Description
The ancient Egyptians, it is sometimes said, worshiped fish and monkeys, snakes and crocodiles; they had gods for every province, town and village and even for individual families. All this is largely true. And yet, as this book makes clear, the immense variety of Egyptian deities never excluded a firm belief in a single almighty Sun-god Ra, ‘the One, self-begotten, and self-existent God’. E.A. Wallis Budge brings together many haunting hymns and extracts from The Book of the Dead to illuminate the exact role of Osiris, the god of the resurrection, the nature of the other main gods and the judgement of the dead. Above all, he suggests, it is the idea of immortality that ‘formed the pivot upon which the religious and social life of the ancient Egyptian actually turned’. Anyone who takes this central truth to heart cannot fail to be inspired by the beauty and profundity of Egyptian religion.
