Ancient Egyptian Religion Essay

Good morning/afternoon students, this following lecture will outline the influential significance religion had within ancient Egyptian society. To summarise the construct of ancient Egyptian religion would be to classify it as a polytheistic religion comprising of a combination of values and practices, that in modern society, would include, magic, mythology, science, medicine and Herbalism, in addition to the contemporary understanding of religion as the belief in a higher deity, and the concept of an afterlife (Dunn, 2013). Fundamentally, the role that religion played in ancient Egyptian civilisation was of exalted significance, as their belief system and rituals of worship were heavily incorporated into their daily lives, influencing their
(Dungen, 2015) However, probably the most distinctive ritual were funerary rituals. Intense beliefs in the afterlife heightened their dedication to performing these rituals to ensure the deceased may enter an afterlife, referred to as the ‘Field of Reeds’, which was believed to be a mirror image of one’s life on earth, except there was no illness, no disappointment and no death. (Mark, 2016) The Book of the Dead is a name given to an ample collection of funerary texts, citing from various periods of Egyptian history, containing magical formulas, hymns and prayers, believed by the Egyptians that these would help to guide and protect the soul, or the Ka, of the deceased through their next journey. Egyptians deemed the contents within these texts enabled the soul to ward off negative spirits attempting to impede one’s progress into the afterlife, and knowledge to pass the tests set by the forty-two judges in the netherworld, a place deceased immediately went to after death, alongside Osiris, the god of the underworld. (Paolo, 2017) For ancient Egyptians, a tomb acted as a chamber for sheltering a deceased body and storing the supplies necessary for the afterlife. These supplies would be scattered around the deceased’s