Abstract:
It is often understood as a truism that the Egyptians were religious. They left abundant evidence of their religious practices throughout their history, in the forms of art, literature, and monumental architecture. The amount of evidence we have for the quotidian life of the ancient Egyptian pales next to the amount of religious evidence that remains, contributing to the persistent notion that the Egyptians were obsessed with religion and death. The difficulty with the perception of ubiquitous faith, however, is that it is almost impossible to know whether the rituals were performed, the texts written, and the tombs and temples built as a result of a true belief in and devotion to the gods, or as a result of lip-service bound in the society’s expectations. The level of society which left the greatest amount of evidence of their religious devotion was the royals, in particular the kings. As a result, our understanding of religious devotion is generally limited to this rarefied group. Within that particular constraint, it should be recognised that each individual king undoubtedly understood their faith and their devotional duties differently. The king under questions here, Pepi I of the Sixth Dynasty, has left quite substantially different evidence of his devotion to the deities than have other kings during the same dynasty; it cannot be said, therefore, that his religious devotion provides an overarching example of religious devotion throughout the Sixth Dynasty, and much less throughout the Old Kingdom as a whole. Thus, in examining Pepi I’s reign for evidence of religious devotion, we are examining the religious devotion of one single king’s reign and perhaps by extension, the ruler in that reign.