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Egyptian pantheon
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Most Egyptologists today side with Sir Flinders Petrie that Egyptian religion was strictly polytheistic. His contemporary adversary, E. A. Wallis Budge, however, thought Egyptian religion to be primarily monotheistic where all the gods and goddesses were aspects of the God Ra, similar to the Trinity in Christianity and devas in Hinduism.
The Egyptian term for goddess was (; , ) and the term for god was (; also transliterated , ).
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Most Egyptologists today side with Sir Flinders Petrie that Egyptian religion was strictly polytheistic. His contemporary adversary, E. A. Wallis Budge, however, thought Egyptian religion to be primarily monotheistic where all the gods and goddesses were aspects of the God Ra, similar to the Trinity in Christianity and devas in Hinduism.
The Egyptian term for goddess was (; , ) and the term for god was (; also transliterated , ). Earliest hieroglyphs for goddesses were just a flag or a flag with an Egyptian cobra arising from the base of the pole. The later hieroglyphs for these terms (R8) are depicted as flags followed by an appropriate gender symbol.
Background and history
Being a culture dating from 10,000 B.C. or before, there is an extensive pantheon for Ancient Egypt. The earliest deities are presumed to be goddess figures such as Bat, Mut, or Ma'at. Symbols for Neith also appear among the earliest of images. Many fertility figurines have been discovered. Vestiges of the early white vulture (Nekhbet) and cobra (Wadjet) goddesses are born on the crowns of the separate Egyptian cultural centers as well as the crown of the united Upper and Lower Egypt of the predynastic and protodynastic periods and all periods thereafter until the Roman period began in 30 B.C. Once the country was united and the dynasties emerged, these two deities, known as the Two Ladies always remained as the protecting deities of the country and the pharaoh in particular.
Cattle were domesticated in Egypt by 8,000 B.C. and by 5,500 B.C. stone-roofed subterranean chambers and other subterranean complexes in Nabta Playa are seen to contain the tombs of ceremoniously-sacrificed cattle, indicating the worship of the goddess Hathor. The fierce lionesses who hunted in groups, were represented by Sekhmet as the warrior goddess in the south. She later was merged with an aspect of Hathor.
Predynastic Egypt included a culture identified as, Naqada, which arose in the western desert. By 4,000 B.C. Gerzean tomb-building was seen to include underground rooms and burial of furniture and amulets, a prelude to the worship of Osiris also. Many local variants of these and other deities existed, becoming polytheistic. After this period historical records began to appear and some were retained in tombs and temples that can be deciphered from the two writing systems that emerged.
Eventually most deities began to be seen as existing in equal pairs, most of the ancient goddesses accompanied by a male counterpart having a similar role, with significant exceptions. Aspects of some deities diversified and merged at different times and in different regions.
The pharaoh was deified after death, and bore the title of "the good god," if male. The title, "servant of god" was used for the religious leaders in the temples of gods, was applied to priestesses and was applied to priests, with parallel constructions for goddesses, the religious leaders of their temples, and for dead pharaohs who were women.
Over the great period of time included in ancient Egyptian culture, some deities arose, gained greater prominence over others or receded into less significance. At times abstract concepts emerged and regressed, as well as did a short-lived episode when one deity eclipsed most others, sometimes referred to as a monotheistic religion, in the 1,300s B.C., toward the end of the eighteenth dynasty that is dated 1,550-1,292 B.C. The worship of some early deities never ceased, however, and with the death of the pharaoh who advanced this cult based upon his favorite regional deity—a quick reversal occurred. Even members of his own family reverted to the worship of the deities as proscribed by the previously dominant cult, which would be eclipsed again and fade into obscurity when the cult of Osiris and Isis reached its highest development.
First mentions of Isis date back to the fifth dynasty which is when the first literary inscriptions are found, but her cult became prominent late in Egyptian history, when it began to absorb the cults of many other goddesses. It eventually spread outside Egypt. She absorbs many aspects of earlier goddesses, becoming identified as the mother of Horus, who represented and protected the pharaohs.
After Horus, Amun was a regional solar deity whose importance increased greatly when the pharaohs of Thebes regained control of the country from invaders and began the eighteenth dynasty. Ra became the next son of the solar deity and his cult rose to later dominance, eclipsing the earlier deities.
The term, hemt-n?r-nt imen "servant of the god, wife of Amun" was a title held by priestesses in the tenth (2,160 BCE) and twelfth (1991-1802 BCE) dynasties (Shafer, p 14), which was adopted by the female members of the royal family in the New Kingdom (the hereditary, royal lineage of Egypt was a matrilineality, carried by its women). The New Kingdom is dated from 1,570-1,070 BCE and includes the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth dynasties. The term "god father" was an epithet of Thoth when he became identified as a counterpart to the goddess, Ma'at.
Ancient Egyptian culture persisted, albeit quite altered, through the Ptolemaic dynasty. That dynasty was ruled by a Hellenistic royal family for nearly 300 years, from 305 BCE to 30 BCE, when the Romans conquered Cleopatra VII, the last pharaoh. Roman rule lasted until the final invasion by Muslim Arabs in 646 CE that ended 975 years of Gręco-Roman rule over Egypt. During that time religious concepts had blended few aspects from the invading cultures with the native, but retained most of the Egyptian cults and deities for continuity with the long history of a culture that served as the authority for the government, maintained the royal lineage, and interwove their deities with those of their rulersalong with the developing Christian beliefs among some of the Romans. Cults of Isis persisted in Egypt and spread with the Greek and Roman cultures—as far as Britain.
Regional pantheons during the Old Kingdom
In the Old Kingdom, the third through sixth dynasties dated between 2,686 to 2,134 BCE, the pantheons of individual Egyptian cities varied by region. Beliefs can be split into five distinct localized groups during that time and which arose later:
- the Ennead of Heliopolis, meaning the nine - consisted of Atum, Geb, Isis, Nut, Osiris, Nephthys, Seth, Shu, and Tefnut
- the Ogdoad of Hermopolis, a changing myth which began with eight deities who were worshipped in four female-male pairs; the females were associated with snakes and the males with frogs: Naunet and Nu, Amaunet and Amun, Kauket and Kuk, Hauhet and Huh; first being a cult having Hathor and her son, Ra (and later, Horus as the son of Isis, who was an aspect of Hathor); later changing to a cult where Hathor and Thoth were the main deities over a much larger number of deities; and even later, Ra was assimilated into Atum-Ra through a merger with Atum of the Ennead cosmogeny; in the final version of the creation myth a lotus, a symbol held by Hathor, was said to have arisen from the waters after an explosive interaction, the lotus was said to have opened and revealed Ra, who later became identified as Horus also
- the Khnum-Satis-Anuket triad of Elephantine, which was the dwelling place of Khnum, the ram-headed god of the cataracts, who guarded the origin of the waters of the Nile which was thought to issue from caves beneath the island; in Elephantine he was worshipped along with his counterpart, Satis, a more ancient gazelle-headed war, protector, and fertility deity who personified the flooding of the Nile, and Anuket, the fertility goddess who was the deification of the Nile, daughter to Satis, and became identified as their daughter in the triad. Other versions of myths identify Khnum with the creation of bodies in association with Heket, the goddess who breathed life into the bodies. In another variant Khnum is identified as the counterpart of Menhit and the father of Heka, a personification of law
Later regional pantheons
List of deities of Ancient Egypt
See also
External links
- . Deurer, 1997
- . ancientegypt.co.uk.
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- . gwydir.demon.co.uk.
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