This research examines images of the deity and other symbols that play a role in ancient Egyptian religious belief. The research will set forth what the images were, how they were used, and what they explain about the nature of Egyptian religion and culture in the ancient period.
Social functionality of religious art. Whatever else is true of the role of symbolic artifacts in Egyptian religious belief, it is also true that these artifacts reflected not only religion per se but also a larger vision of organized, civilized society. For example, Baines cites the presence of an aesthetic sensibility among the elite classes of ancient Egypt. Indeed, an aesthetic sense, symbolized and concretized by way of art pieces, seems to have been one among many mechanisms for differentiating elite from ordinary social experience on one hand, and on the other for reinforcing the fact that art produced in Egyptian society was an index of the high level of development of that society. As Baines puts it: "art served the ordered cosmos, which was celebrated on behalf of the gods and which humanity (as represented by the king) and they defended against the forces of chaos."
The evidence of social stratification throughout antiquity is difficult to overstate. Egypt's elite, says Baines, "appropriated resources and restricted materially and symbolically what was available to others." Thus pots and vases of the nonelite would be likely to be purely functional, while those of the elite, if functional, might also be decorative and redolent of cultural or religious metaphor. One purpose of decorative art, then, would be to mark the social status of the individual possessed of it. It should be remembered as well that certain religious practices were open only to elite classes, which would be consistent with making decorative religious art available only to those classes. As Cerny points out, some ceremonies performed by the king to the god Amun took place ...