View of the World (How the Ancient Egyptians Saw the World)

The ancient Egyptians reckoned the world to be a far several place from what we now know it to be. They conceived the earth was a flat platter of clay heavy on a vast sea of water from which the Nile River sprang. In this fundamental description of the world, the effects of nature were identified as divine descendants of the creator god. The god Hapi, for example, presented the Nile River. The Nile Valley's safe and foreseeable natural cycles assisted in the evolution of the Egyptian civilization. The river's annual inundation of its floodplain brought fertility to the land through water and silt; the region's perpetual sun promoted bountiful harvesting; and the dryness of the climate provided ideal checks for the safe storage of surplus crops. Because the very structure of the ancient Egyptians' civilization turned on the extended predictability of their environment, they looked to their deities to perpetuate the status quo.

Of full the deities of ancient Egypt, the goddess Maat was the most serious in perpetuating the status quo. The Egyptians considered that when the gods wrought the land of Egypt out of topsy-turvydom, Maat was created to embody truth and justness, and the basic orderly agreement of the world. Maat wast the down state of the god-created world, and whole that people had to do in order to live and fly high in the world was to honor and preserve Maat. On a national level, it was the king's province to keep Maat through daily oblations given at the temples. On an individual level, the goal of every Egyptian was to lead an right life that would allow charm into the afterlife after death.

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Creation Beliefs in Ancient Egypt

The sun rises over the
circular mound of
creation as goddesses
pour out the primeval
waters around it
Ancient Egyptian ideas about the creation of the world offer peculiarly valuable insights into the way these orderly, agricultural people saw themselves and their land. Several versions of the creation myth exist, and each evokes images of the Nile River's flood cycle and the increase of bountiful crops on the silt left behind by losing floodwaters.  According to one widely given creation myth, eight deities lay in among the darkness and disarray of a great watery void ahead the world existed.




God Nun, the embodiment of
the primordial waters,
lifts the barque of Ra
into the sky at the
moment of creation
The god Nun personated the water, and the creation of the world began when an earthen mound arose from him. Amun or in one version Ra, the sun god, rose from this mound. In otherwise version of creation, a lotus broken from the waters of Nun, and Amun appeared from within the lotus. Amun, from within himself, brought forth the deities who presented air (Shu) and moisture (Tefnut); then Tefnut gave birth to the sky (Goddess Nut) and the earth (God Geb). Humans were often conceived to be the products of Amun or Ra's tears.



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Deities and Ancient Egyptians

A general realizing of the worldview of the ancient Egyptians is the best grooming for this brief examination of their throwing array of deities. The term  "world view" refers the set of widely held feeling that people of a specific culture  hold to excuse what they maintain in their world. The ancient Egyptians interpreted every natural event in terms of the family relationship between natural and supernatural forces. Those phenomena that figured conspicuously in their lives enclosed the annual cycle of the flood of the Nile River (or inundation), the extended size and frozen harshness of the surrounding desert, and the daily cycle of the sun's coming into court in the east, gradual movement crossways the sky, and eventual disappearing in the west. The ancient Egyptians got a world view in which these and other events and checks were imputed to the actions of multiple, concerned gods and goddesses of Egypt.

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