Ancient Egypt
Elements of its Cultural History

  by Sjef Willockx

 
 


Religion

The ancient Egyptians were an extremely pious people. Reverence and gratitude incited them to toil endlessly for their gods. No walk through an Egyptian museum collection can be meaningfull without at least a basic understanding of this religion.

An outline of ancient Egyptian religion
An introduction to the nature of ancient Egyptian religion. About gods and ethics, rituals and myth, kingship and state religion, folk religion and personal piety.

Magic and Religion in ancient Egypt. Part I: The Roots
This
longer work (91 pages) deals with the fundamental differences in perspective between ourselves and the ancient Egyptians - differences that we have to address, if we ever want to understand the Egyptians. It begins with a list of apparent inconsistencies in the Egyptian culture, and then ventures to examine their background. (in PDF-format, 2005).

Magic and Religion in ancient Egypt. Part II:  81 gods
Part II of the series "Magic and Religion in Ancient Egypt" is to be a cycle of descriptions of 81 gods, mostly in alphabetical order. It will be
published in nine groups of nine gods each (nine "Enneads"). It is meant as an introduction to the most important gods of ancient Egypt, but also as an illustration of the principles of god-forming that were once operative in Egypt, and that have been laid out in detail in Part I.
Two Previews to the first Ennead are now available:

First Preview: Aah and Aker
The file (in PDF-format)
has 19 pages.

Second Preview: Amentet, Andjety and Anubis
This file (also in PDF-format) has 70 pages.

The One and the Many: one book, many misunderstandings
A short note about how a rightfully famous book about Egyptian religion can be misinterpreted and misused. (1 page).

Gods in the DZA
The DZA (
Das digitalisierte Zettelarchiv) holds tens of thousands of "Zettel" (slips, or notes) with hand-written examples of the use of ancient Egyptian words. Among these is also a series, devoted to the occurences of the names of gods, such as quotes from the Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead, and many inscriptions from temples and tombs. This material has not yet been made accessible in a structured way, but for those with enough patience, it is still worthwile to browse around in. To facilitate this, I have listed for this particular corpus the first slip-number per god.


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