The cultural manifestations of religious experience

This volume, which celebrates the 65th birthday of the Egyptologist Boyo G. Ockinga (Macquarie University, Sydney), brings together thirty-four contributions from noted Egyptologists to shed new light on how religious experience manifests itself in the cultural artefacts of Ancient Egypt. In particular, the volume seeks to both raise and address the following questions: Has changing religious thought influenced art and architecture? How do literary works reflect religious and cultural norms? How do historical circumstances affect religious expression? These questions are approached from a variety of perspectives which fall into eight different thematic areas. The first section considers the role of reuse and destruction within the built environment in the construction and enactment of changing religious and social ideas. The second section explores the material culture of tomb deposits and considers such pieces in their historical and functional context. The treatment of human and animal remains within a funerary context is the focus of the third section of the book, whereas the fourth concerns itself with funerary art, which represents a continual juncture between the mundane and the religious, between this world and the next. This section brings to light the artistic, functional, but also social perspectives of tomb decoration. In the fifth section, the workforces and communities around religious monuments are discussed in order to portray the broader context of building, maintaining and living in religious monuments in various periods of Egyptian history. The sixth section concerns epigraphy and document studies, with a particular focus on religious texts in their broadest sense: from religious motifs on private stelae to the layout of monumental stelae and from the religious content of temple texts to the development of religious literature. In the seventh section, the intersection of text, language and society are considered: How does ideology influence a society’s language? How do names come to be and how does orthography help us date and locate text production? Lastly, what can religious texts tell us about language use? The final section of the volume deals with themes key to religious studies, from religious proscription, cosmology and cosmography to the effect of religious ideas on the built environment and cultic practice.