ABSTRACT
The fundamental dynamic of the society which rose in Egypt in the third millennium was both theocratic and theocentric in a quite literal sense. The prosperity and survival of Egypt was the dominant concern of the Egyptian state; indeed the king, who brought together in his own person all the diverse elements of the natural world, humanity and divinity, was acknowledged as a god precisely because only thus could he, with absolute assurance, determine the fates and ensure that the Egyptian state was protected from all harm. There is thus really no such construct as ‘Egyptian religion’, as later ages would understand the term: to an Egyptian of the early third millennium the concept of religion would be meaningless. The integration of identity, survival, the state, and the rituals recognizing the gods’ (or perhaps a sole divinity’s) concern for Egypt was absolute. The most disastrous consequence of the approaching crisis at the end of the Old Kingdom, when in some cases even the shrines of the gods and the supposedly eternal mansions of the kings were ruthlessly destroyed by the mob, was the separation of religion into a discrete function.
