Anthony Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hermione Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
>> It would surely be impossible to state that studies of AE deities and
>> religious thought had ever reached a definitive point ...<<
>
> I never said they did. I said that one must look
> at each deity individually, rather than looking at
> them all as some kind of homogeneous group with a
> single root source. History is never as simple as
> alternative historians would like us to think it
> is. <...snip von Daniken for my sanity...>
> When you start to look into the enormous amount of detailed
> information we have on the specific deities, you
> start to realize these overgeneralized "theories"
> simply don't hold water. Avoiding the specifics
> will leave room for enormous error.

I believe Anthnoy has a point here, Hermione. While I referenced two general works on religion in my original post, I DID note that one should read the Budge work with a caveat of it being outdated.

To that I add that Budge rather simplistically believed that all Egyptian religious worship was based upon nature and fetish worship. While that certainly is an element of some forms of deity worship, it can't explain all forms of deity cults in ancient Egypt.

On the other hand, I doubt that reading about each and every deity in ancient Egypt is required to get the complete view of Egyptian religion. Certain aspects of worship became vairly standardised, and while certain aspects of offerings, cult objects, iconography and so on differed per deity, one doesn't have to know exactly every aspect of Osiride cult worship and not see certain similarities in, say, the worship of Isis.

Tobins covers many of these common features of cult worship in ancient Egypt (as does the book I cited on the writings of A.M. Blackman). Assmann, Hornung, and, to an extent, Tobin and a few others write more about the theological principles of ancient Egyptian religion and its overarching philosophical viewpoints about the nature of creation and cosmology, the goal of divinity in the human world, and the nature of the end time (a later concept in Egyptian religious thought).

HTH.

Katherine Griffis-Greenberg

Doctoral Candidate
Oriental Institute
Doctoral Programme in Oriental Studies [Egyptology]
Oxford University
Oxford, United Kingdom