GODS AND MEN

IN EGYPT
3000 BCE TO 395 CE

FRANGOISE 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 CONTENTS
Ministry of Culture-Centre national du livre/Ouvrage publie avcc le
urncours du Ministere lran~ai, cha1gc· Jc b culture-Centre Nationcil Ju
Livre

Originally published by© Armand Colin, 2002, (1"; VUEF / Armand Colin
2002..
Preface, by Christiane Zivie-Coche lX
Translator's Note xvii
Copyright 2004 by Cornell University

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1. What Is a God?
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 BOOKI

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
r WHAT IS A GOD?
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 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
anthropomorphic process. But for the moment, there is something else at stake.
7
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. 0 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, 1 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. 1
NET]ER,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
1
Translation based on that of A. Nock and A. Festugiere, 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 1). 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 frorn Tanis, which furnishes a list of
hieroglyphic signs accompanied by a description, gives the sign a brief but evoca-
tive definition: "neticr: 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,
WJIAT IS A GOD? 9
FIGURE 1.Signs and determinatives used in writing the word god. From P. E. Newberry, Journal of Egyp-
tianArchaeology 33 (1947): 90, fig.31; and N. de Garis Davies, The Mastaba of Ptahhetep andAkhethetep at
Saqqarah, vol.1 (London, 1900), pl. 7, no. 87, and pl. 4, no. 11.
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 rvliddle 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 lkrmopolito-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 thal 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 som.e of the same ground as netjcr. In lists of categories
of heings such as we find them, among others, in cosmogonies, the gods arc 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 ha11, the plural of ba, the question is more complicated. Like humans,
gods had a ba, which was thus a component ofa 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 JS 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
to 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 "(;od.'' 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 remctj, "man;' do not correspond to what we today
cIass1'fy as " gocI" an d"
. man."
In a relatively recent study 011 the "notion of god," Dimitri Meeks has sought
to go further hv systematizing his research 011 the root nctjerwith 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
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODS
12
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, Buch is, 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 diwrsity 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 nctfcr 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 Etienne Drioton, made use of these texts to af-
firm thdt monotheism, founded on the existence of a singk, 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
13
WHAT IS A GOD?
Kingdom to the Late Period. In autobiograp~ical inscriptio_ns, persons justify
th elves to their peers and to the gods, stating they led a hfe that conformed
to::t, so that they deserved the enjoyment o~ t~e status of akh in the afterlife
d after the Old Kingdom, the status of an Osms. These texts are marked by a
:C,~g social and local context, and the go.d, thoug~ invoked"in a way that se~m!
abstract to us, is nevertheless the one who ~s other"".1se c~lled the god ~f t~e ~1ty,
that is, the local god. It is always this particular deity, with whom the md!Vldual
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 s1m-
le. We must immediately set aside the examples in which it is clear that netjer
:esignates the pharaoh, for the latter, as ~o~der,of the royal_ office with which he
had been ritually invested, had become d1vme. fhere remam 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 Fgyptian iconography that have always been
striking, and whose process and raison d'etre are in need of explanation. Corre-
sponding to this multiplicity of images was that of names and functions: com-
bining them made for the Lgyplian 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 L 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 ( eidolon,
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, Pha r,10h, when he was invested with hi~ rnval 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 Lhcse 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-
15
WHAT IS A GOD?
• b tan integral part of it. In some sense, to make use of a linguistic com-
vine,
.
u an image, no more than a sign, was not arb"1trary. The Pto1ema1c
. ntua
. 1
0
pansof" ,•h·ing the sun" or "uniting with the sun disk" was the translation, on the
0 tou
cultic • ) h · ·
level, of this theological reality. Once (or severa1 times a year, t e pnnc1-
pal tatue of a temple, along with those of his consorts and of the secondary
• ~ were removed from the darkness of their shrines to experience contact
de111es, .
'th the rays of the sun-the ceremony was often earned out on the roof of the
:Ople-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
hich experienced only minor changes thereafter, is also extremely revealing.
;rough 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 a.s closely as
possible by means of a network uf 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.
c:ertain icons were exclusivch attached to a single god, such as the ibis to
Thoth, though at the same tirn~, 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 OP 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 "All" 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 consummale 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
ln seurnd 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 hy animal-
ity ind ivine iconography. Animals had a particular meaning and a particular role
in relation to the divine, and these need to be explained.
Tb 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 GO Dl 17
::s
. hen these images were devised. To be sure, they experienced transforma-
:nd enrichments over ~he millennia, yet from the remotest periods on, they
ertheless displayed certam set features.
ne;nfortunately, though, our knowledge of religious facts prior to the third mil-
lennium, that is, prior to the po~nt when texts aid u_s in explaini_ng ima?~s, is ex-
tr mely tenuous. The evidence 1s sparse and sometimes of dubious ongm, such
asethe 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 Atum, 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
nf the falcon with a human hody, 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 ,l
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 bndy, and in particular the face, arc 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
18 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 fundion 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-Rcshep, Baal, Anat, Astarte, and (Jadesh-all had ah u
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
WffAT IS A GOD?
19
the deep structure of the Egyptian co?cept of th~ divine. Haur~n ha? a place of
hi own in this constellation. A god with a falcons head, he was identified totally
~th the sun god he had become in the New Kingdom: Harmakhis, the Great
WIS hinx: of Giza. He was represented in this form, endowed with his attributes
and . h.im th e same
p functions, under the name Haurun-Harmakh.1s, assurmg
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 manifestati~n in. stories and legen~s). What were_the prin-
ciples regulating these many co~b~at10ns? As the Egyptian_ cosmogorues tell u~,
humankind did not occupy a pnvileged place at the summit of the scale of am-
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
atcd 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 prcs('.nce of the human in the di-
vine," as Dimitri \leeks 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 wocephalic 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 Caiw Mllseum. From S. llassan, Le Sphinx: S011 h1stoire
a la lwnit're des fouilles recentes (Cairo, 1951), p. 72, fig. 22.
WJIAT IS A GOD? 21
There was another way in which the Egyptians_ e~visaged. th: presence ~f the
di • e in an animal. This was not a matter of dep1ctmg a deity m one of his an-
. ';forms, but of divine epiphany in a living animal. This was the case with the
un·
A prs, Mnevis, and Buchis bulls at Memphis, Heliopolis,. and Armant, and with
th am of Khnum at Elephantine and the representative of the ba of Mendes.
w: ~ay add the equally well-known example of the ''.living falcon" o~ E~fu or
Athribis. Unlike the bulls, who fulfilled their role until the end of thetr lives, a
ew bird was enthroned each year. These sacred animals conformed to extremely
nrecise characteristics. In no case was the entire species sacred and consecrated
io 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. dev:1-
oped at temples starting with the last native dynasties presents a borde~lme 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 t hcv were rnore th.1n a simple image, or a mere reflection, given
0
that divine substan~'.e 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:
0 perfect, o luminous, o venerable!
0 great sorceress!
0 luminous mistress,
0 gold of the gods! 2
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 prieres de l'Egypte ancienne, Lit-
teratures anciennes du Proche-Orient 10 (Paris, 1980), p. 445.
WHAT JS 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. I~ the same temple, when
their daughter Hatshepsut makes her appearance, playmg 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 ha 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 350, 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. lt 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 he accompanied by the name of the god. The name, however, did not serve
only lo designate a being, divine or otherwise; rather, it was an integral p,1rt of
his or her person. Thio- 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 d~ity's true name. The pas-
sage from Papyrus Leiden l 350 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 Kin~dom rnvthica! tak de-
picting Isis and Re. The goddess desired to know the tr~te 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
25
waAT IS A GOD?
1 d a serpent that bit him, and then she offered to help him. To be cured, he
: ;t: 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
b nature never divulged, we must content ourselves with those used by the
~tians to designate the various divine persons. Though we shall not study
them exhaustively, the names of the gods call for some re?1ar~s. Some of ~hem
seem at first sight like a sort of theological summary stressmg either an attnbute
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 type's of divine name formations. There are some
that express the geographical location or local origin of a god or goddess. 'I'he
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 ofHer-
akleopolis, which was located near Lake Ka run, at the edge of the Faiyum.
lb provide svmmetry to a masc:uline deity, Egyptians sornctimcs 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 Mon tu along with
Iunyt, whose role she shared. By the same token, to Amun there corresponded
Amaunet, who received a cult at Thebes from Dynasty 18 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 ex.pressing 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 ex.plain 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 ahstract 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 SYNCRETIS1"1C TENDENCIES
lust 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
27
waA'f IS A GOD?
to approach the reality of his or her being. Litanies to a deity "in all his
:!ies" occur frequently in liturgy; Osiris and Isis, among others, benefited
greatly from them. . .
Multiplicity of names was also expressed by ass?c1atmg ~ost oft~~ two, but
t ·mes three or four, distinct names that designate a single d1vme form.
someI
AJnun-Re, Re-Harakhty, Sobek-Re, Khepri-Re-Atum, Ptah -So ·kar-.o··sms, an d
ttarmakhis-Khepri-Re-Aturn are examples. For goddesses, we may cite Hathor-
Maat, Hathor-Tefnut, Isis-Sothis, and Isis-Selkis. . . .
Such associations enabled one deity to borrow the charactenstics 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. Khepn-Re-
Atum expressed the triple aspect of the sun god: Khepri, the sun ri~ing in the
morning; Re, the sun shining at midday; and Atum, the sun setting m the
evening. Harmakhis-Khepri-Re-Atum was manifest specifically in the form ?f
the Great Sphinx, his image, which was one icon among others of the sun god m
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 name~;' who did not_ cease
to transform themselves. This concept was what the Egyptians expressed man-
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 ~ods woul~ seem
irreconcilable, the one god solar and celestial, the other havmg 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 ~f
Osiris before reappearing triumphantly in the morning. This phenomenon 1s
pithily summarized by the double kgend that accompanies a ram-headed
mummy, crowned with the sun disk and protected hy Isis and Ncphthys, 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 Egypt~an
thought, provided we accord the word a definition that corresponds to ~gyp~ian
reality. Erik !Iornung has made an especially clear assessment of the s1tuat1on.
The association of two deities via their nan1es doe~ not imply the disappearance
of the two original realities through fusion. The link established betwe_en them
remained ever transitory and reversible. It was not a matter of proceedmg from

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 historidzation 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. 1\fost Egyptian deities had a local mot that linked them to a cilv 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
29
the one who calls him." Nevertheless,
"
the god, even if called "the greatest," which
,, . h d' . f
rhaps means nothing more than very great, never attains t e 1mens10ns o
~re transcendence, for he never ceases to be present on earth in the company
~f 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 terr_ibl~ con-
fusion, undoubtedly because of the proliferation, and at least partial mter-
changeability, of forms, names, and functions. In the n_ieanwhile, we kn~w that
uch thought, sometimes qualified somewhat approximately as prelog1cal, or
~vage thought, according to the definition of Levi-Strauss, is ill suited to be
ualified as "confused." Quite the contrary, it possesses classificatory systems
~at, though they are not ours, nevertheless have a rigorous internal c~~erence
that assures their ability to function. Thus, we must study the modaht1es, the
family ties, the bonds of hierarchic dependence or numerical c_omb~ations that
govern the divine multiplicity. It is unthinkable th~t t_he E~pt~ans, 1~ the face of
this proliferation of beings that emerged from thetr 1magmat1on, did_ not orga-
nize them according to an order that remains to be defined. We often mvoke the
word pantheon, of course. lf we mean by it simply the totality of the gods and
goddesses of Egypt, the term is acceptable, bu~ it explains noth~ng. I_f ~t i_ndicates
a global organization, comparable to the totality of human soc1et~, 1t 1s 111 t~~n.
Unlike the Greek pantheon, which is our inevitable reference pomt, the d1vme
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 hy 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-
cornitan tly. This is what happened at Heliopolis, when either by masturhating
or by spitting, Atum produced the coupk Shu an<l Tefnut, who in their turn en-
gendered Geb an<l 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 r,:prescnted the l.\\O 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.
 JO PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goos
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 18 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 andAmun, Mut, Khons-the child god
WHAT IS A GOD? 31
bad previously led an auton~m_ous existence that he did n?t_lose after his i~te-
gration into a family. This tnad1c scheme became systematic m the later penods
f history-Horus, Hathor, and Harsomtus at Edfu; Montu, Rattawy, and
~arpre at Tod-a phenomenon_ correspon~ing to the patent effort at organiza-
. n that theologians were makmg at that time. In the same era, the avatars of
~:rus 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"; Haren dotes, "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
lo them wa~ 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, Ptah 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, Lhose 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-
WffAT JS A GOD? 33
tic of the double kingship over Upper and Lower Egypt, as symbo Iized 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, Atum, the unique one, transformed him-
self into three by creating Shu and 1efnut, that is to say, three entities existed, one
of whom remained Atum.
The beginning of chapter 300 of the text of Papyrus Leiden I 350, 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 Khans 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. h . . . d' . fi t·
Numbers enabled t e Egyptians to orgamze 1vme con 1gura ions accor mg
d'
simple system that gave rise to a multiplicity of subtle combinations, and
:/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
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOns
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 advornted 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: nEFlNITTON AVD FUNCTIONS
Polytheism, or the multiplicity of deities ·who are defined in terms of a person
and a function, gave rise to i.>tories about them that constituted the nan ative con-
tent of myths. The word myth is Greek, and when philosophy was horn, 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 e}..iensively 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 c-annot addw.:e 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 thcogamies; theological speculations, sui.:h as we have
glimpsed them in Papyrus Leiden I 350, 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-
3
ena that came into ~~lay in the stories abou~ the gods. f\,!yth ~vas part ~fa system
f lanation, partial or global, of the wuverse orgamzcd mto a cosmos.
0 ;~ries about gods unfold in illo tempore. The time of r'.1yth is 1101:c oth:r th~n
th time of the First Occas10n, when thmgs came mto ex1sten(e, as 1s ohvious m
th: case of all the purely cosmogonic myt?s, but as can also be demonstrated
. the case of the others, though the Egvptians attempted to suppress any reso-
:tion of the continuity between mythic time and historical time, as in the case
fthe king list of the Royal Canon ot Turin.
0 Moreover, in mythic thought, there is no radical break between the time of
myth and that of history. As a mode (~f a?pre~1ending t~e u~1iverse, m~th-serves
to explain the present and to mform lt, tor histoncal tune 1s only the mtuutely
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, pe:~etuated it and c~aselessly reactualized it in the pre-
sent time. Stones about deities were necessanly 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. 'lb ask whether the Egyptians believed
in their myths i& thus scarcely a meaningful question. Hecause the gods did not
reveal themselves, hut 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 mvthi( account was a litcrarv 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
thcv have come down to us. There thus arises the question, which is not easy to
res~ilve, 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 anv trace of them because before that time they had belonged to the do~
main of o~ality? 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 mvthic themes, if not all of them, went back to an
extremely early period that pr~ceded 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 GOns
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 30 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 punishell 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, intnconnections between thl·rn. The constellation
eye-lioness-uraeus, which was associated with the sun god, offered numerous
39
. . ns on the theme of the distant or dangerous goddess who returned to
wriau: peased and beneficent. These myths evidently had a cosmic back-
EgyPt
gsoun,d ~ne linked to the arrival of the inundation in Egypt at the moment when
.
tbe heat of summer was most intense.
Of all the Egyptian myths, the most famous, and also the richest because of
. ultiple aspects and its different levels of interpretation, is uncontestedly the
:;::. of Osiris, or, more exactly, the Osirian mythological constellation, in which
diverse themes are intertwined. Its fame spread far beyond Egyptian culture, and
• is through the account by Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride, that we are able to fol-
~ 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
vear.
' 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 mvth. 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-
 41
PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOns
40

.·. they also qualify other deities, and it is undoubtedly this quality that can
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 ADl~~ divine transcendence. The Egyptians were always conscious of the fact
death, which is an inherent part of the universe.
be od was more than that by means of which he was manifest. No matter
that amany
g ways one attempte d to approach h"1m, h e remame
. d elusIVe.
. Itwas 1m-
.
boWible to define or contain him with language. We may ~onder whet~er_ the
WHAT TRANSCENDENCE? ~tians, who recognized the accordance of word and obJect, of the s1gmfier
d the signified, and who were convinced of the performativity of speech and
We arrive at the end of this chapter, which has been dedicated to the study of the ~ did not implicitly recognize the limits of their theory.
51~ach deity of this polytheistic world was transcendent-otherwise he would
i divine, such as Egyptian representations and texts reveal it to us, via the person
I,
of the gods, their names, their functions, and their myths. Along the way, I have not be a god-transcendent yet manifest in the world. This in no way means that
mentioned theoretical notions such as syncretism, pantheism, and henotheism, there was a single divine entity, of whom the manifestations tha~ we ~ow ~~re
Ii mere reflections. There was a unity before the cosmos was organized mto de1t1es
because Egyptologists have sometimes invoked them in their attempts to explain
Ii Egyptian polytheism-not to mention the quasi-apologetic temptation to re- with plurality and differentiation, which were the two necessary conditions for
veal a monotheism that always lay dormant under the polytheism! It has been setting things in motion at the time of the First Occasion. Moreover, while hymns
Ji to Antun speak repeatedly of the uniqueness of this god, other texts tell us insis-
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 tentlyof"all the gods" whom Amun in no way included. Amun could be "the one
emphasize in this conclusion. who made himself into millions:' that is, a reality intangible to human beings,
The deities of the polytheistic world were figures of the imaginary realm, en- but he was not unique. In Egypt, there was no logic of the excluded middle. The
dowed with a personal identity, a name, a function, and perhaps a history. Being gods, all of them, were imaginary emergences of the differentiated world set up
many, they necessarily had their limits, which is especially perceptible on the as a cosmos. Present in the world yet transcending it, they made it possible to
level of their function and their power. represent and explain it, and also to assure its equilibrium, so long as human be-
But the limits that defined them were not impenetrable borders. The defini- ings carried out the rituals necessary for this maintenance.
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

CHAPTER2
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.
lt must be noted that with this notion of the birth of th~ 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
prt.'-Socratics developed this mode of thinking in Greece, we cannot speak of
Egyptian philosophy. We undoubtedly find no pure inquiry on a given concept,
SJIOGONIES, CREATION, AND TIME 43
·•· th nse of a manifestation of a mind reflecting on a topic. But that does not
iD e :at the concept did not exist. When the Egyptians evoked "that which ex-
~ d does not exist," that is, being and nothingness or nonbeing, did they not
istS. e at an abstract concept free of any mythological element? Perhaps we
:":id
m:t
give up on the implicit idea, which still underlies most of our discourse,
the only concepts are those that we ourselves expound. Lexicog~aphy and
conceptualization have perhaps been confused. Because we find no smgle, un-
uivocal term for "time" in the Egyptian vocabulary, are we to conclude there
:S 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
ure mind game. When we make them an object of reflection, they remain a
~tumbling 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 ~owledge of this ~orld, opening pe_rspec~ives unimaginable for
people in antiquity, whatever theu culture and theu 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 ,11 work on thern, and not only
in the later stages of Egyptian history. But reading ,1 bit more deeply, we discover
elements that arc 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 ...:c 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 ,,tructurc and that their schemes, though they unnot be per-
fectly superimposed, are nevertheless of the same nature. Therein lies the proof
 44 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOns
t~at from the ~eginning on, beyond local and temporal differences, there was a
smgle underlymg 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 sometinies ell ipLic 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 th.it he copied the text from a worm eaten p,q,yrus,
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 earlic-r. This position, which is difficult tu 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-Tatcncn 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
CREATION, AND TlME 45
ieces, most of them quite late, reflecting the existence of different, parallel
anddfu ns without our being able to discern the connections between them.
ua ~ of them played a major role in the elaboration of the Theban cosmol-
Cert f which we know scarcely anything prior to the New Kingdom, and which
ogy,o . . d
t,ecame rich and complex 1~1 the Late Peno . . _. . ..
We shall also have occasion to a'.1Jlyze ce_rtam aspects of the creation t~~ts of
~:~m,
F.s The theologians there had to tace a delicate problem, bee a use two de1t1es-
the potter, and Neith, the venerable goddess of the delta, assimilated to
th rimordial cow Ahet or !vlethycr-each played the role ot creator. Moreover,
in ie cosmogony of Khn um that we read in the temple of Esna, the t~eolo~ians
of the Roman Period offer us an unparalleled picture of the creation ot 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 I 350 and Papyrus 13oulaq 17),
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 ,ill 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 Tex.ts, where its writings arc 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,
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOns
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. 1
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 lirnils of the universe, where ht: t:xisted 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 o( 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.
47
.' osMO GO .....'IES , CREATION, AND TIME
r in this case the preexistence, of Nun necessarily entailed that of the
outence, o 1 . h . f
Yet it seems that the Egyptians were unab e to conceive t e existence o
o,srnos. ' a negation of Nun. I thmk · that t h'1s appreh enston
. o f the cosmos,
.~~
as .
. h is based on the rejection of exclusion and on the consubstant1al perma-
,diic of what we call contraries, is one of the most complex and subtle ap-
nencehes to the incommensural)le rea1·1ty o f bemg.·
pr;ere is a final question to be raised. The Egyptians never seem t~ have asked
lfby Nun existed. For them, he was a reali~y that emerged as m~ch, 1_£ not more,
from the domain of physics as that of belief. But ':e_ can try to mqu~re a~ to the
s that led the Egyptians to account for the ongms of the world m th1s fash-
reason
. The explanation that is often proposed, and wh1c . h I give
. here 1or
c
wh at it
· 1s
·
10n. . b fr
rth rests on the affirmation that the Egyptian concept was not orn om
; e ;peculation of the mind, but rather from observation of natural, geo-
graphical, and physical phenomena that were transposed onto the level of me_ta-
hysics and mythology. In other words, the slow development of Egyptian
~ture during the millennia of prehistory and the annual phenomenon of the
rise and fall of the Nile were images that could have inspired the con_cept ~f ~he
•anterior world" that was Nun. Even if it contains a part of the reality, this m-
terpretation is too reductive, and it does n?t suffice to acc~unt for t~e complex-
ity of the cosmogonic systems that theonzed o~ th~ notion of bemg. At least,
though, it explains how one aspect o~ Nun, which 1s scattered thr~ughout_ the
texts of the New Kingdom, presents him as one of the forms of the mundation,
gushing out of the very depths of the earth.
THE EMERGENCE OF BEING
THB 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 myslery. I le was not created ex nihilo, nor was he transcendent a11d
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 rath~r 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 ti.mnulations
l PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOns
from the"Book ofShu"in the Coffin Texts (spells 78-80). The sun god Re,called
"lord of the universe;' speaks and reveals his mode of existence:
When r 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 rnanifrstcd voursdf as divine budy, who rnodded his own body,
when the sky did not exist, when the eJrth 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,
\Vithout a father who engendered you when you came into existence,
witlwut a mother whn bore you,
your own Khnum; efficacious one, who appeared efficacious.
You arose on earth in its inertia, that which was assembled afterwards;
CREATION, AND TIME 49
You are in your appearance ofTatenen, 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 Khepn:
Atmn, when I was alone in Nun, (but) I am Re when he appeared at the mo-
I amt when he began to govern that which he created. [gloss] Who is he?-Re at
men
th oment when he began to govern that which he created, it is Re who began to
em d . b. 2
appear as king, when the Support of Shu ha not yet come mto emg.
By eventually being identified with Re, local gods of_ sometimes _o~scure ori_gin,
ch as Amun, Khnum, and Sobek, assumed his basic charactenst1cs, especially
:at 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 proto~reator,
played a prominent role in E?Yl'tian ~heolog~. !he Ogd_oad, Khmemu, was
Jinked to Hermopolis, Khmun m Egyptian, but 1t 1s found m 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, infi~ity in
its spatial form; Kek and Kauket, darkness; and Amun and Amaunet'. the h1dd~n;
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 hetwcen these four couples and the four entities, surnames of
Nun, listed in the Book of Shu of the Coffin Texts (spell 76 ): liehu, Nu, KekLt,
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-
" Bo<>k of the Dc,1d, ch,1ptcr 1/; tran,l.1t1on based"" that <>t' ,. S,1uncron and). Yo,·1>ttc, La .l\',rnsw1cc
du monde, Sources oner.tales 1 (Paris, 1959), p. 4~. l;or an English tramlation of the text, sec R. 0. l'aulkner,
in E. von Dassow, ed., The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (San Francisco,
1994), plates 7-10.
50 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goos
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 fro~
Memphis, or the serpents Kematef and lrta, 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 fo~
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
him~elf'. a_ priest of Thoth who lived at the end of the fourth century BCE, a pi-
ous md1v1dual 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 ,vas 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 "lcxts (Spell 80 R1C):
l w,1~ ,1lone with Nun in a state of inntia, when I found nn place to stand, when I
found no place to sit. when Heliopolis, where I am, was not yet founded, when the
' Tomb of Petosiris; translation based on that of Sauneron and Yoyotte, La Naissance du morulc, p. 6 1•
CREATION, AND TIME 51
,wadjon which I sit was not yet constituted, when I had not made Nut, who is above
,ne 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
,night 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:'
The Egyptians were pleased to base some of their myths on wordplays of this
sort lb complicate the situation, the creator ofkn swam about in Nun and
stopped in various places that retained a trace or this primordial ,isit: thus, the
Ogdoad coming and going between Hermopolis, 1vle1nphis, 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. lt 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 cont rastcd with
the unfonned matter. Rut this wcis not a matter of the earth, of this world, which
4 Esna 206, 2; translation based on that of S. Sanneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna aux demiers siecles
du paganisme, Esna 5 I_ Cairo, 1962), p. 255.

52 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Gona.
still d~d 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-
a_tion 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
53
osJolOGONJES, CREATION, AND TIME
i . ed on this world and on the order of time, hence the nec~ssity of cease-
. -,h t·ng the First Occasion, that is, the emergence of bemg and the es-
•--"' repea t . . . . . d
JPlll"! rnent of the cosmos. Humankind took part 1~ mamtammg cr~at1:>n an
fl),lish . the king or his delegates carried out rituals that, each m its own
:... harmony.
.... de ossible the regular continuity of the order that had been establ"tsh ed
-,,,.Y, rnab ·pnning. It seems that the primordial act of the creator god had en -
in the egi
untered no obstacle, but that each of its repetitions, which were ·mevtta
· bl ·
em
°'nlin time was sub1'ect to the risk of failure, of catastrophe, and that human
DO ear ' . . d
. ce they had come into existence, were m some way constrame to par-
1,eings, on . .
ticipate in the funct1onmg of the cosmos.
TllB TEMPTATION OF THB GOWEN AGE
Co ogonies as different as that of Hesiod, narrated in Works and Days, and of
Ge:is 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 ~f Pandora or of Eve. ls such a concept of a lost paradise or ~ Golden Age
perceptible in the Egyptian cosmogonic texts? Did it have a place m 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 be~au5<: a Golde~ Age _pre-
vailed, but because nothing had yet happened. When hfe did n~t 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 Te~s, as well as some later
texts, affirm that the creator god organized the world without ~efect. Y~t _after-
ward disorder existed side by side with Maat, and death stood m 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 the ?f
Heavenly Cow and elsewhere. But this episode effected _no b~sic change m 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 st~ess ~he _ret~rn to the
good order of things, similar to that of the First Occas1:>n, mdicat1~g 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 exper~ence~, they
were infrequent earlier. The best example is the Prophecy of Nefert1, which be-

54 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE
longs to the literary genre of the political propaganda of the Middle Kingdolll.
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
irnprohahlc, for while ea riv texts might he 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 docs not belong to it. Moreover, it is not a
5 Bah el-Amara, propylon of the temple of Khom; K. Sethe and 0. firchnw, Thebanische Temoelin-
schriften ,ws griechisch-romischer Zeit, Urkunden 8 ( Berlin, 1957), p. 76 (90 kl.
CREATION, AND TIME 55
Goos
ile the theological texts of the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods
·que case. Wh
· 1llll the whole, a final, subtle emanation from the thinkers of Egypt, the lat-
~ , on nevertheless influenced here and there by foreign concepts with which
--w::re
tbef
led, willingly or otherw~se, to coex~st. In Egypt: in t~e ensemble of texts
ssess neither the Urzeitnor the time of creat10n 1s presented as a by-
that we po '
gone Golden Age.
TSE TECHNIQUES OF CREATION
To thiS Po int' we have been considering the emergence•
of the autogenous cre-
· ·th
conceived himself, or rather, became conscious of himself m e very
awr, Who . . I . ft
"dst of Nun and stood on the initial mound on the Fust Occas10n. t 1s o _en
~ of the creator that he came into existence, using the verb kheper, which
means "to become" and "to transform:' But we encounter . other
. terms
h
linked to
h ..
engendering and conception, and to the act of_self-fash1onmg, t _oug 1t 1s un-
derstood that the original god performed this act alone, on himself and by
~~ ..
Neither the gods nor the earth, this world with its animate and mammate be-
ings, yet existed. It was in a second moment, indicating alr~ady a ~orm of suc-
cession and temporality, that the creator god set the world m motion, alone or
b delegating certain of his creative powers to gods he proceeded to create: a sec-
'Y moment which was that, par excellence, of d'f£
ond . .
1 erentiat1on.
THE LEXICON OF CREATION
At first glance, even a rapid review of the terms_ employ~d by the ~gyptians_ to
define the creative act reflects, through the lexicographic categones to which
they belong, the colorful conception they entertained of this foun~ing pr~ce-
dure. We shall need to analyze the texts further to see whether behmd the im-
ages, poetic or crude, there is an implicit, more intellectual vision of the startup
of the cosmos.
It is in the Hcliopolitan system in particular that Atum, the creator, uses
means that can seem purely physiological to hring creatures into the w~lrld. He
masturbates and ciaculates, giving birth to the first divine couple, Shu and
Tefnut. Another tradition has these deities born from Atum'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 dose assonance, and thus a close analogv, betw_ecn
the roots ishesh and te(and the nam,'s Shu and Tefnut. Between name and thmg,
there prevailed a har~ony of fact, and that is why sacred etymologies fount~ed
on verbal analouv had such success in Egypt. Again, it was Atum who cned
, 0;

PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Gons
(re.mi), and from his tears,humankind (remetj) was born; in the later period
. h'1story, t h'1s ~heory would spread far beyond the Heliopolitan frame.
Egypt1an so
work and find a plac~ mall the major cosmogonic texts, as at Esna, for example.
~aturally, the Egyptians lent p 7e~nant symbolic meaning to what could seeni
hke ~ere wordplay to us, and 1t 1s perhaps not for nothing that suffering hu-
mamty was born from the tears of the god.
Often, the terms used are vaguer. Belonging still to the domain of physiology,
we find "~o engender" and "to be born:• But in Egyptian, the latter root also ~
the meanmg of modeling, fashioning inanimate objects, for which other specific
verbs were also used. We often encounter the verbs "to make" ( iri), which has
vast range of meaning, or "to create" ( kema, etc.).
Borrowings made it possible to draw on another vocabulary, that of crafts-
manshir and building techniques. The very name of Ptah, the patron of artisans
and a1:1Sts, has been connected with a root meaning "to model;' though its exis-
ten~e- 1s debatable. But however obvious it might seem, the relationship between
a divme 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 ~ntities, 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 Khn~m. For a long time, the ram-headed potter god
could be se~n m the ~epresentat10ns 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 ':"'oukl have_ the impression that the creator god acted only
:'ia ills body, his secretions transforming into divine hypostases or human bc-
mgs, or simply by usint-; his hands, like a skilled workman. This would be to
r:~uce Eg~ptian t~ought to a purely materialistic-physiological or artisanal-
vis10n, which was m no way the case. The architect of creation had manv other
ways of acting. '
CIU'ATIO'-: H}' Pl-:UCFJ>TIO~', SPEECH, AND WJI,/_
A Ptolemaic text from the second pylon of the temple of A.mun 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
57
CREATION, AND TIME
.. and the ability to create, so~ely by speech, which serves to transmit knowl-
f
, ~and will, things corresponding to the wo~ds. .
~ text passage is not just a late formulation. Such a concept, elaborated m
bi y sophisticated manner, already appear~ on an older monument, the
a gblak St ne otherwise known as the Memphrte Theology. We have seen that
Shah a O necessary '
to reJ· ect an Old Kingdom date for the text •m 1avor
C
o f'm-
itbaS•provefd Ramesside Period composition. Ptah mamfests . . . ·n
his creative w1 ac-
clicauons o a ·
_,:i:.. to his heart seat of perception and will, by means of his tongue, w 1c
h' h
b t
transmits his effective word. Very early, there had been contammations ~ ween
COIUU'g ' · ·
ite system and that of Heliopolis; thus we should not be surprised to
the MemPh . · f ah·
a
find the Ennead, which was closely hnked to Atum, as a hypostatls o Pt .
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 fr.om which Horus emerged, by
means of this tongue from which Thoth emerged, m Ptah. .
It happens that the heart and the tongue have power over a~l the members m
consideration of the fact that the one is in every body, the other_m every mout~ of
all the gods, of all humankind, of all the animals, of all the reptiles, of every bemg
that lives, to conceive and decree all that he wishes. . .
His Ennead was before him like teeth and lips, that 1s, this semen and these
hands of Atum, for the Ennead of Atum issued from his seed and ~is 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. · h
The eyes see, the ears hear, the nose breathes air; the! ~form the hear~. It 1st at
which causes every completed thought to emerge, and 1t is the tongue which trans-
mits the thought of the heart. . .
Then all the gods were born and his Ennead completed. All the d1vme 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 :e~ectit~n on the
functioning of the psyche, that the psyche is human. and t!1_at it 1_s attributed by
ot
analogy to a divine power, here Ptah, and that the poss1btl1ty creatmg llo~s
from k.nowledcre and will, which are closely linked and expressed by speech. h)r
to name thing; 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 ag:e~-
mcnt with Jan 1\ssmann, who, in commenting on the text, proposes to_ see 111 it
a quasi-Platonic theory nl the cxisterKe of the world: the ensemble nl the_ cle-
ments of the visible world supposedly corresponds to the totality ot the Sign~,
the medu ne~jer, understood as hieroglyphs created by Ptah, rather than as di-
vine words in the literal sense.
l
J
58 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOl)s
This theory of the psyche, which has been considered to be the most intell~
lh
tua t eory ever elaborated by the Egyptians, was in no way confined to th
Memphite theology of the god Ptah. Though it is less obvious, it can be mad: '
out elsewhere. '~he hypostases of perception and speech, or heart and tongue
were the gods Sia a_nd Hu, who played a significant role in all the cosmogonies'.
The Book of Knowmg the Modes of Existence of Re, recorded on Papyrus Brem.
ner-Rhind'. whi0 has already be~n mentioned, sheds clear light on the fact that
~very phys1olog1cal act from which creation proceeded, effected by the sun god
m 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 w~s 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 everv
divine or human act a manifestation of the will, founded on knowledge, and t~
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
t~ok bodily form as the Ennead, or the first group of gods, who could represent
his hudy; he projected his will outside of himself and set the cosmos in rnotion.
We must now have a look at the criteria according to which the texts present the
orga111z,ed world. The latter was the place of differentiation, of separation, of cat-
egories, even if we do not always grasp their arr,mgement, 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-
t)IOGONlES, CREATION, AND TIME
59
i,not in that it is opposed to an anterior unity, but in that it is con.substantially
' ~ to separation. This is undoubtedly why the creator god did not create
Man, but mankind.
QBATION WAS NOT ANTHROPOCENTRIC
Co trarY to Genesis, the cosmogonic texts do not offer the carefully fixed cal-
:ar of a process each step of which was duly recorded and which ended in the
ell tion of man and his companion as a unique couple, the pause sign at the end
";: week of incessant activity. For the Egyptian creator god, time does not seem
~ 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 divide~ 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 Khn um, the potter. In this representation, however, it was not so much
the matter, the clav, 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 sym holism, 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 lo us
by Egypt.
THE PROVTDENTIAL GOD
The world exisll'd, with its gods, its men, its creatures, and it~ laws that ruled it.
But there are texts that nuance this vision of a god who was indifferent to lhe
creatures born of his power. In the Instruction for King 1'v1erikare, the author
1 60 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE

goes so far as to tell us that the creator god conceived the world for the sake of
Goos CREATfON, AND TIME

he modeled the face,

61

humankind: in order to give a characteristic appearance to figures (?);

he made the eyes open,
Well provide~ are men, the herd of the god. It is for them that he made the sky and he opened the access of the ears,
the earth. It 1s for them that he repulsed the greed of the water. It is so that their he put the body into intimate contact with the atmosphere;
n?strils mi~ht live that he made the breezes, for they are his images, issued from he made the mouth to eat,
his flesh. It 1s for them that he rises in the sky; it is to nourish them that he made he constituted the teeth to chew;
plants, herds, birds, and fish. he also loosened the tongue to express itself. 7

This text, which is exceptional, leads us to raise a question that it is perhaps vain Working in the domain of differentiation, the god created the different races
to try to resolve. Humankind is in the image of its creator. The chosen word is of humans, whom he distinguished by the color of their skin:
part ~fa vast range of terms that we often translate by "image;' without always
graspmg all their lexicographic nuances. We are surely not to seek here an idea Hail to you ... Atum, creator of humans, who distinguished their form, who made
~hat is widespread in Western thought: that there is a divine spark in humankind, their life, who distinguished them from one another by the color of their skin. 8
~n ~a: we po~sess a soul. As created by the Egyptian creator god, man was made
m his image m the same way as a divine statue, which was still not the god. Despite the marked ethnocentrism of all Egyptian thought, which considered
More often, the creator was a providential god who provided for the subsis- the people of the Nile valley to be the only true humans, the creator god was
tence of each of the species in his creation: made into the father of the human race in all its diversity. 1b reinforce their dif-
ference from one another from the beginning on, he endowed them with differ-
He made grass for the cattle to live, ent languages. This theme is already present in the hymn to Aten from Tell
and fruit trees for the henmemet.
el-Arnarna:
He ~ade 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, Humans, cattle, small animals,
makes what the flies live on,
all that is on earth and that walks on feet,
and the worms and the fleas,
that which is above and flies with wings,
and makes what the mice in their holes have need of Syria, Nubia, and the land of Egypt.
and gives life to the winged race on every tree. 6 '
You assigned each one its proper place,
creating what is necessary for his needs.
We see the god's solicitude in providing each species according to its needs. A re- Each one is provided with nourishment,
markable hymn to Khnum, carved on a column of the temple of Esna, explains and with a duly measured lifetime.
the potter god's fabrication of the human body with a surprising wealth of de- Their tongues in their mouths differ in language,
tails. Anatomy and physiology, such as they were conceived at that time, are the and their appearance as well;
basis of this description, wh_ich reviews, member by member, organ by organ, all their skin color is distinct,
~he constttuent members ol the body, which the god created with a view tn their for vou have differentiated the foreign peoples.9
tunction:
This function nften devolves on Thoth, the lord oflanguage and writing: "Thoth,
He made the locks of hair grow, who separated the languages from land to land." Human beings are thus not de-
he made hair sprout, modeling the skin onto the limbs; scended from a common race possessing a universal language that was lost after
he constructed the skull, the episode of the tower of Babel. Humankind never knew a golden age when

'' llvrnn to An1111, from !'.')'nus Boulaq 17; l1:11hL1tion b,hcu on that i,t A. Barn-.:q and E l)rnnu,,
·· F:-ma 250, 9 ..... 10; tr:.1n:-,L1tion h,1sed on th;1t of s~wntron, I.ts J.1;tt's rcligicuse;; d'l'.'sn1i, p. 9ti-
flymne:i(t ,r~ricres de l'l~g,vJuc_ (fr:znenne) Lit.kraturcs ,irk1crnu:s <lu Proche-Urient 1o {Paris) 198oJ, p. 197 .
8 P. Boulaq 17; translation based on that uf Sauneron an<l Yoyutte, La Naissance du monde, p. 69.
For an rngh,h translation of the text, see J. A. Wibon, in). 8. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern fcxts 9 Great Hymn to ,\ten, VI, 8-9; translation based on that of P. Crandet, Hymnes de fa religion d'Aton
Relatin:; to the Old Testament. 2d e<l. (Princeton, 1955). pp. 565-67.
! Paris, 1995), pp. 110-11.
62 PART 1. THE WORLD OF THE

the possibility of mutual comprehension was taken for r ..

Goos .~ O
GONJES, CREATION, AND TIME

in5titutions whose functioning assured the continuity of the order of the

marked with the seal of difference and separation. g anted, it was always d were personally conceived by the creator god at its outset, thus guaran-
. g the temples an antiquity that went back to the very beginnings of the
Th_e texts g:nerally have less to say about the elements of nature· stic .
wh~t 1s essential, they are content to mention the creation of sk king t~ d . CIIJSIDOS.
It was thus no doubt useless for the Egyptians to specify that Maat reigned
agam the same hymn to Khnum from the tern le of E y an earth. It IS
tailed vision of the world below: p sna that offers a more de- front 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-
~e c~use: pl~n~s to b~ born in the midst of the countryside, and he brightened th
;1v;r a?hs wit mult1col~red flowers; he made the fruit trees produce their fru•:
trinsically linked to divine creation, and it was the responsibility of humankind
. o urms a m~ans of subsistence for men and gods. Finally, he opened roe fau I to maintain it in the world, for it was at the same time perpetually threatened.
~:~~:s:~~ntams, and he constrained the quarries to spit forth the mount1s th~; 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
What matter did the creator god use to give birth to the elemen the equal of his neighbor. I did not command them to do evil, (but) it was their
andh Eto the. creatures? Whence did he draw 1·t,. Th"is was a quest10n
. aboutts of nature
wh· h hearts that transgressed what I said" (Coffin Texts spell 1130).
t_ e gyptians were quite discreet. There is a well-known passage in the In t IC Later, we shall consider the role of freedom in human action. But at this point,
t10n
. 1 of Amenemope
c that
. m akes man a b emg
. of clay and straw, sounding sa ruc-bib- it is clear that although man can do evil and is thus a sinner and can otherwise
11ea note ior us But m the E f . is
. an image
. recognize himself as such, he was not originally responsible for sin. He was not
f "lt f h h . . gyp ian text, it of the constitutional
ra1 y o t e ~man bemg, whose destiny is in the hands of the god rather th constitutionally the bearer of an original sin. He did not eat Satan's apple, nor
t. h e representation
. of a man b om of d ust and destined to return to ' it· the latte
an did he open the box that was entrusted to Pandora. He could act against the gods,
ideal is, moreover, opposed to the postmortem beliefs of the Egyptians ~s we shallr and especially against Re, as we are told in the texts about rebellion, of which the
see ater. , Book of the Heavenly Cow is the most explicit. But he was not forever branded
d Khn:m model~d creatures on his wheel, and we may think that he used silt by the wrong that was committed.
dra:n rom Nun, Just as the human artisan employed that of the Nile W"th If neither god nor man bore responsibility for the existence of evil, whose
ou t, the first matter was c?ntained in Nun before being actualized b ~iv~~~ massive presence in the world was evident, where did it come from? When we
work. But_ we are told many times how the creator animated his creature:· it was attempt to follow the ins and outs of Egyptians metaphysics, this question often
by breathmg the breath of life into them that he brought th em m . t o existence.
. . 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-
ORDER AND DISORDER IN CREATION
able mass. Maat, which was constitutive of the cosmos, was inaugurated along
N~t content with setting sky and earth in place and with creatin od with it. Disorder, the quintessential form of evil, was the counterpart of Maat,
~mmals, the creator god also began by institutin the machin rg g s, ~en, and forming a pair that was complementary, not antithetical. It was not the monop-
isht~ say, cities and temples, and the offerings and !tatues of the eg:d~\:;~et~that oly of humankind or of Seth; in the bosom of the Egyptian pantheon, the very
p 1te Theology, we read: · e em- 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-
;i::: ~~:~h~:
h d
!~f;~~;
,
a~rhh~ madJ evhery t_h_ing and every divine speech. He had
a ma e t e c1t1es, he had founded the nomes he
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
had r1ac71h~ g?ds in thei~ cult places, he had instituted their offering loaves', he the passage from Nun to the cosmos, though they had no prior existence.
w~at ~~~s~el t~::~:~:~:.nes, he had made their visible bodies in accordance with Still, in the lengthy account of creation at Esna, this time according to Neith,
not Khn um, we witness the birth of Apopis, the incarnation of the principle of
10 Esna 250, 15-16; translat10n
. based on that of Sauneron, Les FUes religieuses d'Esna p
' .104. evil:
 65
PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOl)g · JIOGONJES, cRBATlON, AND TIME

· d be perceived by others. Moreover, within a single given culture,

But they (the anterior gods) repelled a drop of spittle from her mouth, which she · tetoan . · d
had produced in the bosom of the initial water; it was transformed into a serpent • from certain that "time" responds to a umque concept t~ which all a -
of 100 cubits, which was named Apopis. Its heart conceived revolt against Re, with • far . · t all the more true when we speak of the particular aspect of
IS.
; This pom . .
its associates that issued from its eye. 11 •tba · eternity. Otherwise, why have so many theologians and philosophers,
,· eus · made of tune
also so many poets and novelists · ~e c 1ault,h · o f rup-
t e pomt
In this particular vision of the world, which I think has no parallel, evil was cre- .aacl around which they have attempted to build their systems of thought? Was
ated in its symbolic form of Apopis. The faults worked in the cosmos by the pres- ~ not also the case in Egypt? Who can assure us that in that culture, whose
ence of evil were not contrary to the creative will of the creator god, and this !'ds . structures we struggle to make out by relying on the faint traces that
point of view was a way of mythically ratifying the reality of this world and its ~~ved to us, there did not coexist, without mutual denial or destruction,
deficiencies, which were otherwise incarnate in the equivocal personality of Seth. eeveraJ ways of thinking about time?
[)esp1·te the difficulty of method and the ambiguity of the objectd'to be appre-
. h
bended, we must nevertheless attempt to present the data that we iscern mt e
TIME AND CREATION Egyptian texts.
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-
THB CREATION OF TIMB
nme had a beginning, which was that of the emergence of creatio~ on the First
Occasion. That occasion marked a rupture, the passage from pr~existence to the
smos even if the Egyptians did not reckon time from the creation of the world.
:un re~ained beyond the limits of time. It was in the world that life a~d dea_th
manifested themselves; neither they nor the divisions of time had a pnor exis-
'
tence. In cosmogonic texts and in prayers, it is not rare to encount~r the c;eator
god as the creator and lord of tim~. Thus, in a i_najor hymn to Ne~th,_ r~c~ted ~t
Esna on the celebration of the festival of the thirteenth day of Epiph1, it 1s 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 o f mun danon,
. . ter, t o summer. 12
to wm
The gods were also, by way of consequence, masters of human lifeti~e, 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.

11 Esna 206, 10-11; translation based on that of Sauneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna, p. 265. 12 Esna 163, 25; translation based on that of Sauneron, Les Fetes religieuses d'Esna, PP· 291-92.
66 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GODs CREATION, AND TIME 67

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 epagomcnal days that had to he
added to the calendar of 360 days to obtain cl reckoning that w,1s dose to the as-
tronomical year. The catc1strophc 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":
~anred" spirits (akhu), the dead, small and large cattle ... weep, they weep, very
iue- ch 13
J]lUch, very mu .
b ttle against this always-possible emergence of catastrophe that priests
It\\'85 to a . · d . . d D
-•larly carried out ntuals of conservation that serve to mamtam or er. e-
iq;... • could thus be avoided or at least, constantly be beaten back or de-
strUction ' · · h b d
(erred, thus assuring the continuity of the world, a contmmty t at was ase on
its periodicity.
DID OF THE WORLD, END OF TIME
If the world and time had a beginning, if their continuit~ was co?tinually chal-
lenged, we can also imagine the end of the world and of time, which would cor-
ond roughly to the calamity described by Papyrus Salt. From the texts of the
~phecy of Neferti and the Potter'.s Oracle to th~ invectives hurled by ~e ma-
gician against recalcitrant gods, this theme persists through all the pen~ds 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 wo~ld. It presents At~m,
the creator of the universe, addressing the deceased durmg a verbal sparrmg
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 ~r~ated; thi~ l~nd will return~ the st~te
of Nun, to the state of flood, as ( was) its ongmal cond1tton. I am what will remam,
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 c~eator god himself, who will destroy his creat~on, wh~le Osi~is ~ill subs~st
along with him. The fate of the deceased, though h~ _1s pro°:1sed a hfet~me of mil-
lions and millions of years, remains obscure. And 1t one wishes to pomt out that
this tcxt has onlv onL' parallel in thL' tern pie of Opet ,ind is otherwisL· not neces-
sarily representative of the entirety of Egyptian _thou~h_l, rnay point :)u~, th'.it
it is not exactlv the return to the original chaos, tor Osms, ruler of etenuty, will
:e
also continue ,to exist. Does this passage announce the apocalypse, or is it rather

l.t ! is not 11.it during the night, and daytime does not exist. A brncntation is madt'
l."' Translation h,1i;cd nn th,1t of P. l)crt,:hJin, Papyrus Sal! 82:; ,:' H..\'i. wo51 ), l?itae/ p,,11r la um)crt·ation
(two times) [in the sky ,1ml on earth. The gods and godde.,ses place their hand,
de la ,·ie en (J\russcls, 196',!, p. 1.17.
on their h,·ad, the earth is laid waste, the sun does not come up, and the moon is 14 Translation based on that of P. Barguet, Le Livre de., ttwrts des a11cie11s f:ogyptiem, l.itterntim·~ ari-:i-

slow, it does not exist. Nun is unsteady, and the earth is capsized; the river is un- ennes du Proche-Orient 1 (Paris, 1967), p. 261; for an English translation of the text, see Faulkner, m von
navigable .... All the world groans and weeps. Souls, gods, goddesses, men, "trans- Dassow, ed., The Egypti,m Book of the Dead. pl. 29.
 CREATION, AND TIME
68 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GOns.

·. ral connotation. It is true that it is determined by the hieroglyph repre-

a threat made ~y the creator god to affirm his power? At the very least, it is dear
. - ~ the earth, but that does not suffice to relieve it of all temporal meaning.
that the evocation of the end of the world and of time is not the hope of a fut
paradise. Nor does it exist in an eschatological perspective that will witness ~~e / .-w1~er, several words linked to the measurement of time have, in addition to
~ disk, the classic sign used to indicate temporality, a determinative related
triumph of the creator god and his "justified" creatures after their appeara e
c
b eiore h d. . . nee
t e ivme tnbunal of the afterlife. If men triumph over death, it is, if we
tbethe category of space; while examples of this phenomenon multiplied in the
~lemaic Period, they are already to be found in earlier texts. Furthermore,
may risk this paradox, in the here and now.
lbefC is no doubt that the concept of time was closely l~ed :o that of space: so
that djetdoes not necessarily lose all temporal value. Nor 1s this close correlation
TIME AND ETERNITY 1,etWCCn the two notions f~reign t~ us. In its linear asp~ct, no doubt m?re th~n
The question of time leads inevitably to that of eternity, or at least, what we are
in its cyclical aspect, time IS conceive~ under ~he auspices of ~pa~e._ ls it not 1~
S()lllC way a succession, finite or infimte, of pomts, each of which IS 1mpercept1-
accustomed _to calli_ng eter~ity: _a stretch of time that has neither beginning
nor end, an immobile duration, m some sense the opposite of time, supposing 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-
that we can apprehend such a concept, or perhaps the same thing. "Eternity is,
tion and attach them to other religious realities, we consider that time was not
no ~oubt, only the same thing otherwise;' as Marguerite Yourcenar has sagely
homogeneous, we can perhaps attempt to clarify, in a manner that will neces-
put It.
sarily be partial and hazardous, what the Egyptians were expres:i~g when they
In E~tology, this question has inspired innumerable discussions leading to
spoke of neheh and djet. Between the two, there were both oppos1t1on an~ com-
contradictory conclusions, in which it is not always easy to discern valid argu-
plementarity. Neheh was closely linked to Re, and thus to the day and to light. It
ments. Recently, there have been basically three German Egyptologists-
in some sense represented the future in its virtuality, but also in its cyclical and
Wolfhart Westendorf, Erik Hornung, and Jan Assmann-to whom we must add
discontinuous, uncompleted return. Djet, the domain par excellence of Osiris,
the Hungarian Laszlo Kakosy, who have brought the controversy to its most ad-
vanced point.
The Egyptians used two terms, neheh and djet, to refer to an undetermined
l~ngth of time. For a long time, these terms have been translated, and they con-
tmue 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-
ti?n 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 ~ess ~ake the terms accord from one language into another, each language
reflectmg its own concept of the universe. It has been suggested that neheh and
djet are hvo nearly synonymous terms that supposedly encompass the totalitv of
time; but this is highly improbable. The Egyptians often resorted to dualit~· to
express a reality of existence or of the imagi11ary, but f<.)r the most part, umifr-
lying this duality is a dual concept that is in 110 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 thi~ direction: the tenns are not <ilways used together; they ca:1 occur
alone, a clear sign that each has its own meaning. fIGuu, 4. The ourohorus, h,,rne by Shu and kfnul, surrounJing 1h,· sun gnd. 1-'roJll i\. PiQnkntl and N .
. In a~ oppos~te manner, in order to resolve the difficulty of explaining the du- RJrnbova, Mythological Papyri: Egyptian Re!igwus TeXts and Represent,,ti,ms, vol. 5 (New York. 1957 ), P· 22,

ality ot terms, 1t has been proposed that one of them, djet, had a spatial, not a fig. 8.
1
70 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE G
01)

belonged to the night, to the subterranean world of the duat, and the writin
djet and duat could be confused in the Ptolemaic Period. It represented a gs
static and completed aspect of time. But we know otherwise that the theolo~<>re
made an immense effort to make of Re and Osiris two indissociable asp,.!;:°'
. .
th e d1vme, . h
representmg t e course of the sun in its diurnal and nocturnal
""""'of
pects: symbo~ing yest~rday and tomorrow. Neheh and djet are thus consu~
stant1ally associated. This double aspect is summarized with great concision •
two comp!ex but e:xu:em~ly evocati_ve signs that were used in the Ptolemaic
The sun disk, appeanng m the honzon and containing a falcon, an image of the
tex: CHAPTER3

s~n god, repres~~ts ~eheh, while a serpent wrapped around a mummy, or bette, THE GODS ON EARTH
still, around Osms himself, served to write djet, the prototype of the ourobo.11 ·
(see fig~re 4). Time, in its form of neheh and djet, time that cannot be quan:
tied, which is counted indefinitely in millions and millions, nevertheless had
beginning and undoubtedly an end. It exists because the cosmos exists, becaUS:
it is ~ part of it, ~hile chapter 175 of the Book of the Dead affirms that Osiris will
subs1s,t alon? with "':tum wh~n ~he latter brings the world back to its original
state. fhus, 1t was said of Ne1th m 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. 30. 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.

THB 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
l
72 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goo
taken. Moreover, a certain stability of structures subsisted throughout the co
. . ·1· . d urse
o f Egypt1an c1v1 1zatlon, an we ca~ spe~k of one re~igion throughout the land
and through the course of three millenma of a specific, uninterrupted cultu
This is why, when treating religious phenomena, we are able to consider sour re.·
a~ old as the Pyramid :rexts side by side with others as recent as the theologi:
dIScourses of Ptolemaic temples, often clarifying what is merely allusive in th
former with the help of the latter. With due methodological precautions, su :
retrospective extrapolation is relatively safe.
. With regard to temples, we face this same problem, but in a much more crit-
ical man~er; 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 P?verty of the documentation for the oldest periods. The mention here of a
certa1~ n~ber of t~mples is not intended to constitute an exhaustive topo-
graphical hst; rather, 1t 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-
nerar~. 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.
Yetother types of chapels. whose names and images would never disappear
from Iigyptian vocahulary and iconography, were already in existence at this
early time. Thus, the seh-netjer, the "tent of the god," would remain closelv con-
nected with Anuhis, its lord. Thus also, there was the sanctuary of Min, a ;ort of
round hut that was always specifically attached to that god and would remain so
?own to its la~es_t re_vresentations; its constant presence beside images of the god
1:" 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. 'T'hey testify, how-
ever, to the existence of cults addressed to deities who thus possessed places of
their own, as early as the predynastic, and undouhtedly the protohistorical era.
73
from this substrate, which was never forgotten, that the Egyptian concept
temple developed in the course of ~enturies and mille_n?ia, a concept ch~rac-
by the persistence of a certam number of traditional representat10ns,
gh 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
af Dendara, certain inscriptions there furnish information that is highly reveal-
c • of its antiquity, above and beyond the fact that a statue of Pepy I was found
~ e sacred enclosure of the goddess. One inscription states that the temple was
::.,uilt and reorganized by Tuthmosis III, who himself based his work on ancient
cfocUillents going back to the time of King Cheops, or, according to another text,
10 the "followers of Horus;• that is, to the first kings of the unified country. It
eould 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
eome 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 i?)," the highest office al Heliopolis, and the priestesses of
Hathor or Neith in the Memphite region. The earliest mention of a priestly of-
fice of Isis goes hack to the end of the Old Kingdom. As in the case of the rep re-
 74 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE GO
o,,
sentations of primitive chapels, the texts are too succinct for us to be able t d
duce the ~xact duti_es of a priest of this period. Finally, the text of the Pal~rm:
Stone, which conta1~s the roya~ annals of the Old Kingdom down to the middle
of Dynasty 5, mentions d~m~ms and go~ds belon~ing to temples, a concrete
proof that they were funct1omng and playmg a role m the economic activity of
the realm.
, This bundle of convergent indications allows us to draw merely a broad out.
lme of the effective existence of divine cults in the Old Kingdom and earli
Though :hey were not fundamentally different from those we know better fro:
later penods, they were certainly less elaborate.
OLD AND MIDDLE KINGDOM TEMPLES
Thou~h they are extremely rare, some divine, nonfunerary temples dating to the
Old Kmgdom 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•
dent 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-
a~ce: 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
75
that it was conceived and constructed as part of the king's complex, which
ntains the Sphinx, we are less sure of its function-solar, perhaps, with
0 '°n-air court; but nothing proves that there was a correlation between this
. pe and the colossal statue. A little further south, at Abu Ghurab, under Dy-
.,-tY 5, a dynasty that was clearly devoted to worship of the sun, King N_euserre
erected an open temple dedicated to the sun god, whose court contamed an
c,belisk, an image of the prim~rdial benben of :1eliopolis (see figure 5). While this
zf of building was not a umque prototype, it was also not the model of a tem-
the roost classical type. Recent excavations at the site of the temple of Sa tis
on the island of Elephantine at Aswan have enabled a theoretical reconstruction
f the changes and successive enlargements of the building from the Predynas-
:C 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-
 77

di51ll88ded to serve as fill in the Third Pylon. It is there that it was discov-
it has been restored to its original appearance, but scholars have been un-
to determine its original location.
the cult of Montu flourished during Dynasties 11 and 12, his temples at
ud, Tod, and Armant, all in the neighborhood of Thebes, experienced
erable enlargement. Under the site of the Middle Kingdom temple at
ud, there remain traces of what, according to the excavators, is the orig-
stru.cture, which they date to the First Intermediate Period. Their proffered
ation, which is only an insufficiently supported hypothesis, would make
a•ctuary of the Osirian type. We know that this god was present in the tem-
'f.1,es of the region, which were rebuilt in the Ptolemaic Period, but it would be
'lmP'Udent 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
·· nwerial, 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 18.
After this rapid survey, which has enabled us to establish some chronological
merence 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-
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goos
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 onlv modest manifc~tations. Bv the same to-
ken, certain rituals were undoubtedly ,at first funerary before bei;1g diverted lo
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 tern pie plans, rituals, and liturgies intended for deities,
before theology assumed its definitive form in the New Kingdom; the latter pe-
riod ~aw the development of a complex system that drew its material from an-
cient sources, exploiting their latent potentials. Funerary architecture and cult
ON EARTH 79
,,ei-e the archetypes of divine temples and cults; the gods were similar to the
dead,
'J'HB TEMPLE ARCHETYPE I'ROM THE NEW KINGDOM
TO THE PTOLEMAIC PERIOD
Just as evidence of temples is rare for the Old and even the Middle Kingdom, so
'tis abundant from the New Kingdom down to the Roman Period, notwith-
~ding 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 v,rith 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 sometirnl's difficult to discern because of the many additions that
were rnade to it by the successive pharaohs who worked there and also because
an axis perpendicular to the original one was created during Dynasty 18. Yet it is
on the basis of this example, and that of other, simpler temples, such as that of
Ramesses III at rvledinet 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 temcnos, its sacred e11L'losure, 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
So PART l. THE WORLD OF THE Goos

edifice. Most often, the enclosure walls that have been excavated date to the Late
Period, Dynasty 30, or the Ptolemaic Period, for they replaced other, older ones.
Tanis, however, offers a very fine example from the Third Intermediate Period 123
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 tern.
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 0 0 0 0
sides, at least, by a colonnade. In the ancient Egyptian vocabulary, it was called Hypostyle Hall

either the forecourt or the festival court; the people had access to it on the occa- 0 0 0 0
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, 121
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
rn [gJ

the "great seat;' but also a shrine-either fixed (in stone) or transportable (of rn [gJ
wood)-in which statues were enclosed. In certain cases, it was deemed neces- [g [gJ
sary to add an intermediate room, the barque sanctuary, which contained a base
[g [gJ
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 rn Court rn .
triad that received a cult (see figure 6).
The Ptolemaic temples preserved this structure for the most part, with vari- rn [gJ
b

ants that were appropriate to individual monuments, such as the great colon-
nade at Philae or the bipartition of the temple of Korn Ombo, which was
\ ~
rn
rn
[gJ
~
consecrated jointly to Sobek and Haroeris; each god had his own part of the tem- f
ple, which was built with two parallel axes. There were, however, more signifi-
Pylon C
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 a
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 FlGlJIIE 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
chapels dedicated to various deities who cohabited with the lord of the temple Paintings, vol. 2, Theban Temples, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1972), pl. 8.
and who, by their presence, introduced complementary theological elements.
82 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goo,
Such chapels could also be kiosks constructed on the rooftop terrace of th
building, as at Dendara. Less deep into the temple, other rooms were added th~
had a more functional, but nevertheless ritualized, origin: examples are the lab.
oratory, place~ under the ~uthority of Shese1:1~; lord o! pe~fumes; the treasury;
the hall of fabncs; and the library, where certam books, wntten 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 aim.oat
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 wabetwas 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
tcrnenos, as still dcmonst rated by the ruins of the Ramcsscu m; these were pcKked
with .1gricultural produds that came from the domains of Lhe god and wcrl' used
in the offerings of the daily cult, and with precious commodities lhat 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 JO, 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
83
le t stages of Egyptian history. Another late innovation either surprised,
1~ or shocked Greek visitors. With the astonishing.spread of animal cu~ts,
· J,eaUile necessary to raise livestock of all sorts of species, from among which
[ft selected, when the moment came, the beast promote~ to the ra~ of sacre~
~ al either until it died, as had always been the case with the Apts or Buch1s
: 0; for a year, such as the falcon that was enthroned at Edfu. The temple _of
ldfu, like that of ~thribis, had a _falcon house. Elsewhere, the sacred menageries
were filled with ibises or crocodiles.
=
.
:C
With the decor of the divine theater on earth thus described, we can turn to
rotagonists and the roles that they played. Information pertaining to the ear-
periods being far too thin, more so than with any other aspect of the reli-
. us phenomenon, we must draw on the rich arsenal of t~e New Ki?gdom and
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 ~as ~ot 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 comme_mor_at: ritually
the sacrifice of Jesus, or to make offerings to its gods of Brahmamc ongm. 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 pe?~le pro-
claimed the existence of the divine, but rather the place where the d1vme was
rooted and manifested itself directly and visibly on earth, its permanent recep-
tacle and thus itself divine.
NAME AND ORIGIN
The designation uf a temple in the Egyptian vocabulary proves what has just
been asserted. It is not a matter of the "personal" name that each cul tic building
received and that reveals a specific theological aspect that distinguishes it, such
as the sanctuary in the east of Karnak, called "Ramesses andAmun arc those who
hear prayers," ;n 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 Neuserrc at Abu Churab was
called "that which arouses the joy of Re;' a programmatic name reflecting the
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goos
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 Mon tu!' 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 wisdorn texts,
and their individual prayers, often referred to their loc:al deity as "god o( 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 ljrcie 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 oflocal cosmogonies that repre·
ON EARTH 85
ta search for an explanation of origins, the intrinsic link between a god in his
;:graphical dimension as lord o~ this ~r that place is obvious. ~t was he who,
the First Occasion, caused a pnmord1al mound to emerge, sohd ground that
:Ved 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-
partance 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 go~ 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.
jTHE 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 18 and
19. Papyrus f farris I lists the possessions of the great religious domains at the end
of the reign of Ra messes 111, ,rnd 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 80,000 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 TuthnHi,idcs 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 GO
H. Gardiner, is another invaluable source of information regarding the poss •
sions of Amun outside the Theban region itself.
. From a °:uch later dat~, 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 o~Thebes to south of Gebel el-Silsila and which had
be~n donated to him by the king. There was another type of donation, this one
pnvate but guaranteed by royal surety; it is attested by numerous stelae call d
"d~nation stelae," d~dicated by pri~ate indiv~duals, nearly all of them dating : 0
a s~ngle stretch of time from the Libyan Penod 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 cler~y of Amun, with private persons playing only a secondary role in the
t~ans~c!1ons that could take place. If, in the beginning, only the king was sover-
eign, It 1s 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 ~n-
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 Amama schism concretized this rupture. This vi-
sion ?f a religious turning point during Dynasty 18 cannot be ignored, but it
cert~1nly does not su~ce to explain the situation entirely. Conversely, with the
dechne of the New Kingdom and the breakup of political unity, the high priests
of Amun ac~uired 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
thr?ughout the history of Egyptian culture, but undoubtedly more on the his-
toncal 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, hut 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 Fgyptian 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
Ds II GODS ON EARTH 87
'ble except to certain individuals who were permitted to approach it in
es ~,-rnSI , d .. fE
~ condition of purity. While the villages an c1ties o gypt were, as a gen-
: ,ral
astnrule,open, the temple and its sacred perimeter, the temenos, was - surrounded ki
a high wall of unbaked brick that isolated it from prof~e- ternto:y, mar ng
by b ndary between what was without and what was w1thm, the impure and
the ou It served to protect the one who was supposed to dwell within it, shel-
tbe pure. · h'1es o f o ffi1c1a
· Is
d d hidden. Certain late texts belonging to the autob1ograp
: a:re punctilious in their duties, tell how after periods of troubles, it was
0
w ry to cleanse the temenos of temples that had been invaded and soiled by
oecessa " 11· f
soldiers. Thus, Djedhor of A11!ribis recounts th~t he foun~ ma_ny dwe mgs o
soldiers within this enclosure, had the~ d_em~hshed, and ~untied the wa~et-
ctuary after the dwellings that were ms1de 1t were demohshed, for the vices
san
of slavery(?) were there.
»1
While passing through the gate of the enclosure was authorized to all on at
least certain occasions, to penetrate further, o?e had to bel~ng to th~ personnel
of the temple and to place oneself in the reqmred state of ntual punty.
The further one advanced along the axis of the temple, the closer one came
to the receptacle of the sacred. This progression was marked i~ two w~~s in the
architectural layout of the edifice. The floor gradually rose, whil~ th~ ce1lmgs ~e-
came lower, the volumes thus becoming gradually smaller, while hght was dis-
pensed more and more parsimoniously. Those who entered t~e temple pass~d
from the full sunlight of the initial courtyards to the filtered hght of the cl01s-
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 bv 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 ~e~ut
of the temple, its "interior" (khcnu in Egyptian), was concentrated_all the d1vme
energy that animated the statue, which was an effigy and a const1tuen~ part of
the deity. At the same time, texts defined it in other terms that revealed 1~s fu~c-
tion; it was the "horizon" of the god or even the "sky," according to the mscnp-
tions of the high priests of Amun in Dynasty 18. i\~ for the doors that led to 1.t,
1 E. Jelinkova-Rtcymond, Le.s Jnscripiion., de la statue guerissl"use de Djed-Her-le-Sa uvrnr. Hibliotheque
d'hude 23 (Cairo, 1956\ pp.101 and 102.
 ON EARTH
88 GODS

. , of the sacred lake was in contact with the water table.

which were opened by lhe king or by his representative during the Jaily cult, . way, for the watt:rth pylon they were assimil.1ted to Bakhu. and Manu,
the two towers o e ·. ' . l . ·I • o f t he course o f the
, . , the limits
were nothing other than the ''gates of the horizon" or the "gates of the sky." lf
r d e~tern mountams, w 11L i ,\ere
do not misapprehend, the naos was a projection of the sky onto the earth. easiern an w :-. .
while the eHigy of the god belonged to the earth, his ba was in the sky, as . f the building, the t1oor represented the earth: from which
texts rciter c1te. This ,lSlK'Cl of their union was exprcss<:d by the ritual of"unif i..thearch1tectureo 1 . - ite·d h\· columns with luxuriant plant or
l" _b the atter rep1e"'e1 . - . .
with the disk;' which is first attested in the Ptolemaic Period. In its stony mat tion was orn, . . :l . , . d ,·th stars or with astronomical images,
·1·1 , ·cilmg ecorate w1 , ' . 11 I
capitals. 1c c
l
riality, the naos was the metaphorical image of the sky, because a form of the _ _·
'-' l
ne other t 1an t e s Y·
. h k· At the bottoms of the wa s, tie
. . _ f
gud, rnatcrializ<:d in his statue, permanently resided in it. Everything in the tern,. . as the decans, is no d h I rd of the temple, leadmg prncess10n~ o
ple converged on this ultimate point. •. h pproaches the go ' t e O . h' c l or eco-
-~ra~ ad "fi ld. "personifications of nomes and vanous. geo?rap lha . _. t
/1tfd~ an . , . e :• meta ihorically represent Egypt, w!uch trorn t e a~ue_n
-'91)llllCentttKS, v.ho _r , ld On the remainder ol the wall~, the deLota-_
THE 1EMPI.E AS MICROCOS,W f • a- the entire wor • . · 11 t
paint o ·view wt,. t . ·e toward the bolv of holies. Consisting pnnc1pa '. o
As the dwelling of the divine statue, the temple was a sacred place, as opposed to · uon leads from tie en ram h. h ·mns· or calendars, it functioned as an un-
the prlJfane world that surrounded it; Lhe naos represented Lhe image ol lhe sky rif;ualscenes, but Jlso 0f texts sue as y f -. - double point of view, both
th 1 •£ fthetempleandofthecosmos rcma
on earth. The temple was the perpetually renewed point of irruption 0f the di- age of e ue o .
vine into the world as constituted and organized into a cosmos; but because, in .:..,al
.....
and symbolic.
: . . }.t
d' . .
enderecl no contra 1ct1on,
the temr)le was an en-
Egypt, il was obligatory to make incessant reference to the hrst Occasion, it was By a trick of nurrors t 1-1 eng ld b tat tl1e same time, Lhe melJphorical
- l , the profane wor ' u . .
also the place where the existing emerged al the beginning of the world. From c}ave of the.sacrec Ill - B . ssuring its uninterrupted functtonmg, Egyp-
the New Kingdom on, the temple as image of the primordial mound was a topic . e of this world as co:-mos. Ya d th and the or-
: : could maintain the beneficent presence of the sacre on ear
of Egyptian texts. Thus, on the base of one of the obelisks of Hatshepsut bet\veen
th(' fourth and Fifth pylons of the tcmpk of Karnak, we read that il was "the der of the cosmos.
horiwn on earth, the ;mgust mound of the First Occasion." The same theme
would be greatly expanded on in the lengthy dedicatory inscriptions on the Sec-
THE cuLT: RITUALS AND LITURGIES
ond Pylon, with their eulogy of Thebes written under Plokmy Vlll; the lexls in-
sist on the equivalence between the temple and the mythic place where A mun . . , , l he dwelling place of his effigy, which was
set foot on the first Occasion. In the same way, from Dynasty 18 on, the small If the temple was the_ hou~t: of t1_1e goc ,ht t .. ther a ~eritahle part of his being, en-
l . J, manimate image . u ia .
temple of Medinel Habu was called the ''precise l or sacred) place of the hrsl Oc- moret1anas1mpe, . d t·ntcaretokccpitahw,tosat-
T£ h' ffi v reqmre cons a
casion." In the late theology of Amun, highly colored by outside influences, dowed with a sort ot i e, t is e g, . f "··1t·isf\' .,,,11case" is hetep, a word
d 'ti ,E y·pL1antenn or s, /•'t · ' •
which began to be elaborated in Dynasty 25 and spread during the Ptolemaic Pe- isfy and appease t h ego ~- 1e, g . , I· ·1 fthis service enabled the proper
1 • f~'rmgrs J The rt gn an Yo
that also Ges1gnates o e •... . uentl . that of the world that depended on
riod, this primordial place came to play a fundamental role, for il sheltered the
co;~e1
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-
functioning of the temple and,
the god~. The la~ter we~e respon;i
responsible for it, and it was th yd
w~:
r th: functioning, but humans were also
had to assure this service. Thus, see a
th t cholars have sometimes wished to
"'!e
derstand and explain the far vaster symbolic role of the temple. The place where close connection between go?s .an me_nh : s h do ut des, but which was in
summarize somewhat simplistically wit t e p rase
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 fact more subtle. d . f di'fied and ritualized acts, both
. f h d mprise a senes o co
which the late texts are quite explicit, is well known, The wall that surrounded The service o t e go .co . . of festival days. According to a
and protected it, in certain cases constructed with recesses and projections, or in the daily service and 111 t?e so~e~n h~:~:~ing who represented the divine
with undulations, was perhaps at the same time the image of Nun, who did not principle that had always existed m hgyp 'i ~ authorized to carry out the
cease to be present in the world that emerged from him; this widespread inter- on earth because of his office, was! eon y:;r~~is was the reason for his om-
pretation should, however, be treated with caution, for it is weakly supported by cult, that is, to stand face to face with thlle g. d. the decorated walls of tern-
. t ti· n in a peno s on
nipresence and his represen a 0
Egyptian texts describing temples. Even within the temenos, Nun was present in

90 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Gons
pies, facing its divine protagonists while making the ritual gestures. But becau
he was only one man, specialized priests took his place, fulfilling the conditio:
~ecessary to this se~vice. Study of the "grammar" of the temple will also shed
hght on the symbolic role of a certain number of rituals.
THE DAILY CULT RITUAL
The texts of papyri in B~rlin, represe~tations from the temple of Sethos I at Aby.
dos, and those from vanous 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 withou;
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-memoire 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 ofthis 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.
'l'hen began the god's meal, which was ready in the adjctcent room. Only one
tray of fn.-~h bread entered the sanctuary, hnwever, and it would remain thet:e un-
til the next morning. Perhaps there were practical reasons for this frugality: the
bread was ~he sole foodstuff that could remain unspoiled for an entire day in the
confined au 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-
preC'iated that of rolling food. But it was abo thl'. case that a svmbolic offering
sufficed, a ~ingle item removed from the totality of the dishes c:rnsecrated tn th~
god, to nourish his effigy and his ba, which ca1~e to join it. As for the rest of the
food presented in abundance on the altars arranged throughout the edifice for
91
S GODS ON EARTH
1'11
itS lord and for the deities who surrounded him, it would later be redistributed
the personnel of the temple. .
to Of all the foods offered to deities, we must pause over the meat sacnfices,
,which played a signifi~nt r~le in m~st ancient ~eligio~s. The Greeks esta~lished
extremely rigid codification of this key practice, which could be orgamzed by
~JDagistrate or a private person, and which was followed by a publ_ic banquet;
also encounter this phenomenon at Rome. In Egypt, we find no ntual for the
:ughter, carving, and distribution of the pieces of meat intended ~or the h~lo-
causts or, more often, for simple grills. Nevertheless, from scattered information,
-1 seems clear that in this procedure, whose result and goal was to cause the
:roma 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
coJDpletely deny the existence of hu~an sacrifice, a question t~at_ itself raises
many questions and cannot be settled ma formal manner. The v1ctrm 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 slc1tue 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 he constuned. The holy of holies was once again closed.
Two other services punctuated tl1l'. day: at noon and in thl'. evening, that is,
when the sun reaC'hed its zenith and at sunset. These were much bridcr than the
morning service, and the holy of holies was not reopened. At midday, the offi-
 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
se(Vice, evidently on the days of lunar festivals. A larger number of officiants
to0k 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
indudcd several of them. \Ve know them first of all from calendars, some of
which, from the New Kingdom on, have corne down to us on papyrw,. These cal
endars contain lists that were valid for all Egypt, the most important festivals be-
ing celebrated evervwherc, even if they rnntained local variants here or there. ln
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, UendMa, Esna, and Phi
Jae-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 Gons
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, 4 performative, even when no one came to ammate 1t.
represented on the walls of the colonnade of the latter temple. At Medin et 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 ~
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 Khn um; 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-memoire 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 templcofEdfu, took place outside the temple walk 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 tern pie a vast condensation of the entire liturgical and mythological
apparalus that pcrlained to the tern pie. From that tin11.· on, the way in whid1 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
95
c:iould say that the temple was capable of functioning on its own, without priests,
· tor the combination of images and texts on ~he wa_lls were in and of themselves
Festivals can be divided into several categories, according to the point of view
dopted. Scholars have contrasted the solemn commemorations that took place
1 •thin the building with those that entailed a procession, or even a voyage, on
; part of the gods. Thus, the first day of Thoth, the "Openin~ of the :ear;' af-
ter the crucial passage of the five epagomenal days, was a maJor day mall the
teroples of Egypt, since it was necessary _to assure the ma~tenanc: of order, a
new starting point for the normal unfoldmg 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 fr,stival of the victory of Horus to assess that it indeed
reactualizes the ddta rnvth of the contendings of Horus and Seth, dmvn 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 ~,erpctuation of the myth parti(ipatcd in the maintenance of
tht: order of the world and in the triumph of /v1aat. The festivals of tht: month of
Khoiak, which we know especially from Dendara and about which Herodotus
provides some information, are clearly the commemoration of the murder of
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goos
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 oflinguistics 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
1'IIB GOOS ON EARTH 97
}ord." in the course of which the pharaoh purified the temple with fumigations
{incense. In addition to these scenes, there are the dedication formulas that of-
~n 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 roythological 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-
 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Goos
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
99
lfl!O 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-
·caI ~easons. This circle could be enlarged to include deities from geographically
:earby 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-memoire 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 RITUAL/ST 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 Goos
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-
f!IB 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 Korn
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:
0 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 a Edfou au temps des
Ptolemees, vol.1, Bibliotheque d'Etude 20/1 (Cairo, 1944), pp. 184-86.

102 PART I. THE WORLD OF THE Gons
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 ofEdfu 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 oflife. 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 oflearning 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 ofTebtunis in the Faiyum yielded hun-
dreds of papyri or papvrus fragrncnts, mostly written in hieratic, Demotic, or
CrL'ek and dating for the most part to the second centur; of our own era. They
touched on all areas of priestly knowledge, which was still very mud1 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.
Tlfl:" CATI:"GORIJiS OF CI,LRGY
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
103
·ety when their divine master was a powerful god and they were highly
~~ . .
d in the hierarchy. Moreover, the hierarchy could, as m the case of Amun,
pJa<:e ea veritable power or counter-power in conflict with the pharaoh. In the
=::st temples, the personnel ~as ~educed to ~ mi~i~um and was li~e differ-
. t d· but things were otherwise m the large mstitut10ns. The officiants were
enua
callede"servants
' •
of the god," a phrase that scholars habitua11y trans1ate as "priests
· "
or"'prophets." .
The clergy of Amun had a "first prophet" who was at the summit of the hte~-
a,chy, as well as a second, third, and fourth prophet, each ~he _sole holder of his
rank, and then a mass of undifferentiated prophets. In prmc1ple, on~y the first
prophet had access to the holy ofh~lies, while th~ others, accompamed by lec-
tor-priests or ritualists, whose specialty was readmg the _papyrus ro~s, stopped
t the hall of offerings. A large part of the personnel consisted of ordmary wabs,
!pure priests." The latter conformed to the minimum of required pu~ity but di~
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 belon~ to the clergies?~ goddess~s,
though not exclusively; for instance, many female smgers and mus1C1ans partic-
ipated in the cult of Amun at Thebes. In the Ethiopian and Saite P~riods, the Di-
vine Adoratrice, who was consecrated to Amun and sworn to celibacy, played a
predominant role vis-a-vis the first prophet_ of the go~. A crowd_ of subordi~ate
servants-pastophoroi (bearers of sacred obJects), sacrificers, artisans of various
sorts, and gardeners-constituted the remainder of the personnel. In c~rtain
clergies, the high priest bore a specific title, such as the "greatest of artisans"
(other interpretations are possible), who headed the priesthood of Ptah, ~r ~he
"greatest of seers(?)" at Heliopolis. From Dynasty 26 on, there was a flounshmg
of obsolete titles that suited the taste of the day, and many prophets oflocal 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. Si nee priests were only royal sub
stitutes who acted hy 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 re•warding 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 Goos

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 PART II
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 THE LIVING AND THE DEAD
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 leam
from the annals of the priests of Karnak. There were thus, on the one hand, the
dosed 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.