Dead Kings as Living Egyptian Gods

The close relationship between the deceased king and the Egyptian gods may be seen in the textual and representational evidence associated with the royal mortuary cults from early times. The Pyramid Texts clearly attempt to place the deceased kin on the same

The intimate embrace of Ramesses III and the goddess
Isis underscores the divine nature of the deceased Egyptian
monarch. 20th Dynasty. Tomb of Amenherkhepshef, Valley
of the Queens, Western Thebes. Egyptian Gods.

 level as the Egyptian gods - both by directly asserting that he is a god, and by stating that he "is" Osiris, Ra, or some other deity. In some cases the texts not only show the deceased king's parity with the divine cohort, but they also stress his ascendance over the other gods, showing that he is certainly not viewed as a minor deity in the afterlife. We do not know if these assertions of the deceased king's deity were originally statements of formally held belief or whether they represented a desired situation which was attempted through the use of the maigical texts.

The idea of the king's deified afterlife was certainly established by Old Kingdom times, however, and the same types of textual evidence are found in royal mortuary contexts throughout subsequent periods of Egyptian history. Representations of the deceased king in the presence of deities likewise indicate equailty between the two from early times.

The very purpose of the royal mortuary cult seems to have been the affirmation of the deceased monarch's divinity, yet the specific nature of the divinity must not be overlooked. A number of years ago, William Murnane showed, in a study of the texts and representations of the great mortuary temple of Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, that much of the focus of the royal mortuary cult was as ongoing reaffirmation of the king's divine kingship rather than eternal life per se. This conclusion was expanded in later studied of other mortuary temples dating back to the Old Kingdom, and it now seems clear that in many, if not all, cases the stress of all these royal mortuary establishments is on the continuation of the king's reign on a divine level in the afterlife.

It must not be forgotten that even from a relatively early date - perhaps by the end of the Old Kingdom - funerary spells for the afterlife transformation to the divine became available to other classes of society. Nobles, and later others, could also aspire to become gods in the afterlife. It is unthinkable that these individuals regarded their afterlife state to be equivalent to that of the king or the great Egyptian gods. It seems far more likely that what was envisaged for both commoner and king alike was an afterlife which represent a king of divinized state of their own social stations in life. In the case of the deceased king, there were specific associations which might be seen as elevating his position above that of his earthly reign. This is seen particularly in the concepts of the royal ancestors, and of the king as Osiris and Re.

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