Chapter 4. Egypt: Maat, Pharaoh and the Afterlife

Mesopotamia (ch. 3) gave the ancient world a pessimistic picture of the dead and kings who ruled as servants of the gods. Egypt gave it the reverse: a king who was himself divine, a cosmic order the king had to uphold, and an afterlife that, from the Middle Kingdom on, the sources describe as open to anyone who passed the judgment of Osiris. Several threads of this study start here. Atenism is often called the first monotheism and has been linked to Moses. Egyptian priests show how temple wealth turns into political power. Thoth and Isis came back as Hermes Trismegistus and the goddess of the Roman mysteries (ch. 43, ch. 45). This chapter reports what the library’s sources say on each of these, and where they disagree.

Many creations: Heliopolis, Memphis and Hermopolis

Anthony Mercatante states the basic fact: “The Egyptians did not have one widely accepted creation myth but many explanations that were often in conflict with one another.” These were “interpreted by the priests at the centers of worship, such as Hermopolis, Heliopolis, Memphis, and Busiris”. In some versions, he notes, “life is generated from the god’s masturbation” [Mercatante, Who’s Who in Egyptian Mythology, #72968, “Creation Myths”]. The reference shelf identifies the shared elements: the lifeless waters of Nu, a primeval mound (benben) that rose from them, probably modelled on land emerging after the Nile flood, and the sun rising from the mound. It treats the city theologies as partly “competing theologies” and partly “different aspects of the process of creation” [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths].

Source: Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths.

The Memphite version is the one later readers single out, because it makes creation an act of speech. The Theban version made Amun supreme. Amun had been the “hidden” member of the Ogdoad, and his rise built the theological case for the Karnak priesthood that appears later in this chapter [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths].

Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus and Set

Heliopolis supplied the divine family. Stephan Weaver summarises it: “Nut gave birth to Set, Osiris, Isis and Nephthys—the prominent Egyptian gods,” and Osiris was “the ruler of the afterlife, the dead and the Underworld” [Weaver, Egyptian Mythology, #66942]. Mercatante writes that Osiris was “originally the personification of the flooding of the Nile”. Because he “conquered death… the Egyptians believed his followers would also conquer death”. In “every funeral inscription from the Pyramid Texts to the Roman Period, what happened to Osiris was also done for the deceased, since the deceased was identified with Osiris during the rites” [Mercatante, #72968, “Osiris”]. The reference shelf says the murder of Osiris by Set and the victory of Horus “provided a powerful narrative linking the ancient Egyptian ideology of kingship with the creation of the cosmos” [Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths].

The struggle over the throne is presented as a lawsuit. In Mercatante’s retelling Set proposes to settle it by single combat. Thoth objects: “That is not the way to settle a legal matter. We must follow what is just. How can we make Set the king when he is only the brother of Osiris,” while Horus is the son [Mercatante, #72968, “Horus”]. Graham Hancock notes that the most detailed account of the Osiris myth is Plutarch’s. In it Osiris brings civilisation, ends cannibalism and human sacrifice, and gives the first code of laws before he is killed [Hancock, Amprentele Zeilor, #14120]. Albert Pike reads the same myth astronomically, as the sun’s yearly journey and the struggle of light and darkness [Pike, Morals and Dogma, #378717, “Egyptian Priesthood Influence and the Osiris Legend”].

Maat and the god-king

The reference shelf defines Maat as “truth, balance, law, morality, and justice”, and as a goddess. Her opposite was isfet, chaos and violence. Ra rose from the mound only “after he set his daughter Maat in place of isfet”, and kings “inherited the duty to ensure Maat remained in place”. From the Fifth Dynasty the vizier in charge of justice was called “Priest of Maat”. The Instruction of Ptahhotep says: “Maat is good and its worth is lasting… he who transgresses its ordinances is punished” [Wikipedia: Maat].

The Routledge introduction The Egyptians (catalogued without an author) describes how kingship was staged. The king took the titles “King of Upper and Lower Egypt” and “Son of Ra”. His crook, flail and sceptres were “imbued with divine power (heqa) like the person of the king himself”. He “acted as judge like the sun-god Ra-Harakhty”. A royal text boasts that the king knows “that secret speech which the Eastern Souls speak”. The book comments that what matters is “that the king knows who they are and what they speak, and others do not” [The Egyptians: An Introduction, #363364]. The same book shows that the ideology could be reinvented. After the First Intermediate Period, “Mentjuhotep II reinvented the cult of divine kingship”. It also cautions that “despite the divine associations of the kingship, there was, of course, a potential for conflict within the palace” [#363364].

Texts for eternity and the judgment of the dead

The funerary literature grew from royal privilege into common use. The Egyptians traces the “Coffin Texts” of the Middle Kingdom to the “exclusively kingly ‘Pyramid Texts'”, alongside newer material and royal patronage of Osiris’s cult at Abydos. It reports that “some” call this the “democratization” of funerary beliefs, after which “everyone could look forward to the afterlife” [#363364]. Morris Bierbrier defines the Book of the Dead as “a type of papyrus often buried with the dead from the New Kingdom onward”. He writes that its “most important spell concerned the ritual of the weighing of the heart against the feather of maat to determine the deceased’s worthiness to enter the afterlife” [Bierbrier, Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, #366518, “Book of the Dead”]. Elsewhere he describes the deceased passing gates “guarded by demons” to reach the court of Osiris [#366518]. To enjoy the afterlife, Bierbrier adds, the dead “had to have led a virtuous life according to the precepts of maat” [#366518].

Mercatante describes the Negative Confession as “a confession of sins not committed”, made in the Hall of Judgment before Osiris and forty-two assessors, before the heart was weighed [Mercatante, #72968, “Negative Confession”]. Weaver quotes the formula: “I have not stolen. I have not slain men and women… I have not uttered lies… I have not committed adultery. I have made none to weep” [Weaver, #66942, ch. IV]. Mesopotamia sent every soul to the same dust. In Egypt the outcome of death depended on conduct measured against Maat, an idea this study meets again in the Zoroastrian Chinvat bridge (ch. 17).

Amun’s priests and the Amarna revolution

Temples were economic powers. The reference shelf states that major temples “became major landholders, their activities supported by vast estates worked by thousands of people”. The estates remained “ultimately under royal control”. Eighteenth Dynasty conquests in Nubia, Canaan and Syria poured wealth into Amun’s temple at Karnak [Wikipedia: Atenism]. Bierbrier describes the high priest of Amun as holder of the chief religious office at Karnak. He writes that the temple’s “great wealth led to an increase of political power for the high priest of Amun, under whom Thebes became virtually independent during the Third Intermediate Period” [Bierbrier, #366518, “High Priest of Amun”]. The Egyptians is more cautious. The usual picture of late Ramesside decline and priestly power “is probably exaggerated”, because the surviving evidence comes almost entirely from Thebes. The end of the Twentieth Dynasty “has been attributed to a military coup or to the power of the Amun priesthood” [#363364].

Amenhotep IV broke with all this around 1353 BC. The reference shelf describes the Aten, the sun disc, rising first to equality and then to exclusive worship. The king took the name Akhenaten, explained there as “effective spirit (akh) of the Aten” (Bob Brier renders it “beneficial to the Aten”) [Wikipedia: Atenism; Brier, Tutankhamun and the Tomb That Changed the World, #70198]. He built a new capital, Akhet-aten (Amarna). For about twenty years Atenism was the state religion, and “the worship of other gods” was met “with persecution” [Wikipedia: Atenism]. Its classification is disputed: “monotheistic or monolatristic”, or, for some Egyptologists, henotheistic [Wikipedia: Atenism]. The reference shelf also reports that Akhenaten stressed Maat so heavily that “the king’s contemporaries viewed [it] as intolerance and fanaticism” [Wikipedia: Maat]. The Egyptians quotes the Great Hymn: “You (the sun god) made the earth as you wished… you set every man in his place” [#363364]. The reaction was severe. Mercatante writes that “there is some speculation that the king and his wife were murdered” and that “all known records of his reign were destroyed by the priests of Amen-Ra”. Tutankhaten changed his name to Tutankhamun [Mercatante, #72968, “Aten”].

Moses the Egyptian: Freud, Assmann and their critics

Akhenaten’s god soon became attached to Moses. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (1939) argued that Moses was an Egyptian noble and follower of Akhenaten, “the world’s earliest recorded monotheist”. On Freud’s account Moses led his followers out of Egypt and was killed by them. His Aten was later fused with “a volcano god called Yahweh” of Midian, and the repressed guilt of the murder was passed down the generations [Wikipedia: Moses and Monotheism]. S. Heller traces the book to Freud’s “internal conflict regarding his Jewish heritage”, in which the people “murdered their Egyptian founder” [Heller, Freud A to Z, #27057]. The critics are blunt. W. F. Albright found it “totally devoid of serious historical method”. Donald Redford concluded that “there is little or no evidence to support the notion that Akhenaten was a progenitor of the full-blown monotheism that we find in the Bible” [Wikipedia: Moses and Monotheism].

Jan Assmann’s Moses the Egyptian (1997) takes a different approach, which he calls “mnemohistory”: it studies how the past was remembered, not what happened. Assmann distinguishes Akhenaten’s monotheism, which “remained rooted within the cosmos”, from the transcendent theology of Moses. He calls the latter an anti-Egyptian “counter-religion”, and he names the “Mosaic distinction” by which a group treats every religion outside it as illegitimate. He answered his critics in The Price of Monotheism (2003) [Wikipedia: Moses the Egyptian]. On the Great Hymn’s resemblance to Psalm 104, the reference shelf records the disagreement. James Breasted believed the psalm was inspired by the hymn. Miriam Lichtheim judged that “a specific literary interdependence is not probable”. Assmann and Redford argue for some Egyptian influence [Wikipedia: Great Hymn to the Aten]. Alternative authors go further. Gary Greenberg argues that “Moses was the chief priest of the Aten cult” who fled at Akhenaten’s death, and dates the Exodus to 1315 BC [Greenberg, The Moses Mystery, #81927]. Laurence Gardner writes of “Moses (Akhenaten)” as one person [Gardner, Lost Secrets of the Sacred Ark, #77979]. Ch. 29 examines these theories against the archaeology of the Exodus.

The legacy: Hermes, Isis and the mysteries

The reference shelf records that Greeks in Ptolemaic Egypt identified Thoth with Hermes and worshipped the two as one at Hermopolis, the old seat of the Ogdoad. The “Thrice-Great” Hermes became the supposed author of the Hermetica. Renaissance writers believed he was a contemporary of Moses until Isaac Casaubon showed in 1614 that the writings “must postdate the advent of Christianity” [Wikipedia: Hermes Trismegistus] (see ch. 45). Masonic esotericism made Egypt the origin of all initiation. Pike claims that the Egyptian priesthood “utilized the Mysteries to claim divine authority”. He holds that the Osiris legend, “adopted by the Hebrews”, underlies Freemasonry’s Master’s Degree, and that rites in Phrygia and Greece were “direct copies of the Egyptian mysteries” [Pike, #378717, “Egyptian Priesthood Influence and the Osiris Legend”; “Egyptian Mysteries as the Model for Global Initiation Rites”]. These are Pike’s claims as the library’s guide summarises them. The Isis and Serapis cults of the Roman world, the documented heirs of Egyptian religion abroad, are treated in ch. 43.

Key points

• Egypt had several city cosmogonies: Heliopolis (Atum and the Ennead), Memphis (Ptah creating by heart and tongue), Hermopolis (the Ogdoad) and Thebes (hidden Amun). Mercatante calls them “often in conflict” [#72968; Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths].
• The Osiris–Isis–Horus–Set myth tied kingship to cosmic order. Each dead person was ritually identified with Osiris [Mercatante, #72968; Wikipedia: Ancient Egyptian creation myths].
• Maat, the order set in place of isfet, was the king’s duty to uphold. The pharaoh was “Son of Ra”, judge like the sun god, and the sole knower of secret speech [Wikipedia: Maat; The Egyptians, #363364].
• Funerary texts moved from royal Pyramid Texts to Coffin Texts and the Book of the Dead. The weighing of the heart against Maat’s feather made the afterlife depend on conduct [#363364; Bierbrier, #366518].
• Temple wealth gave the high priests of Amun political power, up to Theban near-independence. The Egyptians considers the usual picture of priestly power “probably exaggerated” [Bierbrier, #366518; #363364].
• Akhenaten’s Atenism was a short-lived state cult with persecution of other gods. It is classed variously as monotheistic, monolatrous or henotheistic, and was erased after his death [Wikipedia: Atenism; Mercatante, #72968].
• Freud made Moses an Atenist Egyptian, and Assmann recast the question as cultural memory and the “Mosaic distinction”. Albright and Redford reject the historical link, and Greenberg and Gardner push it further [Wikipedia: Moses and Monotheism; Wikipedia: Moses the Egyptian; #81927; #77979].
• Thoth became Hermes Trismegistus, and Pike claimed that Egyptian mysteries were the model for all initiation [Wikipedia: Hermes Trismegistus; Pike, #378717].