked to the god Montu, of whom he was the terrestrial intermediary; the
necropolis of late date, the Bucheum, has been found near Armant. (Bibliography: see Apis.)
Dedwen. Anthropomorphic Nubian god, attested in religious literature since the Pyramid
Texts.
Ennead. Originally a group of nine deities, but sometimes also more, whose prototype was the
Ennead of Heliopolis, born of the creator god Atum. At Karnak, there were two Enneads, each
with fifteen members. (W. Barta. Untersuchungen zum Götterkreis der Neunheit, Münchner
ägyptologische Studien 28, Munich, 1973.)
GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES 345

Geb. God of the earth, son of Shu and Tefnut, and husband of Nut, from whom he was sep-
arated by the air. Father of Osiris and his brother and sisters, he was a chthonic power, rep-
resented anthropomorphically. (S. Bedier, Die Rolle des Gottes Geb in den ägyptischen
Tempelinschriften der griechisch-römischen Zeit, Hildesheimer ägyptologische Beiträge 41,
Hildesheim, 1995. )
Hapy. Personification of the inundation, represented as an androgynous, obese figure; present
in agricultural processions, along with personifications of fields. The Egyptians attributed two
sources to the inundation: Elephantine in the south, and in the Memphite region, in the neigh-
borhood of Kher-Aha, from which he surged forth at the beginning of each year. (j. Baines,
Fecundity Figures, Warminster, 1985; D. van der Plas, L'Hymne à la crue du Nil, 2 vols., Leiden,
1986.)
Harendotes. Form of Horus, avenger and protector of his father Osiris; in his child form, his
cult became widespread in the later periods of Egyptian history, as was the case with other
child gods.
Harmachis. "Horus in the horizon," name of the Great Sphinx of Giza, reinterpreted as an icon
of the sun god beginning with Dynasty 18. (C. Zivie-Coche, Sphinx: History of a Monument,
Ithaca, 2002.)
Harpokrates. "Horus the child," another form of Horus, son of Isis and Osiris.
Harsiese. "Horus, son of Isis," a form of the child Horus, especially linked to his mother and
often represented on the latter's knees; many bronzes representing them have been found.
Harsomtus. "Horus who unites the Two Lands"; known under two forms, both mostly at Den-
dara: a chthonic god with primordial functions, represented as a serpent, and a child Horus,
son of Horus and Hathor, who assured the maintenance and the transmission of the royal in-
heritance.
Hathor. Represented as a cow or a cow-headed woman, she was the goddess of drunkenness
and love, though she also reigned over the realm of the dead at Thebes. She was also mistress
of foreign lands: Sinai, Byblos, Punt. (S. Állam, Beiträge zum Hathorkult, Münchner ägyptol-
ogische Studien 4, Berlin, 1963; P. Derchain, Hathor Quadrifrons: Recherches sur la syntaxe d'un
mythe, Istanbul, 1972.)
Haurun. Canaanite deity, introduced into Egypt at the beginning of Dynasty 18, when he was
identified with the Great Sphinx of Giza, in the form Haurun-Harmachis, who could be rep-
resented as a sphinx or a falcon.
Heh and Hauhet. One of the couples of the Ogdoad, they were symbols of the boundless.
Heka. Personification of magical power, he received a cult on the model of the other gods; he
also played an important role in the sun barque. (H. to Velde, "The God Heka in Egyptian The-
ology," Ex Oriente Lux 21, 1970, pp. 175-86.)
Herishef, or Harsaphes in Greek ("He who is on his lake"). Ram-headed god adored at Her-
akleopolis. (Mohamed Gamal el-Din Mokhtar, Ihnâsya el-Medina [Herakleopolis Magna]: Its
Importance and Its Role in Pharaonic History, Bibliothèque d'étude 4o, Cairo, 1983.)
Horus. Falcon god, or anthropomorphic with a falcon's head. Sky god who absorbed a certain
number of local falcon gods. He was linked to the sun god (Re-Harakhty, Horus-Re, etc.), and
34 6 GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES

especially to Osiris and Isis, whose son he was, destined to avenge his dead father. He was rep-
resented on earth by the pharaoh.
Horus, (sons of). Four deities, lords of the cardinal points and of the canopic jars.
Hu. Personification of speech, who, along with Sia, perception, incarnated the power of cer-
tain creator gods, such as Ptah in the Memphite Theology. He was also a symbol of provisions
and food.
Ir. Personification of sight, who, with hearing, accompanied Thoth or Khonsu. (E. Brunner-
Traut, "Der Sehgott und Höhrgott in Literatur und Theologie," in J. Assmann, E. Feucht, and
R. Grieshamnmer, eds., Fragen an die altägyptische Literatur, Studien zum Gedenken an E. Otto,
Wiesbaden, 1977, pp. 125— 45.)
Irta. Primordial serpent, born of Kematef, who in his turn created the Eight in the framework
of the late Theban cosmogony. The place where these deities of the time of origins were buried
and venerated was the mound of Djamet on the west bank of Thebes, in the area of Medinet
Habu.
Isis. Daughter of Geb, sister and wife of Osiris, and mother of Horus, whom she raised in the
marshes of the delta. Extremely popular because of her role in the myth of Osiris, she was gen-
erally anthropomorphic but could also assume various other forms because of her many com-
binations with other goddesses. Her major temples date to the late periods of Egyptian history,
such as that of Philae or that of Behbeit el-Hagar in the delta. Model wife and mother, she was
the object of great devotion from the first millennium on, as evidenced by the thousands of
bronzes and amulets representing her nursing the infant Horus. She was also the most im-
portant of the Egyptian deities whose cult spread widely beyond Egypt, throughout the
Mediterranean region. (M. Münster, Untersuchungen zur Göttin Isis vom Alten Reich bis zum
Ende des Neuen Reiches, Münchner ägyptologische Studien ii, Berlin, 1968.)
lunyt. Goddess of Armant; consort of Montu, along with Rattawy and also Tatenent, the third
companion of the god.
Kek and Kauket. One of the four couples of the primordial Ogdoad, they symbolized dark-
ness
Kematef, "he whose time is over." Primordial serpent who preceded Irta and the Ogdoad in
the Theban tradition and who was buried in the mound of Djamet at Medinet Habu.
Khentamentiu, "foremost of the westerners." Funerary god of Abydos, he was definitively sup-
planted in the Middle Kingdom by Osiris, who retained the god's name as an epithet.
Khepri, "he who comes into existence." Form of the morning sun, represented by a scarab or,
more rarely, a man with a scarab for a head. He entered into triadic combinations, such as
Khepri-Re-Atum.
Khnum. Ram-headed god who presided over the cataract at Elephantine. Creator god at Esna,
he modeled gods and men on his potter's wheel. (A. Badawi, Der Gott Chnum, Glückstadt,
1937-)
Khons, "the wanderer." Moon god, anthropomorphic and crowned with the moon in the form
of a crescent and a disk. Beginning with Dynasty 18, he was the child god in the triad Amun,
Mut, and Khons at Karnak, where a vast temple was dedicated to him.
GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES 347

Maat. Anthropomorphic personification of the order and equilibrium of the cosmos and so-
ciety. She was depicted as a woman, often squatting, with a feather in her hair that was a hi-
eroglyph for her name. (J. Assmann, Maât: L'Égypte pharaonique et l'idée de justice sociale,
Paris, 1989.)
Mehetweret, Methyr in Greek, the "great swimmer." Primordial goddess who swam in the orig-
inal waters in the form of a cow. She could be associated with the cow goddess Ahet, and also
with Neith.
Meretseger, "she who loves silence." Goddess of the Theban peak, she protected the necropolis.
Min. Anthropomorphic, ithyphallic god, lord of generation and fecundation. Honored at
Koptos and Akhmim, he also protected the routes of the eastern desert. (H. Gauthier, Les Fêtes
du dieu Min, Recherches d'archéologie, de philologie et d'histoire 2, Cairo, 1931; A. McFarlane,
The God Min to the End of the Old Kingdom, Australian Center for Egyptology, Studies 3, Syd-
ney, 1995.)
Mnevis. Sacred bull of Heliopolis, representative of the sun god Re. Some of his tombs have
been found at Heliopolis. (Bibliography: see Apis.)
Montu. God of Thebes and the nearby cities Madamud, Tod, and Armant, where he reigned
during the Middle Kingdom before being somewhat eclipsed by Amun. Anthropomorphic
with a falcon's head, often wearing the double uraeus. In texts of the New Kingdom, his role
was closely linked to the kingship and to the protection of the pharaoh. His presence is again
well attested in the Ptolemaic Period, when his temples were enlarged and rebuilt. At that time,
he was closely associated with Amun, and also with Osiris. (E. Werner, The God Montu: From
the Early Attestations to the End of the Old Kingdom, Ann Arbor, 1985.)
Mut. Represented in the form of a vulture, and later as a woman, she was the consort of Amun
at Karnak from Dynasty 18 on. By coming to be associated with other goddesses, she played a
more important role than she originally had.
Nefertem. God who issued from the primordial lotus, represented in human form, with a lo-
tus on his head. Child god along with Ptah and Sakhmet at Memphis. (H. Schlögl, Der Son-
nengott auf der Blüte, Aegyptiaca Helvetica 5, Geneva, 1977.)
Neith. Delta goddess whose traces have been found from as early as the Archaic Period; an-
thropomorphic and adorned with the red crown of Lower Egypt, she reigned over the city of
Sais. She played a fundamental role as primordial goddess in the cosmogony of Esna. (Ra-
madan el-Sayed, La déesse Neith de Sais, 2 vols., Bibliothèque d'étude 86, Cairo, 1982.)
Nekhbet, "she of Nekheb," otherwise called the city of el-Kab in Upper Egypt. This vulture god-
dess was protectress of the city and of the kingship.
Nepri. Grain god, son of Renenutet.
Nun. Uncreated entity, preexistent at the time of the organization of the cosmos, who sub-
sisted after the initial appearance of the creator god and the creation of the generations of gods
and humans and the organization of the cosmos. Reservoir of all potentialities, in particular
the annual inundation, he was also space, associated with the Duat traversed by the sun god
during the night. A notion difficult to make out, he is often defined in Egyptological works as
a primordial ocean that was then pushed back to the confines of the cosmos, which is diffi-
cult to prove by the Egyptian texts.
348 GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES

Nut. Goddess of the sky, daughter of Shu and Tefnut, and sister and wife of Geb, from whom
she was separated by Shu. Represented as a woman with her body arched above the earth, or
as a celestial cow. Day after day, she swallowed the sun god and then bore him anew in the
framework of the diurnal and nocturnal cycle.
Ogdoad. Group of eight primordial gods who presided at the beginning of the cosmos in the
Hermopolito-Theban cosmogony. Represented as men and women with the heads of serpents
and frogs, they gave birth to the sun god. Their collective name, "the Eight," attached them to
the city of Hermopolis, Khemenu in Egyptian, which was also the city of Thoth. But it was
only in Dynasty 26 that we first find their different names, four of them masculine, each with
its feminine counterpart. (K. Sethe, Amun and die acht Urgötter von Hermopolis, Berlin, 1929.)
Onuris. God originally of This in Upper Egypt, he was associated with the goddess Mehit. "He
who brings back the distant one," assimilated to Shu, he played an important role in the myth
of the return of the lioness Tefnut or the eye, in the company of Thoth. Also a defender of Re
against Apopis. (H. Junker, Die Onurislegende, Vienna, 1917.)
Osiris. Anthropomorphic god, tightly wrapped. Son of Geb, he ruled on earth and was killed
out of jealousy by his brother Seth. His wife Isis went in search of the dismembered pieces of
his body, rejoined them, and with the god she had restored to life, she conceived a posthu-
mous child, Horus. Later, the latter battled with Seth to gain his legitimate throne, while Osiris
ruled over the domain of the dead, who, like him, could be resuscitated. Moreover, he had an
agrarian function in the annual renewal of the cycle of the seasons. His principal cult places
were Abydos in Upper Egypt and Busiris in the delta, where each year, major festivals com-
memorated the passion of the god. Nevertheless, his festivals in the month of Khoiak were cel-
ebrated throughout Egypt. (J. G. Griffiths, The Origins of Osiris and His Cult, Leiden, 1980; E.
Chassinat, Le Mystère d'Osiris au mois de Khoiak, 2 vols., Cairo, 1966.)
Ptah. Anthropomorphic god, tightly wrapped like a mummy and wearing a tight-fitting cap.
He was worshiped at Memphis in the earliest periods as patron of artisans, and he had a clergy.
Already in the Old Kingdom, he was associated with the funerary deities Sokar and Osiris. Be-
ginning with the Ramesside Period, he was associated with Tatenen, a chthonic god known
from funerary texts. Ptah-Tatenen then played the role of creator god, on the model of Atum
or Amun (P. Berlin 3048, Shabaka Stone, Ptolemaic texts). In the New Kingdom, he formed a
triad with Sakhmet and Nefertem. (M. Sandman Holmberg, The God Ptah, Lund, 1946.)
Qadesh. Egyptian creation based on the figure of a Canaanite goddess, depicted frontally and
nude, with a Hathoric hair style. Her name, which means "Holy One," was created from the
Semitic root q-d-sh, though no deity bearing such a name is attested in texts from the West
Semitic area. She was frequently associated with Min and Reshep on private stelae.
Rattawy, "(female) sun of the Two Lands." Female counterpart of Re, she became a deity in
her own right, the consort of Montu at Armant.
Re. Sun god of Heliopolitan origin, where he was associated with Atum and Harakhty. Cre-
ator of the world, humankind once rebelled against him. In his two barques, he traversed the
sky in the daytime and the Duat at night. Associated with many other deities, including Amun.
(J. Assmann, Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun and the Crisis of Polythe-
ism, London, 1995.)

Renenutet, Thermouthis or Hermouthis in Greek. Goddess of the harvest, mother of the god
GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES 349

Nepri; she was depicted in the form of a serpent or a woman with a serpent's head. (J.
Broekhuis, De Godin Renenwetet, Assen, 1971.)
Reshep. Syro-Palestinian god, anthropomorphic, introduced into Egypt at the beginning of
Dynasty 18. A bearer of arms, he was at first charged with the personal protection of the king.
Later, he appears on stelae of private persons at Deir el-Medina, at Memphis, and in the delta,
with a prophylactic role.
Sakhmet, the "powerful one," anthropomorphic and lion-headed. Dangerous goddess who
had to be appeased by the appropriate rites to render her beneficent. Often worshiped at the
mouth of wadis, her principal cult place was Memphis, where she became the consort of Ptah
and the mother of Nefertem. (S. E. Hoenes, Untersuchungen zu Wesen und Kult der Göttin
Sachmet, Bonn, 1976.)
Sarapis. "Creation" from the beginning of the Ptolemaic Period. With a Greek name and form,
this god took up aspects of the Egyptian Osiris-Apis, worshiped at Saqqara; associated with
Isis, he had some of the functions of Osiris. His cult spread progressively in both the Greek
and the Egyptian community and enjoyed a great popularity in Egypt and abroad, especially
in the Roman Period, when the god assumed an increasingly universalist aspect. (P. Borgeaud
and Y. Volokhine, "La Formation de la légende de Sarapis: Une Approche transculturelle,"
Archiv für Religionsgeschichte 2, 2000, pp. 37-76.)
Satis. Goddess of Elephantine, she became the consort of Khnum and the mother of Anukis.
(Bibliography: see Anukis.)
Sedjem. Personification of hearing; associated with Ir, sight, he accompanied Thoth or Khons.
Selkis. Anthropomorphic goddess who wears a scorpion on her head; played a prophylactic
role against various kinds of bites and a protective role toward the dead. (E von Känel, Les
Prétres-ouab de Sekhmet et les conjurateurs de Serket, Bibliothèque de l'École des Hautes
Études, Section des Sciences religieuses 87, Paris, 1984.)
Seth. Depicted as a fabulous animal or a man with the head of that animal. Represented all
the ambivalence and ambiguity of the divine. Protector of the sun barque of Re, he was also
the maleficent god who killed his brother Osiris and who, more generally, was the cause of
disorder. He was the figure of the foreigner in the very bosom of the Egyptian pantheon, and
eventually, he was demonized, and his name and his representations were mutilated. (H. te
Velde, Seth, God of Confusion, Probleme der Ägyptologie 6, Leiden, 1967; 2d ed. 1977.)
Shai, Greek Agathodaimon, figure of destiny. Anthropomorphic, but later represented in the
form of a serpent. (J. Quaegebeur, Le Dieu égyptien Shai dans la religion et l'onomastique, Ori-
entalia Lovaniensia Analecta 2, Louvain, 1975.)
Shed, "the savior," protective god who borrowed the appearance of the child Horus. He bore
arms and is sometimes depicted standing in a chariot. Especially venerated during the New
Kingdom, many attestations of him have been found at Deir el-Medina. Model of the child
Horus on the crocodiles on prophylactic stelae of the later periods of Egyptian history. (B.
Bruyère, "Sur le dieu Ched, à propos de quelques monuments nouveaux trouvés à Deir el
Médineh en 1939," in Rapports sur les fouilles de Deir el-Medineh (1935-1940), fasc. 3, Fouilles
de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale 20/3, Cairo, 1952, pp. 138-70.)
Shu. Created by Atum, along with his sister Tefnut, by means of masturbation or spitting. His
35 0 GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES

role was to separate sky and earth, or Geb and Nut, for he was the air. (P. Derchain, "Sur le
nom de Chou et sa fonction," Revue d'Égyptologie 24, 1974, pp. no-16).
Sia. Personification of perception, who, with Hu, speech, incarnated the creative power of the
creator god as he conceived the world by means of his will.
Sobek. Crocodile god venerated in many places in Egypt, especially in the Faiyum and at Korn
Ombo, where one part of the double temple was dedicated to him, while the other belonged
to Haroeris, or Horus the Elder. (C. Dolzani, Il Dio Sobk, Rome, 1961.)
Sokar. Very ancient chthonic deity, worshiped in the Memphite region and more specifically
at Ra-Setau, "the entry of the subterranean ones." He was frequently represented in the form
of a mummified falcon and had a distinct form of barque for his festival processions. Asso-
ciated with Ptah and Osiris, his cult was to be found in many localities in Egypt, including
Thebes. (C. Graindorge, Le Dieu Sokar à Thèbes au Nouvel Empire, Göttinger Orientforschungen
28, 2 vols., Wiesbaden, 1994.)
Sopdu. Represented anthropomorphically or as a crouching falcon, at home in Per-Sopdu,
present-day Saft el-Hinna in the eastern delta, where he protected the border of the land from
foreign incursions. (I. Schumacher, Der Gott Sopdu—Der Herr der Fremdländer, Orbis Bibli-
cus et Orientalis 79, Freiburg, 1988.)
Sothis. The star Sirius represented as a woman, frequently associated with Isis. She symbol-
ized the beginning of the year and of the inundation.
Tatenen. Chthonic god who did not appear until the Middle Kingdom; he was associated with
the original powers and also with the funerary realm. From the Ramesside Period on, he is
found associated with Ptah in a creative function. (H. Schlögl, Der Gott Tatenen, nach Texten
und Bildern des Neuen Reiches, Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 29, Freiburg, 1980.)

Tatenent. One of the consorts of Montu in the Theban region. (M.-T. Derchain-Urtel,
Synkretismus in ägyptischer Ikonographie: Die Göttin Tjenenet, Göttinger Orientforschungen
8, Göttingen, 1979.)
Taweret. Pregnant hippopotamus goddess, charged with protecting women during childbirth.

Tefnut. Sister of Shu, created by the creator god Atum. In the Coffin Texts, she appears as Maat
with her brother Life (ankh), who cause their father to live, and who also represent the two
forms of eternity, neheh and djet. The frequently expressed hypothesis that she was connected
with moisture is nowhere confirmed.
Thoth. Moon god, substitute for Re and scribe of the gods. He could be represented as an ibis,
a man with an ibis head, or a baboon. He had various cult places in the delta and at Hermopolis
in Middle Egypt. (P. Boylan, Thoth, the Hermes of Egypt, London, 1922.)
Wadjit. Serpent goddess, protectress of Lower Egypt, linked to the city of Buto; frequently as-
sociated with the goddess Nekhbet of Upper Egypt.
Waset. Personification of the city of Thebes.
GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES 351

ANCIENT EGYPT
35 2 GLOSSARY OF GODS AND GODDESSES

DELTA

FAIYUM FROM DENDARAR

TO EDFU
CHRONOLOGY

Down to the eighth century BCE, the dates are approximate and susceptible
to minor changes.

Predynastic Period
3000 first unification of Egypt; founding earliest traces of the cult of Apis
of Memphis; legendary reign of
Menes; Horus Narmer
Archaic Period
2950-2780 Dynasty 1: Horus Aha, Djet, Den
2780-2635 Dynasty 2: Peribsen, Khasekhemwy
Old Kingdom
2685-2561 Dynasty 3: Djoser construction of the Step Pyramid at
Saqqara by the architect Imhotep
2560-2450 Dynasty 4: Snofru, Cheops, construction of the Great Pyramids
Khephren, Mycerinus of Giza and the cemeteries of pri-
vate persons
2450-2321 Dynasty 5: Sahure, Neferirkare, sun temples of Abu Ghurab; appear-
Neuserre, Wenis ance of the Pyramid Texts in the
pyramid of Wenis
2321-2140 Dynasty 6: Teti, Pepy I, Pepy II pyramids with texts at Saqqara

First Intermediate Period

2140-2022 Crisis of political power; division appearance of the Coffin Texts
of Egypt; Dynasties 7 to 10,
Memphite, Herakleopolitan

Middle Kingdom (2022-1650)

2022 reunification of Egypt under rise to importance of the cults of
Mentuhotpe II; Dynasty 11. Amun at Thebes and of Osiris at
Dynasty 12, kings named Abydos
Amenemhet (Ito IV) and
Senwosret (Ito III). Dynasty 13,
kings named Sebekhotpe. Dynasty
14, Nehesy, Salitis

Second Intermediate Period

1650-1539 Dynasties 15-17; Hyksos sovereignty capital at Avaris (Tell el-Daba)
over all Egypt
354 CHRONOLOGY

New Kingdom (1539-1080)

1593-1293 Dynasty 18; reconquest of Egypt by
Ahmose; kings named Amenophis
(I to III), Tuthmosis (Ito IV),
Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutan-
khamun, Haremhab; Asiatic
campaigns and creation of an
empire in the Near East growth in the power of Amun; ap-
pearance of the Book of the Dead;
introduction of foreign, Syro-
Palestinian deities. Amarna
episode: Aten, the sun disk, pro-
moted to the rank of sole god by
Akhenaten; return to the tradi-
tional polytheism under Tu-
tanhkhamun
1293-1190 Dynasty 19: Sethos I, Ramesses II,
Merneptah; creation of the city of
Pi-Riamsese in the eastern delta
1190-1069 Dynasty 20: Ramesses III, Ramesses pillage of the royal tombs; the high
IV to XI priest Herihor assumes power at
Thebes

Third Intermediate Period (1069-656)

Tanite Dynasty 21: Smendes, founding of the capital of Tanis,
Psusennes, Siamun the Thebes of the north
Libyan Dynasty 22: kings named
Shoshenq and Osorkon
Dynasty 23: Osorkon III
750 Conquest of Upper Egypt by the
Kushite Pi(ankh)i
Dynasty 24: Tefnakhte and Bocchoris
Kushite Dynasty 25: Shabaka,
Taharqa, Tantamani; Kushite
sovereignty over all Egypt; struggle
against the Assyrians

Late Period (656 —332)

656-525 Saite Dynasty 26: kings named
Psammetichus (I to III), Necho,
Apries, Amasis
525-404 Dynasty 27: first Persian domination
404-343 Dynasties 28-30. Nectanebo I and II beginning of construction work at
Behbeit el-Hagar, Philae, Dendara
343-332 second Persian domination
332-331 Alexander in Egypt founding of Alexandria
323-317 regency of Philip Arrhidaeus

Ptolemaic Period (305-31)

305 Ptolemy son of Lagos assumes "creation" of Sarapis
the title of king
285-247 reign of Ptolemy II, Philadelphos construction work at Behbeit el-
Hagar, Philae
CHRONOLOGY 355

247-221 reign of Ptolemy III, Euergetes I Canopus Decree; beginning of con-

struction work at Edfu
221-203 reign of Ptolemy IV, Philopator
203-181 reign of Ptolemy V, Epiphanes; Memphis Decree
secession and reconquest of the
Thebais
181-143 reign of Ptolemy VI Philometor
143-51 dynastic quarrels and troubled construction work at Kom Ombo,
successions; intervention of Dendara, Armant; decrees of
Rome in Egyptian affairs Ptolemy VIII, Euergetes II
51-31 Cleopatra VII; Caesar, and later
Antony, in Egypt
31 victory of Octavian at Actium
over the fleet of Cleopatra and
Antony

Roman Period (30 BCE-395 CE)

30 Egypt becomes a Roman province;
suicide of Cleopatra
19 CE Germanicus visits Egypt
69 Vespasian proclaimed emperor by Vespasian visits the temple of Sarapis
the legions of Egypt at Alexandria
115-117 "Jewish War"; disappearance of the
Jewish communities of Egypt
130 Hadrian visits Egypt Drowning and deification of Anti-
noos; founding of Antinoe
172-173 revolt of the boukoloi of the delta
under the leadership of the priest
Isidoros
199-200 visit of Septimius Severus
215 visit of Caracalla; disturbances at
Alexandria
247 reign of Decius anti-Christian persecutions; con-
struction work on the temple of
Esna
303-304 reign of Diocletian anti-Christian persecutions
391-392 edicts of Theodosius destruction of the Serapeum of
Alexandria; persecution of the
"pagan" cults
August 394 last hieroglyphic inscriptions at
Philae
395 Division of the empire between
Honorius and Arcadius; from
then on, Egypt was part of the
eastern empire until the Arab
conquest
537 closing of the last "pagan" cult, that
of Isis at Philae
BIBLIOGRAPHY

GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY

The list here is a brief one, because there are relatively few works of synthesis on Egyptian re-
ligion.
For the convenience of the reader, books and articles dealing with specific topics are listed
under the relevant chapters. This is not a complete bibliography, which would surpass the lim-
its of this work, but rather, a list of the most important, or the most recent, works that address
the state of a given question at the present time. The list also includes some relatively old ref-
erence works that still have the merit of furnishing valuable information, though their ap-
proach to the topic of religion is outdated, as is especially the case with the book by Adolf
Erman.
The many individual entries for religious concepts and the names of deities in the Lexikon
der Ägyptologie are not listed here, so as not to overburden this bibliography. Obviously, it is
useful for the reader to consult this work.

PHARAONIC EGYPT

Allen, J., J. Assmann, A. B. Lloyd, R. Ritner, and D. Silverman. Religion and Philosophy in An-
cient Egypt, Yale Egyptological Studies 3. New Haven, 1 989.
Assmann, J. The Mind of Egypt: History and Meaning in the Time of the Pharaohs. New York,
2002.
. The Search for God in Ancient Egypt. Ithaca, 2001.
Baines, J. "Interpretation of Religion: Logic, Discourse, Rationality." Göttinger Miszellen 76
(1984): 25-54.
Bonnet, H. Reallexikon der ägyptischen Religionsgeschichte. Berlin, 1952.
Clarysse, W., A. Schoors, and H. Willems, eds. Egyptian Religion, The Last Thousand Years:
Studies Dedicated to the Memory of Jan Quaegebeur. 2 vols. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta
84 -85. Louvain, 1998.
Derchain, P. La Religion égyptienne. Histoire des religions 1. Paris, 1952.
Erman, A. A Handbook of Egyptian Religion. Reprint ed. Chesapeake, Va., 199o.
Frankfort, H. Ancient Egyptian Religion: An Interpretation. New York, 1948.
. Kingship and the Gods: A Study of Ancient Near Eastern Religion as the Integration of So-
ciety and Nature. Chicago, 1948.
Frankfort, H., H. A. Frankfort, J. A. Wilson, and T. Jacobsen, Before Philosophy: The Intellec-
tual Adventure of Ancient Man. Chicago, 1946.
Graefe, E., and U. Verhoeven, eds. Religion und Philosophie des Alten Ägypten: Festgabe für
35 8 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Philippe Derchain zu seinem 65. Geburtstag am 24. Juli 1991. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta
39. Louvain, 1991.
Helck, W., E. Otto, and W. Westendorf, eds. Lexikon der Ägyptologie. 7 vols. Wiesbaden, 1972-
1989.
Hornung, E. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Ithaca, 1982.
. Idea into Image: Essays on Ancient Egyptian Thought. New York, 1992.
Kees, H. Die Götterglaube im alten Ägypten. Leipzig, 1941.
Kemp, B. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization. London, 1989.
Leitz, C., ed. Lexikon der ägyptischen Götter und Götterbezeichnungen. 7 vols. Orientalia Lo-
vaniensia Analecta 110-16. Louvain, 2003.
Lustig, J., ed. Anthropology and Egyptology: A Developing Dialogue. Sheffield, 1 997.
Morenz, S. Egyptian Religion. Ithaca, 1 973.
Quirke, S. Ancient Egyptian Religion. London, 1997.
Redford, D. B., ed. The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. 3 vols. New York, 2001.
Sainte Fare Garnot, J. Religions égyptiennes antiques: Bibliographie analytique (1939-1943). Paris,
1952.
Shafer, B., ed. Religion in Ancient Egypt: Gods, Myths, and Personal Practice. Ithaca, 1991.
Vandier, J. La Religion égyptienne. Mana: Introduction à l'histoire des religions 1. Paris, 1949.
Vleeming, S., ed. Hundred Gated Thebes. Acts of a Colloquium on Thebes in the Graeco-Roman
Period. Leiden, 1995.
Yoyotte, J. La Pensée préphilosophique en Égypte. Histoire de la philosophie, vol. 1. Paris, 1969,
pp. 1-23.

PTOLEMAIC AND ROMAN EGYPT

Bevan, E. A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty. London, 1927.

Bouché-Leclercq, A. Histoire des Lagides. 4 vols. Reprint ed., Brussels, 1963.
Bowman, A. K. Egypt after the Pharaohs. London, 1986.
Cleopatra's Egypt: Age of the Ptolemies. New York, 1988.
Dunand, F. "Grecs et Égyptiens en Égypte lagide: Le Problème de l'acculturation." In Modes
de contact et processus de transformation dans les sociétés anciennes. Pisa and Rome, 1983,
pp. 45-87-
Fraser, P. M. Ptolemaic Alexandria. 3 vols. Oxford, 1972.
Grimm, G., H. Heinen, and E. Winter, eds. Alexandrien. Mainz, 1981.
, eds. Das römisch-byzantinische Ägypten. Mainz, 1983.
Hölbl, G. A History of the Ptolemaic Empire. London, 2001.
Johnson, A. C. Roman Egypt to the Reign of Diocletian. Economic Survey of Ancient Rome,
vol. 2. Baltimore, 1936.
Lewis, N. Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt. Oxford, 1986.
. La Mémoire des sables; La Vie en Égypte sous la domination romaine. Paris, 1988.
Maehler, H., and V. M. Strocka, eds. Das ptolemäische Ägypten. Mainz, 1978.
Préaux, C. Le Monde hellénistique: La Grèce et l'Orient (323-146 a. C.). 2 vols. Paris, 1970.

TEXTS

Athanasius. The Coptic Life of Anthony. San Franciso, 1994.

La Bible d'Alexandrie. Translated by M. Harl et al. Paris, 1986.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 359

Corpus Papyrorum Judaicarum. Edited by V. A. Tcherikover, A. Fuks, and M. Stern. 2 vols.

Cambridge, Mass., 1957-1964.
The Desert Christians: Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Translated by Benedicta Ward. New York,
1980.
Diodorus Siculus. The Library of History. Book I. Translated by C. H. Oldfather. London, 1961.
. Naissance des dieux et des hommes. Translated by M. Casevitz. Paris, 1991.
Herodotus. The Histories. Translated by A. de Sélincourt. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, 1972.
The Life of Pachomius: Vita Prima Graeca. Translated by Apostolos N. Athanassakis. Missoula,
Mont. 1975.
The Nag Hammadi Library. Translated under the direction of J. M. Robinson. New York, 1977.
Philo. About the Contemplative Life, or, the Fourth Book of the Treatise Concerning Virtues.
Translated by E C. Conybaere. New York, 1987.
Plutarch. De Iside et Osiride. Translated by J. Gwyn Griffiths. Cambridge, 1970.
Select Papyri. Vols. 1-2: Non-literary Papyri. Translated by A. S. Hunt and C. C. Edgar. Lon-
don, 1932-1934.
Strabo. The Geography. Book 17. Translated by H. L. Jones. London, 1 949.

BOOK I

PART I, CHAPTER 1

The major monographs on individual deities are listed in the "Glossary of Gods and God-
desses."

Assmann, J. Egyptian Solar Religion in the New Kingdom: Re, Amun, and the Crisis of Polythe-
ism. London, 1995.
. "Gott." In Lexikon der Ägyptologie, vol. 2/5. Wiesbaden,1976, cols. 756-86.
. "Die `Häresie' des Echnatons von Amarna: Aspekte der Amarna-Religion." Saeculum 22
(1972): 109-26.
. "Die Loyalistische Lehre Echnatons." Studien zur Altägyptischen Kultur 8 (1980): 1-32.
. "Primat und Transzendenz: Struktur und Genese der ägyptischen Vorstellung eines
`Höchstes Wesens.-In Aspekte der spätägyptischen Religion, ed. W. Westendorf. Göttinger
Orientforschungen 9. Wiesbaden, 1979, pp. 7-42.
. "Die Verborgenheit des Mythos in Ägypten." Göttinger Miszellen 25 (1977): 7-43-
Baines, J. "Egyptian Myth and Discourse: Myth, Gods, and the Early Written and Iconographic
Record." Journal of Near Eastern Studies 5o (1991): 81-105.
Fecundity Figures: Egyptian Personifications and the Iconology of a Genre. Warminster, 1985.
. "Myth and Literature." In Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms, ed. A. Lo-
prieno. Probleme der Ägyptologie 10. Leiden, 1996, pp. 361-77.
. "On the Symbolic Context of the Principal Hieroglyph for 'God:" In Religion und
Philosophie im alten Ägypten. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 39. Louvain, 1991.
Barta, W. Untersuchungen zum Götterkreis der Neunheit. Münchner ägyptologische Studien
28. Munich, 1973.
Brunner, H. Die Geburt des Gottkönigs. Ägyptologische Abhandlungen 10. Wiesbaden, 1964.
Daumas, E Les Dieux de l'Égypte. Paris, 1965.
Derchain, P. "Divinité: Le Problème du divin et des dieux dans l'Égypte ancienne." In Diction-
naire des mythologies, ed. Y. Bonnefoy, vol.1. Paris, 1981, pp. 324-30.
360 BIBLIOGRAPHY

. "Encore le monothéisme." Chronique d'Égypte 125 (1988): 77-85.

Gardiner, A. "Personification (Egyptian)." Hastings Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Ed-
inburgh, 1908-1926, pp. 787-92.
Griffiths, J. G. The Origins of Osiris and His Cult. Leiden, 1980.
Hoffmeier, J. Sacred in the Vocabulary of Ancient Egypt: The Term Dsr with Special Reference to
Dynasties I-XX. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 59. Freiburg and Göttingen, 1985.
Hornung, E. Der ägyptische Mythos von der Himmelskuh: Eine Ätiologie des Unvollkommenen.
Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 46. Freiburg and Göttingen, 1982.
. Akhenaten and the Religion of Light. Ithaca, 1999.
. Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt: The One and the Many. Ithaca, 1982.
Meeks, D. "Notion de `dieu' et structure du panthéon dans l'Égypte ancienne." Revue de l'his-
toire des religions 205/4 (1988): 425-46.
. "Zoomorphie et image des dieux dans l'Égypte ancienne." Corps des Dieux. Le Temps de
la réflexion 7 (1986): 171-91.
Otto, E. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Stierkulte in Ägypten. Leipzig, 1938.
Posener, G. De la divinité du pharaon. Paris, 1960.
Schott, S. Mythe und Mythenbildung. Untersuchungen zur Geschichte und Altertumskunde
Ägyptens 15. Leipzig, 1945.
Stadelmann, R. Syrisch-palästinensche Gottheiten in Ägypten. Probleme der Ägyptologie 5. Lei-
den,1967.
Traunecker, C. The Gods of Egypt. Ithaca, 2001.
Zivie-Coche, C. "Dieux autres, dieux des autres: Identité culturelle et altérité dans l'Égypte an-
cienne." In Concepts of the Other in Near Eastern Religions, ed. I. Mon, I. Gruenwald, and I.
Singer. Israel Oriental Studies 14. Leiden, 1994, pp. 39-80.

PART I, CHAPTER 2

Allen, J. Genesis in Egypt: The Philosophy of Ancient Egyptian Creation Accounts. Yale Egypto-
logical Studies 2. New Haven, 1988.
Assmann, J. Zeit und Ewigkeit in Alten Ägypten. Heidelberg, 1975.
Assmann, J., and M. Bommas, Altägyptische Totenliturgien, vol. 1. Heidelberg, 2002.
Bickel, S. La Cosmogonie égyptienne avant le Nouvel Empire. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis 134.
Freiburg and Göttingen, 1994.
de Buck, A. De Egyptische voorstellingen betreffende den oerheuvel. Leiden, 1922.
Derchain, P. "Cosmogonie: En Égypte pharaonique." In Dictionnaire des mythologies, ed. Y.
Bonnefoy, vol. 1. Paris, 1981, pp. 224-28.
. "Zijn en niet-zijn volgens de Egyptische filosofie." In Excelsior (Anvers,1962), pp. 171-
89
Firchow, O., and Sethe, K. Thebanische Tempelinschriften aus griechisch-römischen Zeit.
Urkunden des ägyptischen Altertums 8. Berlin, 1957.
Grandet, P. Hymnes de la religion d'Aton (Hymnes du XIVe siècle avant J. -C.). Paris, 1 995.
Grapow, H. "Die Welt vor der Schöpfung." Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache und Altertum-
skunde78 (1931 ): 34-38.
Hornung, E. "Chaotische Bereiche in der geordneten Welt." Zeitschrift für ägyptische Sprache
und Altertumskunde 81 (1956): 28-32.
Kákosy, L. "Einige Probleme des ägyptischen Zeitbegriffes." Oikumene 2 (1978): 95-111.
Mendel, D. Die kosmogonischen Inschriften in der Barkenkapelle des Chonstempels von Karnak.
Monographies Reine Élisabeth 9. Turnhout, 2003.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 361

Otto, E. "Das `Goldene Zeitalter' in einem ägyptischen Text." In Religions en Égypte hellénis-
tique et romaine. Paris, 1969, pp. 93-108.
. "Der Mensch als Geschöpf und Bild Gottes in Ägypten." In Probleme biblischer Theolo-
gie. Munich, 1971, pp. 335-48.
Reymond, E. The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple. Manchester, 1969.
Ryhiner, M.-L. L'Offrande du lotus dans les temples égyptiens. Rites égyptiens 4. Brussels, 1986.
Sauneron, S. and J. Yoyotte. "La Naissance du monde selon l'Égypte ancienne." In La Naissance
du monde. Sources orientales 1. Paris, 1959, pp. 19-91.
Schott, S. "Altägyptische Vorstellungen vom Weltende." In Studia Biblica et Orientalia, vol. 3.
Analecta Biblica 12. Rome, 1959, pp. 319-3o.
Smith, M. On the Primaeval Ocean: The Carlsberg Papyri 5. CNI Publications 26. Copenhagen,
2002.
Westendorf, W. "Die Geburt der Zeit aus dem Raum." Göttinger Miszellen 63 (1983): 71-76.
Zandee, J. "Das Schöpferwort im alten Ägypten." In Verbum: Essays on Some Aspects of the Re-
ligious Function of Words. Utrecht, 1964.

PART I, CHAPTER 3

Alliot, M. Le Culte d'Horus à Edfou au temps des Ptolémées, 2 vols. Bibliothèque d'étude 20.
Cairo, 1954-1959.
Assmann, J. Ägyptische Hymnen und Gebete. Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis. Rev. ed. Freiburg and
Göttingen, 1999.
Barguet, P. Le Temple d'Amon-Ré à Karnak: Essai d'exégèse. Recherches d'archéologie, de
philologie et d'histoire 21. Cairo, 1962.
Cauville, S. Essai sur la théologie du temple d'Horus à Edfou. 2 vols. Bibliothèque d'étude 102.
Cairo, 1966-1968.
. "Une règle de la `grammaire' du temple." Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Ori-
entale 83. Cairo, 1983, pp. 51-84.
Chassinat, E. Le Mystère d'Osiris au mois de Khoiak, 2 vols. Cairo, 1966-1968.
Daumas, F. Dendera et le temple d'Hathor. Recherches d'archéologie, de philologie et d'histoire
29. Cairo, 1969.
. Les Mammisis des temples égyptiens. Paris, 1958.
Derchain, P. "Un monument de géographie liturgique à Edfou," Chronique d'Égypte 73 (1962):
31-65.
. Rites égyptiens I: Le Sacrifice de l'oryx. Brusells, 1962.
. "Rituels égyptiens." In Dictionnaire des mythologies, ed. Y. Bonnefoy, vol. 2. Paris,1981,
pp. 328-33.
. "Le rôle du roi d'Égypte dans le maintien de l'ordre cosmique." In Le Pouvoir et le sacré.
Brusells, 1962, pp. 61-73.
. "Théologie et littérature." In Ancient Egyptian Literature: History and Forms, ed. A. Lo-
prieno. Probleme der Ägyptologie io. Leiden, 1996, pp. 351- 60.
Derchain-Urtel, M.-T. Priester im Tempel: Die Rezeption der Theologie der Tempel von Edfu und
Dendera in der Privatdokumenten aus ptolemaischer Zeit, Göttinger Orientforschungen 19.
Göttingen, 1989.
Egberts, A. In Quest of Meaning: A Study of the Ancient Egyptian Rites of Consecrating the Meret-
Chests and Driving the Calves. Leiden, 1993.
Fairman, H. "Worship and Festivals in an Ancient Egyptian Temple." Bulletin of the John Ry-
lands Library 37 (1954): 165-203.
362 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gabolde, L. Le `grand château d'Amon" de Sésostris 1er à Karnak: La Décoration du temple d'A-
mon-Ré au Moyen Empire. Mémoires de l'Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 17.
Paris, 1998.
Gardiner, A. H. "The House of Life." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 24 (1938): 157-79.
Gauthier, H. Les Fêtes du dieu Min. Recherches d'archéologie, de philologie et d'histoire 2.
Cairo, 1931.
Goyon, J. -C. Les Dieux-gardiens et la genèse des temples (d'après les textes égyptiens de l'époque
gréco-romaine): Les Soixante d'Edfou et les soixante-dix-sept de Pharbaetos, 2 vols. Biblio-
thèque d'étude 93. Cairo, 1985.
Gundlach, R., and M. Rochholz, eds. Ägyptische Tempel: Struktur, Funktion und Programm.
Hildesheimer Ägyptologische Beiträge 37. Hildesheim, 1994.
Gutbub, A. "Remarques sur quelques règles observées dans l'architecture, la décoration et les
inscriptions des temples de Basse Époque." In Mélanges offerts à Jean Vercoutter. Paris,1985,
pp. 123-36.
-. Textes fondamentaux de la théologie de Kom Ombo. 2 vols. Bibliothèque d'étude 48.
Cairo, 1973.
Hornung, E. Geschichte als Fest. Darmstadt, 1966.
Kees, H. Die Hohenpriester des Amun von Karnak von Herihor bis zum Ende der Äthiopenzeit.
Probleme der Ägyptologie 4. Leiden, 1964.
. Das Priestertum im ägyptischen Staat vom Neuen Reich bis zum Spätzeit. Probleme der
Ägyptologie 1. Leiden, 1953.
Kruchten, J. -M. Les Annales des prêtres de Karnak (XXIe-XXIIIe dynasties) et autres textes con-
temporains relatifs à l'initiation des prêtres d'Amon. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 32. Lou-
vain,1989.
Labrique, F. Stylistique et théologie à Edfou. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 58. Louvain, 1994.
Lefebvre, G. Histoire des grands prêtres d'Amon de Karnak jusqu'à la XXIe dynastie. Paris, 1929.
Meeks, D. Le Grand texte de donation au temple d'Edfou. Bibliothèque d'étude 59. Cairo, 1972.
Meeks, D., and C. Favard-Meeks. Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods. Ithaca, 1996.
Montet, P. "Le Rituel de fondation des temples égyptiens." Kémi 17 (1964): 74-100.
Moret, A. Le Rituel du culte divin journalier en Égypte. Annales du musée Guimet, Bibliothèque
d'études 14. Paris, 1902.
Naguib, S. A. Le Clergé féminin d'Amon thébain. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 38. Louvain,
1990.
Nelson, H. "Certain Reliefs at Karnak and Medinet Habu and the Ritual of Amenophis I." Jour-
nal of Near Eastern Studies 8 (1949): 201-32 and 310 -45.
Otto, E. Gott und Mensch nach den ägyptischen Tempelinschriften der griechisch-römischer Zeit.
Heidelberg, 1964.
. Das Verhältnis von Rite und Mythen im Ägyptischen. Heidelberg, 1958.
Quaegebeur, J., ed. Ritual and Sacrifice in the Ancient Near East. Orientalia Lovaniensia Ana-
lecta 55. Louvain, 1 993.
Quirke, S., ed. The Temple in Ancient Egypt: New Discoveries and Recent Researches. London,
1997.
Reymond, E. The Mythical Origin of the Egyptian Temple. Manchester, 1969.
Rochemonteix, M. "Le Temple égyptien." In Oeuvres diverses. Bibliothèque égyptologique 3.
Cairo and Paris,18 94, pp. 1-38.
Sauneron, S. Les Fêtes d'Esna aux derniers siècles du paganisme. Esna 5. Cairo, 1962.
. The Priests of Ancient Egypt. Ithaca, 2000.
Spencer, P. The Egyptian Temple: A Lexicographical Study. London, 1984.
BIBLIOGRAPHY 363

Traunecker, C. "De l'hiérophanie au temple: Quelques réflexions." In Religion und Philosophie

im alten Ägypten: Festgabe für Philippe Derchain, ed. U. Verhoeven and E. Graefe. Orientalia
Lovaniensia Analecta 39. Louvain, 1991, pp. 302-17.
Winter, E. Untersuchungen zu den ägyptischen Tempelreliefs der griechisch-römischer Zeit.
Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien, Denkschriften. Vienna, 1968.
Yoyotte, J. "Héra d'Héliopolis et le sacrifice humain." Annuaire de l'École Pratique des Hautes
Études, Section des Sciences religieuses 89. Paris, 1980-1981, pp. 31-102.
Here, it is not possible to cite all the many studies published on specific rituals.

PART II, CHAPTER 4

Assmann, J. Maât: L'Égypte pharaonique et l'idée de justice sociale. Paris, 1989.

. Ma'at: Gerichtigkeit und Unsterblichkeit im Alten Ägypten, 2d ed. Munich, 1995.
Baines, J. "Practical Religion and Piety." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 73 (1987): 79-98.
Barucq, A., and E Daumas. Hymnes et prières de l'Égypte ancienne. Littératures anciennes du
Proche-Orient io. Paris, 1980.
Bergman, J. "Discours d'adieu-Testament-Discours posthume: Testaments juifs et enseigne-
ments égyptiens." In Sagesses et religions. Paris, 1979, pp. 21-50.
Borghouts, J. E Ancient Egyptian Magical Texts. Leiden, 1978.
. "Divine Intervention in Ancient Egypt and Its Manifestation (BAW)." In Gleanings from
Deir el-Medina, ed. R. Demarée and J. J. Janssen. Leiden, 1982, pp. 1-10.
. The Magical Texts of Papyrus Leiden 1348. Oudheidkundige Mededelingen uit het
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden te Leiden 51. Leiden, 1971.
Broze, M. La Princesse de Bakhtan: Essai d'analyse stylistique. Brussels, 1989.
Brunner, H. "Die freie Wille Gottes in der ägyptischen Weisheit." In Les Sagesses du Proche-
Orient ancien. Paris, 1963, pp. 103-20.
Daumas, E "Le Sanatorium de Dendera." Bulletin de l'Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale
56 (1957): 35 -57.
Derchain, P. "Anthropologie: Égypte pharaonique." In Dictionnaire des mythologies, ed. Y. Bon-
nefoy, vol.1 (Paris, 1981), pp. 46-50.
. "De la magie à la méditation." In La Maggia in Egitto ai Tempi dei Faraoni, ed. A. Roc-
cati and A. Siliotti. Verona, 1987, pp. 47-55.
. Le Papyrus Salt 825 (BM 1005): Rituel pour la conservation de la vie en Égypte. Brussels,
19 6 5.
Drioton, E. "Une Statue prophylactique de Ramsès III." Annales du Service des Antiquités de
l'Égypte 39 (1939): 57-89.
Faulkner, R. "The Bremner-Rhind Papyrus/III-The Book of Overthrowing `Apep.."' Journal
of Egyptian Archaeology 23 (1937): 166-85.
Hornung, E. "Der Mensch als 'Bild Gottes' in Ägypten." In Die Gottenbildlichkeit des Mensches,
ed. O. Loretz. Munich, 1967, pp. 123-55.
Jansen-Winkeln, J. Ägyptische Biographien der 22. und 23. Dynastien. 2 vols. Ägypten und altes
Testament 8. Wiesbaden, 1985.
Kákosy, L. Egyptian Healing Statues in Three Museums in Italy (Turin, Florence, Naples). Catol-
ogo del Museo Egizio di Torino, Serie I, Monumenti e Testi IX. Turin, 1999.
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Koenig, Y. Magie et magiciens dans l'Égypte ancienne. Paris, 1 994.

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Lipinski, E. (ed.). State and Temple Economy in the Ancient Near East. Louvain, 1979.
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Peremans, W., and E. Van't Dack. Prosopographia Ptolemaica. vol. 3: Le Clergé, le notariat, les
tribunaux. Reprint ed., Louvain, 1977.
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Ray, J. D. The Archive of Hor. London, 1976.
Stambaugh, J. E. Sarapis under the Early Ptolemies. Leiden, 1972.
Thompson, D. J. Memphis under the Ptolemies. Princeton, 1988.
van den Horst, P. W. Chaeremon: Egyptian Priest and Stoic Philosopher. Leiden, 1987.

PART II, CHAPTERS 4, 5, AND 6

Baumeister, T. Martyr invictus. Münster, 1972.
Bell, H. I. Cults and Creeds in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Liverpool, 1 953.
Bergman, J. Ich bin Isis: Studien zum memphitischen Hintergrund der griechischen Aretalogien.
Uppsala, 1968.
Bonneau, D. La Crue du Nil, divinité égyptienne, à travers mille ans d'histoire. Paris, 1964.
van der Broek, R., and M. J. Vermaseren, eds. Studies in Gnosticism and Hellenistic Religions.
Leiden, 1981.
Cerfaux, L., and J. Tondriau. Le Culte des souverains dans la civilisation gréco-romaine. Tour-
nai, 1957
Chuvin, P. Chronique des derniers païens. Paris, 1990.
Chrétiens d'Égypte au IV siècle: Saint Antoine et les moines du désert. Dossiers Histoire et
Archéologie 133 (December 1988).
Derchain, P., ed. Religions en Égypte hellénistique et romaine. Paris, 1969.
Dunand, F. Le Culte d'Isis dans le bassin oriental de la Méditerranée. vol. 1: Le Culte d'Isis et les
Ptolémées. Leiden, 1973.
Fowden, G. The Egyptian Hermes: A Historical Approach to the Late Pagan Mind. Cambridge,
1986.
Grelot, P. Documents araméens d'Égypte. Littératures anciennes du Proche-Orient 5. Paris,
1972.
Griggs, E. Early Egyptian Christianity. Leiden, 1 989.
Guillaumont, A. Aux Origines du monachism chrétien. Bellefontaine,1979.
Judge, E. A., and S. R. Pickering. "Papyrus Documentation of Church and Community in
Egypt to the Mid-fourth Century." Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum 20 (1 977): 47-71.
Méléze-Modrzejewski, J. Les Juifs en Égypte. Paris, 1991.
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Juifs du Nil. Paris, 1981, pp. 15-49 and 237-45.
Musurillo, H. The Acts of the Pagan Martyrs. Oxford, 1954.
Nag Hammadi: Bibliothèque gnostique au bord du Nil. Dossiers Histoire et Archéologie 7o (Feb-
ruary 1983).
Pagels, E. H. The Gnostic Gospels. New York, 1 979.
Quaegebeur, J. Le Dieu égyptien Shaï dans la religion et l'onomastique. Louvain, 1975.
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. "Reines ptolémaïques et traditions égyptiens." In Das ptolemäische Ägypten. Mainz,

1978, pp. 245-62.
Ronchi, G. Lexicon Theonymon rerum sacrarum et divinarum ad Aegyptum pertinentium quae
in papyris ostracis titulis graecis latinisque in Aegypto repertis laudantur. 5 vols. Milan, 1974-
1977.
Rubsam, W. Götter und Kulte in Faijum während der griechisch-römisch-byzantinischen Zeit.
Bonn, 1964.
Thompson, D. B. Ptolemaic Oinochoai and Portraits in Faience: Aspects of the Ruler-Cult. Ox-
ford, 1 973.
Tondriau, J. "Esquisse de l'histoire des cultes royaux ptolémaïques." Revue de l'histoire des re-
ligions (1950): 207 ff.
van Voss, M. H., ed. Studies in Egyptian Religion Dedicated to Professor Jan Zandee. Studies in
the History of Religions 43. Leiden, 1982.

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el-Al, Abd, Abd el-Hafeez, J. -C. Grenier, and G. Wagner. Stèles funéraires de Kom Abu Bellou.
Paris, 1985.
Bataille, A. Les Inscriptions grecques du temple de Hatshepsout à Deir el-Bahari. Cairo, 1951.
. Les Memnonia: Recherches de papyrologie et d'épigraphie grecques sur la nécropole de la
Thébe d'Égypte aux époques hellénistique et romaine. Cairo, 1952.
Bell, H. I. "Popular Religion in Graeco-Roman Egypt." Journal of Egyptian Archaeology 34
(1948): 82- 97.
Delekat, L. Katoche, Hierodulie und Adoptionsfreilassung. Munich, 1964.
Dunand, F. "Fête et propagande à Alexandrie sous les Lagides." In La Fête: Pratique et discours.
Paris, 1981, pp. 13-40.
. "Fête, tradition, propagande: Les Cérémonies en l'honneur de Bérénice, fille de Ptol-
émée III, en 238 a.C. In Livre du centenaire de l'IFAO. Cairo, 1980, pp. 287-301.
. Religion populaire en Égypte romaine: Les Terres cuites isiaques du musée du Caire. Lei-
den, 1979
Fakhry, A. The Necropolis of El-Bagawât in Kharga Oasis. Cairo, 1951.
Grimm, G. Die römischen Mumienmasken aus Ägypten. Wiesbaden, 1 974.
Lefebvre, G. Le Tombeau de Petosiris. 2 vols. Cairo, 1923-1924.
Parlasca, K. Mumienporträts und verwandte Denkmäler. Wiesbaden, 1966.
Rice, E. The Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Oxford, 1983.
Vandoni, M. Feste publiche e private nei documenti greci. Milan, 1964.
INDEX

Abu Ghurab, 75, 76f, 83 -84, 93 Amenophis III, 38, 225

Abydos, 90,136 Amulets, 97,109,124-25,129-33, 157, 169, 301,
oracles at, 311-12, 316 305
Osiris cult at, 77, 115 -16,186-87, 238, 276 Amun, 28-30, 75-77, 143, 241, 343
Admonitions of Ipuwer, 151, 176 Amaunet and, 26, 49
Afterlife, 15, 23, 27, 78,139,163,184-91, 319-38 cult of, 26, 75, 79-82, 81f, 85-86,103,116,
Christian beliefs about, 333 -38 118f, 120, 311
Greek beliefs about, 324-25, 328-29 Ennead of, 31-32, 57
judgment in, 142, 157, 180-83, 239, 320-23 Hatshepsut and, 22-23, 3 8
Middle Kingdom beliefs about, 185-87 hymns to, 36, 41, 45
New Kingdom beliefs about, 187-89, 19of images of, 16, 20
Old Kingdom beliefs about, 184-85 names of, 24-25, 33-35, 40-41, 56
writings on, 155-56, 180, 184-91, 19of Zeus and, 242, 246-47
See also Book of the Dead See also Re
Agathos Daimon, 16, 244 Amun-Re, 27, 36,137
Abet, 45, 50 Anat, 17-19, 343
Ahmose, 22-23, 38,114, 178 Anchorites. See Eremites
Akhenaten, 35-36, 77, 344 Androgynous deities, 17-18, 26, 48, 270
Alexander the Great, 197-99, 203, 207, 209, 219 Animals
cults and, 215, 248, 287 burial of, 21,119, 331-32, 331-33, 332f
Greek colonies before, 240, 268 cults of, 83,119,131
Alexandria dreams about, 135
art of, 267 names of, 25
cemeteries of, 323, 326 sacrifice of, 21, 34, 82, 90-91, 97, 99, 277, 285,
Christians of, 259-64, 279-81, 340-41 296
Dionysos cult at, 285-88 temple, 21, 83,119, 211-12, 296, 332
Greeks of, 218-20, 242, 257-59, 267-70, 275 See also Zoomorphism
imperial cult at, 205, 251-52, 258 Ankh (ansate cross), 97, 336-37
Jews of, 243f, 254-59, 280 Anthony (saint), 263 -64, 335, 338
Library of, 233, 249 Anthropomorphism, x, 16-21, lof
map of, 243f Antinoe, 326, 328, 336
Ptolemaia festival of, 285-89 Antoninus, Marcus Aurelius, 127, 202, 212-13,
Serapeum at, 214-21, 242, 252, 337, 340 242, 316
Amarna Period, 35-36, 110, 121 Antonius, Marcus, 251
Amaunet, 26, 49, 343 Anubis, 19, 343
Amenemope, 62,137 afterlife and, 320, 322
Amenophis I, 114, 120, 132 devotees of, 309
Amenophis II, 134 images of, 320-21
 37 0 INDEX

Anukis, 114, 343 Book of Knowing the Modes of Existence of

Aphrodite, 241, 248 Re, 58, 234
Hathor and, 242, 272 Book of the Dead, 18, 70,142,159,175,180-83,
Isis and, 272, 273f 187-91, 320, 325
Apis, 17, 20-21, 83, 119, 197, 278, 344 creation myths in, 44, 67
burial of, 306, 331, 333 tombs and, 169, 172
Sarapis and, 215, 217, 220 versions of, xii, 188, 270
Apocalypse, 67-68, 257 See also Afterlife
Apollinopolis. See Edfu Book of the Heavenly Cow, 22, 28, 3 8, 53, 63, 189
Apollo, 241-42, 268 Book of Two Ways, 186,188
Apopis, 46, 63-64, 91, 124, 126, 151, 268, 344 Buchis, 21, 83, 344
Arensnuphis, 229, 23of Burial practices. See Funerary rites
Arianism, 262-64, 280-81 Busiris, 119, 186, 238, 251, 319
Arsinoe, 204, 246, 248-52, 255, 295
Artemis, 215, 242, 275 Cadavers, 33, 1 57, 159, 161-64,168-69,191, 321
Ash, 19, 344 See also Mummies
Asklepios, 216, 219, 303, 312-13, 337 Calendars, xiii, 65-66, 93-96, 116, 126, 226, 297
Astarte, 17-19, 114, 136, 275 -76, 3o6-8, 344 Callixenes of Rhodes, 285-88
Aswan, 75,172, 236, 249 Canopus, 136, 218, 242, 312-13
Asylum, right of, 209-10, 232, 265, 307, 310 Canopus Decree, 289
Aten. See Sun disk Cartonnages, 320, 327-28
Athena, 242, 277 Cats, 16, 21, 331-33, 33 2f
Atum, 16-17, 27, 57, 344 Chaos, 46, 52-53, 62-64, 67-68
creation myths and, 48-51, 55-56, 58, 61, Charms, 124-28
67-68, 234 See also Magic
genealogy of, 29-30, 33, 44 Christianity, 52, 259-66, 339-41
Osiris and, 67, 70 evil in, 142, 264
Augustus, 201, 203, 250-51, 278 funerary beliefs of, 156-57, 168, 279, 333-38
Autobiographies, 178-80 gnosticism and, 260-61, 275-76
heresies in, 261-63, 280-81
Ba, io -11, 15, 27, 31, 130, 168, 172 syncretism of, 278-81
afterlife and, 23-24, 163,168-69, 325 See also Bible
animal, 21, 333 Circumcision, 211
disputes with, 146, 151,161 Claudius, 251, 258
temples and, 23, 90, 95, 121 Cleopatra I, 204
Baal, 18-19, 344 Cleopatra II, 209, 248
Bastet, 16, 119, 242, 277, 331-32, 344 Cleopatra VII, 203-4, 210, 242, 243f, 250-51
Bendis, 244, 276 Clergy
Berenike (princess), 208, 250, 289 categories of, 102-4, 121, 207, 211, 296-97
Berenike (queen), 204, 248, 285, 289 kings and, 206-13
Bes, 129, 132, 136, 305, 321, 344 role of, 99-104, 206, 211, 299-300, 306
Bible, 124-25, 134, 140, 253, 334 taxes on, 211
creation myths and, 5 2-53, 59, 61-62 women, 103
gnosticism and, 260-61 See also Priests
Greek translation of, 255 -57 Coffin Texts,143,151,169
See also Christianity afterlife in, 185-88
Birth, 66,128-29,132,135, 226, 29 2-93, 305 Book of Shu in, 48 -49
Blindness, 141-42 Book of the Dead and, 187-88
Book of Amduat, 189, 190f creation myths in, 32-33, 44, 46, 50-51, 53, 63
Book of Apopis, 189, 291 Pyramid Texts and, 185-86
INDEX 371

Complaints of the Eloquent Peasant, 120, 145-46 in dreams, 22, 65, 214
Coptic tradition, 8, 256, 260, 337-38 evolution of, 267-76, 270f--274f
Corpus Hermeticum, 7, 268, 275-76, 340 female, 9-10, 25-26, 293
Creation, 58 -64 foreign, 16-19, 246f, 276-81
chaos and, 62-64, 67-68 Greek, 25, 240-47, 245f, 267-78, 27of-274f,
lexicon of, 55-56 338
myths of, 42-55, 159, 188-89, 234 hidden, 23-25, 33, 56,128
time and, 64-70 local, xii, 13, 28, 84,132-33,136, 236
Crocodiles male, 18, 25-26
burial of, 295-96, 333 names of, 6, 24-28, 40,136-37, 256, 269, 317
deities as, 131, 228, 246, 252, 277 numbers and, 32-35
dreams about, 1 35 piety and, 107-11, 121, 300-302
myths about, 54 power of, 28-29, 85-86
temples and, 21, 83 savior, 137-38, 203
Crowns, 18, 33, 216, 218, 272, 324 sky, 16, 22, 28
Cult(s), 11-12, 8 9 -96, 233-39 tripartition of, 23 -24, 27, 30-34, 40,163, 228
ancestral, 277 words for, ix-x, 7-13, 9f
animal, 83,119, 277-78 See also Divine and specific deities
domestic, 131-33 Demeter, 232, 242, 244, 246
Greek, 240-47, 245f, 267-78, 270f-274f, Demotic Chronicle, 201
286-88, 300-301 Demotization, 175, 185-87
imperial, 205, 250-52, 258, 279 Dendara
liturgies of, 93-96, 233-34, 285-94 Hathor cult at, 73, 82, 95,116, 226, 236, 238-
magic and, 122-23, 316-18 39
mystery, 292 Osiris festivals at, 94
pharaoh, 198, 200, 203 temples at, 82, 93,101,136, 301
piety and, 107-11, 121, 300-302 Dep, 51, 200
royal, 202-5, 247-50, 254, 277 Diocletian, 262, 265-66, 278, 333
temples and, 71-74 Diodorus Siculus, 210, 326, 330, 335
See also Rituals and specific deities Dionysos, 203, 219, 244, 245f, 246, 248-49
Curses, 123-26, 129, 165-66,176, 305 cult of, 286-88
Osiris and, 241-42
el-Dakhla oasis, 270, 321 Dioskouroi, 232, 241-42, 245-46
Death, 130-31, 153-56, 164-68, 174-76 Dispute between a Man Weary of Life and His
causes of, 159-61 Ba, 146-49,151,161
Dance of, 157 Divine, xii-xiii, io8, 136-43
perception of, 66,158-61 figures of, 13-24
representations of, 156-58, 162-64 organization of, 29-36
sleep and, 133, 156 power of, 28-29, 198 -202
See also Funerary rites profane and, 86-88,104, 121-22
Dedwen, 18, 344 substance of, 21-23
Deir el-Bahari, 52,114,177 transcendence and, 40-41, 46,139
graffiti at, 337 uniqueness of, 35 -36, 137
Hatshepsut cult at, 23, 38, 312 See also Deity; Religion
temples at, 136, 304 Djedhor of Athribis, 87,125
Deir el-Medina, 114, 120, 129, 137 Dreams, 133-36
oracle of, 311, 314-15 charms and, 126
Deir el-Shelwit, 91, 236, 301 deities in, 22, 65, 214
Deity(ies), 21-23, 29-36, 59-62, 83 -89, 99-100 medicine and, 135-36, 218, 304, 312-13
androgynous, 17-18, 26, 48, 270 records of, 308
37 2 INDEX

Dualities, 25-26, 32-33, 40, 46-48, 49, 261 Opet, 94-95,119-20

Dush participation in, 300
cemeteries at, 279, 327, 329-30 potter's wheel, 45, 94, 289-94
temples at, 232, 238, 268, 312 processions for, 116-19, 118f, 311
Ptah, 116-18, 290
Edfu Ptolemaia, 285-89
funerary cult at, 50 See also Cults
Horus cult at, 21, 31, 83, 86, 94-95, 116-19, First Occasion, 37, 41, 47, 50-55, 58-59, 63-66,
206, 225 -28, 268 71, 78, 85, 88
library at, 233, 299 Frogs, 49, 129, 336, 348
myths of, 36-37, 39, 46, 51, 85 Funerary rites, 1 53-57, 319-38
temples at, 54, 93,101,113, 235 Christian, 156-57, 168, 333-38
Egg, 9-10, 50-51, 293 Egyptian , 50, 78, 153-55,i69,172- 82, 239,
Elephantine 319-33
imperial cult at, 251 Greek, 324-25, 328-29
Jews of, 253-54, 278 writings on, 165, 185-91, 19of
Khnum cult at, 227, 229 See also Death; Mummies
Satis cult at, 75
Ennead, 31, 34, 51, 57-59, 236, 344 Geb, 25, 29, 30f, 39, 44, 51, 345
Epitaphs, 166, 324 Ghosts, 165
Eremites, 263-66, 279-80, 306-10, 315, 338 Giza
Esna cemeteries of, 172-73
cults at, 50, 65, 94, 118 -19, 289-94 Sphinx of, 19, 27, 74-75, 114-15, 117f
myths of, 51, 56, 85, 234, 347 Gnosticism, x, 26o-61, 275 -76
temples at, 60, 62, 93,112, 201, 226-27 Gold, 22-23, 327
Eternity, 64, 68-70,172,181 Graffiti, 114-15, 120, 229-31, 337
See also Afterlife
Ethics, 140, 143-49, 179-83 Hadrian, 221, 236, 247
Evil, 63-64, 97,147,150-51 Alexandrian palace of, 243f
Christianity and, 142, 264 Apis cult and, 278, 333
magic and, 164-65, 299, 316-18 imperial cult of, 251-52
Eye Hapy, 18, 26,156, 345
lunar, 38-39, 299, 321 Harmakhis-Khepri-Re-Atum, 27
solar, 16, 38 -39, 234, 302 Haroeris, 80, 228-29, 235
Harpokrates, 216, 220, 345
Falcon(s) images of, 273 -74, 274f, 305
cemeteries for, 331 on lotus flower, 302-3, 3o3f
coronation of, 94 -95,119 temple of, 229
Horus as, 16-17, 19, 228 Harsomtus, 31, 226, 228, 345
ideogram of, 8-9, 9f Hathor, 22, 31, 38, 129, 138, 345
sun god and, 70 Aphrodite and, 242, 272
temples and, 21, 83 festivals of, 94-95,116,143
Festival(s), 93-96,116-19, 117f, 118f images of, 16, 19
Amun, 116-18, 118f names of, 27,130
Burning Lamps, 119, 238 temples of, 73, 82,114, 226-29, 23of, 236, 238
calendars of, 226 Hathors,129,151
Goodly Reunion, 94, n6 Hatshepsut, 22-23, 3 8, 77, 82, 88, 312
Khoiak, 226, 238-39 Hauhet, 26, 49, 345
music for, 94, 103, 157, 167, 286, 290-91, 293 Haurun, 19, 114-15, 117f, 345
New Year, 93 -95, 131 Hawara, 279, 326, 334, 336
INDEX 373

Hebrew, 255-56 Instruction of King Khety, 123, 147-48

Heh, 26, 49, 345 Instruction of Ptahhotep, 147-50, 159
Heka, 26, 123, 127, 345 Irta, 50, 346
Hekau, 58,126-27 Isis, 24-25, 28, 73-74, 137, 217-21, 237, 242, 320-
Heliopolis, 21, 29, 31, 44, 49-51, 57, 84, 344 21
Heliopolitan doctrine, 55, 59-60,183, 234-36 afterlife and, 191, 320-21
Herakles, 219, 232, 246 Aphrodite and, 272, 273f
Herishef, 25, 345 genealogy of, 29-30, 44
Hermes, 242, 246, 276 hymns to, 23, 233, 237, 268, 275, 304
Hermes Trismegistos, 7, 268, 275-76, 340 images of, 16, 272, 273f, 302, 3 05, 339
Hermopolis, 49-51, 84, 236, 247, 251, 259, 321 myths about, 39, 123, 129, 346
Hermopolitan tradition, 31, 44-45, 49-50, 234, names of, 27, 231, 237, 275, 277
303, 348 temples of, 115-16, 226, 229-32, 230f, 235-
Herodotus, ix, 95,116,157, 218, 240-42, 267-68 39, 242, 243f, 300-301
on Egyptian cults, 119, 206-7, 235, 238, 319- Islam, 14
20 Iunyt, 26, 346
on mummies, 169, 326-27, 33 0
Heron, 246f, 276 Jackals, 19, 158
Hesiod, 36, 53 Judaism, 14, 253-59, 278
Hieroglyphics, 8-io, 9f, 26, 34, 70, 155-56, X85 Alexandria and, 243f, 254-59
Horn of plenty, 204, 218, 270, 287-88, 3 03, 305 magic and, 124-25
Horus, 31, 85, 134, 137, 345-46 numerology and, 32
Apollo and, 241-42, 268 persecution of, 257-59
eye of, 3 8-39, 299, 321 prophets of, ioo, 253-54
genealogy of, 29-31, 34, 39, 57 sacrifices in, 92
hymns to, 90, 268 synagogues of, 83, 253, 258
images of, 16, 1 9, 273-74, 274f, 321 taxes on, 258-59
magic and, 125, 127-28 See also Bible
Seth and, 39, 44, 228 Judgment of the Dead, 142, 157, 180-83, 239,
temple of, 95, 227-28 320-23
Hu, 26, 346 Justice, 63, 113, 137-42, 177, 203, 255, 311
Hymns, 94, 102, 248, 286, 290-91, 293
to Amun, 36, 41, 45 Ka, 31,56-57, 130,163,168-69
to Horus, 90, 268 Karanis, 232, 236, 302, 326
to Isis, 23, 233, 237, 268, 275, 304 Karnak
to Khnum, 60-62, 291 Amun cult at, 75, 79 -82, 81f,116,118f, 120
to Neith, 65, 291 Enneads at, 31-32, 344
to Ptah, 24, 45, 48-49 temples at, 34, 54, 63, 88, 94, 104, 113, 115, 137-
See also Music 38
Kek, Kauket and, 26, 49, 346
Ibis, 15, 21, 83, 331, 332 Kematef, 11, 50, 52, 88, 346
Icons, 13-16 el-Kharga oasis, 232, 238, 279, 327, 334
Imhotep. See Imuthes Khemenu. See Hermopolis
Imperial cult, 205, 250-52, 258, 279 Khentamentiu, 77,186, 346
Imuthes, 229, 303-4, 312, 337 Khepri, 189, 190f, 346
Incense, 12, 23, 82, 91, 92f, 97, 163, 325 Khepri-Re-Atum, 27, 33, 49, 344, 346
Instruction for Merikare, 59-60,148 -49 Khmeniu. See Ogdoad
Instruction of Amenemope, 62,148-50 Khnum, 16, 30, 247, 346
Instruction of Ankhsheshonqy, 147-50, 152 creation myths and, 45, 49, 56, 59, 63, 234
Instruction of Any, 149-50, 164-65 family of, 129, 227
374 INDEX

Khnum (continued) magic and, 125-26, 218, 303 -5

festivals of, 94, 290-94 mummies and, 153, 168-69, 326
hymns to, 60-62, 291 physicians and, 159-60
Judaism and, 254, 278 treatises on, 233, 297
temples of, 51, 201, 227, 229 Medinet Habu, 50, 79, 88, 93
Khons, 15, 25, 30-31, 34, 54, 79, 346 Mehetweret, 26, 347
Kings, 206-13 Memphis, 50-51, 114
divinity of, 31-32,100,112-14,163-64,183- decree of, 208
87 Greeks of, 240-41
power of, 66, 86, 99-100, 197-205, 287 Jews of, 253
rituals and, 99 -100,145,198 -203, 247-52, necropolis at, 331
258, 277, 279 royal cult at, 249-50
Korn Ombo, 8o, 101, 228-29, 234-35, 236 Serapeum of, 136, 215-16, 220, 265, 305-10,
Kysis. See Dush 313
temples at, 21,116-18, 236, 306
Laboratories, temple, 82,156, 227 Memphite Theology, 14, 31, 234
Lagide dynasty. See Ptolemaic Period creation myths and, 43-44, 57-58, 62-63
Latopolis. See Esna Mendes, 16, 21, 242, 333
Libraries, 82, 94, 102, 233, 297 Methyer, 45, 50, 347
Alexandria, 233, 249 Min, 17-18, 25, 72, 94, 129, 236, 347
"gnostic," 260-61 Mithra, 244, 276
Nag Hammadi, 260-61 Mnevis, 17, 20-21, 296, 347
Lions, 16, 20, 38, 69f, 131, 235 Monachism, 263 -66, 279 -80, 306 -10, 315, 338
Liturgies, 93 -96, 233-34, 285-94 Monotheism, ix-xiii, 6, 13, 32, 35-36, 40, 46,
Lotus, 50-51,161 239, 254, 276-81, 339
Harpokrates and, 302-3, 303f See also Polytheism
Nefertem and, 30-31, 347 Montu, 16, 26, 31-32, 347
Luxor, 38, 94, 112,119, 300-301 cult of, 77, 84, 310
Mummies, 169, 176-77
Maat, 13, 63, 91, 95, 97, 179-83, 347 animal, 21,119, 331-33, 332f
creation myths and, 53-54 cadavers and, 33,157, 159-64,168-69,191,
images of, 26,157-58 321
lords of, 188, 202 Christian, 279, 334-36
rules of, 35, 45, 113, 144-51, 168 cupboards for, 335
Magic, io8, 111, 122-28,176, 316 -18 figurines of, 157, 188
books of, 233 headed, 27
gnosticism and, 275-76 hieroglyphs of, 70, 155 -56
medicine and, 125-26, 218, 303-5 medicines from, 153, 168-69, 326
numerology and, 32-35 rituals for, 131, 159, 164, 169 -70, 171f, 178, 320
oracles and, 311-16 techniques for, 154-55, 326-~7, 330-31
popular religion and, 122-23, 299-3 06 See also Funerary rites
See also Rituals; Superstitions Music, 94, 103, 157, 167, 286
Manetho of Sebennytos, 208, 214, 257 See also Hymns
Marcus Aurelius, 127, 202, 212-13, 242, 316 Mut ("death"), 155-56, 161
Mark Antony, 251 Mut (deity), 18, 30,142, 347
Marriage customs, 131 Myths
Mastabas, 171-73, 175, X85 creation, 42-56, 159, 188-89, 234
Medicine functions of, 36-40
amulets and, 131, 305 rituals and, 97-98
deities of, 131, 312 sources for, 73-74, 102, 233-34, 238-39, 302-4
dreams and, 135-36, 218, 304, 312-13 time, 37, 64-70
INDEX 375

Nag Hammadi Library, 260-61 temples of, 116, 186-87, 232, 238
Names tombs of, 229, 238
death and, 155-56, 163, 166,168, 173 -74, 177- Osor-Hapi, 215
78, i8o, 191 Ouroboros, 69f, 7o
deity, 6, 24-28, 40,136-37, 256, 269, 317 Oxyrhynchos, 232, 236-37, 251, 335
power of, 129-30, 130, 203-4, 299
Narmouthis, 232-33, 236-37, 304 Pachomius (saint), 264-65, 338
Naukratis, 219, 240-41 Palermo Stone, 74
Naunet, 26, 49 Pan, 16, 242, 277
Nectanebo, 199, 226, 230f, 236, 306 Panebtawy, 228
Nefertem, 30-31, 347 Pantheon, 29
Neith, 8, 17, 227, 237, 347 Persians, 178, 197, 199, 206
Athena and, 242 Petosiris (priest), 5o, 182, 207, 269, 270f, 319,
creation myths and, 45, 51, 63-65, 234 321-23
festivals of, 118-19 Pharaohs. See Kings
hymns to, 65, 291 Philadelphia, 232
Nekhbet, 25, 131, 347 Philadelphos, 204, 232
Nephthys, 27, 29, 44, 129, 320-21 Philae
Nepri, 132, 347 calendar of, 93
Netjer, 7-13, 9f, 26, 34, 35, 57, 84 Isis cult at, 23
Neuserre temple, 75, 76f, 83-84 Roman cults at, 250-51, 337
Nicene Creed, 263 temples at, 92f, 112, 209, 229-31, 230f, 236,
Nile River, 26, 51, 270, 271f, 290 238, 301
emperor as, 203, 212 Philo of Alexandria, 254, 257-58
Hapy and, 18, 26,156, 345 Physicians, 159-60
Nun and, 46 -47, 62 See also Medicine
Osiris and, 238, 271 Piety, 107-22, 121, 143-44
Numerology, 32-35 cults and, 131-33, 300-302
Nun, 26, 32, 44-55, 49, 58, 62-67, 88-89, 347 dreams and, 133-36
Nut, 17, 25, 29, 30f, 38, 44, 51, 348 kingly, 203
life events and, 128-31
Ocean, primordial, 45, 48-49, 51, 64 Pilgrimages, 301, 304, 337
Octavian, 201, 203, 250-51, 278 Plotinus, 268
Ogdoad, 26, 31, 34, 44-45, 49-54, 88, 348 Plutarch, 39, 214-15
Ombos, 228-29, 234 -35 Pluto, 214-15
Oneiromancy, 133-36, 214, 218, 313 Pneferos, 232, 236, 277
Ontology, 42-45 Polytheism, 14-16, 40-41,103,139, 235 -36
Opet, 16, 67, 94-95, 119-20, 237, 238 foreign deities and, 16-19, 276-81
Oracles, 119-21, 310-18 monotheism versus, ix-xiii, 6, 13, 32, 35-36,
Oratories, 113-16 46, 239, 276-81, 339
Oserapis, 215 Poseidon, 242, 243f
Osiris, 18-19, 27, 32, 36-39, 67-7o, 137, 163, Potter's Oracle, 67, 201, 220
241-42, 317, 348 Potter's wheel, 56, 59, 62, 227
afterlife and, 175, 185-91, 319 -22 festival of, 45, 94, 289-94
cult of, 77, 94-97, 116, 183,186-88, 226, 235 - Priests, 101-3, 108, 121-22, 127, 166, 177, 296-98
39, 29o, 319-20 Christian, 279-80
genealogy of, 30, 39, 44 duties of, 99-103, 121,135-36, 211
images of, 16, 163, 271, 272f, 320 families of,103 -4, 206-7, 211, 296
names of, 25, 27, 67,156 influence of, 85-86,199-200, 206-8, 315,
Nile River and, 238, 271 340
Sarapis and, 215, 217-19 Ptolemaic Period, 206-10
37 6 INDEX

Roman Period, 210-13 Re, 69-70, 151, 310, 348

See also Clergy creation myths and, 48 -50, 53, 58, 63
Profane, sacred and, 86-88,104,121-22 eye of, 16, 38 -39, 234, 302
Propaganda, 202-5, 221 names of, 24-27,123,137
Prophecy of Neferti, 53-54, 67, 145 Osiris and, 27,186,188
Prophets, 100-103, 121, 211, 253-54, 296 See also Amun
Ptah, 18, 30 -33, 57, 132, 242, 348 Recluses, temple, 306 -10
creation of, 62, 234 Re-Harakhty, 27, 36
cult of,112,114,137 Religion, ix, 108, 122, 136-43, 229, 233-35
festivals of, 116-18, 290 popular, 107-8, 122-23, 299-30 6
hymns to, 24, 45, 48-49 sanctuaries for, 225-32, 23of
name of, 25, 56 See also Divine; Theology
Ptah-Sokar-Osiris, 27,163 Renenutet, 75, 129, 132, 134, 237, 348 -49
Ptah-Tatenen, 44, 48 Reshep, 18-19, 114, 136, 276, 349
Ptolemaia festival, 285-89 Ritual(s), 37, 41, 89-98,121-22, 317
Ptolemaic Period, 197-203 clergy for, 99-104,121-22
education of, 267-68 embalming, 169, 178, 320, 326-27, 330 -31
Greek cults and, 244-46, 276-78 execration, 123 -26,129,165 - 66,176, 305
Jews during, 254-56, 258 hunting, 97
myths of, 51, 55 -57, 63 initiation, 104
priests of, 206-10, 213 liturgies for, 93 -96, 233 -34, 285-94
religious policy of, 214, 219, 236 maintaining life, 66-67
Sarapis cult during, 214-21 naming, 129-30
temples of, 73-75, 79-83, 8if, 87-88, 93, 96, opening the mouth, 15, 131, 159, 164, 169-70,
101,113,206-10 171f, 178
Ptolemais (city), 219, 242 purification, 87, 91, 93, 97,101,103, 127-28
Ptolemy I, 199-200, 203, 214-16, 248, 285, 294 uniting with the disk, 15, 23, 95, 226, 291-92
Ptolemy II, 200, 205, 208, 214-15, 244, 248-50 vocabulary of, 96-98
festival of, 285-86 See also Festivals; Funerary rites; Magic
Septuagint and, 2 55-56 Roman Period, 197-98, 201, 205
Ptolemy III, 202, 204, 218, 227, 236, 289 art of, 217-18, 269-70
Ptolemy IV, 208, 218, 236, 244 cults of, 221, 246-47, 250-52, 277-78
Ptolemy V, 208-9 Greeks during, 242, 258, 268, 276-78
Ptolemy VI, 227, 248-49 Jews during, 257-59
Ptolemy VIII, 92f, 208-9 priests of, 55, 210-13
Ptolemy X, 209 Rosetta Stone, 208
Ptolemy XII, 200-201 Royal cult, 202-5, 247-50, 254, 277
Pyramid Texts, 29 -30, 37, 39, 72-74, 78, 123, 170
afterlife in, 155-56, i8o, 184-86, 189-91 Sacred, profane and, 86-88,104,121-22
Coffin Texts and, 185-86 Sacrifice, 121, 127, 211-12, 220
creation myths in, 44 -46, 53 animal, 21, 34, 82, 90-91, 97, 99, 277, 285, 296
human, 91
Qadesh, 18-19, 114, 136, 348 night of, 238
Qantir,115 Sais, 51, 119, 347
Qasr el-Sagha, 75 Sakhmet,11,16, 25, 30,114,131, 237, 349
Sarapis, 214-21, 232, 238, 349
Ramesses II, 225, 253 cross of, 337
Ramesses III, 79-80, 8if images of, 215-18, 217f, 220, 302, 339
Rams, 16, 20-21, 56, 278, 333 recluses of, 306-10
Ra-Setau, 186 See also Serapeum
Rattawy, 25-26, 31, 348 Satis, 30, 75,114, 237, 349
INDEX 377

Scarab, 169 Sopdu, 18, 35o

Scorpions, 125-27, 160 Sphinx, 2of, 80, 302
Scribes, 102, 117f, 135, 234, 297 of Giza, 1 9, 27, 74-75, 114-16, 117f
Selkis, 127, 237, 349 Story of Setne, 313, 322
Serapeum, 281, 300-301, 308 Suicide, 161
of Alexandria, 214-21, 242, 243f, 252, 337, 340 Sun disk, 35-36, 44-45, 61, 69 -70, 344
of Canopus, 312-13 uniting with, 15, 23, 95, 226, 291-92
of Memphis, 215-16, 220, 265, 305-10, 313 Superstitions,1o8,111,153, 299-300, 336
See also Sarapis charms and, 124-28
Serpent(s) curses and, 123-26, 129, 165-66, 176, 305
afterlife and, 189, 321 See also Magic
bearded, 244 Syncretism, xiii, 26-28, 219, 239, 254
deities as, 9-10,16, 22, 49 -50, 67, 131, 134, Christian, 278-81
244, 277, 291 funerary beliefs and, 333 -38
magic and, 125-28, 160 Greek, 203-4, 234-35, 267-77, 27of-274f
myths about, 54 Jewish, 278
ouroboros and, 69f, 7o magical, 276
primordial, 11, 5o, 52, 88, 346 Roman, 278
Sarapis and, 215, 217
winged, 158 Taboos, xii, 28,153
Seshat, 96 Taimhotep, 160, 167
Seth, 17-19, 63 -64,131, 349 Tale of the Doomed Prince, 129, 131, 151
Ennead and, 31 Tatenen, 5o, 348, 35o
genealogy of, 29, 44 Taweret, 129, 132, 232, 238, 277, 321, 350
Horus and, 39, 44, 228 Taxes, 206-12, 211, 258-59, 296
men of, 134 Tebtunis, 102, 233, 236, 294 -98, 309, 326
myths about, 39 Tefnut, 29, 33, 44, 55, 69f, 235, 35o
name of, 25 Temenos, 79-8o, 87-89,104,115
sacrifices to, 91 Temple(s), 71-89, 96-99, 225-32, 230f, 268-
Typhon and, 242 69
Setne-Khaemwas, 125,177 animals of, 21, 83, 119, 211-12, 296, 332
Shabaka Stone. See Memphite Theology asylum in, 209 -10, 232, 265, 307, 310
Shadow, 168, 321 autonomy of, 206-10
Shai, 16,129,132, 244, 349 daily life in, 90-93, 294-98
Shamanism, 127 economic power and, 85-86, 206, 296
See also Magic gates of, 88, 97, 99, 112-13,116
Shed, 137, 349 laboratories of, 82,156, 227
Shu, 11, 17, 34, 234-35, 349-50 popular religion and, 107-8, 111-13,121-23,
creation myths and, 44, 48-49, 55 299-306
genealogy of, 29, 30f, 33 Ptolemaic, 73-75, 79-83, 81f, 87-88, 93, 96,
Khnum and, 291-92 101, 113, 206-10
ouroboros and, 69f sun, 75, 76f, 83-84
Sia, 26, 35o taxes on, 206-12, 296
Sinope, 214-16 See also specific deities and cities
Sinuhe, no-11, 159 Theadelphia, 209-10, 232, 236, 246, 277
Skeletons, 157, 164, 321 Thebes, 34, 50 -51, 95,114, 335
Sobek, 27, 49, 235-36, 35o Amun cult at, 26, 85-86,103, 116,118f, 311,
temples of, 75, 8o, 228-29, 233, 294-98 343
Soknebtunis, 294 -98, 309 deities of, 26, 347-48, 350
Soknopaiou Nesos, 313-14 necropolis at, 172, 326
Sokonopis, 233, 314 temples at, 46, 77, 209
378 INDEX

Theology, 36 -37, 55, 228-29, 233-35, 269 Tutankhamun, 163

eschatology and, 67-68 Tuthmosis III, 73,188-89, 199
Memphite, 14, 31, 43 -44, 57-58, 62-63, 234 Tutu. See Tithoes
ontology and, 42-49
rituals and, 121-22 Udjat eye, 38 -39, 299, 321
See also Religion Underworld. See Afterlife
Thoth, 114, 35o Uniting with the Sun Disk ritual, 15, 23, 95, 226,
afterlife and, 320-22 291-92
Ennead of, 32
Hermes and, 242, 268, 275-76 Vespasian, 218, 251, 254, 258
Hermopolis and, 84-85, 348
images of, 15, 20 Wadjit, 242, 350
myths about, 38, 57, 61,157 Waset, 26, 35o
New Year festival and, 95 Writing
prayers to, 138 Aramaic, 253
as savior, 137 autobiographical, 178-80
temple of, 269 Coptic, 260
Time, 43, 68-70,183-84 creation of, 61
creation of, 64-67 funerary, 165, 185-91, 19of
dreams and, 133 hieroglyphics for, 8-io, 9f, 26, 34, 70, 155 -
end of, 67-68 56,185
mythic, 37 scribes and, 102, 117f, 135, 234, 297
Tithoes, lof, 302
Tombs, 166, 169-73, 176-78, i8o, 191 Yaho, 253-54
Trajan, 235, 257-58
Transcendence, x, 40-41, 46,139 Zeus, 203-4, 216, 232, 241-47, 252, 277
Tripartition of deities, 23-24, 27, 30 -34, 40, Zodiac, 321-22
163, 228 Zoomorphism, x, 16-21, lof, 25, 277
Tuna el-Gebel, 326, 33o
EGYPTOLOGY/HISTORY/ANCIENT RELIGIONS

n their wide-ranging interpretation of the religion of ancient

Egypt, Françoise Dunand and Christiane Zivie-Coche explore how,
over a period of roughly 3500 years, the Egyptians conceptualized
their relations with the gods. Drawing on the insights of anthropology,
the authors discuss such topics as the identities, images, and functions
of the gods; rituals and liturgies; personal forms of piety expressing
humanity's need to establish a direct relation with the divine; and the
afterlife, a central feature of Egyptian religion. That religion, the authors
assert, was characterized by the remarkable continuity of its ritual prac-
tices and the ideas of which they were an expression.
Throughout, Dunand and Zivie-Coche take advantage of the most
recent archaeological discoveries and scholarship. Gods and Men in
Egypt is unique in its coverage of Egyptian religious expression in the
Ptolemaic and Roman periods. Written with nonspecialist readers in
mind, it is largely concerned with the continuation of Egypt's tradition-
al religion in these periods, but it also includes fascinating accounts of
Judaism in Egypt and the appearance and spread of Christianity there.

FRANÇOISE DUNAND is Professor of the History of Religion, Marc Bloch

University, Strasbourg. CHRISTIANE ZIVIE-COCHE is Director of Studies,
L'École pratique des Hautes Études, Section des Sciences religieuses,
Paris. She is the author of Sphinx: History of a Monument, also from
Cornell. DAVID LORTON, an Egyptologist, lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Cover design by Scott Levine.

Cover illustration of the goddess Isis facing the pharaoh Horemheb, from the Tomb of Haremheb, Valley of
the Kings, Thebes, Egypt, 18th dynasty, c. 1330-1305 BCE, © E. Strouhal, Werner Forman / Art Resource, N.Y.

ISBN 0-8014-8853-2

90000
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