What do you think?
Rate this book
The Religion of Ancient Egypt
This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.
113 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1906
124 people are currently reading
419 people want to read
About the author
William Matthew Flinders Petrie
484 books22 followersSir William Matthew Flinders Petrie FRS, known as Flinders Petrie, was an English Egyptologist and a pioneer of systematic methodology in archaeology. He held the first chair of Egyptology in the United Kingdom, and excavated at many of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt, such as Naukratis, Tanis, Abydos and Amarna. Some consider his most famous discovery to be that of the Merneptah Stele. Petrie developed the system of dating layers based on pottery and ceramic findings.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
June 1, 2022
I'm not sure why I listed this book as read in 2014. I'm sure I haven't read it before.
Be that as it may, I enjoyed the wealth of details about Egyptian deities and their evolution, the Egyptian understanding of the cosmos, of the human being, of worship, morals and society. Egyptology has no doubt progressed by leaps and bounds since the author's time but I learned a lot.
I was less comfortable with Petrie's theory that certain aspects of ancient Egyptian religion sneaked their way into Christianity and Islam.
Be that as it may, I enjoyed the wealth of details about Egyptian deities and their evolution, the Egyptian understanding of the cosmos, of the human being, of worship, morals and society. Egyptology has no doubt progressed by leaps and bounds since the author's time but I learned a lot.
I was less comfortable with Petrie's theory that certain aspects of ancient Egyptian religion sneaked their way into Christianity and Islam.
July 10, 2021
A concise introduction to fundamental Egyptian theology. There is history, but this is prehistory.
Ancient Egypt is unarguably the cradle of all modern civilisations. Religion was a fundamental fact in all aspects of life, not just from the cradle to the grave, but even beyond !
Study of religion is to study the evolution of the human psyche. Which is pretty damn interesting. Many beliefs and traditions have their origins in 6000BC beliefs when humans had just started settling down and farming. Egyptian civilisation spans an enormous span of time. Segmented into dynasties, it’s possible to track how beliefs and religion evolved over 4000 years, and how modern religions came out to be.
This book talks about beliefs that were already ancient to people we consider ancient. Well, like an analogy goes, In time cleopatra is closer to the moon landing than to the time the great pyramids were built. This stuff is old. It’s mind boggling to imagine Egyptian beliefs in preislamic Arabia and preroman or prehellenic Europe.
Ancient Egypt is unarguably the cradle of all modern civilisations. Religion was a fundamental fact in all aspects of life, not just from the cradle to the grave, but even beyond !
Study of religion is to study the evolution of the human psyche. Which is pretty damn interesting. Many beliefs and traditions have their origins in 6000BC beliefs when humans had just started settling down and farming. Egyptian civilisation spans an enormous span of time. Segmented into dynasties, it’s possible to track how beliefs and religion evolved over 4000 years, and how modern religions came out to be.
This book talks about beliefs that were already ancient to people we consider ancient. Well, like an analogy goes, In time cleopatra is closer to the moon landing than to the time the great pyramids were built. This stuff is old. It’s mind boggling to imagine Egyptian beliefs in preislamic Arabia and preroman or prehellenic Europe.
November 12, 2023
I have a habit of writing dismissive reviews of E. A. Wallis Budge's books on ancient Egyptian religion, but it's not because I have a grudge against him in particular. It's simply that Egyptologists of his time didn't understand Egyptian religion well at all, but their books keep being reprinted because they're in the public domain. For comparison, I looked at this book from the same era, whose author, one of the giants in the history of Egyptology, was no friend of Budge and often disagreed with him.
Petrie's book is just as dated as anything Budge wrote, and inaccuracies appear as early as the first chapter. To wit: the idea that the Egyptian pantheon resulted from a combination of separate "tribal monotheisms" seems to be entirely wrong, judging by the scant evidence from the Predynastic Period; Isis and Osiris first appear in Egyptian texts in the Fifth Dynasty, not earlier; and the first substantial texts relating to them, the Pyramid Texts, already connect them with Horus and with each other. Possibly the most glaring inaccuracy is Petrie's assertion that the afterlife beliefs surrounding Ra and Osiris dated to the Predynastic Period, when in fact neither of those deities is known to have been worshipped in the Predynastic. Most of those facts should have been clear even in 1906, thanks to the rapid archaeological discoveries that had been made over the previous 25 years, but Petrie was much more an excavator than an analyst, and much of the writing about Egyptian religion in this period was built more on the authors' preexisting assumptions than on sober analysis of the evidence.
One of Petrie's preexisting assumptions, which appears repeatedly here, is that different types of ideas can be traced to different races of people. For instance, Petrie implies that gods that represented abstract, intellectual concepts, such as Ptah, originated among the "Dynastic Race" that he believed invaded Egypt in late prehistory and spurred the creation of dynastic Egyptian civilization. It's in keeping with the eugenicism that ran through much of Petrie's work, and it is nonsensical.
Much of the book gives a reasonably accurate description of Egyptian religious practice, but it's a very thin description—the original edition of the book was less than a hundred pages—and one you could easily get from more recent and sophisticated sources. Perhaps the best starting point is Ancient Egyptian Religion by Stephen Quirke, or a combination of Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt by Emily Teeter with the first four chapters of The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by Richard H. Wilkinson.
Petrie's book is just as dated as anything Budge wrote, and inaccuracies appear as early as the first chapter. To wit: the idea that the Egyptian pantheon resulted from a combination of separate "tribal monotheisms" seems to be entirely wrong, judging by the scant evidence from the Predynastic Period; Isis and Osiris first appear in Egyptian texts in the Fifth Dynasty, not earlier; and the first substantial texts relating to them, the Pyramid Texts, already connect them with Horus and with each other. Possibly the most glaring inaccuracy is Petrie's assertion that the afterlife beliefs surrounding Ra and Osiris dated to the Predynastic Period, when in fact neither of those deities is known to have been worshipped in the Predynastic. Most of those facts should have been clear even in 1906, thanks to the rapid archaeological discoveries that had been made over the previous 25 years, but Petrie was much more an excavator than an analyst, and much of the writing about Egyptian religion in this period was built more on the authors' preexisting assumptions than on sober analysis of the evidence.
One of Petrie's preexisting assumptions, which appears repeatedly here, is that different types of ideas can be traced to different races of people. For instance, Petrie implies that gods that represented abstract, intellectual concepts, such as Ptah, originated among the "Dynastic Race" that he believed invaded Egypt in late prehistory and spurred the creation of dynastic Egyptian civilization. It's in keeping with the eugenicism that ran through much of Petrie's work, and it is nonsensical.
Much of the book gives a reasonably accurate description of Egyptian religious practice, but it's a very thin description—the original edition of the book was less than a hundred pages—and one you could easily get from more recent and sophisticated sources. Perhaps the best starting point is Ancient Egyptian Religion by Stephen Quirke, or a combination of Religion and Ritual in Ancient Egypt by Emily Teeter with the first four chapters of The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt by Richard H. Wilkinson.
October 28, 2022
Originally published in 1906, this short public domain ebook by one of the fathers of Egyptology makes for a fascinating read, one worth repeating often.
I was not aware of how the fortunes of Egyptian gods waxed and waned through the dynasties, reflecting the rise and fall in power of their respective localities and tribal affiliations. The author makes clear how the religious mythology may represent actual events and movements of tribes in prehistory, leading up to the population of early kingdoms’ Egypt. He also makes clear just how chaotic, self-contradictory, and basically cobbled-together in retrospect the whole Egyptian pantheon is. Thousands of years of painting over the cracks and trying to explain the inexplicable have created this fascinating mess. Looking at it as a whole from the 20th century may give the impression it was all set in stone, but it all changed and fluctuated wildly from dynasty to dynasty, with each century giving an entirely different picture.
Similarly, Egyptian religious ideas clearly influenced the empires of the Middle East as well as ancient Greece and Rome, and can be traced all the way into the foundations of Christianity: Isis and Horus have directly given rise to the Madonna and Child. The trinity and monasticism also derive directly from Egyptian custom.
Quite a brave assertion to make in Edwardian times when Christian and imperial exceptionalism was the norm, but one which makes complete sense when one accepts that religion is an ever changing, ever mutating and adapting thing, rather than an immutable truth.
The distinction between ancient religions that tolerated and absorbed, and more recent monotheisms of “jealous gods”, is particularly interesting, as is the theory that localised monotheism is the first true form of religion above animism, and that pantheons are representations of how ancient peoples each with their own identifying god came into contact and interacted with each other, a sort of historical record embodied in myth.
Definitely a book that encourages further reading and learning.
I was not aware of how the fortunes of Egyptian gods waxed and waned through the dynasties, reflecting the rise and fall in power of their respective localities and tribal affiliations. The author makes clear how the religious mythology may represent actual events and movements of tribes in prehistory, leading up to the population of early kingdoms’ Egypt. He also makes clear just how chaotic, self-contradictory, and basically cobbled-together in retrospect the whole Egyptian pantheon is. Thousands of years of painting over the cracks and trying to explain the inexplicable have created this fascinating mess. Looking at it as a whole from the 20th century may give the impression it was all set in stone, but it all changed and fluctuated wildly from dynasty to dynasty, with each century giving an entirely different picture.
Similarly, Egyptian religious ideas clearly influenced the empires of the Middle East as well as ancient Greece and Rome, and can be traced all the way into the foundations of Christianity: Isis and Horus have directly given rise to the Madonna and Child. The trinity and monasticism also derive directly from Egyptian custom.
Quite a brave assertion to make in Edwardian times when Christian and imperial exceptionalism was the norm, but one which makes complete sense when one accepts that religion is an ever changing, ever mutating and adapting thing, rather than an immutable truth.
The distinction between ancient religions that tolerated and absorbed, and more recent monotheisms of “jealous gods”, is particularly interesting, as is the theory that localised monotheism is the first true form of religion above animism, and that pantheons are representations of how ancient peoples each with their own identifying god came into contact and interacted with each other, a sort of historical record embodied in myth.
Definitely a book that encourages further reading and learning.
April 25, 2020
Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie outlines major themes in religious practice and thought in Ancient Egypt. In fifteen chapters, the author describes the: Nature of Gods; Nature of Man; Future Life; Animal Worship; Animal-Headed Gods; Human Gods; Cosmic Gods; Abstract Gods; Abstract Gods; Foreign Gods; Cosmogony; Ritual and Priesthood; Sacred Books; Private Worship; Ethics; and Influence of Egypt. I listened to the LibriVox audiobook read by Kajo and Piotr Nater. While some readers will disagree with the author's argument that Egyptian culture was a nonnative culture which diffused into North Africa and Asia, other readers should be satisfied with the balanced and broad descriptions of the different, evolving aspects of contemporaneous (circa 1909) scholarship on religion in Ancient Egypt.
January 5, 2022
"The ran is the name which was essential to man, as also inanimate things. Without an name nothing really existed. The knowledge of the name gave power over its owner; [..] Both in ancient and modern races the knowledge of the real name of a man is carefully guarded, and often secondary names are used for secular purposes. It was usual for Egyptians to have a 'great name' and a 'little name'; the great name is often compounded with that of a god or a king, and was very probably reserved for religious purposes, as it only found on religious and funerary monuments. "
September 28, 2017
Straightforward, no words wasted
I would have considered five stars if I had known anything about the author of his sources, or from what authority he writes. He writes as a professor talks, and seems to assume his words are authority enough.
But, I liked it.
I would have considered five stars if I had known anything about the author of his sources, or from what authority he writes. He writes as a professor talks, and seems to assume his words are authority enough.
But, I liked it.
January 3, 2019
I have no idea whether the findings of Petrie are still valid, but it makes for awesome reading. The mutation of Isis and Horus into Mary and Jesus, in it's iconic fashion, was, "like, wow, man!"
This review is pretty thin because I am no scholar. But I really dig Atum and Anubis.
This review is pretty thin because I am no scholar. But I really dig Atum and Anubis.
September 24, 2025
This book contains many inaccuracies and misrepresentations of the ancient Egyptian religion. Given its publication date, some of this may reflect what was believed at the time, but it’s not a reliable source for anyone who truly wants to learn about ancient Egypt.
May 25, 2021
Interesting!
Interesting and informative. It is amazing to see how this ancient religion is embedded in most of the world's religions.
Interesting and informative. It is amazing to see how this ancient religion is embedded in most of the world's religions.
April 25, 2023
Amazing book, I listened to the free audiobook version on YouTube. I will leave the link below so everyone can enjoy! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJ_69...
October 20, 2023
I loved this book, very small but has good knowledge.
July 5, 2018
Very interesting mythology knowledge. The way the author described the ancient traditions and believes and the transition from polytheism religion into monotheism in Ancient Egypt.
PS: The book is short but it needs a lot of re-reading due to hard theological and historical vocab.
PS: The book is short but it needs a lot of re-reading due to hard theological and historical vocab.
September 14, 2024
El autor, W. M. Flinders Petrie, al parecer fue un eminente egiptólogo inglés a mediados de siglo XX, lo cual me dio cierta confianza a la hora de leer el libro. No obstante cuando empecé el libro me pareció un tanto caótico. Aun así continúe su lectura esperando que posteriormente encajaran mejor los conceptos y fuera más legible, pero para mi sorpresa el libro continuaba en la misma línea, siendo un caos.
Al final no lo acabé del todo (y eso que el libro es muy pequeño) pero es que no había forma humana de sacar nada en limpio de lo que estaba escrito.
He querido pensar que quizá la traducción es muy mala o que sea una edición realmente penosa. El autor parece ser que es una persona respetable dentro del mundo de la egiptología, por ello quiero darle un voto de confianza al autor y pensar que la obra es mala por otros motivos. Claro, que a lo mejor es una obra clave en la egiptología y yo no he sabido pillarle su valor. Sea como sea, el libro es realmente aburrido y lioso.
Al final no lo acabé del todo (y eso que el libro es muy pequeño) pero es que no había forma humana de sacar nada en limpio de lo que estaba escrito.
He querido pensar que quizá la traducción es muy mala o que sea una edición realmente penosa. El autor parece ser que es una persona respetable dentro del mundo de la egiptología, por ello quiero darle un voto de confianza al autor y pensar que la obra es mala por otros motivos. Claro, que a lo mejor es una obra clave en la egiptología y yo no he sabido pillarle su valor. Sea como sea, el libro es realmente aburrido y lioso.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
May 23, 2014
This is a good primer on this subject for the beginner. The author provides an overview the customs, practices, gods and history of ancient Egyptian religion, and although scholarship has advanced greatly since it was initially published (1912), it would be hard to find a better, more accessible introduction to the subject for the curious. Highly recommended.
February 1, 2015
Good book...
I liked this book very much. Loaded with facts, someone really did their homework here. The chapters were well divided, and contained some information that I had read previously in other books. Good factual back up. Gave credence to other information that was entirely new to me.
I liked this book very much. Loaded with facts, someone really did their homework here. The chapters were well divided, and contained some information that I had read previously in other books. Good factual back up. Gave credence to other information that was entirely new to me.
October 11, 2012
This book has some good points and I rather like the way it is organists. At the same time, I do not agree with a fair bit of the information and feel the author did not fully explore the ideas he presented.
April 22, 2010
Concise, useful, and even readable.
Currently reading
January 3, 2011So far, very informative and interesting, though lacking some explanations. Just recently started, may need to read more to decide fully.
July 10, 2015
Informative
The Religion of Ancient Egypt is vary informative it opens up the way the Ancients thought about there life and surroundings
The Religion of Ancient Egypt is vary informative it opens up the way the Ancients thought about there life and surroundings
January 28, 2024
Interesting.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews