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What can Ancient Egypt tell us about the development of religion and civilization?
The answer is: a great deal, more than I could possibly fit into a single episode. As part of a broader research project into economics, I’ve been studying various histories, and the history of Ancient Egypt has been particularly fascinating and informative. One of the world’s earliest civilizations, it extends over 3000 years of history, from the Bronze Age and through the Iron Age into classical antiquity. As I mentioned in a recent episode, the Great Pyramid was more ancient to Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, than Cleopatra is to us.
Let’s begin by situating ourselves in history, putting the present in the context of the past. What is a civilization? The political scientist Samuel Huntington described it as the biggest “we” within which humans identify themselves. In his famous book The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington identified nine such civilizations—depending on how you count—in the present era: Western, Latin American, Orthodox, Buddhist, Sinic, Hindu, Japanese, Islamic, and African. The Buddhist and African civilizations are considered (by Huntington) to be border cases because of their comparative cultural and political disunity. If we were to think about civilizations the way we think about technology—and I would argue that civilization is a kind of technology—then we might think about the present civilizations as being “3rd generation,” depending on how you think about it.
About 12,000 years ago, humans invented agriculture and began a transition from an exclusively gatherer-hunter lifestyle to a more sedentary one. This is the Neolithic Period: the same stone tools as the prior era (the Paleolithic), but with agriculture. During this time, people would largely have identified themselves as belonging their tribe or village, or possibly city, as a few small ones had arisen here and there. So we might think of this as “civilization generation 0.1.”
Towards the end of this period, we start to see a kind of consolidation of peoples into the first civilizations. I think the reason that this happened at the time it did is fairly straightforward: prior to agriculture, you couldn’t tie power to land. You had to follow the food, and so it was hard to get a consistent advantage over other groups. But if you can stay in one place and grow food—more food than you’d be able to gather directly from nature—then you gain a comparative advantage over others depending on your particular geographical circumstances. If you can grow a lot of food, you can give it to others in exchange for military service, putting you in a position to subjugate anyone whose land doesn’t yield as much. Your power is now tied to the land, and you can use that power to gain control of more land. So some groups began to dominate just as a result of their incidentally being in control of preferable land, and that created a positive feedback loop: more land, more power; more power, more land. These coalesced into the first generation of civilizations: the Xia Dynasty along the Yellow River in East Asia, the Indus Valley Civilization along the Indus river in South Asia, the Sumerian civilization in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in the near Middle East, and Egyptian Civilization, along the Nile in North Africa. Bronze technology also appeared around this time, and civilizations started appearing in the New World continents not much later, in the Andes Mountains and in Mesoamerica.
Then we have the classical civilizations, the second generation civilizations of the era of the Greek and Roman empires which arose following the advent of the Iron Age, and those civilizations were the predecessors of the civilizations of today. Remember that this model, though, is neither universal nor uniform. There are still gatherer-hunter peoples living today, and the number of what I’m calling “generations” of civilizations and the transitions between them are not always clear cut and certainly didn’t happen everywhere at the same time.
Of the first generation civilizations, we have the most information about the Egyptian. They lived in a very arid land and documented their existence in the form of writing—often carved into stone—and great stone monuments. This gives us our best look at central features of our 3rd-gen civilizations—religion, the state, warfare, technology, culture—as they existed in an earlier stage of development. As Egyptian civilization extended into the classical era, we also have documentation by the early historians of that period, such as Herodetus, so we get another window into the development of civilization by looking at it from the perspective of a second generation civilization.
I mentioned a bit earlier that power began to consolidate into civilizations around geographical areas of favorable farmland, and for those purposes, it’s hard to beat the Nile Valley. Until the 20th century, when the Nile was controlled by damming, the Nile flooded every year, irrigating the land and depositing a layer of silt rich in nutrients. In the 4th millennium BCE, two kingdoms coalesced along the Nile’s banks, one in Upper Egypt in the south, and one in Lower Egypt in the north, along the Nile Delta. These kingdoms had arisen from the earlier Naqada cultures, and we see among their artifacts various engraved maceheads. A mace is a simple weapon, basically just a rock on a stick, and those rocks became a potent symbol of power for the Naqada people. These maceheads were decorative—some were made out of ceramic or other fragile materials and obviously not intended for actual use in combat—and this shows us the meaning vested in physical power by the Naqada people (Shaw, 2000).
Around 3150 BCE, a little over 5000 years ago, Upper and Lower Egypt were consolidated into a single kingdom by the first Pharaoh, King Narmer (by the way, Pharaohs almost always had multiple names and were given still further names later on by the Greeks, so if you research this yourself, you might see different names for the same people). This initiated the Early Dynastic Period of the First and Second Dynasties. This was followed by the Old Kingdom of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties, lasting from about 4,600 years ago to about 4,100 years ago. This period saw the earliest monumental architecture in the history of Egypt, including the pyramids.
At the end of the Sixth Dynasty, the civilization largely collapsed. The Seventh through Tenth Dynasties occured over a period of only about 125 years, though we have very little historical evidence from the period, which we call the First Intermediate Period, and are far from certain about those divisions. Literature from early on in the subsequent era, the Middle Kingdom, depicts the First Intermediate Period as being a time of uncertainty and turmoil. The Middle Kingdom comprises the Eleventh and Twelfth Dynasties, and then we have the Second Intermediate Period, during which Egypt was ruled by a foreign power they called the Hyksos. The Hyksos were expelled during the early Eighteenth Dynasty, which initiated the New Kingdom, the golden age of Egypt. The New Kingdom was ended by a period of global civilizational collapse whose cause is still unknown to us. This began the Third Intermediate Period, followed by the Late Period, during which Egypt was conquered by the Achaemenid Persians, who were themselves subsequently conquered by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. The Greeks were then conquered by the Romans, but Egypt remained under the control of a dynasty of Greek monarchs until the death of Queen Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE, at which point the Romans took control of Egypt, resulting in its effective absorbtion into classical civilization.
One period of Egyptian history bears special mention: the Amarna Period, which took place during the 18th Dynasty, in the early part of the New Kingdom era, in the 14th century BCE. Ancient Egypt is remarkable for its cultural conservatism: over the course of 3000 years, very little changed in terms of art, religion, and other cultural markers. Central to Egyptian culture was the concept of ma’at, which encompasses, truth, balance, order, law, morality, and justice. Egypt, for the Egyptians, was part of (and at the top of) the divine order of ma’at, which was changeless and eternal. Our modern notions of continual change and progress would have been abhorrent to them, literally anathema.
The only deviation was the reign of Akhenaten and, to a much lesser degree, his immediate successors Smenkhkare, Neferneferuaten, Tutankhamun, and Ay. In the fifth year of his reign, Ahkenaten (then Amenhotep IV) proclaimed that the supreme god was not the sun god Re but rather the Aten, the disk of the sun itself. Not long after, Akhenaten forbade the worship of the traditional Egyptian gods and declared that the Aten is the only god, creating the world’s first monotheistic religion. Akhenaten built a new capital in the middle of the desert and withdrew from the traditional activities of leadership. After his death, his successors took steps towards restoring the old order, but the Pharaoh Horemheb, who succeeded Pharaoh Ay, took things much further and sought to eradicate Akhenaten’s legacy completely.
One thing that is consistently visible throughout the history of Egyptian civilization is the power of words. Words are incredibly powerful for the Egyptians. One Egyptian myth describes the world as having been spoken into existence by the Ptah. Pharaohs’ various names were believed to invoke the character and spirit of their reign. Individuals’ true names were believed to convey power over that person and so were often concealed (David, 2002). Certain incantations had magical power. And this isn’t just the case with Egypt: take the English word “spell,” as in “a magic spell.” The relation to the word “spell,” as in “spelling out the letters of a word,” is not at all coincidental: they actually have the same etymology.
I have a theory about this that ties into theories about how religion might have first developed. Keep in mind that this is completely hypothetical. I think these facts about Egyptian religion, as well as various others, are good evidence but aren’t enough to prove that I’m right.
Okay, how do you know that signifiers are not the same as the things signified? If I say the word “car,” how do you know that the word is not in some way the same as an actual car? Kind of a silly question, right? Why would they be in the first place? But think about pre-symbolic humans who had no prior concept of representation. As representation began to appear in human culture, I think the instinctual position was actually to believe that the signifier and the signified are connected in some deeper way than just the signifier-signified relationship itself, and here’s why: pre-symbolic humans had at least some understanding of cause and effect. After all, we had been using tools for far longer than we had been talking. So how does a sign—like a word, for example—cause the concept in question to be represented to you? Well, consider how natural signs would signify their causes to our pre-symbolic human friend. What does a sound in the bushes signify? Could be a predator, could be prey, could be a lot of things, but one way or the other, it signifies the presence of something. There is a direct ontological relationship between the sound and the significance of the sound: the sound is there because something is there making the sound. So I think that the natural assumption for a proto-symbolic human would be that some ontological relationship is present in the signifier-signified relationship: the presence of the word means that the thing signified is present in some way.
Now, perhaps you’re saying, “Yeah, okay, but when your paleolithic friend says ‘tiger’ and a tiger doesn’t appear you’re going to figure out pretty quickly that the word is just an arbitrary sound that isn’t ontologically connected to actual tigers.” I’m actually not convinced that that’s the case. Not entirely, anyway. Let’s go back to that question: how do you know that signifiers are not the same as the things signified? What are the conditions required for being able to ask that question in the first place? What kind of words do you need? Second-order words. You need words about words, symbols that represent other symbols. And you don’t get second-order words until after you get first-order words. So there’s going to be a period of human history after people are able to represent things but before anyone is able to properly formulate the question of whether they’re actually connected. And while people are certainly going to understand that they don’t have to hide from the word “tiger” the same way they would from an actual tiger, I don’t think this is sufficient to lead them all the way to the conclusion that the relationship between signifier and signified is completely arbitrary and only rarely ontological (as in the case of onomotopoaeia). I think they would naturally believe that a word is something of the thing that the word means.
What then would be the nature of this quasi-reality? I’m going even further out on a limb here, but the implication would seem to be that there is a kind of invisible substance to the world in which all things partake. The word “spiritual”, which is derived from the Latin word meaning breath, seems an apt descriptor, as breath is the physical substance of words (although any real connection to the hypothetical idea I’m describing here is almost certainly spurious). Whatever you call it, we can see how this invisible substrate of reality would lead people to believe in a spiritual afterlife.
The Ancient Egyptian treatment of death is quite famous. The Great Pyramid, after all, one of the greatest monuments of the ancient world, was built as a tomb for the Pharaoh Khufu. Tombs of other Pharaohs discovered in the Valley of the Kings were lavishly decorated. Notable in particular among these decorations are the Pyramid Texts of the Pharaoh Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty of the Old Kingdom, dating to the 24th century BCE, about 4400 years ago. These texts, inscribed on the walls of Unas’s tomb, describe his journey through the afterlife. Indeed, these texts in general—those inscribed on the walls of tombs and the insides of coffins—were believed to be the causal force of the transformation of the dead person into an akh, the eternal spiritual form of a postmortem human (Allen, 2005). In one section of the Pyramid Texts of Unas, which we call the “Cannibal Hymn,” Unas arrives in the afterworld and proceeds to eat the gods in order to gain their power. It seems to be that the Egyptians believed that, by writing something down, it would actually come to pass.
It’s worth considering, I think, how the religion and culture of Ancient Egypt may have influenced the development of Christianity. There were certainly many opportunities for cultural exchange. According to the Book of Exodus, the Israelites had settled in Egypt after Joseph became a government official there, and lived there peacefully for four hundred years (though such a long duration is chronologically unlikely [Grant, 2012]), until a new Pharaoh came to power “who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8), likely Ramesses II, widely considered to be the greatest Pharaoh in the history of Egypt. According to Exodus, this Pharaoh feared the Israelites’ growing population and was worried that they might join with some enemy against Egypt, and so enslaved them, until they were freed by the intervention of Moses and his brother Aaron.
Whether or not this narrative occurred exactly as it did in the Bible—and we have good reason to believe it didn’t—we do have good reason to believe that the Israelites were in Egypt for a time. According to historian Michael Grant, it was the Exodus which constituted the Israelites as a single people. Prior to that, during their time in Egypt, they would have been disunited tribes sharing certain linguistic and cultural features, such as a polytheistic religion. During their time in Egypt they would have likely absorbed some elements of Egyptian culture but also would have sought to differentiate themselves from it, as this has been a consistent theme in their history.
Curiously, even if they had been in Egypt for only a century prior to the Exodus, that would have placed them in Egypt during the Amarna Period. One wonders whether contact with the first monotheistic religion influenced the Israelites in their development of the second, but that’s highly speculative. After all, the Israelites did not become fully monotheistic until the Babylonian exile, about 700 years later (Grant, 2012).
Another curious feature of Egyptian culture and religion was the role of the king. Upon ascending to the throne, the king became Horus-on-earth. This is not to say that the king became identical to the god Horus, but rather that they became the incarnation of Horus, allowing the divinity of Horus and of the divine order in general to be accessible to humankind (David, 2002). This situation bears a remarkable similarity to the role of Jesus Christ in Christianity. Jesus is believed by Christians not to have been identical with God, but an incarnate form of God who, through his teachings and his death, performed an intermediary role in the lives of humankind.
Let’s consider what this society would have looked like to one born into it. We’ll take as our avatar in this undertaking a man of common birth whose lifespan occurred over some duration of the New Kingdom, the most prosperous era of Egyptian history. Not that a man’s perspective is any more valuable in general than anyone else’s, but for our purposes, given the patriarchal nature of Egyptian society, that choice allows us access to some particularly revealing facets of Ancient Egyptian culture, as well as patriarchy, religion, and hegemony in general.
When you’re born, you’re given two names, one public, and one secret and known only to you and your mother. You learn from your parents that you have been born into a world of perfect order. The world was created (as I mentioned earlier) by the gods from a primeval chaos of darkness and infinite waters, created perfect and maintained in perpetual balance by ma’at. Each day the sun rises, and each night it sets. The moon cycles through its phases, with the cycle repeating every lunar month. And each year, without fail, the Nile floods, irrigating and fertilizing the soil and providing for an almost unfailingly plentiful harvest. The world exists in an ordered hierarchy with Egypt at the top, and Egypt possesses its own hierarchy with the Pharaoh at the top, uniting the divine and terrestrial worlds and maintaining the balance and order of things. Nothing ever changes. Everything is as it should be and as it must be.
You join or are conscripted into the military and rise quickly through the ranks, participating in many great battles, plundering foreign lands and bringing the riches back to Egypt. After many years, you become a general, leading armies alongside the Pharaoh himself, gaining fame and glory throughout the land. You marry the Pharaoh’s eldest daughter, and when the Pharaoh dies, you ascend to the throne (Ancient Egypt did not have clear rules of ascension and sons did not always inherit the throne; often, one became Pharaoh by marrying into it). You know exactly how it is that you will attain the divinity of Horus, because you partook of the various feasts and ceremonies that occurred during the year of coronation of the last Pharaoh. The priests tell you that, through this process, you will become Horus-on-Earth. Do you have the least question in your mind that this might not actually be the case? Of course not, why would you? From your perspective, everything that you’ve been told about Egypt and about cosmology and about yourself seem to accord perfectly with the way things actually are, and given that you’re now the king of the most powerful nation in the world, you’re certainly not incentivized to question any of it. When the priests tell you which rituals to perform and which words to say so that the Nile continues to flood, you do as they say, and the Nile does indeed continue to flood. What reason could you possibly have to believe that you’re not actually causing it? You certainly would never take the risk of not performing the rituals. Weak floods sometimes occurred which strained the food supplies and threatened famine; the total absence of a flood would be devastating to the nation.
If you caught my last episode, you might remember my discussion of how we’re inclined to take the world that we’re born into as being the natural order of things. For Ancient Egypt, this effect would be especially potent. From the perspective of someone in the New Kingdom, you’re part of a natural order that has lasted for over a thousand years. You’re surrounded by great monuments built by your ancestors. You might be aware that there had been periods of decline in the past, but that would only underscore for you the importance of maintaining the cosmic order. In this extreme example, we can see how certain false beliefs can be self-perpetuating. This also ties into another idea from a previous episode, this one being my partner’s, which we called the divine reward attribution fallacy. Generalizing that concept as much as possible, it describes a situation in which someone interprets earthly prosperity as being a sign of divine favor; then, if this person should become prosperous for whatever circumstantial reasons, they will believe that God endorses their behavior, even if that behavior is completely unrelated or only indirectly related to their prosperity.
In the case of the Ancient Egyptians, their prosperity was largely a result of their having happened to be the people occupying the right place—the Nile Valley, one of the most fertile flood plains in the world—at the right time, the right time being after the invention of agriculture. But they interpreted their prosperity as being a sign that everything they believed and everything they did—from their religion to their monarchy to their aggressive foreign policy—was good and right.
It is worth noting, though, that Ancient Egypt featured several women monarchs—some of the first in recorded history—and possibly even a few trans or non-binary monarchs. Merneith ruled as regent in the First Dynasty while waiting for her son Den to come of age. Setibhor ruled as regent in the Fifth Dynasty, though little is known of her or her reign. Sobekneferu ruled in the Twelfth Dynasty not as a regent but rather with the full royal titulary (note that the Ancient Egyptian word for king was used by all monarchs regardless of gender; whether the word is gender-neutral or whether it was masculine and adopted by non-male monarchs regardless is not known to me); likewise Hatshepsut of the Eighteenth Dynasty, who in some statues was depicted with more masculine features or wearing the famous royal false beard. Akhenaten—the heretic pharaoh I mentioned earlier—is an interesting case. Artwork during the Amarna period was the only deviation in Egypt’s history from the classical style, and depictions of Akhenaten often depicted the pharaoh with androgynous or feminine features such as wide hips and the suggestion of breasts.
You’ll remember that I also mentioned that Pharaoh Horemheb worked to eradicate the legacy of the Amarna period. Akhenaten’s religion was quite interesting, and seems, to me, to have arisen from a genuine spiritual insight about the nature of the divine. The hymns that Akhenaten wrote in praise of the Aten are quite stirring, and in general, he seems to have been a rather peaceable person. He was not interested in acquiring riches through warfare or expanding the kingdom, and Amarna artwork depicts him as being affectionate towards his family. But none of this mattered to the established elite of Egyptian society, and as soon as the opportunity came to re-established the old order, they took it, and worked to make it seem as though the whole affair had never even happened. Now, perhaps this desire to restore the old order came from an authentic faith in the old gods, but we can at least say that their actions were highly motivated by the power relationships of the old order.
All in all, I think it’s important to realize that our modern civilization is in many ways a continuation of ancient civilization rather than something of an entirely different nature. The details differ, but we’re still the same species of living being with the same basic needs, as well as the same basic flaws and biases. We’re still heavily reliant on our environment, and I think that this is especially important to remember, because the conditions of our society make that connection somewhat invisible, whereas the ancient Egyptians were reminded of it daily. And as much as we’ve worked to separate out religion as a distinct domain of human affairs, its roots are deeply intertwined with every other aspect of our societies.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
Allen, J. (2005). The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts. Society of Biblical Literature.
David, R. (2002). Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt. Penguin Books.
Grant, M. (2012). The history of ancient Israel. Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Shaw, I. (2000). The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press.