Life in Ancient Egypt

Life in Ancient Egypt

Life in Ancient Egypt was one that involved an ordered life. The Nile flooded and the sun dried the land on a regular basis every year. People lived their lives in a orderly fashion that has them following set routines from year to year. This routine was greatly integrated with the Egyptian belief in the spiritual world and the religion it soon became. Egyptian religion helped people to see definition in their lives and gave them something to live for. There was an afterlife to look forward to and a spiritual rule of law that would take care of them until then. Also there was a state that was created by the religion to lead the people correctly. Therefore, the most important role that religion played in Egypt was that gave people the spiritual definition and structure for the ordered life that they lived.

Egyptian religion revolved around death and the afterlife because it was believed that an individual's life would continue on a different plateau after their death, with life as merely a transitional stage. This was a strong belief that saw death as only a passage to another life that one would live; this life was actually more important than the one a person lived in the present life. "Thus there is an air of permanence about Egypt; the past is never far from the present."(Mckay 25) Therefore, people lived their lives waiting for death and the afterlife and thus their lives revolved around it. Ancient Egyptians believed that when one died, a journey would be made to another world, where one would have the ability to lead a new life. Egypt was a society whose climate never really killed anything and simply brought things back to life. "The climate of Egypt is so stable that change is cyclical and d...

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... spiritual definition of structure to live life by. They had definition for what was going on around them in terms of science and natural events. This extended to give people the ability to structure their lives around the events. It gave the ability to live their lives with direction toward the bliss of the afterlife. It also eliminated fear and directed happiness towards death. This gave people an order in their life that could have been chaos if death had never been understood. People also received structure in terms of the law and order that the religious writings provided. The state was also strong and orderly because of the religion. Showing another aspect of how people received structure from the religion in their lives. Thus, in Egyptian life, the most important function of religion was giving spiritual definition to people's ordered and structured lives.