Once Egypt had been united and a central government was established, the cult of the living king seems to have been developed in addition to the cults of the local and national deities. This fact tends to be taken for granted, but we know very little about how this situation came to be, and if or to what extent the early king was viewed as divine in his lifetime. Even in the later historical periods when evidence is clearer and more plentiful, there is disagreement among scholars as to the degree to which the Egyptian king was regarded as human, divine or both...
Egyptian Gods in the Divinity of the Kingship
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The gods Thoth and Horus pour water over the king in a
ritual illustration. Temple of Horus, Edfu.
Theologically, the Egyptian king stood between humanity
and the gods in his monarchical role. Egyptian Gods. |
It is almost certain that the living Egyptian king was viewed as a divine being. In representations the king depicted far larger than his human subjects and on the same scale as the gods themselves. Not only were monarchs said to be "like" or the "image of" various deities, but the word netcher or "god" was also frequently used as an epithet of kings. The formal titulary of the Egyptian king also spelled out his relationship with several key deities, indicating that he was not only viewed as the son of Ra during his lifetime (from the 4th dynasty on), but also as the living manifestation or image of the falcon god Horas (perhaps from the beginning of the Dynastic Period). There are other important lines of evidence for this point of view. The muth of the king's divine birth, for example, was developed in the New Kingdom, but was apparently not something incented by Hatshepsut, as in sometimes stated, and seems to have existed since at least Middle Kingdom times. Even before this, the underlying purpose of the complex genealoogy of the gods constructed by the priests of Heliopolis may have been as much to establish the divine lineage and nature of the king as to establish the order of creation, a fact seen by Rudolf Anthes as early as the middle of the last century. As a result of this type of evidence, Henri Frankfort, in his important study Kingship and the Egyptian Gods, and many other scholars, have believed that the pharaoh's rites of coronation and accession elevated him to the identity with the gods.
On the other hand, this may not be the only conclusion that can be drawn from the sources which provide our information on Egyptian kingship. There is no doubt whatsoever that the living king was regarded as subservient to the gods and that in theory, and to some degree in practice, every king acted as their servant in the enactment of temple rituals. The evidence considered above may also be viewed in different ways. The frequent identification of the king with various deities could often be little more than hyperbole. Marie-Ange Bonheme has also recently pointed out that while the king's formal names may indicate an aspect of divinity in the monarch, they do not clarify the "degree of divinity" which is involved. As early as 1960, Georges Posener showed that the image of the living pharaoh as a god-king is perhaps exaggerated by the royal and religious sources which aim to highten the divine aspect of kingship. In popular literature and etxts the Egyptian king is hardly portrayed as a god. He cannot work the miracles of his wise men and is certainly neither omniscient nor invulnerable in the way we would expect if he were truly regarded as divine. From this perspective, it would seem that it was not the king who was honored as a god, but the incarnate power of the gods that was honored in the king.
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