2013/04/23

EGYPTIAN DEPICTIONS OF DEITIES THE MANY FACES OF GOD: DIVINE IMAGES AND SYMBOLS IN ANCIENT NEAR EASTERN RELIGIONS Egypt
1. GENERAL In the same way that Tacitus was amazed by the Jews, who made no images of their god, Juvenal (Satire XV) sneered at the Egyptians: . '. what monsters the mad Egyptians worship. Some of them honour the crocodile, others bow down to the ibis bulging with snakes; the long tailed ape is sacred .... The iconography of the Egyptian deities was a multi-coloured palette of forms and faces, as is illustrated by the "divine catalogue" in the Persian period Hibis temple at Charge. No wonder that Hornung observes that in the Egyptian language there are more than twenty words for our terms "picture" or "image".

A depiction in the Louvre has the goddess Hathor (goddess of music, dance, joy, fertility and birth) in four forms: as a woman with a sistrum (a musical instrument) on her head, a cow, a serpent and a lion-headed female.

Basically, there are three representing deities visually:

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(i) Some gods, such as Ptah (god of craftsmen and architects) , are depicted only anthropomorphically; (ii) The protectress of women and children, Taweret, was only depicted zoomorphically; (iii) The most common form seems to be a mixture of the two, ther anthropic, with a human body and the head of an animal. Sekhmet (goddess of war and healing) as a divine statue in the temple at Karnak, is shown as a woman with the head of a lioness.

One has to bear in mind that there is no one-to-one relationship between a divine name and its representation; one deity could be represented in many forms. The god Amen (or Amun sun god) has been depicted in human form, sometimes as a human with the head of a ram, as a ram, and even as a human with the head of a crocodile.

Conversely, one image can represent many deities. The so-called tree goddess can be identified as the goddesses Isis, Nephtys, Nut, Hathor and Maat. Sometimes we have a combination of these types. There are cases where a deity is depicted in two forms on the same object, as on the Hildesheim stela which represents Mahes both as a lion and as a man with the head of a lion. The goddess Hathor is a classic example of the complexity of the representation of Egyptian deities: in the Old Kingdom she is depicted as a woman with cow horns, whilst at Deir el Bakhri she is shown as a cow giving suck to the divine pharaoh.

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There were also other possibilities. In Egypt, for instance, the deities were sometimes represented by symbols, as on standards and staves. The divine standards were carried to the battlefield by Ramses III and his army (Medinet Habu), just as the Assyrian armies did with their divine standards. In the Abydos temple the standards were worshipped in a shrine. The god Osiris, who is commonly depicted as a mummified human, could also be an anthropomorphised djed-pillar (connected to a fertility cult) . The "tree goddess" is depicted as a woman, although she is sometimes "reduced" to only a breast with arms, as in the tomb of Thutmoses III.

What is typical of the Egyptian deities is that they did not carry their specific attributes in their hands (the was-, the plant sceptre, and the life symbol [ankh] occur with all major deities). Their divinity "went to their heads" - their specific divinity is depicted on their heads in the form of symbols, or as a specific type of head (usually the head of an animal rather than that of a human).Thoth (god of wisdom, writing, numbers, the arts and astronomy) has the head of an ibis and Isis (goddess of motherhood, fertility and magic) has a throne on her head, the latter also being used as a hieroglyphic sign in writing. The goddess Maat (goddess of harmony, justice and truth) wears a feather; a bronze ostrich feather, which might have belonged to a statue of the goddess Maat, was found at Lachish. Much in the same way as some deities had no specific cultic location, other deities had no independent iconography either. There was, in fact no real iconography of the old creator and sun god of Heliopolis Ra and Ra is represented visually (to take one example) as the falcon- headed god with sun-disk Ra-Harakhty ("Horus of the horizons).

2. AMARNA In the same way that Akhenaten's theology was revolutionary and not an example of reform or natural evolution, the "representation" of his god was also new. Instead of the older anthropomorphictheriomorphic representations of the traditional deities, Akhenaten's single god was worshipped not as a three-dimensional statue but rather in the form of the sun-disk only. The reliefs emphasize the radiating rays connecting the sun in heaven with the earth and ending in small hands, administering life symbols (ankh or was symbols = power) to the holy family. Here we have a unity with the sun-disk providing a connection between the different figures. It is an elaborated form of the hieroglyphic sign for sunshine or light. The same representation is depicted on seal impressions from Amama.

The god of Akhenaten is not just another form of the sun god, or the sun-disk, but the living sun best described as the light. The new concept of god could not be captured by means of iconic representations. The traditional gods were made of precious stones and the craftsmen were highly skilled in making them. In contrast, the god of Akhenaten is his own maker and therefore inaccessible to human iconography; he is the one "who produced himself by himself, no craftsman knows him. The living sun, like the living god, transcends the indirect life of statues or cult images. Akhenaten launched a systematic programme of iconoclasm destroying the images of the deities, obliterating particularly the images of Amun, defacing his name and even going so far as to erase the plural "gods,, altogether.

To conclude: in ancient Egypt the deities were mostly represented iconically, the mixed form (anthropomorphic body with zoomorphic head) being typical. Something totally unique happened in the Amama period with the representation of Akhenaten's god.