Scan barcode
A review by librarianonparade
Religion and Magic in Ancient Egypt by Rosalie David
2.0
Ancient Egypt is one of those civilisations where we seem to know far more about Egyptian death than Egyptian life, far more about the attitudes and arrangements relating to funerals, gods and the afterlife, than we do about their daily lives, their domestic arrangements, social interactions and hierarchy. This is because, obviously, most of what has survived from Ancient Egypt are burials, tombs and temples - those relics of civilisation that were built for eternity, rather than the more earthly and temporal homes and workplaces of the population.
As a result, our mental images of Ancient Egypt have been shaped to place religion and death in a central position that may not entirely have reflected reality - any more than our own day-to-day lives are currently defined by our deaths or our thoughts on the afterlife. In fact, religion and spirituality probably plays more of a role in daily life today than it did in antiquity - modern faith reflects a universalism and a personal relationship with the divine than did not exist in antiquity. The gods were ever-present, it's true, and controlled all life on earth, but few required any kind of moral code or rules for living, at least from the mass of the population.
Rosalie David takes a chronological approach in this book, working from the very earliest days of Egypt as an identifiable unified country, all the way up to the end of pharaonic rule with the death of Cleopatra VII - an immense sweep of time. She explores not just the current knowledge of the practice religion and magic in Ancient Egypt, but how and why archaeologists and scholars have come to the conclusions we have. Personally I found the discussions about the archaeological digs as interesting as the conclusions drawn from them, much of which, as is inevitable, is speculation. You simply cannot learn about a civilisation in entirety from its burials, grave goods and religious precincts - anymore than a survey mosques and Catholic churches could adequately tell the story of modern Europe, for example.
The downside of this chronological approach is that the author cannot tell the story of religion in Ancient Egypt without also telling the history of Ancient Egypt - and to narrate the sweep of thousands of years of history, and its impact and influence on religion, in less than 500 pages, means it's a very cursory and shallow exploration of both. I was quite frequently lost, and the pace at which the text proceeded meant that it felt patchy and jumpy, immediately proceeding from a contextual historical explanation to some new religious or magical fact with no real bridge between.
So whilst this book was interesting in places, overall I found it a letdown. Perhaps the scope was just too large, too ambitious for such a slim book; or perhaps such a complex subject, with so much conjecture, extrapolation and scholarly interpretation, just cannot adequately be condensed into 500 pages and still remain coherent and enjoyable to the average reader.
As a result, our mental images of Ancient Egypt have been shaped to place religion and death in a central position that may not entirely have reflected reality - any more than our own day-to-day lives are currently defined by our deaths or our thoughts on the afterlife. In fact, religion and spirituality probably plays more of a role in daily life today than it did in antiquity - modern faith reflects a universalism and a personal relationship with the divine than did not exist in antiquity. The gods were ever-present, it's true, and controlled all life on earth, but few required any kind of moral code or rules for living, at least from the mass of the population.
Rosalie David takes a chronological approach in this book, working from the very earliest days of Egypt as an identifiable unified country, all the way up to the end of pharaonic rule with the death of Cleopatra VII - an immense sweep of time. She explores not just the current knowledge of the practice religion and magic in Ancient Egypt, but how and why archaeologists and scholars have come to the conclusions we have. Personally I found the discussions about the archaeological digs as interesting as the conclusions drawn from them, much of which, as is inevitable, is speculation. You simply cannot learn about a civilisation in entirety from its burials, grave goods and religious precincts - anymore than a survey mosques and Catholic churches could adequately tell the story of modern Europe, for example.
The downside of this chronological approach is that the author cannot tell the story of religion in Ancient Egypt without also telling the history of Ancient Egypt - and to narrate the sweep of thousands of years of history, and its impact and influence on religion, in less than 500 pages, means it's a very cursory and shallow exploration of both. I was quite frequently lost, and the pace at which the text proceeded meant that it felt patchy and jumpy, immediately proceeding from a contextual historical explanation to some new religious or magical fact with no real bridge between.
So whilst this book was interesting in places, overall I found it a letdown. Perhaps the scope was just too large, too ambitious for such a slim book; or perhaps such a complex subject, with so much conjecture, extrapolation and scholarly interpretation, just cannot adequately be condensed into 500 pages and still remain coherent and enjoyable to the average reader.