Images of the Deity in Egyptian Religious Belief

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 functio

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mystical experience, though they may have been connected to deification or praise of pharaoh as well. Statuary was a part of this whole line of activity. In the early stages of Egyptian civilization, the focus seems to have been on funerary equipment for the pharaoh, who was to undergo a transfiguration into a god after death. Curto notes that the aesthetic quality of tombs from the Third Dynasty onward were created "as an 'organic whole,' while the divine temples are similarly perfected at a much later date." In other words, the rulers of Egypt were looking to their own house and, in the manner of rulers of antiquity, their personal immortal glory. The fact that increasing care was devoted to the creation of temples and monumental statuary implies that the cult of the king, including the funerary part of it, could have been supplanted by the divine cult. On the other hand, it could also be true that finer temples and statuary (and divinities) for the living could have been identified with the pharaoh, not necessarily distinguished from him. In that regard, Curto cites the growing importance of political order to Egypt's rulers: Intent on affirming their divine role and on unifying the country, it is likely that the kings did
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Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

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