Property of Sekhmet

Stephen Quirke's book has been sitting about on my shelves for long enough; it's time to actually read it, and post some notes here as I go along.

The first chapter of Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt is devoted to blowing up any preconceptions the reader brings to the subject, down to whether we can meaningfully apply terms like "religion" to Ancient Egypt. We tend to get a homogenised view of Ancient Egypt, which was a huge country with different borders at different times, made up of multiple geographic regions (floodplain, marsh, oasis), with people of different ages, genders, and stations in life. Quirke is inviting us, when we read that "the Ancient Egyptians said/did such-and-such", to ask which Ancient Egyptians, and where, and when.

Quirke opens by commenting on modern religion: when we declare our faith, we're declaring which religion we've chosen from the selection available. (An atheist or agnostic is making the same choice.) He writes, "... a human group may instead express itself without reference to any contemporary or earlier other society or way of expression." (That phrase will give you a quick taste of Quirke's writing, which is not the easiest going.) Actually, I'm not sure of this, but I don't think the idea of mutually exclusive religions actually gets going until the early Christians refuse to worship deified Roman emperors. Quirke suggests the influx of foreign religious ideas in the Late Period and Graeco-Roman times brings Egypt somewhat closer to the modern model of competing faiths. In the ~2600 years before that, the only religious alternative was Atenism - which lasted just 12 years.

Quirke repeatedly warns against a homogeneous view of the Ancient Egyptians. Nomads, shepherds, and farmers, people on islands and people at the margin of cultivation, were all differently affected the annual Nile flood - which itself was unpredictable. The peasantry included people with no, some, or lots of land. Rich Egyptians only packed their tombs with "full-house inventories" at two times in history, around unification and "the period of greatest military presence in western Asia, circa 1450-1300 BC" - at other times they were supplied as if for a single journey; girls and infants might be buried with amulets and jewellery, "as if for puberty or childbirth rites they did not live long enough to see".

A table reminds us how few temples have survived - most of them Ptolemaic or Roman from Upper Egypt, where they were made from durable local sandstone. The limestone temples of Lower Egypt were literally burned to make lime for plaster. (Abydos survived by dint of being buried in the sand.) So our information on religion from temples is strongly filtered by historical contingency. Quirke mentions other sources of information, such as the remains of mudbrick temples and votive offerings.

"One of the most deeply rooted modern assumptions pervading accounts of ancient Egyptian religion is the opposition between official cult and personalized practice," writes Quirke (italics in original). He attacks this binary, pointing out that, for example, royalty, the nobility, and commoners all resorted to the same healing amulets and spells.

Discussing the images and names of the gods, Quirke suggests that the multiple representations of each god, and the splitting and combining of gods, allowed the ancients to focus on a specific aspect of the divine. He mentions the multiple Horuses, Amun, Ra, and Amun-Ra, and the "four forms of Anubis", matching the cardinal directions or four steps in embalming. Gods might even split off because of an architectural detail, such as a space created by symmetry which could be filled by a new deity - so Tasenetnefret, the quality of being a good sister, splits off from Isis to become "an independent deity receiving offerings of her own". These multiple images are matched by the multiple epithets and descriptions of gods in religious texts. Quirke also discusses the lack of long narratives about the Egyptian gods, even suggesting that "myth" may be a "confusing" term to use for Egyptian religion. (Or is this another artifact of what happens to have survived - given the number of narratives we do have, in magical / healing papyri, for example?)

Finally, Quirke ponders whether the idea of a "priest" is even applicable to Ancient Egypt, where the temples were staffed on a rotating basis byt people who had other jobs the rest of the time.

So that's got us softened up for what's to come!



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Quirke, Stephen. Exploring Religion in Ancient Egypt. Wiley, London, 2015.