Friday, December 17, 2021

Joachim Friedrich Quack on "Foreigners Coming to Egypt and Bringing Their Own Deities"

  

Foreigners Coming to Egypt and Bringing Their Own Deities

 

Taking your gods with you in migration situations seems quite normal to us; indeed, it is well attested in modern cases. For Egypt and its neighbors, there is a remarkable diversity. On the one hand we have the Asiatics, especially those coming from the Levant and speaking Semitic languages, who came to Egypt in considerable numbers during the second millennium BCE, especially its second half.

 

The cult of Asiatic deities in Egypt is therefore quite well-attested for the New Kingdom (ca. 1550–1070 BCE), and there are numerous studies on the subject. It would be easy, indeed much too easy, to simply present texts and images of these cults. It is far more fruitful to separate the evidence into different categories. I would like to separate those deities for which the documentation consists mainly of intellectual adaptations from those where a cult in Egypt can be amply documented by sanctuaries, votive stelae, and the like.

 

Some interesting observations can be made on this subject: Firstly, the Asiatic deities freely enter into combinations with traditional Egyptian deities, and more often than not both are found together; for instance, the Asiatic deities Qudshu and Reshep are very often shown together with the Egyptian Min as a triad. On an even more complicated level, a stela from Giza depicts a foreign deity in very un-Egyptian garb and with an outlandish name in the top register, while in the register below it is said that the dedicator venerates the Egyptian goddess Isis. The dedicator’s title makes it clear that he is attached to the cult of an Asiatic deity, actually Hauron, while the image shows the Egyptian god Horus; thus, as regards iconography and names, the “foreign” and “familiar” are remarkably criss-crossed.

 

This leads us to the point that some traditional Egyptian figures could be reinterpreted by the Asiatics in light of their own religious traditions. Thus, the great Sphinx of Giza was often understood at this time as representing the Canaanite god Hauron. An alternative idea was to equate him with the Egyptian falcon-shaped god Horus—a conception that was certainly aided by the phonetic similarity of the names. In this specific case, it can even be demonstrated that the equation of the two gods was not limited to a local Asiatic community but also adopted by the Egyptian priestly elite. A recently published mythological manual from the seventh century BCE provides a list of five different forms of Horus, one of which is Hauron.

 

To what degree did this continue in later times? To what degree are well-attested Asiatic deities from New Kingdom Egypt still present in the religious system of the Graeco-Roman period? The question seems all the more relevant as many Egyptologists, including Assmann, have claimed that the Egyptians of the Late Period were increasingly xenophobic. There is certainly a substantial drop in the documentation of Asiatic deities in Egypt in the Late Period. Still, the deities of Asiatic origin did not altogether vanish. On the one hand, they were still present in communities with a strong Syrian background (even special colonies of (As)syrians), who had a quarter of their own in Memphis. I would assume that many of the Asiatics in Egypt assimilated after some generations but that the old religious traditions were retained longer if there were large coherent communities where the members supported themselves in their shared traditions. On the other hand, there are those deities that were assimilated in the Egyptian religious system mainly because they were responsible for specific aspects of life for which there was no Egyptian deity at hand, like Astarte, the patron of the horse. In addition, the deities still do occur as a component in personal names. Some were even incorporated into Egyptian temple decoration. (Joachim Friedrich Quack, "Importing and Exporting Gods? On the Flow of Deities Between Egypt and Its Neighboring Countries," in Antje Flüchter and Jivanta Schöttli, eds., The Dynamics of Transculturality: Concepts and Institutions in Motion [Heidelberg: Springer International Publishing, 2015]: 255-77, here, pp. 263-64, emphasis in bold added)