Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

by Robert N. Bellah

  This human action, focusing on the king, takes two main forms. One is the “hostile confrontation” with “the powers that belong to the nonexistent outside creation but invade creation and must be driven out of it. It is the duty of the king and the gods to do this.“72 Such negative powers can be represented by foreign enemies-Libyans or Asiatics-as well as by domestic rebels, or, indeed by anyone who transgresses the proper order of the world. From the earliest beginnings of Egyptian kingship there appears the image of “the smiting of the enemies,” often a painting or relief of the pharaoh holding a number of enemies or rebels by the hair while wielding a weapon with which he will destroy them. Military power was always associated with the Egyptian state and had a powerful symbolic justification in holding the line against chaos.

  But there was another aspect of the confrontation with chaos or the nonexistent, namely its essential role in “fertility, renewal, and rejuvenation.“73 Unless the sun, which grows old at dusk, descends into the utter darkness of the underworld, it will not be reborn at dawn; unless the land is submerged by the inundation of the Nile, it will not bear new crops; unless all things, including humans, die, life will not continue. All these transactions with chaos are dangerous and must be acted out with meticulous ritual propriety, but it is only through them that life as we know it can go on. As the sun, from the Fifth Dynasty on, became ever more central in Egyptian religion, solar ritual became the primary focus of the cult. Unless the ritual was properly enacted, that is, carried out every hour of the day and night, in principle by the king but usually delegated to his priestly deputies, the very source of life would be endangered.

  It is this second kind of confrontation with chaos, dangerous but not hostile, indeed essential, that helps us understand the importance of mortuary ritual and royal tombs in Egyptian history. The apparent Egyptian preoccupation with death was in reality a preoccupation with life. Because the death of the king was the greatest threat to human order, special precautions needed to be undertaken to be sure that it rendered life and not death. Tombs were not built, pyramids were not constructed after the death of the king, but such construction began early in his reign. The king’s son was obligated to complete the work and undertake the funeral ritual, but we know that the tombs of kings who died early were seldom impressive. Royal tombs, above all the great pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty, which remain among the wonders of the world, were monuments to the life of the king, before and after death. We could even refer to them as the reified rituals of divine kingship, the “flags” in Kemp’s analogy, of the ancient Egyptian state.

  When we first find decorated tombs in the Fifth Dynasty and later, the scenes depicted are full of life, not only the daily life of humans, but the life of animals and plants as well. In later centuries the preoccupation with the netherworld grew and representations of daily life were no longer so evident. But the “afterlife” to the ancient Egyptians was not viewed as a radically other world, but as a continuation of this one. From this point of view, as Hornung emphasizes, the relation between order and chaos was “anything but negative,” because the right relation between them was the very source of everything the Egyptians most valued.74

  John Baines, among others, has taken pains to remind us that the lives of most of the ancient Egyptians were hard and, all too often, brief. In a population of 1 to 1.5 million, the real elite was a “close-knit group of a few hundred … The core elite together with their families numbered two or three thousand people.” Even when including secondary elites and local administrators who had some degree of literacy, together with their families, the “ruling class” only composed 3 to 5 percent of the population.75 Although Baines argues that the daily life of the great majority was little different from that of Neolithic villagers, and local identification, particularly with the local deities or local versions of widely known deities, remained important throughout Egyptian history, the centralized Egyptian state reached into the village economically in the form of taxes, politically through military conscription or corvee labor, and almost certainly culturally. Especially during the early dynasties the royal court was peripatetic, regularly voyaging up and down the Nile, so that most villagers would have had some experience of the royal presence in their neighborhood. The contrast in style of life between that of the court and that of the villagers would indeed have given most people the impression that the king was a living god.

  In Egypt as in other early archaic states, centralization of power under the leadership of the king was associated with remarkable cultural creativity in the development of writing, art, and architecture, but also with experiments in pushing the limits of human power. Evidence for human sacrifice in late predynastic and early dynastic Egypt is not plentiful, but is sufficient to make it clear that it was practiced. Retainer sacrifice of wives, officials, and servants occurred in the First and Second Dynasties, but then ceases.76 Retainer burial is a marker of the extraordinary status of the king, who can take his closest associates with him into the afterlife, unlike ordinary mortals.

  But the most extreme example of pushing the limits of power must be the building of the great pyramids of the Fourth Dynasty, after retainer sacrifice had been abandoned. Impressive tombs are a hallmark of Egyptian culture before and after the Old Kingdom, but nothing in Egyptian history or that of any other archaic society comes near to equaling the colossal undertaking involved in the construction of the great pyramids of Cheops and Khephren at Giza in the middle of the third millennium BCE, engineering feats not equaled again in human history until the twentieth century CE. The wealth and manpower of the whole country must have been mobilized for decades to complete these enormous projects. The workmen who actually produced these monuments were not slaves, but ordinary villagers from all over the country who were required to spend given periods of time at the construction site. If there was no “national economy” earlier, this vast building project surely created one. But it also undoubtedly strained the early state to its limits. Just as retainer sacrifice had been abandoned earlier, so such gigantic construction projects were never repeated. Jan Assmann views the building of the great pyramids as a kind of culmination of the building of the early state:

  In a sense the great pyramids of Giza represent the culmination of a process that began in Naqada [late predynastic period]. The tombs become increasingly monumental and the power of the chief (later the pharaoh) becomes greater and greater, taking on divine dimensions until the pharaoh becomes akin to the Supreme God. This increasing divinization of the ruler finds visual expression in the development of the royal tombs-a process that reaches its logical conclusion at state provides the immense forces and organizational resources without which the architecture would be impossible. Thus the pyramids also symbolize and visualize the organizational prowess of the state, as embodied in the king, whose will is strong enough to move mountains.77

  These great pyramids, visible to anyone traveling up or down the Nile for the last 4500 years, made, as Herodotus put it, even time afraid. They too will pass away, but unlike most Egyptian monuments, not any time soon.

  It is ironic that, because we have no inscriptions associated with them, we know little about the exact meaning of the great pyramids. In Egypt as in Mesopotamia many centuries pass from the “invention of writing” until the appearance of continuous texts. Even when such texts do appear in the Fifth and Sixth Dynasties, their subject matter is very limited: administration and temple, above all mortuary, ritual. For one thing the literate class was still extremely small. For another, oral culture does not disappear with the invention of writing-far from it-and much cultural knowledge was still entrusted to living memory rather than writing. Early writing gives us insight only into fragments of a whole way of life, a way of life primarily transmitted not only orally but mimetically, that is, by

  But the Old Kingdom, destined to remain forever enclosed in more than a little mystery, in spite of its claim through the great pyramids to overcome time, did in fact come to
an end, and was followed by what is known as the First Intermediate Period at the end of the third millennium, that is, roughly 2150 to 2040 BCE. Because in archaic societies there is no such thing as “religion” or “politics” (we use those terms only analytically to describe dimensions of what was concretely a single whole), societal collapse and religious crisis are two ways of describing the same phenomenon. When the centralized state disintegrated and whoever claimed to be king exercised no effective power, then local upstarts appeared. Assmann speaks of an alternation in Egyptian history between the “monocentric surface” of the centralized state and the “polycentric deep structure” that reappeared whenever the surface structure crumbled. Not only did the geographic entities of the predynastic period reemerge, but something of the ethos of the earlier period appeared as well: namely the culture of the “violent hearted,” for upstarts rule by force and survive only by military victory.79

  Nonetheless, centuries of dynastic history could not be obliterated and what at first glance looks to be a period of regression was in fact a period of marked cultural advance. Local power claimants could no longer act as appointees of the king: they had to seek other sources of justification. Naked power may have been the initial basis of local rule, but was not alone sufficient. Rather than claiming appointment by the king, local rulers claimed to have been appointed by the local god, and local cults flourished at the expense of the high gods. Rulers gave evidence of their divine chosenness by their capacity to bring order and even justice to the local scene.

  Endemic civil war interrupted the smooth transmission of oral and mimetic culture; a new flowering of written texts arose to fill the gap. Austere and relatively brief autobiographical texts from late Old Kingdom tombs have been found, often perfunctorily listing the magnanimous deeds of the deceased. But such autobiographical texts flourish in the first Intermediate Period. They give a dark picture of surrounding conditions in order to highlight the achievements of the local ruler. The autobiographical inscription of one such ruler, the Nomarch80 Ankhtifi of Hierakonpolis and Edfu, states:

  I am the vanguard of men and the rearguard of men. One who finds the solution where it is lacking. A leader of the land through active conduct. Strong in speech, collected in thought, on the day of joining the three nomes. For I am a champion without peer, who spoke out when the people were silent, on the day of fear when Upper Egypt was silent.81

  Already in the Old Kingdom norms of moral obligation to the common people were reiterated in mortuary inscriptions. Ankhtifi resumes and expands this tradition when he claims:

  But with Ankhtifi these acts were not merely the reiteration of established moral norms. In a time when people were dying of hunger and even eating their children, every norm of ordinary morality was being violated. Thus when Ankhtifi asserted:

  he was engaged in what Assmann calls “saving justice.“83 He was not a bureaucrat operating under established moral norms, but a patron protecting, indeed saving, his clients from disaster and expecting loyalty in return. Assmann sees in this the emergence of a new rhetoric: “The rhetoric of crisis and salvation foregrounds the patron as a savior whose achievements have preserved the nome from the certain disaster seen everywhere else.“84 If crisis conditions place a new emphasis on loyalty to the patron, they consign the disloyal to destruction. Assmann believes that the culture of loyalism created in the disastrous circumstances of the First Intermediate Period, became central to the culture of the Middle Kingdom, when fear of chaos was used to justify rule long after the country had been successfully reunited.

  Assmann sees a shifting pattern of Egyptian values accompanying the oscillations between monocentric and polycentric polities. “Integration” was the norm in periods of unity; “competition” in periods of disunity. It was the task of the Middle Kingdom (2040-1650 BCE) to move the new cultural rhetoric of the First Intermediate Period from the context of competition to the context of integration. But times had changed. The centralized state was not the isolated pinnacle that it had been in the Old Kingdom, when all faces were turned to the center. The center had to attract the loyalty of the newly independent and vigorous peripheries by cultural, not just military means. Assmann describes the problem:

  On the one hand, it was necessary to reestablish the norms of integrative ethics and self-effacement so radically challenged by the collapse of the Old Kingdom. On the other, these norms had to be universalized: the ethic of a tiny privileged minority had to be transformed into the ethic of a broad cultural elite representing Egyptian ideals and sustaining the existence of the state. Something akin to “education” was needed. Indeed, the Middle Kingdom was the first to find that it required a systematic education policy as part of its project of political restoration.85

  Education required schools and standard texts, as well as new genres of writing. It is from the Middle Kingdom that we begin to find “wisdom” texts, hymns and tales. “Literature” is a dangerous word as its origins are so recent in the West, but if we use the word cautiously, then we can begin to speak of Egyptian literature from early in the second millennium BCE. Of particular importance are the so-called “instruction texts” in which often a father imparts worldly wisdom to his son, but which also contain significant new religious ideas. To students of ancient China this focus on moral education for a bureaucratic ruling class, with a high regard for certain “classic” texts, will sound more than a little familiar, even though Confucianism in China developed many centuries later. As we will see, the differences are as important as the parallels.

  The ancient Egyptian system of moral norms was summed up in a single term: ma`at. The term has been variously translated as order, justice or truth. None of these translations is wrong, but none is adequate, for, as Eric Voegelin puts it, “The symbol is too compact to be translated by a single word in a modern language. As the Maat of the cosmos it would have to be rendered as order; as the Maat of society, as good government and justice; as the Maat of true understanding of ordered reality, as truth.“86 Assmann proposes the translation “connective justice,” emphasizing the element of reciprocity that forms communities and establishes obligations. He cites a royal inscription from around 1700 BCE:

  If ma`at points to the generalized reciprocity that is central for tribal societies and found in most moral systems subsequently, for the Egyptians it became substantial in the form of a goddess. Its “religious” status is indicated by the frequent depiction of the king offering maat as a small statue of the goddess to the god being addressed, who is said to “feed on” ma`at. Such a small statue of the goddess appears frequently in depictions of the judgment of the dead where the “heart” of the deceased is put on the scales opposite to the statue of the goddess. A heart lacking in ma`at will sink, thus condemning the deceased to nonexistence.

  The appearance of the heart as a central symbol in ancient Egyptian religion is itself a symptom of the changed relation between god, king and humans after the First Intermediate Period. The “loyalism” that linked the local ruler to his god and his followers to him was generalized in the Middle Kingdom to the realm as a whole. The idea of kingship growing out of this way of thinking was closer to the Mesopotamian model of rule than to that of the Old Kingdom.88 None of the old symbols were abandoned: the king was still Horus, and the son of Re. But the emphasis now was on the king as steward of the god, as chosen by the god; it was the god who was the real ruler.

  But the king was also, on a grand scale, the patron and protector of the people. If Assmann uses the term “savior,” he does not mean a savior from this world, but a savior in this world. In summing up he says, “Egyptian civilization needs no Redeemer, only a `good shepherd’ protecting his sheep from the wolves.“89 Concomitantly, the king requires a more consciously willed loyalty than would have seemed necessary in the Old Kingdom. Assmann describes a kind of history of the heart, remembering that in Egyptian heart means more than it does in English: it includes mind and will as well as feeling. In the Old Kingdom the
elite ideal was the “king-guided individual.” There is no mention of the individual heart for “the heart of the king thinks and plans for all.” In the Middle Kingdom the ideal is the “heartguided individual,” the person whose loyalty has been internalized, whose veneration of the king has become part of his innermost self. The New Kingdom will see another development, the “god-guided individual,” but that must await consideration until a bit later.

  Assmann argues that the Egyptian emphasis on the role of the ruler as protector of the weak against the strong, of the poor against the wealthy, as the upholder of any semblance of order against the chaos of civil discord, was a kind of Hobbesian justification of what was in some ways a police state in the Middle Kingdom.90 Yet he is also aware that we are not talking about a Neolithic village where village elders could maintain order, much less a hunter-gatherer band ruled by a general will. When large-scale agricultural societies break down, violence and horrors of all sorts not infrequently erupt. One may doubt how many of the weak and poor the pharaoh really protected against the privileged of the land, but that his rule kept mayhem at bay may not have been just ruling class propaganda. It may have been appreciated, and not only by elite classes.

  It is in the New Kingdom (1550-1070 BCE) that something that at least incipiently can be called theology flowers, but conscious reflection on religious meaning begins in the Middle Kingdom if not before. In order to understand the nature of Egyptian religious reflection, there are certain things we must consider. In The Search for God in Ancient Egypt, Assmann describes three dimensions of what he calls implicit theology, that is, aspects that appear primarily in practice: the local or cultic, the cosmic, and the mythic. He then describes what he calls the “fourth dimension,” explicit theology. He warns us early on that there was no “theoretical discourse” in ancient Egypt,9’ which makes his use of the term “theology” problematic. Eric Voegelin suggests a term for reflection that pushes mythical thinking to its limit-to the verge of theoretical reflection without ever quite crossing the boundary- This might be a better term for Assmann’s fourth dimension than explicit theology.