The Egyptian Culture Reflected in Worship

The Egyptian Culture Reflected in Worship

Much of our knowledge about ancient Egyptian culture is based on elaborate worship rituals related to death and the afterlife. Egyptians were devoted to their gods and to their pharaohs who were gods on earth, as demonstrated by their willingness to build the pyramids for the safe passage of their leaders into the afterlife.

Understanding the development of Egyptian society and their theological system requires a basic knowledge of the geography of the area. The Nile River Valley and Nile Delta, circa 4000-5000 BCE, was comprised of about 12,000 square miles of arable land. The villages and towns of ancient Egypt were found up and down the length of the Nile with most of the population living below the First Cataract (located approximately at present day Aswan).

The Egyptians were accomplished farmers. They knew the Nile would flood each year and bring new life and abundant grain. The Nile's flooding was predictable and left rich new deposits of silt for new crops, making irrigation easy to plan. A basin irrigation system allowed the flood waters to flow gently into each field, cleansing and renewing the earth each year.

The virtual isolation of the Nile Valley allowed Egyptian civilization to develop unthreatened by its neighbors. The Mediterranean Sea lay to the north, vast deserts were found to the east and west, and dense jungle lay to the south. An invader would have to be quite determined to brave the elements that protected the Nile Valley civilization.

Since Egyptian civilization was a product, in many ways, of the natural forces that surrounded its people, the people looked to nature to explain the unexplainable. Egyptian gods were depicted as wise, caring, predicta...

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...ring the shadow land that was the double of the Nile Delta. No famine or sorrows bothered him in this blessed afterlife. If his heart weighed too heavy, he would be thrown to the animal gods who tear him to shreds.

The hieroglyphs left by the priests of ancient Egypt were meant to provide the dead with a guide to the afterlife, to instruct the Ka what it should do in every test as it navigated the after world. Those same hieroglyphs have done much more. They have provided present day scholars with an amazing record of a culture that existed thousands of years ago and some insight into the minds of the people who lived in that culture. Through those ancient writings we have come to know how the ancient Egyptians worshiped, how they viewed their leaders, how they thought they should relate to one another, and how they viewed their role in this life and the next one.