Ancient Egypt; An Egyptian History From the Past to Present Day (Illustrated)

He was normally depicted as a man wearing a headdress in the form of a plume, which is also the hieroglyph for his name. He was not a solar deity but his role in providing sunlight connected him to Ra. Indeed, he was one of the few gods who escaped persecution under the heretic king Akhenaten. Geb was the father of Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephythys, and was a god without a cult. As an Earth god he was associated with fertility and it was believed that earthquakes were the laughter of Geb.

He is mentioned in the Pyramid Texts as imprisoning the buried dead within his body. Also Known as Amen, Amun, Ammon Amun was the chief Theban deity whose power grew as the city of Thebes grew from an unimportant village, in the old Kingdom, to a powerful metropolis in the Middle and New Kingdoms. He rose to become the patron of the Theban pharaohs and was eventually combined with sun god, Ra who had been the dominant deity of the Old Kingdom to become Amun-Ra, King of the Gods and ruler of the Great Ennead.

The implication is that his true identity can never be revealed. His cult spread to Ethiopia, Nubia, Libya, and through much of Palestine. The Greeks thought he was an Egyptian manifestation of their god Zeus.

Even Alexander the Great thought it worthwhile consulting the oracle of Amun. Protector of the Dead Anubis is shown as a jackal-headed man, or as a jackal. His father was Seth and his mother Nephythys. His cult center was Cynopolis, now known as El Kes.

He was closely associated with mummification and as protector of the dead. It was Anubis who conducted the deceased to the hall of judgment. Originally an avenging lioness deity, she evolved into a goddess of pleasure. Her cult center was in the town of Bubastis in the Western delta. Many cats lived at her temple and were mummified when they died.

An immense cemetery of mummified cats has been discovered in the area. Unlike the other gods, Bes is represented full face rather than in profile, as a grotesque, bandy-legged, dwarf with his tongue sticking out. He was associated with good times and entertainment, but was also considered a guardian god of childbirth.

Bes chased away demons of the night and guarded people from dangerous animals. Hapi was not the god of the river Nile but of its inundation. He is represented as a pot-bellied man with breasts and a headdress made of aquatic plants. He was thought to live in the caves of the first cataract, and his cult center was at Aswan. Hathor was the daughter of Ra and the patron goddess of women, love, beauty, pleasure, and music.

In this last manifestation, she holds the solar disc between her horns. There was a dark side to Hathor. It was believed that Ra sent her to punish the human race for its wickedness, but Hathor wreaked such bloody havoc on earth that Ra was horrified and determined to bring her back. He tricked her by preparing vast quantities of beer mixed with mandrake and the blood of the slain.

Murdering mankind was thirsty work, and when Hathor drank the beer she became so intoxicated that she could not continue her slaughter.

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Each year the goddess Hathor visited her husband the god Horus at Edfu temple to celebrate the feast of the Divine Union. Horus was the son of Osiris and Isis and the enemy of the wicked God Seth.

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He is depicted as a hawk or as a man with the head of a hawk. He was the god of the sky and the divine protector of kings. Horus was worshipped throughout Egypt and was particularly associated with Edfu, the site of the ancient city of Mesen, where his temple can still be seen. There are many stories of his wars against his uncle Seth, who murdered his father and usurped the throne. Eventually Horus defeated Seth and became the king of Egypt.

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A very important figure in the ancient world, Isis was the wife of Osiris and mother of Horus. She was associated with funeral rites and said to have made the first mummy from the dismembered parts of Osiris. As the enchantress who resurrected Osiris and gave birth to Horus, she was also the giver of life, a healer and protector of kings. Isis is represented with a throne on her head and sometimes shown breastfeeding the infant Horus. Her most famous temple is at Philae though her cult spread throughout the Medi-terranean world and, during the Roman period, extended as far as northern Europe.

There was even a temple dedicated to her in London. Also known as, Khepri, Khepra, Khepera, Khepre was a creator god depicted as a Scarab beetle or as a man with a scarab for a head. The Egyptians observed young scarab beetles emerging spontaneously from balls of dung and associated them with the process of creation. It was thought that Khepre rolled the sun across the sky in the same way a dung beetle rolls balls of dung across the ground. Khnum, was depicted as a ram-headed man. He was a god of the cataracts, a potter, and a creator god who guarded the source of the Nile,. His sanctuary was on Elephantine Island but his best-preserved temple is at Esna.

He was a moon god depicted as a man with a falcon-head wearing a crescent moon headdress surmounted by the full lunar disc. Like Thoth, who was also a lunar deity, he is sometimes represented as a baboon. Khonsu was believed to have the ability to drive out evil spirits. Rameses II sent a statue of Khonsu to a friendly Syrian king in order to cure his daughter of an illness. She was depicted as a seated woman wearing an ostrich feather, or sometimes just as the feather itself. Her power regulated the seasons and the movement of the stars.

Ammut, devourer of the dead, ate those who failed her test. Montu was a warrior god who rose to become the state god during the 11th dynasty. During the Twelfth Dynasty Montu was displaced by the rise of Amun, but he took on the true attributes of a war god when warrior kings such as Thutmose III and Rameses II identified themselves with him. Mut formed part of the Theban Triad. She was one of the daughters of Ra, the wife of Amun, and mother of Khonsu. She was the Vulture goddess and is often depicted as a woman with a long, brightly colored dress and a vulture headdress surmounted by the double crown.

In her more aggressive aspect she is shown as a lion-headed goddess. Like Isis and Hathor, Mut played the role of divine mother to the king. Her amulets, which depict her as a seated woman suckling a child, are sometime confused with those of Isis. Together with Isis she was a protector of the dead, and they are often shown together on coffin cases, with winged arms. She seems to have had no temple or cult center of her own. Osiris was originally a vegetation god linked with the growth of crops. He was the mythological first king of Egypt and one of the most important of the gods.

Cultural Atlas of Ancient Egypt

It was thought that he brought civilization to the race of mankind. He looks at archaeological evidence in an extraordinary way. So, for example, when he is looking at early temples, Barry is not afraid to have an educated guess and reconstruct a very plausible picture of early religious life in Ancient Egypt, which fits all the archaeological evidence beautifully, but is also very imaginative.

Another great thing about the book, and a reason I think so many people love it, is that it is full of wonderful illustrations. They are just about the most useful illustrations in any academic book on Ancient Egypt, and they are all by Barry Kemp himself. They really bring complicated subjects alive. For anyone who wants to get beneath the surface of Ancient Egypt, it is a fascinating discussion and analysis.

This is the extraordinary thing. There have been dozens of new excavations, and because Barry is the doyen of Egyptian archaeology, he has his finger right on the pulse of all the new work that is going on. For example, if you look at the excavations in the north-eastern Delta at Tell ed-Daba, which was home to an Asiatic line of pharaohs called the Hyksos, who invaded Egypt in about BC, there is this very distinctive Palestinian culture with all sorts of weird and wonderful things that you never usually find in Egypt. And the way that Barry takes that site and brings it to life to illuminate a very peculiar episode in Ancient Egyptian history is just brilliant.

What it does is to vividly bring to life a particular period which many people are very interested in. It really conjures up what life was like at that time. It is something that I have also tried to bring out in my new book, because I think we often look at Ancient Egypt through rose-tinted spectacles: This book is a useful tool to use in the task of re-balancing our interpretation of Ancient Egypt.

Well, he had regular security patrols throughout his capital city. There was a network of tracks criss-crossing the city and all the areas around the city, and there seems to have been almost permanent paramilitary policing of his capital city. Probably the class of bureaucrats; Akhenaten had undertaken a thorough revolution, and had kicked out a lot of the old order, and there would have been large numbers of people who resented him for doing that.

It is a stark illustration of the way power was exercised in the ancient world. You talk about the re-balancing of our image of Ancient Egypt. But for many people, there is this popular image of all the slaves dying while things like the pyramids were being built…. That is one of the enduring myths about Ancient Egypt that is not actually true! There was no slavery at the time of the pyramids. So what do you do to feed and mobilise a work force that is otherwise idle and potentially restive?

The answer is that the people were required to give their labour to the state as a form of taxation in a pre-monetary economy. It was a brilliant way of deploying a huge work force. But we do know that the pyramid workers were well housed and well fed, and they were certainly given rations beyond those that your average worker would have received during the normal working year. And there is very good evidence of medical treatment. There are skeletons of pyramid-builders who had clearly suffered injuries that healed again.

This is a very different kind of book.



Why do we find Ancient Egypt such an endlessly fascinating topic? What is it about it that entrances us and has entranced countless generations? The book deals with the one character of Akhenaten, who is probably the most controversial figure in the whole of Ancient Egypt history. He abolished all the gods except for one, who he said was the sole god and his personal god. The book looks at how Akhenaten has been co-opted and hijacked by a whole different range of groups, from psychoanalysts to protestant fundamentalists to gay rights campaigners.

Everyone has seen in Akhenaten a figure that he or she could use to his or her own ends. But he himself was the king who overthrew centuries of tradition in Ancient Egypt to found a brave new vision of the cosmos, with him at its centre. Greece and Rome somehow feel more familiar, whereas Ancient Egypt seems very different, with its animal-headed gods and its tombs; it is something about that combination of antiquity and mystery that is endlessly appealing.

Ancient Egyptian technology - Wikipedia

I wanted to choose one book that demonstrates the intensely visual nature of Ancient Egypt; this one is full of fantastically beautiful art. And it is also one of the best recent examples of a coffee-table book, if you like. But it is a coffee-table book with some outstanding scholarship as well. Ancient Egypt is one of those subjects that lends itself to large-format books, and has done so for the last years. This is one of the best. It has fantastic illustrations of sculpture, paintings, architecture and jewellery from the first great flowering of Ancient Egypt in the pyramid age.

If you are going to have one book that really brings you face to face with some of the most glorious products of Ancient Egyptian civilisation, this is it. He was a great warrior pharaoh who forged the Egyptian empire all the way south into modern Sudan and all the way north up into Syria. Five Books aims to keep its book recommendations and interviews up to date. If you are the interviewee and would like to update your choice of books or even just what you say about them please email us at editor fivebooks.

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