Ancient Egypt's Religion - Sennedjem

My name is Sennedjem and I died three-thousand years ago (C.1200BCE). I am now in the afterlife and it’s everything the Egyptians said it would be, a land full of all thing pleasurable in our earthly existence. Here is a painting of my wife Lynferti and I playing senet together, a very popular board game. This is painted on the walls of my tomb in Deir el Medina, in Western Thebes where i’m buried with my wife and the rest of my family. We Egyptians had very strong beliefs in our religion and everything we did related back to our gods. We built beautiful temples and statues to our beloved gods, praising them. Like this one wonderful temple built by the great Pharaoh, Ramesses II. It was the largest in Egypt! We built many things other than temples and statues to our gods. We built tombs to hold the deceased and make traveling to the afterlife a lot easier. That was my job. I built and decorated tombs, ‘Servant in the Place of Truth’ was my title. Religion in the new kingdom stayed pretty much the same except when Akhentatan came into power, but we’ll talk about that later. We were a polytheism society which meant we worshipped many gods. We also had festivals to appreciate them, like the Opet festival. As I said before the afterlife is a place full of everything you could ever wish for and Egypt’s attitude to this was very happy and to die was not an end, but a new beginning. We had specific gods associated with the afterlife. With the new kingdom we had a new way to bury our Pharaohs as well. We created the valley of Kings. Depending on your social status, you were buried very differently. Being a nobleman I had a beautifully decorated tomb just for me and my family. We Egyptians relied on our gods for pretty much everything. Everything we did, we did for them. 

We have an abundance of sources from Ancient Egypt such as reliefs from temples, tombs and sarcophaguses. Most of our temples are dedicated to our gods. It's where they lived. Like The temple at Karnak is dedicated to our most loved god in the new kingdom, Amun. The priests became so powerful, economically, they threatened supremacy of the Pharaoh. Many famous tombs exist in the valley if kings like those of Tutankhamun, Nakht and mine. Mine unlike many tombs was perfectly intact. No one had tried to break in and steal anything. In 1886 it was discovered. The walls of my tomb tell tales of my family and I in our everyday lives. This is a photo of what it looked like inside. As many sources there were when i was alive, there are just as many as when you are alive. These sources are mainly written down in journals or in educational books. For example a book by Pamela Bradley in 1999 called Ancient Egypt: The Reconstruction of the Past. She critically analysis Ramesses II as the ‘great’, questions military campaigns and talks of the connection of gods to the people.

Throughout the new kingdom there was a major change in religion. What before was polytheism, turned into monotheism with the rule of Akhenaten. The Aten, was a manifestation of the sun god into a solar disk as seen here on the left. Akhenaten, driven both by his religious conviction and his desire to break the power of the priesthood of Amun, took this one step further and promoted the Aten as the sole god of Egypt. Without the king’s support, the cult of the sun god Amun was reduced in importance and eventually banned throughout the country. He even built a new city north of Thebes with art and temples only dedicated to Aten. The new city was called Akhenaten. Most Egyptians were uncomfortable with this new religion, they weren’t willing to give up their other gods and goddesses. When Tutankhamun (his son or nephew) came into power this was abolished and once again, polytheism was back and Thebes was the capital. A common festival we celebrated every year was the Opet Festival. This festival was dedicated Amun. In the second month of akhet, the induntation period. In the Eighteenth Dynasty it lasted 11 days but in the Twentieth it lasted 27 days. The statues of Amun, Mut and Knons were taken from Karnak to Luxor via the Nile river. On the walls of colonnade at Luxor built by Amenhotep III we can see reliefs of this event.Here on the right is a picture of this. These beliefs and rituals were important to the Egyptians because people other than the Pharaoh and their royal party, were involved. The belief system and public festivals brought that religion to the people. No one saw the statues inside the temples until they were brought out in festivals. These rituals and beliefs that the people held so dear to their heart was the only thing that connected the people to their Pharaoh. 

Death was not the end, but a new beginning of a new existence. We had many gods associated with the after life. The two main ones are Anubis and Osiris. Osiris was the god of the after life. He ensured the resurrection of humans after death and his cult spread all over Egypt. Osiris is the one who sits on the throne and presides over the weighing of the heart. The weighing of the heart is a tribunal in front of six other gods where your heart is weighed against a feather and if it’s heavier then the feather you don’t enter Osiris’s land of the afterlife. If the heart is lighter or the same as the feather than you can go, if not, your heart is eaten by Ammut, the Devour of the Dead. Anubis, watcher of the graveyard, is the god of mummification. Here is a relief from my tomb, of Anubis laying his hands on me in my sarcophagus. The myth is that he was able to restore life to Osiris by embalming his corpse and wrapping it in linen. The afterlife contained all things pleasurable. These pleasurable effects could be brought about through many means. Mummification and the burial in an elaborate tomb with the right funerary equipment could bring about these pleasurable effects. Egyptians did all they could in life and afterlife to be with our gods. Everything in a tomb was dedicated to them hoping that they would enter the land of Osiris and finally be with our beloved gods. 

The new kingdom brought a new way to bury our Pharaohs. The Valley of Kings, discovered by Amenhotep I. Along with his parents, they are the god protector of The Valley of Kings. Unfortunately the nature and whereabouts of his tomb are still unknown.  Before The Valley of Kings, pharaohs were built in huge pyramids. An obvious target to tomb robbers. So the change to a valley hidden and well camouflaged brought about the restorations of many tombs, along with my own. Funerary practices include, embalming, decorating tombs and the funeral cortège. Depending on your social status, your burial and funeral could be very different. Embalming consisted of priests, who were responsible for mummification. Mummification involved breaking the skull bones and extracting the brain using a metal hook, removing eternal organs for the canopic jars, drying the body in soda bicarbonate for 70 days and wrapping the corpse in linen ready to be put in their sarcophagus. Embalming priests assumed the identity of Anubis and in certain procedures wore a jackal mask. Because people had to be recognised in the after life, a mummy mask with the idealised features of the deceased was fitted onto the sarcophagus. Here is what mine looked like. I was one handsome man. Being in a higher social status did help a lot. Most Egyptians could not afford burials with expensive stone sarcophaguses or even just decorated wooden coffins. So many people buried their loved ones in simple pits often without any coffins at all. Once the embalming was done people decorated your tomb. Decorating a tomb in the new kingdom was quite different to previous burials. In the new kingdom there were less items from our everyday life and more specifically objects made for our afterlife, like meals guarantying our survival in the afterlife and protection symbols like the eye of Horus and the heart scarab. Canopic jars holding the heart, intestines, liver and lungs were also put in the tombs. The last part of this process of entering the afterlife, was the funeral cortège. Professional mourners were hired to moan and scream while a high official was being put in their tomb for eternity. They wore pale blue and were mostly women. With Pharaoh’s, their vizier lead the funeral cortège. The servants carrying the sarcophagus would wear white. These practices were only for the rich. Funerals were the most expensive part of anyones ‘life’. Once again, like everything else. All this money went to trying to be just that bit closer to our gods. 

Everything the ancient Egyptians did was to be closer to our gods. We worshipped them with every fibre of our being. We loved them and did everything we could to make them happy. We built temples and statues in their honour. We based our religion on them and had annual festivals dedicated to them. Everything we could saw or felt had a god attached to it. Our afterlife was the only place where we would be at rest and happy with the gods for eternity. We spent our life building up to being buried in a decorated tomb with our families. All our money was spent trying our hardest to be like a god. We loved them, and in the end it all worked out, because i’m with my beloved family, my wife, lynferti, forever and ever. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome to life after death.