The Role of Birds across the Religious Landscape of Ancient Egypt
Foy Scalf
Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt, Oriental Institute Museum Publications 35 (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2012), 33-40.
Abstract
The proliferative variety of animal imagery within ancient Egyptian religion continues to remain a source of astonishment and bewilderment to many viewers (Pearce 2007, pp. 242–64).Crowned beasts, human bodies with animal heads, and fantastic deities depicted with the commingled limbs of numerous creatures — what Virgil called“monstrous shapes of every species and Anubis thebarker” — are commonly found in the Egyptian artistic repertoire (Smelik and Hemelrijk 1984, p. 1854).What, however, did such representations mean? For some Greco-Roman authors seeing and hearing of Egyptian practices, animal veneration was a source of ridicule, hypocritically invoked as Greeks and Romans had their own forms of animal worship, some of which were imported from Egypt.
Others, such as Plutarch, Diodorus, and Horapollo, while often not approving of the practice, had at least a partial understanding of the complex symbolic web woven by Egyptian philosophers. Despite the potential confu-sion a glance at an Egyptian religious work of art can cause, the visual metaphors employed actually havean internal consistency and logic. If it were not the case, what power would the images have either to influence people or explain their ideologies. A primary impediment to understanding a figure such as the bimorphic Horus, shown with a human body and a falcon’s head, is adopting a literal interpretation of the scene (fig. 2.1). The iconography of divine beings was a human invention, an intellectual construct developed to provide a means to express,discuss, manipulate, and understand the variousphysical forces within the cosmos inhabited by the people of ancient Egypt.
Foy Scalf
Between Heaven and Earth: Birds in Ancient Egypt, Oriental Institute Museum Publications 35 (Chicago: Oriental Institute, 2012), 33-40.
Abstract
The proliferative variety of animal imagery within ancient Egyptian religion continues to remain a source of astonishment and bewilderment to many viewers (Pearce 2007, pp. 242–64).Crowned beasts, human bodies with animal heads, and fantastic deities depicted with the commingled limbs of numerous creatures — what Virgil called“monstrous shapes of every species and Anubis thebarker” — are commonly found in the Egyptian artistic repertoire (Smelik and Hemelrijk 1984, p. 1854).What, however, did such representations mean? For some Greco-Roman authors seeing and hearing of Egyptian practices, animal veneration was a source of ridicule, hypocritically invoked as Greeks and Romans had their own forms of animal worship, some of which were imported from Egypt.
Others, such as Plutarch, Diodorus, and Horapollo, while often not approving of the practice, had at least a partial understanding of the complex symbolic web woven by Egyptian philosophers. Despite the potential confu-sion a glance at an Egyptian religious work of art can cause, the visual metaphors employed actually havean internal consistency and logic. If it were not the case, what power would the images have either to influence people or explain their ideologies. A primary impediment to understanding a figure such as the bimorphic Horus, shown with a human body and a falcon’s head, is adopting a literal interpretation of the scene (fig. 2.1). The iconography of divine beings was a human invention, an intellectual construct developed to provide a means to express,discuss, manipulate, and understand the variousphysical forces within the cosmos inhabited by the people of ancient Egypt.
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