The Two Lands.

OpeningThree thousand years.

Egyptian religion ran continuously for longer than any other system in this volume — from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE to the final closure of the temple of Isis at Philae by Justinian in 537 CE. The basic cosmology stayed remarkably stable across that span.

This deck follows the principal myths — the solar voyage of Ra, the death and resurrection of Osiris, the weighing of the heart in the underworld court — through the major cult centres (Heliopolis, Memphis, Hermopolis, Thebes), the funerary literature (Pyramid Texts, Coffin Texts, Book of the Dead), the Akhenaten interlude, and the Greco-Roman afterlife in the cult of Isis.

The texts are abundant. Pyramid walls, coffin interiors, papyrus scrolls placed with the dead. The reading-list at the end privileges modern translations: Faulkner, Allen, Quirke, the Ritner anthology, Pinch, Wilkinson.

Chapter IFour creation stories.

The Egyptians did not feel obliged to choose. Each major cult centre maintained its own cosmogony, and the same priest could read all four without contradiction.

Heliopolis: at the start the waters of Nun, dark and undifferentiated. The first mound rises. Atum stands on it and creates the first pair, Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture), by autoeroticism or by spitting. They produce Geb (earth) and Nut (sky). Geb and Nut produce Osiris, Isis, Set, and Nephthys. The nine — Atum, Shu, Tefnut, Geb, Nut, Osiris, Isis, Set, Nephthys — are the Ennead.

Hermopolis: eight primeval beings — the Ogdoad, four pairs of male-and-female frogs and snakes (Nun and Naunet, Heh and Hauhet, Kek and Kauket, Amun and Amaunet) — preceded the lotus from which the sun emerged. Memphis: Ptah created by thinking with his heart and speaking with his tongue. Thebes: Amun, the Hidden One, was the originator behind even Atum.

Chapter IIThe voyage of Ra.

The sun-god Ra crossed the sky each day in his solar barque, the Mandjet (boat of millions of years), accompanied by a crew of gods. At sunset he transferred to the night-barque, the Mesektet, and travelled the twelve hours of the night through the underworld, the Duat. Each hour was a region of the dead. The seventh hour was the most dangerous: the great serpent Apep (Apophis) attempted to swallow the sun, and Set, riding on the prow, speared him.

Each dawn the sun was reborn from the body of Nut, who swallowed it at dusk and gave birth to it again at sunrise. The temples were oriented and the calendars were set by this voyage. The hieroglyphic determinative for "day" (hru) is the disk of Ra.

The Amduat ("That which is in the Underworld"), inscribed in the burial chambers of New Kingdom royal tombs, is the canonical hour-by-hour account.

Chapter IIIThe death and return.

The central cycle of Egyptian religion. Osiris, son of Geb and Nut, was a good king of Egypt who taught humanity agriculture and law. His brother Set, jealous, lured him into a custom-fitted coffin at a banquet, sealed it, and threw it into the Nile. The coffin floated to Byblos and was lodged in a tamarisk tree.

Isis recovered the body. Set seized it again and dismembered it into fourteen pieces, scattering them across Egypt. Isis with her sister Nephthys gathered thirteen — the phallus had been eaten by an oxyrhynchus fish — and reassembled the body, fashioning a phallus of gold or wax. By her magic she conceived their son Horus.

Osiris became king of the underworld, judge of the dead. Horus, when grown, contended with Set for the throne of Egypt — a long mythological court-case running through several texts (The Contendings of Horus and Seth, c. 1160 BCE). Horus won. The pharaoh, in life, was Horus; in death, Osiris.

Chapter IVIsis.

Wife and sister of Osiris, mother of Horus, the most powerful magician among the gods. Her name (Aset) means "throne". She is depicted with the throne hieroglyph on her head, or with cow's horns and the solar disk (a borrowing from the goddess Hathor in the New Kingdom).

Her actions are the engine of the Osiris cycle. She finds the body, reassembles it, conceives Horus, hides him in the marshes of Khemmis, protects him during his minority (the magical "stings of the seven scorpions" episode), pleads his case before the gods. She is the model of the wife as defender, the mother as advocate, the magician as protector.

Her cult survived the closure of Egyptian religion as a pan-Mediterranean mystery cult. Apuleius's narrator at the end of the Golden Ass (c. 150 CE) is initiated into her mysteries at Cenchreae. There is a real and traceable line of devotional iconography from the Egyptian Isis-and-Horus to early Christian Madonna-and-Child.

Chapter VSet.

The most morally complex god in the Egyptian pantheon. In the Osiris cycle Set is the murderer; in the solar voyage he is the indispensable defender of Ra against Apep. The Egyptians did not resolve this tension. Set is the god of disorder, storms, foreign lands, the desert — but disorder is necessary to the cosmos.

His cult was strongest in Upper Egypt and the Delta. The kings of the Second Dynasty (Peribsen, Khasekhemwy) used Set names; the Ramessides of the Nineteenth Dynasty (Seti I, Seti II) named themselves "Man of Set". The hostile re-reading of Set as pure evil belongs to the late period — Persian and Greco-Roman — when foreign rule made his association with foreignness an additional moral charge.

His consort Nephthys was paradoxically the sister of Isis, with whom she sometimes co-mourns Osiris. The texts do not present her as wicked despite being Set's wife. The system tolerates ambivalence.

Chapter VIHorus.

The falcon-sky-god, embodiment of kingship. The pharaoh in life was the living Horus; the title "Horus name" was the first and most important of the king's five royal names from the earliest dynasties. Horus's two eyes were the sun and the moon; the lunar eye was wounded by Set in their conflict and restored by Thoth (the wedjat eye, a ubiquitous protective amulet).

The Contendings of Horus and Seth (Papyrus Chester Beatty I, c. 1160 BCE) is a strange comic-mythological narrative of the eighty-year court case in which Horus and Set vie for the throne. The gods bicker, switch sides, get tricked, get drunk; Horus wins. The text reads almost like a satire of divine politics.

Harpocrates — the "Horus the Child" form, finger to lips — became the Greco-Roman god of silence. The gesture was originally a child's hand-to-mouth, misread by Greek viewers.

Chapter VIIThe jackal at the door.

Anubis was the original lord of the dead in early Egypt, before Osiris was promoted to that role in the Middle Kingdom. He was the inventor of mummification; he embalmed Osiris's body and so was the prototype of every later embalmer. His priests wore the jackal mask during the rites.

His mythological role narrows over time but stays central. In the funerary court he is "Lord of the West" — overseer of the necropolis — and the operator of the scales in the weighing of the heart. He remains, throughout the long Egyptian record, the god most directly attendant on the corpse.

His name in Egyptian is Inpu; "Anubis" is the Greek form. In Greco-Roman times he was syncretised with Hermes as Hermanubis, an underworld guide-figure that bridged the two systems.

Chapter VIIIWisdom and order.

Thoth is the divine scribe. He invented hieroglyphs, measured time, recorded the verdict in the underworld court. He is the patron of seshu — the literate scribal class who ran the Egyptian state. The "Sayings of Thoth" are wisdom literature; his book — invented or alluded to in Demotic and Greco-Roman texts as the Book of Thoth — was supposed to contain the names and powers of all things.

Maat is more abstract: a goddess and a principle. Maat means truth, justice, cosmic order, the way things should be. She is the daughter of Ra and rides in his solar barque. The pharaoh's job, on earth, was to maintain Maat against the encroachment of isfet — chaos, disorder, falsehood. Every offering scene in every Egyptian temple includes the king "presenting Maat" — a small seated figure of the goddess — to the gods.

The two together — Thoth and Maat — are the conceptual centre of the Egyptian moral cosmos. Truth recorded; truth weighed.

Chapter IXThe goddesses of joy and rage.

Hathor — cow-goddess of love, music, motherhood, and drunkenness; mistress of dance and sexuality; protector of the dead. Her temple at Dendera is one of the best-preserved in Egypt. Her festival of drunkenness commemorated the myth of Sekhmet: Ra, angry at humanity, sent the lioness Sekhmet to destroy them. She did so with relish and would not stop. The other gods coloured 7,000 jugs of beer red with pomegranate juice; she drank them, mistaking them for blood, and fell asleep. Humanity was saved.

Sekhmet and Hathor are often the same goddess — the destructive and the benevolent aspects of one solar feminine figure (the Eye of Ra motif). Bastet the cat-goddess of Bubastis is another aspect: the Eye of Ra in her benign form.

The principle here is iconographically distinct goddesses can be theologically the same goddess — the system tolerates and rewards multivalence. Mut, Wadjet, Nekhbet, Tefnut, Pakhet are all read in some texts as forms of the Eye.

Chapter XThe funerary corpus.

The Egyptian afterlife literature is the most extensive of the ancient world. The earliest layer is the Pyramid Texts (c. 2400–2150 BCE), inscribed on the inner walls of late Old Kingdom royal pyramids — spells to launch the dead king to the sky as an imperishable star, identify him with Osiris, and provide him with food, drink, and protection.

The Middle Kingdom adapted this corpus for the lower elites: the Coffin Texts (c. 2100–1700 BCE), painted on the inside of wooden coffins. They added the underworld journey and the judgment scene.

The New Kingdom turned this into the Book of the Dead (formally Going Forth by Day, c. 1550–50 BCE), a papyrus scroll customised for each individual. Around 200 chapters; no single papyrus contained all of them. Chapter 125 is the central one — the negative confession before the forty-two judges of the dead. Raymond Faulkner's 1972 translation is the standard English; James Allen's 1988 study (Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts) is the academic benchmark.

Chapter XIThe court of Osiris.

The dead person enters the Hall of Two Truths. Anubis leads them in. Forty-two assessor-gods sit in two rows. The deceased makes the negative confession to each in turn. Then the heart is placed on one pan of a great balance; the feather of Maat is placed on the other.

If the heart is heavy with sin, it sinks and is devoured by Ammit — "The Devourer" — a composite monster, lion-leopard-hippo-crocodile. The deceased is annihilated. If the heart is in balance with the feather, the deceased is declared maa-kheru ("true of voice") and led by Horus to Osiris's throne. They become an Osiris themselves — a "blessed dead", able to live in the Field of Reeds.

The most-illustrated scene in Egyptian art. Versions of it appear on hundreds of papyri (the Hunefer papyrus and the Ani papyrus, both British Museum, are the standard images) and on countless tomb walls. It is the closest thing in any ancient mythology to a coherent moral theology of the afterlife.

Chapter XIIThe Egyptian person.

Egyptian anthropology was unusually elaborate. A person was not a single soul but a composite: the body, the ka (the life-force, the double — what offerings nourished after death), the ba (the personality, a human-headed bird that could leave the tomb by day), the akh (the transfigured spirit form the deceased achieved through ritual), the sheut (shadow), and the ren (true name).

The aim of mummification, tomb-building, and funerary ritual was to keep these components functioning together after biological death. The body had to be preserved so the ba could rejoin it at night. The tomb had to be supplied so the ka could be fed. The name had to be inscribed so it could not be erased — to erase a name was to annihilate one of the souls.

The ushabti figurines placed in tombs were servants for the afterlife: they would answer ("ushabti" means "answerer") when the deceased was called to perform corvée labour in the Field of Reeds.

Chapter XIIIMummification and the tomb.

Mummification was the technological infrastructure of the religion. The body had to last because the ka and the ba required a physical anchor. The earliest mummies were Predynastic burials in the dry sand of Upper Egypt (c. 3500 BCE) where natural desiccation occurred. The Old Kingdom developed artificial mummification; by the Twenty-First Dynasty (c. 1000 BCE) it had reached its technical peak.

The viscera went into four jars topped with the heads of the four sons of Horus: Imsety (human, liver), Hapi (baboon, lungs), Duamutef (jackal, stomach), Qebehsenuef (falcon, intestines). The heart stayed inside, since it was needed for the weighing.

The procedure took roughly seventy days. It was conducted in the wabet, a temporary structure outside the tomb. The "Opening of the Mouth" ritual at the tomb door — touching the mummy's mouth with adzes and other implements — re-animated the senses for the afterlife.

Chapter XIVThe Aten interlude.

Around 1353 BCE the pharaoh Amenhotep IV did something unprecedented. He suppressed the worship of Amun and the other state gods, declared the visible solar disk — the Aten — the only deity, renamed himself Akhenaten ("effective for the Aten"), and built a new capital, Akhetaten (modern Amarna), 300 km north of Thebes. The temples to other gods were closed; their names were chiselled out of inscriptions.

Whether this was monotheism in the strict sense is debated. The Aten alone was worshipped, but Akhenaten and Nefertiti served as the sole intermediaries; ordinary people worshipped the king worshipping the god. The art of the period is also unprecedented — naturalistic, intimate, with the king's elongated features and the family scenes of the royal couple and their daughters.

His Great Hymn to the Aten is a major literary monument. It has structural parallels with Psalm 104 that have been read either as influence (Egypt-on-Israel) or as common Levantine cultural inheritance. Either way it is one of the great religious poems of the ancient Near East.

Chapter XVThe reaction.

The Aten cult outlasted Akhenaten by about a decade. Tutankhamun (r. c. 1332–1323 BCE) restored the old gods, abandoned Akhetaten, and re-opened the temples. After his death his successors Ay and especially Horemheb went further: they erased Akhenaten's name from monuments, dismantled his buildings (re-using the talatat blocks as fill in the Karnak pylons, which is how we have so many of them now), and excised the entire Amarna interval from official king-lists.

The vehemence of the erasure is itself revealing: the state and priesthood treated Akhenaten as having damaged something essential. Egyptian religion was a system of cosmic order — Maat — whose maintenance was the king's principal duty. Suppressing Amun, who was Egypt's chief deity in the New Kingdom and the supplier of state revenue through his temples, was an act of disorder so profound that the next dynasty would not even acknowledge it had happened.

Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings — discovered intact by Howard Carter in 1922 — is the chief surviving piece of high-end New Kingdom funerary art.

Chapter XVIHow the religion ran.

Egyptian temples were not congregational. They were the houses of the gods. The cult image — usually a small statue of gold and precious materials — sat in a sealed shrine in the innermost sanctuary. Each day the high priest (acting for the king) performed the daily offering: opening the shrine, washing and dressing the image, presenting food and incense, then resealing it.

Ordinary people had no access to this. They worshipped at the outer courts, at festival processions when the cult image was carried out in its barque, and at household shrines. The big festivals — Opet, Beautiful Festival of the Valley, the festival of Hathor at Dendera — drew enormous crowds.

Temple economies were vast. Karnak alone, in the Twentieth Dynasty, employed perhaps 80,000 people across its estates and held maybe a tenth of Egypt's arable land. The Egyptian state was, in some periods, in tension with its own priesthoods over revenue and influence.

Chapter XVIIThe king's role.

The pharaoh was the hinge of the cosmos. In life the living Horus; in death an Osiris, joining the imperishable stars. His ritual function was to maintain Maat — to perform offerings to the gods that kept the cosmic order intact. The state ran on this premise. Failures of pharaonic legitimacy were read as cosmic failures: the First Intermediate Period and the Second Intermediate Period — both periods of weak central authority — were remembered as times when "the river ran dry, men ate their children, the dead were thrown into the Nile."

The pharaoh's body itself was sacred — an image of the god. Royal portraiture was idealised, geometrically composed, eternal. The Amarna art that broke this convention by showing Akhenaten with elongated face, soft belly, family intimacies, was disturbing not just for theological but for visual reasons.

The role survived dynastic change. Persian, Greek (Ptolemaic), and even Roman emperors were depicted on Egyptian temple walls performing the offering rituals as Egyptian pharaohs — Augustus offering at Dendera, Trajan at Philae. The form of the religion required a king.

Chapter XVIIIThe animal-headed gods.

Foreign visitors — Greeks especially — were endlessly puzzled by the Egyptian habit of depicting deities with animal heads, and of treating certain individual animals (the Apis bull at Memphis, the Buchis bull at Hermonthis, the Mnevis bull at Heliopolis) as living manifestations of gods. The Apis was selected from the herds by specific markings — a white triangle on the forehead, a vulture-shape on the back — and lived a pampered existence at the temple of Ptah; at death he was mummified and entombed in the Serapeum at Saqqara.

The animal-headed depictions were not literal. They were visual shorthand for divine attributes: the falcon for Horus's sky-ranging, the jackal for Anubis's necropolis-haunting, the ibis for Thoth's measuring (the bird strides in measured paces). The Egyptians, when challenged by Greeks, said the gods chose to manifest themselves in animal form because animals had qualities humans lacked.

The animal mummy industry of the Late Period was vast. Pilgrims at temples bought mummified ibises or cats as votive offerings.

Chapter XIXThe long Greek and Roman afterlife.

Egypt's conquest by Alexander (332 BCE) and its three centuries of Ptolemaic rule did not end the religion; they transformed it. Greek and Egyptian deities were syncretised — Amun with Zeus (hence the oracle of Ammon at Siwa, where Alexander was hailed as son of the god), Thoth with Hermes, Hathor with Aphrodite, Isis with Demeter and Aphrodite. The Ptolemaic temple-building program (Edfu, Dendera, Philae, Kom Ombo) produced some of the best-preserved Egyptian religious architecture, all of it dating after the founding of Rome.

The cult of Isis spread along Mediterranean trade routes during the Roman Empire, reaching Britain and the Black Sea. The Iseum Campense in Rome, the Pompeii temple of Isis, the Isis cult at Mainz are evidence. Apuleius's Golden Ass (c. 150 CE) ends with the narrator's initiation into her mysteries.

The final closure of the temple at Philae by Justinian I in c. 537 CE marks the formal end. By then the religion had run continuously for over 3,500 years.

Chapter XXHow we got the texts back.

The hieroglyphic script was last actively used in the 4th century CE; by the 5th it was unreadable. For 1,400 years Egyptian religion was inaccessible in its own words. The texts on temple walls were treated as decorative emblems or magical mysteries; the Renaissance "hieroglyphica" tradition (Horapollo, Pierio Valeriano, Athanasius Kircher) made up symbolic readings that bore no relation to the actual writing.

The Rosetta Stone was found by French soldiers at Rashid (Rosetta) in July 1799. Its trilingual decree of Ptolemy V (196 BCE) — Greek, Demotic, hieroglyphic — supplied the parallel text. Thomas Young identified that the cartouches contained royal names. Champollion, working from the Greek and from his knowledge of Coptic (which he correctly identified as the descendant of late Egyptian), broke the system in 1822.

From 1822 the texts came back. The Pyramid Texts were fully published only in 1908–22 (Sethe), the Coffin Texts 1935–61 (de Buck), the Book of the Dead in many editions across the 19th and 20th centuries. We now read more Egyptian than any educated Egyptian read after about 200 CE.

Chapter XXIEgypt in the modern imagination.

Egypt has been the most visually captivating of all extinct mythologies for European modernity. After Napoleon's 1798–1801 expedition (with its accompanying scholar-cohort, whose Description de l'Égypte appeared 1809–1822), the imagery became a permanent layer of European decorative art. Verdi's Aida (1871, premiered Cairo). The iconographic flooding of Art Deco after Carter's 1922 discovery. The American obsession with the curse-of-the-pharaohs from the same moment.

The dark side: 20th-century esoterica — Theosophy, Crowley's Thelema, the New Age, Afrocentric appropriations both legitimate and otherwise — have used Egyptian imagery in ways that have little to do with the actual religion. Most popular knowledge of "Egyptian mythology" is filtered through these channels.

The serious popularising literature: Erik Hornung's Conceptions of God in Ancient Egypt (1971; Eng 1982); Geraldine Pinch's Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (2002); Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010); Jan Assmann's The Search for God in Ancient Egypt (2001).

Chapter XXIITwenty-five.

• c.2350Pyramid Texts (Allen)Anonymous · EG
• c.2000Coffin Textsde Buck ed. · EG
• c.1500Book of the Dead (Faulkner)Anonymous · EG
• c.1350Great Hymn to the AtenAkhenaten · EG
• c.1290AmduatAnonymous · EG
• c.1160Contendings of Horus and SethAnonymous · EG
• c.450Histories Bk IIHerodotus · GR
• c.100De Iside et OsiridePlutarch · GR
• c.150The Golden AssApuleius · ROM
• 1822Lettre à M. DacierChampollion · FR
• 1971Conceptions of GodHornung · CH
• 1973Ancient Egyptian LiteratureLichtheim · IL
• 1980AkhenatenAldred · UK
• 1992The Mind of EgyptAssmann · DE
• 2001Search for God in Ancient EgyptAssmann · DE
• 2002Handbook of Egyptian MythologyPinch · UK
• 2003Complete Gods and GoddessesWilkinson · UK
• 2005Egyptian ReligionHornung · CH
• 2006The Egyptian Book of the DeadQuirke · UK
• 2010Rise and Fall of Ancient EgyptWilkinson · UK
• 2012The Twilight of the GodsKlotz · US
• 2013The Story of EgyptFletcher · UK
• 2017The CleopatrasFletcher · UK
• 2017The Egyptian Mythology handbookHart · UK
• 2024Sands of SaqqaraIkram · EG

Chapter XXIIIWatch & read.

↑ Egyptian Gods Explained · an introduction to the pantheon

More on YouTube

Watch · How Isis brought her true love back from the dead
Watch · The Egyptian Book of the Dead · Tejal Gala

Read about

Erik Hornung's Conceptions of God. Geraldine Pinch's Handbook for the mythology proper. Jan Assmann's The Mind of Egypt for the cultural-historical depth. Stephen Quirke's The Egyptian Book of the Dead for the funerary literature in context.

Chapter XXIVWhy we still read these.

Three reasons. The first: the cycle of Osiris is one of the half-dozen most influential religious narratives ever produced — death, dismemberment, the active grief of the wife, magical resurrection, the king as the dying-and-returning god. The pattern recurs (Adonis, Tammuz, possibly Christ as a structural cousin). It begins, as far as the textual record goes, in Egypt.

The second: the funerary literature is the most extensive treatment of the afterlife in any pre-modern culture. The Egyptians thought about death harder than anyone before or since. The technology of mummification, the spell-collections of the Pyramid Texts and Book of the Dead, the elaborate moral theology of the weighing of the heart — together they constitute a coherent attempt to systematise what survives the body.

The third: the religion is the longest continuous one we know. Three and a half thousand years on the same river, with detectable continuities of cult and theology across the entire span. The closest case is the Hindu tradition. No other system documents that kind of duration.

Chapter XXVAn order of operations.

Three suggestions for someone new.

Start with the funerary papyrus

Faulkner's edition of the Ani Book of the Dead reproduces the entire papyrus in colour facsimile with translation alongside. About thirty hours of careful study and you will have read the most-illustrated religious text of the ancient world in something close to the form an ancient owner saw.

Then a synoptic handbook

Geraldine Pinch's Handbook of Egyptian Mythology (2002) — clean, alphabetical, scholarly but readable. Its index lets you reverse-engineer any iconography you encounter.

Then visit the temples

If you can travel: Karnak, Luxor, Edfu, Dendera, Philae, Abu Simbel. If not: Toby Wilkinson's The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt (2010) is the best one-volume narrative history. The Metropolitan Museum's online collection of Egyptian art is the best free virtual visit.

Chapter XXVIContinuities into Christianity.

Egyptian religion did not vanish abruptly. Its language survived as Coptic, the liturgical language of the Egyptian Church, which in turn preserved the late form of Egyptian phonology that allowed Champollion to crack the script. Several iconographic motifs migrated. The Madonna and Child as a seated woman with a child on her lap — visually identical to thousands of small Isis-and-Horus statuettes from the Late Period — is the clearest example.

Some saints (St. Menas, the Coptic martyrs of the Diocletian persecutions) take on roles formerly held by older deities. The cross as ankh — the crux ansata — is an Egyptian survival in the Coptic Church visible to anyone visiting the monasteries of Wadi Natrun.

The mainstream of Egyptian temple religion ended; the substrate has been visible in popular practice and visual culture down through the Coptic millennium and the Islamic centuries that followed. The Nile changes more slowly than its religions.

Chapter XXVIIThe geography of the religion.

Egyptian religion is geographically determined to a degree few other systems are. The annual flood of the Nile (the inundation, June–September) deposited the silt that made agriculture possible. The desert flanked the cultivated strip immediately. East of the Nile was the rising sun and life; west of the Nile was the setting sun and death — every necropolis is on the west bank.

The journey of the sun through the underworld each night is the cosmological equivalent of the river's flow, the year's flood-cycle, and the agricultural rhythm. Death and rebirth, withdrawal and return: these are not metaphysical abstractions but observed facts about the country.

This is why the religion stayed structurally stable for so long. The geographical framework that gave rise to it did not change. The Nile flooded predictably, the sun rose predictably, the land between them stayed narrow. As long as the river kept its rhythm — until the building of the Aswan Dam in 1970 — the imaginative substrate of the religion was reinforced annually.