Questions And Answers On Ancient Egyptian Religion

2. When it comes to religion, scholars are deeply divided on how it affected Egyptian life. Some scholars believe Egypt was a secular state and religion did not impact the individual. Other people argue the opposite saying that religion influenced all aspects of an individual’s life. However, the case for middle ground can also be made. Another plausible theory is that religion helped to govern society, but it was not all consuming. This is a more likely theory as both the idea of a secular state and all consuming religion-based state both have major flaws. It is unlikely that Ancient Egyptian was a secular state. One of the counterarguments to a secular state is secularity is a modern idea. This is something that has come into practice
Since it is an ancient culture, it can be very challenging to measure just how religious, or not religious, a culture was. There is no definite way to measure religion. In general, debates about Ancient Egypt have no easy answers. There is no one alive that we can talk to in an attempt to find answers. Instead, we are left with scripture and archaeological finds that do not always agree. Additionally, since this time period was thousands of years ago, much evidence of their lifestyle is gone. The evidence that is typically found is of the wealthy and elite as they could afford to build the tombs which preserved many objects from their lifestyles. This means that the commoners which made up most of the society have little remains, leaving us with much less evidence on their style of life. Also, with the archaeological objects we find, it is hard to determine exactly what they mean as we may only have partially context and/or not understand the symbolic, or lack of, meaning. Given these challenges on lack of evidence, it is difficult to try and answer exactly how these ancient people lived, leading us to the debates that we currently
Ancient Egyptian religion seemly counters the idea of biblical monotheism and yet also supports the idea of order of cosmos like in the Hebrew Bible. The reason for this is Ancient Egyptian religion is often mistaken as polytheism. Polytheism is seen as a false religion in comparison to the story of Moses from Ancient Israel. However, Ancient Egypt was not a polytheism. They did have many different deities, however all the deities connected back to the Atum. By all the deities connecting back to one, it portrays a sense of unity which is similar to the Hebrew Bible. Atum is considered by the Ancient Egyptians to be the creator god. He is all powerful and all encompassing. While there are other deities like Geb who represents Earth or Nut who represents the sky, all these deities connect back to Atum, In Ancient Egypt, these deities are portrayed as mere projections of Atum. All deities are created out of Atum so Atum flows through each deity. In this way, Ancient Egyptians practiced monotheism, like the Ancient Israelites did with the story of Moses. Ancient Egyptians did not practice polytheism like the Ancient Israelites thought they