Tom Holland

Of gods and men

Neil MacGregor’s last major exhibition at the British Museum is a fascinating portrait of a crucial period in Egyptian history that holds a mirror up to today

Over the stupefyingly long course of Egyptian history, gods have been born and they have died. Some 4,000 years ago, amid the chaos that marked the fragmentation of the original pharaonic state, an incantation was inscribed on the side of a coffin. It imagined a time when there had been nothing in existence save a single divine Creator. ‘I was alone in the emptiness,’ the god proclaimed, ‘and could find no place to stand.’ Nevertheless, beside him, he could feel the gods that were yet to exist. ‘They were with me, these deities waiting to be born. I came into being and Becoming became.’ The gods emerged, to reign first on earth and then in the heavens, and history began.

Outside Egypt itself, the British Museum is as good a place as any to trace their evolution: how, for millennia, temples were raised in their honour, and rituals performed. What happened to them, though, that eventually they came to fade and be forgotten? A new exhibition at the museum, Egypt: faith after the pharaohs, explores this momentous question. Certainly, as the show makes clear, the extinction of native rule in Egypt did not spell the immediate death of her ancestral gods. Instead, under first the Persians, then the Greeks, and finally the Romans, they endured as they had ever done, seemingly immortal. Whether in their temples or painted on the walls of tombs, the same portraits were reproduced century after century: of Isis, the divine mother feeding Horus, her baby son, or of Horus himself, grown to manhood and sporting the head of a hawk, or of Anubis, jackal-featured protector of the dead.

Not only did Egypt’s conquerors make sure to parade their respect for the country’s gods, but they added to its pantheon. The greatest temple in Alexandria, a city founded on the Mediterranean by a Macedonian king, was raised in honour of Serapis, a deity who combined a thoroughly Greek beard and robe with a primordially Egyptian lineage.

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