Egyptian Religion Origin Egyptian religious beliefs and practices were closely integrated into Egyptian society of the historical period (from c. 3000 BCE).Religious phenomena were pervasive, so much so that it is not meaningful to view religion as a single entity that cohered as a system. Nevertheless, religion must be seen against a background of potentially nonreligious human activities and [Link] (5th century BCE) remarked that the Egyptians were the most religious of people. During its more than 3,000 years of development, Egyptian religion underwent significant changes of emphasis and practice, but in all periods religion had a clear consistency in character and [Link] is inappropriate to define religion narrowly, as consisting onlyin the cult of the gods and in human piety. Religious behaviour encompassed contact with the dead, practices such as divination and oracles, and magic, which mostly exploited divine instruments and associations. There were two essential foci of public religion: the king and the gods. Both are among the most characteristic features of Egyptian civilization. The king was the centre of human society, the guarantor of order for the gods, the recipient of god- given benefits including life itself, and the benevolent ruler of the world for humanity. He was ultimately responsible for the cults of the dead, both for his predecessors in office and for the dead in general. His dominance in religion corresponded to his central political role: from late predynastic times (c. 3100 BCE),state organization was based on kingship and on the service of officials for the king. The king's principal original title, the Horus name, proclaimed that he was an aspect of the chief god Horus, a sky god who was depicted as a falcon. The king had a unique status between humanity and the gods, partook in the world of the gods, and constructed great, religiously motivated funerary monuments for his afterlife. The task of the king as the protagonist of human society was to retain the benevolence of the gods in maintaining order against disorder. This ultimately pessimistic view of the cosmos was associated principally with the sun god and the solar cycle. It formed a powerful legitimation of king and elite in their task of preserving [Link] king was almost always depicted as the person offering to the gods, although templerituals were performed by priests. The divinized king coexisted with his mortal self, and as many nonroyal individuals as kings became deified after [Link] gods, the king, humanity, and the dead existed together in the cosmos. Egyptian religion was polytheistic. The gods who inhabited the bounded and ultimately perishable cosmos varied in nature and [Link] were neither all- powerful nor all-knowing. Their power was immeasurably greater than that of human beings, and they had the ability to live almost indefinitely, to survive fatal wounds, to be in more than one place at once, to affect people in visible and invisible ways, and so forth. The characters of the gods were not neatly defined. Most had a principal association, such as that of Re with the sun or that of the goddess Hathor with women, but therewas much overlap, especially among the leading deities. In general, the more closely circumscribed a deity's character, the less powerful that deity was. Egyptian gods were renowned for their wide variety of forms, including animal forms and mixed forms with an animal head on a human body. The most important deities were the sun god, who had several names and aspects and was associated with many supernatural beings in a solar cycle modeled on the alternation of night and day, and Osiris, the god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. With his consort, Isis, Osiris became dominant in many contexts during the 1st millennium BCE, when solar worship was in relative [Link] this pessimism, the official presentation of the cosmos on the monuments was positive and optimistic, showing the king and the godsin perpetual reciprocity and harmony. This implied contrast reaffirmed the fragile order. Deities had principal manifestations, and most were associated with one or more species of animal. For gods the most important forms were the falcon and bull, and for goddesses the cow, cobra, vulture, and lioness. Rams were widespread, while some manifestations were as modest as the millipede of the god Sepa. Some gods were very strongly linked to particular animals, as Sebek was with the crocodile and Khepri with the scarab [Link] could express aspects of a deity’s nature. Apart from major deities—gods who received a cult or had a significant cosmic role—there were important minor figures. Several of these marginal beings had grotesque forms and variable [Link] number of deities was large and was not fixed. New ones appeared, and someceased to be worshipped. Deities were grouped in various ways. The most ancient known grouping is the ennead, which is probably attested from the 3rd dynasty (c. 2650-2575 BCE).The most common grouping, principally in the New Kingdom and later, was the [Link] important ordering of deities was syncretism, a term with a special meaning for Egyptian religion. Decorum and the affirmation of order reinforced each [Link] beliefs are known from monuments and documents created by and for the king and the small elite. The beliefs and practices of the rest of the people are poorly [Link] status of personal religion in the context of official cults is poorly [Link]and the next world dominate both the archaeological record and popular modern conceptions of Egyptian religion. This dominance is determined to a great extent by the landscape of the country, since tombs were placed if possible in the desert. Vast resources were expended on creating prestigious burial places for absolute rulers or wealthy officials. Tombs contained elaborate grave goods representations of “daily life,’ or less commonly of religious subjects, and some texts that were intended to help the deceased attain the next world and prosper there. The texts came increasingly to be inscribed on coffins and stone sarcophagi or deposited in burials on papyrus. Some royal tombs included long passages from religious texts, many of them drawn from nonmortuary contexts and hence more broadly valuableas source material. The majority of evidence from ancient Egypt comes from funerary monuments and burials of royalty, of the elite, and, for the Late period, of animals; relatively little is known of the mortuary practices of the mass of the [Link] the fear of the dead, there was a moral community between the living and the dead, so that the dead were an essential part of society, especially in the 3rd and 2nd millennia BCE. The basic purpose of mortuary preparation was to ensure a safe and successful passage into the hereafter. Belief in an afterlife and a passage to it is evident in predynastic burials, which are oriented to the west, the domain of the dead, and which include pottery grave goods as well as personal possessions of the deceased. The most strikingdevelopment of later mortuary practice was mummification, which was related to a belief that the body must continue intact for the deceased to live in the next [Link] evolved gradually from the Old Kingdom to the early 1st millennium BCE, after which it declined. It was too elaborate and costly ever to be available to the majority.