The Penguin History of the World

The calendar, though it owed much to the observation of stars, must have reflected also in its remoter origins observation of the great pulse at the heart of Egyptian life, the flooding of the Nile. This gave the Egyptian farmer a year of three seasons, each of approximately four months, one of planting, one of flood, one of harvest. But the Nile’s endless cycle also influenced Egypt at deeper levels.

The structure and solidity of the religious life of ancient Egypt greatly struck other peoples. Herodotus believed that the Greeks had acquired the names of their gods from Egypt; he was wrong, but it is interesting that he should have thought so. Later, the cults of Egyptian gods were seen as a threat by the Roman emperors; they were forbidden, but the Romans had eventually to tolerate them, such was their appeal. Mumbo-jumbo and charlatanry with an Egyptian flavour could still take in cultivated Europeans in the eighteenth century; an amusing and innocent expression of the fascination of the myth of ancient Egypt could still be seen in recent times in the rituals of the Shriners, the fraternities of respectable American businessmen who paraded about the streets of small towns on great occasions improbably attired in fezzes and baggy trousers. There was, indeed, a continuing vigour in Egyptian religion which, like other sides of Egyptian civilization, long outlived the political forms that had sustained and sheltered it.

Yet it remains something with which it is peculiarly difficult to come to grips. Words like ‘vigour’ can be misleading; religion in ancient Egypt was much more a matter of an all-pervasive framework, as much taken for granted as the circulatory system of the human body, than of an independent structure such as what later came to be understood as a church. There were, of course, religious personnel, priesthoods associated with particular cults and places, and already under the Old Kingdom some of their priests had status sufficient to ensure their burial in expensive tombs. But their temples were economic agencies and storage centres as well as the foci of cults, and many priests both then and later were to combine their ritual duties with those of scribes, administrators and royal bureaucrats. They were hardly what later ages would think of as clergy.

Egyptian religion is best seen not as a dynamic, lively social force, but as a way of dealing with reality by managing different parts of an unchanging cosmos. Yet even to say that requires qualifications. We have to remember that concepts and distinctions which we take for granted in assessing (and even talking about) the mentalities of other ages did not exist for the men whose minds we seek to penetrate. The boundary between religion and magic, for example, hardly mattered for the ancient Egyptian, though he might be well aware that each had its proper efficacy. It has been said that magic was always present as a kind of cancer in Egyptian religion; the image is too evaluative, but expresses the intimacy of the link. Another distinction lacking to ancient Egypt was the one most of us make automatically between the name and the thing. For the ancient Egyptian, the name was the thing; the real object we separate from its designation was identical with it. So might be other images. The Egyptians lived in symbolism as fishes do in water, taking it for granted, and we have to break through the assumptions of a profoundly unsymbolic culture to understand them.

A whole world view is therefore involved in appreciating the meaning and role of religion in ancient Egypt. At the outset there is overwhelming evidence of its importance; for almost the whole duration of their civilization, the ancient Egyptians show a remarkably uniform tendency to seek through religion a way of penetrating the variety of the flow of ordinary experience so as to reach a changeless world most easily understood through the life the dead lived there. Perhaps the pulse of the Nile is to be detected here, too; each year it swept away and made new, but its cycle was ever recurring, changeless, the embodiment of a cosmic rhythm. The supreme change threatening men was death, the greatest expression of the decay and flux which was their common experience. Egyptian religion seems from the start obsessed with it: its most familiar embodiments, after all, are the mummy and the grave-goods from funeral chambers preserved in our museums. Under the Middle Kingdom it came to be believed that all men, not just the king, could expect life in another world. Accordingly, through ritual and symbol, through preparation of the case he would have to put to his judges in the afterworld, a man might prepare for the afterlife with a reasonable confidence that he would achieve the changeless well-being it offered in principle. The Egyptian view of the afterlife was, therefore, unlike the gloomy version of the Mesopotamians; men could be happy in it.