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The Pharaoh in Egyptian Religion

This research examines the position of the pharaoh in Egyptian religion. The research will set forth evidence of the overlap and convergence of divine and human aspects of the king in Egyptian culture from the period of the Old Kingdom through the New Kingdom (2686 to 1070 BC, Third through Twentieth Dynasties) with a view toward identifying the ratio between and among the pharaoh's political, religious, and ritual functions and how the reality and/or extent of the pharaoh's divinity was perceived.

Although the character and reach of the identification of the pharaoh with the divine shifted over the course of pharaonic civilization in Egypt, there persisted throughout the Old and New Kingdoms the view that the pharaoh had either divine attributes or divine nature and in either case had and exercised divine power. As Schulman puts it: "The Egyptian king was, from the beginning of recorded Egyptian history until the triumph of Christianity, god." Schulman's note that the king's four-name "royal titulary" unvaryingly identified the pharaoh with the god of cycles of light and fertility, Horus, in his various aspects, and eventually (and with relative levels of strength) identified him with the sun god as well. This core fact can scarcely be discounted, inasmuch as such commentators as Fairman declare that "the dominant element in the Egyptian concept of kingship was that the king was a god--not merely godlike, but very god."

Over the course of the dynasties, the king's divine aspect was represented in a variety of ways. Schulman comments that economic realities help explain why each successive pyramid at Giza was smaller than its predecessor, but elsewhere notes that the pharaoh's divinity had a mythic character, whether expressed as the fact of a towering edifice or as an "iconographic motif of the triumphant king [on an edifice] executing a defeated enemy ruler, frequently in the presence of a [fellow] god," which could be like...

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The Pharaoh in Egyptian Religion. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 06:19, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1683222.html