I just finished reading Jodi Picoult’s The Book of Two Ways and it really got me thinking about this idea that maybe Judaism was built as an opposition to Egyptian religion.
Judaism’s one G-d vs Egypt’s many gods. Judaism’s laws against mutilating the body vs Egypt’s entire embalming process. Judaism’s rejection of idols vs Egypt’s embracing of statues and temples. Judaism’s lack of discussion about the afterlife vs Egypt’s obsession with it.
If we were to look at the religions in this historic context you’d probably see Judaism’s entire ethos and creation as a rejection of Egyptian life.
Now of course we can’t deny influences from other polytheistic religions at the time but Egypt is the one that’s primarily referenced in the Torah. And geographically it’s the closest.
What do you think?
ooh boy, this is gonna be controversial to be sure, but interested in seeing what world you come up with free of these absolute religious monoliths steamrolling literally every other religion out of existence
Does anyone know when the term Kemetism/Kemeticism first developed? And what did the ancient Egyptians, Greek, Romans, etc. call the religion/culture practiced by the Egyptians? The terms "Hellenism" and "Judaism" date back to antiquity; was "Kemetism" or another term ever used back then to refer to the Egyptian way of life?
Like... why don't we worship Ra or Zeus? You could die back then for saying these guys don't exist and now you would be crazy to worship them.
I know that Christianity started with Jesus but the old testament is at least thousand years older... not to mention Hindu as older than all other religions.
What was the pivoting point people stopped believing ancient gods and it moved into mythological stories category? Wouldn't the same happen to current religions given enough time?
It did really have all the right ingredients present. Paradise or Punishment, Order vs Chaos, religious texts and strong priesthood. So, Egyptian paganism reforms with a more codified order of events and a strong emphasis on the book of the dead and other aspect of life and the afterlife. How do interactions with the Byzantines and later Arabs change?
I'm curious to know about the origins of Hellenic paganism. If any historian can tell me about this then yeah. Thank you.
When looking at the Narmer palette, I couldn't help but notice how distinctly Egyptian it looked, not only the style of the art and how they show the King, but also the gods being shown. Despite being a religion that was more than 3k years old (the palette is from c. 3100 BCE so I'm just "assuming" that Ancient Egypt as we know it kinda dies past 0CE, that non-existent date), they still had depictions of, for instance, Hathor, who would continue to be an important god for thousands of years in that region.
Now obviously the role and relevance of the individual Ancient Egyptian gods probably changed a lot, but still we see, in the sort of "nascent dynastic" period of Ancient Egypt, with the same gods as what they had in the New Kingdom! So how did their mythology (stories, gods, etc.) change over the centuries?
Did more stories get "invented" over time, have we ever been able to distinguish vaguely when a certain god, ceremony, festival or story (i.e. Sekhmet killing humanity, only to be duped into drinking beer tainted with ochre, turning her into Hathor and saving humankind) comes into existence?
Mummification appears to have been a gradually complicated process (simple sand burial to a complex ritual involving many layers of wrappings and coverings, etc.) but does that check out for other things?
In other parts of the world you hear about local gods reimagined as Christian saints, pagan festivals becoming Christian holidays, religious sites reused as Churches etc. In Egypt, did the Coptic Church preserve any elements of ancient Egyptian religion? What that religion still even practiced in a recognizable form when Egypt was Christianized?
I recognize that “ancient Egypt” covers an immensely large topic but most things I’ve read and encountered focus heavily on nobles and leaders getting into the after life /having a good afterlife, and everyone else helping them do that.
What was the average person’s feelings toward the after-life (and overall religious life) outside of the pharaoh?
Are there any books featuring pre-Christian religions/mythos from indigenous populations from around the world. Especially those from Australia, Africa and the Americas.
Edit: Thanks for all the suggestions I'll check them all out. I also forgot to mention a preference for non-fiction as im doing research for a comic of mine. Though I've been meaning to read more fiction as well so it works out.
A Twitter threads going around in my native language claimed that the Nile River was comparibly more navigable than the Euphrates and Tigris area, thus led to Ancient Egyptian having more a more uniform cultural and religious identity with the worships being focused to the Pharaohs as representation of Osiris, while the swamps of Mesopotamia led to Ancient Sumerian developing a more fractured identity with each city having their own deities and the "head" of this pantheon depends on which city managed to subjugate the rest. How true is this claim and how much did geography affect the development of religion in the Near East?
