ABSTRACT
The area of semiotics into which I shall venture! spans several aspects of ancient Egyptian civilization often regarded as autonomous and studied as such: the language, visual arts, and state ideology, the last occasionally subsumed under religion. The widespread existence of symbolism2 in Egyptian art is acknowledged,3 but iconology" as a field of Egyptological study is only in its beginnings.s Ancient Egypt probably produced more visual symbols than any other civilization in the world. This was at least partly due to the fact that the multi-layered Egyptian religion did not possess a written codified version of its basic tenets, such as the Bible of the Christians, the Koran of the Moslems, or the Torah of the Jews, which could have been used to reaffirm the creed among the faithful and to proselytize among the non-believers. The questions of how religious beliefs were spread among the population and how profound was their religious knowledge have not yet been satisfactorily answered. Egyptian temples did not serve as meeting places where 'officially approved' beliefs would have been communally affirmed in the way churches, mosques and synagogues do, and the power of the word thus was not the nearly exclusive means of communicating such ideas to ordinary people. For most, opportunities for a religious experience at the 'officially recognized' level (although the term would require a more precise definition) came through contact with visual images of deities, be it statues seen during religious festivals, or divine manifestations, such as animals or natural inanimate objects. The same applied to state ideology where, in the conditions of very limited literacy, visual power symbols were the main tools of state propaganda. The 'unofficial' popular religion which, for most Egyptians, was the main form of such an experience is still insufficiently
known because of the paucity, if not absence, of monumental and written documentation.
