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Ancient Egyptian Symbols and Gods |
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To understand Egyptian art one must realize that it is not art in the ordinary Western sense of art. It represents a magic ritual that was to function for the person for whom the art was created. The characters depicted and the actions represented were avatars for the real people and actions. If the art was placed in a tomb then those actions would be done repetitively for the dead. So a picture of the dead person praying to a god was placed on the wall of a tomb, then that avatar would pray acting for the dead for all eternity.
Art not in tombs was used in place of god or object. Thus a statue of a god would be worshiped just as if it were the god itself. Offerings would be made to it, and prayers said to it. The principle here was that the ka, or spirit of the god, would take the message to the god himself. Humans also have a ka that exists in the world after you die, something akin to our concept of a ghost.
Art did not have to be good to be effective. But royal patronage tended to buy the best artists, so most of what one sees in a museum is the art from the graves of pharaohs. Lesser stuff ends up in the archives of museums, and seldom sees the light of day.
At the end of the 19th Century, Sir Wallis Budge, director of Egyptian antiquities in the British Museum, wrote a book called Egyptian Religion. It is still in print and what most people today know of the Egyptian religion comes from this hopelessly out-of-date and biased book. Budge summarizes the thesis of his book in these words:
"[That the ancient Egyptians] believed that mortal man could be raised from the dead, and attain life everlasting. The resurrection was the object with which every prayer was said, and every ceremony performed, and every amulet, and every formula, of each and every period, was intended to enable the mortal to put on immortality and live eternally in a transformed glorified body."
This is a Victorian view of Egyptian religion which ignores much of the pagan element that must have been present. The book projects concepts familiar to modern Christian values on to a people that existed in a different world. One suspects that much of the evidence that Budge ignores in his book weakens his argument considerably, for example he completely ignores Min, who doesn't fit comfortably into Christianity. Min is not the only other god left out, most of the other nature gods are ignored or rephrased to be aspects of the sun god. In ancient Egypt other gods were seen to control nature and sacrifice and prayer were made to affect elements of daily life, religion was not just tied to death and resurrection. Unfortunately no one else has written a good popular survey of Egyptian religion, probably because the facts are so tied up with 3000 years of Egyptian history that the academic complexities of the subject would bore most readers.
Another important problem is that the name given to a particular god in a specific city and a instant of time may be used for 2500 or more years, but the meaning of the gods name changes continuously during that time. It may become merged with other gods and become a hyphenated name, loosing its identity and function in the other god. It can then be viewed as an aspect of the other god which controlled a part of nature that used to be its original domain. Thus the god of sunrise and sunset merge with the sun god. So does the god of male potency and procreation, Min, who eventually is viewed as just another aspect of the sun god.
This transformation of meaning over time is true of all words, it makes language as slippery as a fresh caught fish is an amateur's hands. It is difficult to say anything true about things so amorphous.
So to begin to understand Egyptian art one needs to know the players. Ignoring all the problems of saying anything truthful about 3000 years of an evolving mythology, there is a quick summary presented below. The icons mostly come from Budge's Egyptian Religion, although some were derived from works of art in other books.
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The Ankh is the sign of life. It is one of the most important amulets used in ancient Egyptian tombs and pictures. In the shape of a 'T' of a cross surmounted by a loop; the Ankh symbolizes the triumph of life over death. |
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The Shen is the hieroglyphic sign of infinity or everlasting. |
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Aten, a symbol of the sun's disk; represents the universal creator of all things in all lands; the source of all life. This was a national religious symbol of Egypt chosen by Amenhotep the Fourth to replace Ra. However it fell from favor after his death, and Ra rose in importance again. Eventually, Osiris and the cult of resurrection subsumed all the nature gods in importance. |
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The Eye of Ra is an Egyptian symbol which is believed to bring good health. Later in Egyptian history when the Osiris legend became dominant it was called the Eye of Horus. On a coffin, often drawn as a pair of eyes, it acted as the eyes of the dead looking east to the rising sun for immortality. |
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Khepra, the scarab, or dung beetle. On the desert the scarab can often be seen pushing a ball of dung, a food supplement, in case she gets hungry. The ancient Egyptians noticed that the beetle was born from a similar ball and assumed that they were one and the same. In the egg ball, which we now know, is always kept in the dung beetle's nest, the eggs eventually hatch and eat their way out of the ball. In Egyptian lore the ball represents the sun, and the beetle the motive force that moves the sun across the sky. The obvious coupling of the dung ball and rebirth also aids the religious symbolism by linking the sun to resurrection. Often the scarab is represented as a flying scarab (the lower icon). |
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The king may wear two crowns the white crown of Upper Egypt, shown on the left, and the red crown of Lower Egypt shown on the right. Sometimes these are combined into the double crown. The symbols he carries are the symbols of his earthly authority. Kings in ancient Egypt occupied a position called the Pharaoh. Pharaoh and King are often used as synonyms, but really one represents the position, the other the individual. Like referring to the power of the president of the United States by calling upon the White House to do something. |
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Learn about the Egyptian nature gods: sun, sky, and the earth. |
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Learn about the Osiris myth: Gods of Life, Death, and Resurrection. |
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Learn about other Egyptian Gods. |
Back to the Introduction to Egypt.
Ancient
Egyptian Artifacts
Egyptian Tour
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2003-02-26