ANCIENT EGYPTIAN SKEPTICISM

JUAN JOSÉ CASTILLOS

Uruguayan Institute of Egyptology

ABSTRACT - The ancient Egyptians had the reputation of being the most religious of
people. According to some ancient writers they went to the extreme of worshiping animals
and even some of the vegetables in the gardens. In a more restrained and realistic
conception it is firmly established that religious devotion went far beyond the realm of the
official cults and involved the people with many examples of private devotion.

However, are we to assume that as some prominent philosophers wrote, there was no
philosophical thinking in ancient Egypt, something disproved by countless texts that
expressed concern with what we could properly call philosophical matters?

Then some could also say that skepticism was unknown among such devoted people. But
the ancient literature provides examples of such attitudes and the behaviour of most
people at the time exhibits little respect for aspects of their religious beliefs, which is not
surprising given the endless frustrations of the lower strata of the population as to the
traditions handed down from their rulers and the elite.

Although not encouraged or allowed to the extent that it might have led to the appearance
of groups of skeptics like in ancient Greece and Rome, the feeling did exist and
manifested itself in a variety of ways.

Despite the fact that there is much evidence to cast doubts as to the supposed
deep religious attitude and feelings of the ancient Egyptian people all through
pharaonic times1, there are many who confusing ancient religiosity with its modern
version, assume that the Nile Valley was a place where a pious population made
religion the centre of their lives2.

1
"Ancient Egyptian culture was permeated by statements symbolic and direct, which defined a
world of deities and divine power. They amounted to a form of knowledge that was largely divorced
from general behaviour and which afforded little recognition of individual experience ......... The
exemplary life was a career pursued in what was basically a secular society", B. Kemp, How
religious were the ancient Egyptians?, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5 (1), 1995, 25.
2
"Religion was the dominant social force in ancient Egypt. Religious influence was pervasive
affecting almost everything ............. From the time of the New Kingdom, Egyptians were convinced
that only a sinless soul could enter into afterlife. The dead undergo last judgment, which consisted
of two tests before Osiris under the supervision of Anubis, the controller of funerals and cemeteries,
who stood in as a man with a jackal’s head. It was assumed that the dead are interrogated by a
The contemporary religiosity expressed by conversion and deep commitment to a
body of beliefs at a strictly personal level, both by participating in rituals and
adhering to the stipulations of the deity, differs so much from the ancient religious
experience that renders it as incomprehensible and leads to a number of
misunderstandings3.

It appears also as inadequate the use of even the word ‘religion’ to refer to the
ancient Egyptian body of beliefs and rituals but it has been used for almost two
centuries and we are forced to clarify this concept in order to avoid such
misunderstandings4.

The relationship at a personal level between individuals and families and the realm
of the divine as examples of personal piety is also open to criticism due to the
uncertainties related to such practices5.

However, and in spite of the wide spectrum of opinions within egyptology as to the
existence and the extent of such a pious feeling among the population, it seems
that it flourished mainly at times of personal or widespread disasters, in which
people tried all possible alternatives to calm their fear and apprehension6.

panel of deities about their activities while on earth, while their hearts, which is the seat of the soul,
were weighed on a scale against an ostrich feather, which symbolized Maat, the goddess of truth",
E. Okon, American Journal of Social and Management Sciences, 3 (3), 2012, 93, 95.
3
"Piety seems to have been conceived of as a form of relationship between man and god based on
a conscious decision ........... Conversion in the proper sense is inseparably linked to a notion of
absolute and metaphysical truth that is alien to ancient Egypt ........ Let us now return to the point
from where we started, the movement of Personal Piety and the emphasis it laid on the heart and
its decision for God. It seems obvious that we are dealing here with the application of the patron-
client relationship to the god-man relationship. In the Middle Kingdom, this model had been adopted
by the state in order to redefine the pharaoh-subject relationship. In the New Kingdom, the same
model enters the sphere of political theology and religious anthropology", J. Assmann, Conversion,
Piety and Loyalism in Ancient Egypt, in G. Stroumsa, ed., Transformations of the inner self in
ancient religions, Leiden, 1999, 32, 33, 42; "The research carried out in this thesis supports the
more recent view of scholars. Festivals demonstrate the link between individual religiosity and state
religion because they were controlled and run by the state", L. Dewsbury, Invisible religion in
ancient Egypt, A study into the individual religiosity of non-royal and non-elite ancient Egyptians,
Birmingham, 2016, 305.
4
"Our use of the term 'religion' for ancient Egypt, whilst justifiable as a convenience, clearly covers
a relationship between belief and behaviour which is distinctive for its place and time", B. Kemp,
How religious were the ancient Egyptians?, 25.
5
"To sum up, we may say about household religion in the Middle Kingdom that most of the sources
point out to the worship of ancestors in the domestic context; although in small number we have
sources that attest the presence of gods in houses and that the chosen gods were essentially
deities related to the domestic life; we have many sources that attest to the performance of religious
procedures but it’s not possible to associate them with some type of worship in particular; some of
these sources help us to realize how the worship was done; other sources were not directly related
to the worship of ancestors or gods but indicate other practices / concerns", S. Mota, ENIM 11,
2018, 30.
6
"Personal Piety: Intimate Personal Dimension or Aspect of Official Religion?, Helmut Brunner
argued that the piety of the Ramesside Period resulted from a feeling of fear, probably rooted in
specific social problems stemming possibly from the preceding Amarna Age, when personal contact
with a deity was not permitted except through the intercession of the king. Moreover, he defined
Rather than a phenomenon of personal devotion manifested itself in the shrines
and the temples we may be in the presence of quite another situation centered
around the official cults favoured by the state7.

At places like Deir el-Medina, better documented than most, this image of popular
piety does not hold much water and exhibits more a secular manifestation among
the population8.

Since there were humans on earth, there has been a wide variety of personalities
and behaviours, the same as with all animals and due to the individual genetic
makeup.

We can always find animals in all species, and especially among the more
developed ones, that far from conforming to the habits and ways of the majority
differ in some modes of behaviour that make them somehow stand out.

So, it should not be surprising that there were always in all human communities as
far back in time as we go, individuals that naturally distrusted all they were told or
shown and refused to go along as much as they dared with the ways of those
around them9.

Egyptian 'personal piety' as a 'eigene Erscheinung in der ägyptischen Religion', that is, a
phenomenon specific to Egyptian religion, parallel to the temple cults, myths, and funerary beliefs",
M. Luiselli, Personal Piety, in J. Dieleman and W. Wendrich, eds., UCLA Encyclopedia of
Egyptology, Los Angeles, 2008, 2.
7
"In ancient Egypt, for example, the abstract transcendence that finds its expression in pure
symbolic markers at the temple and its scripture tends to restrain the religious impact on social
control to perennial celebrations and measures of public rites and sacred places", G. Stauth,
Afterword: Holism, Individualism, Secularism, AJSS 33:3, 2005, 529.
8
"This side of Deir el-Medina, as well as the building of so many shrines both here and at the
Amarna Workmens' Village, can create the impression that religion was at the forefront of the lives
of these two communities. The full range of sources from Deir el-Medina, however, documents a
great diversity of personal outlook, which could lead to acts of sacrilege, to the rejection of oracular
decisions, and to outspoken disagreements with senior authority", B. Kemp, How religious were the
ancient Egyptians?, 32; "The record from the houses of Deir el-Medina reveals little evidence for
individual expression of personal piety towards gods, a phenomenon perhaps expected based on
earlier studies that focused on hymnal texts. Without excluding the possible experience of pious
feelings towards deities as an important motivation for any religious activity, the majority of religious
actions sought the individual’s well-being within a broader familial context", L. Weiss, Religious
Practice at Deir el-Medina, Leiden, 2015, Chapter 4.
9
"Similar factors lie behind the development of explicitly skeptical traditions. Every society includes
men and women with unorthodox ideas, people who adopt a radically dissenting attitude to
generally accepted views on religion, politics and social order. But in an entirely oral culture,
skepticism tends to die with the individual skeptic", S. Johnston, ed., Ancient Religions, Cambridge,
2007, 130.
We could call them troublemakers as they were probably considered at the time or
the typical early skeptics who most probably attached little importance to all that
was considered sacred by their peers and that could not be readily verified10.

This attitude, as we may call it, being intuitive and spontaneous, differed from both
ancient and modern skepticism11.

We are dealing here not with an inquiry into the possibility and truthfulness of
knowledge, criterion of truth and appearances, certainty and justified belief but with
a suspension of belief in matters that exceed easily verifiable everyday
assertions12.

A probable source for early pagan skepticism may have had to do with the stories
in ancient religions of gods behaving in unethical or bizarre ways or beliefs that
seemed inconsistent with the contemporary realities of everyday life13.

10
"In epistemology there are, typically, three main questions: (1) What is knowledge?, (2) Can we
have knowledge, and if so, what is its scope and extent? and (3) What are the sources of
knowledge? Skeptics answer the second question from a negative and pessimistic standpoint. In
other words, they either deny that we can know anything at all or consider the dominion of
knowledge to be very limited. Since ancient times, skepticism has been based largely on arguments
for doubting the reliability of our various belief sources. The importance of the 'skeptical arguments'
is not only because of the challenge they offer in lieu of the possibility of gaining knowledge, but
also because they help us to deepen our understanding of knowledge. Thus, skeptical arguments
have been a central concern of epistemology, as Laurence Bonjour interestingly points out: '... if
skeptics did not exist, one might reasonably say, the serious epistemologists would have to invent
them'", P. Fatoorchi, On intellectual skepticism, A selection of skeptical arguments and Tosi's
criticisms, with some comparative notes, Philosophy East and West, Volume 63, Number 2, 2013,
213; "In the past, as is true today, religion very likely harnessed powerful social emotions to
reinforce social unity and ostracize deviants", M. Rossano, The religious mind and the evolution of
religion, Review of General Psychology, Vol. 10, No. 4, 2006, 348.
11
"The contemporary model of skepticism uses the concept of strong knowledge when addressing
the question of knowledge itself, thereby foregoing its own epoch that accepted the concept of weak
knowledge. The weakening of the concept of knowledge resulted in the absorbing of common
beliefs, which led to the return of their critique as a part of contemporary skepticism (people are not
deprived of the right to have their own beliefs, as in ancient times, but the status of these beliefs as
knowledge is questioned)", R. Zieminska, History of Skepticism: In search of consistency,
Introduction, Szczecin, 2017.
12
“Ancient skepticism is most centrally about belief, not knowledge. This reflects an intuition about
rationality that is deeply different from modern ideas. The ancient skeptics argue that, if we cannot
confidently claim knowledge, we should hold back from any kind of truth-claim. That is, we should
hold back from belief, not just from knowledge-claims. As a consequence, the ancient skeptics face
puzzles about thought, belief, language, and action. How far can one abstain from belief, and still
lead a life that is recognizably the life of a rational animal?”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy,
Ancient Skepticism, Stanford, 2010.
13
"Everyday pagan worries about the gods come from this source, which one might call the
problem of gods behaving badly. These are not philosophical worries about divine causality,
materiality, or finitude, but more everyday worries about whether we should worship the gods even
if we think them ethically inferior to humans ......... You cannot continue to live an ordinary religious
life, going along with religious observances and beliefs, if these explicitly involve a commitment to
specific theological beliefs which you no longer accept. Suspending judgement on beliefs about
God, where these are universal and cross-cultural, does deprive particular religious beliefs and
observances of support which they explicitly claim. In this situation, the religious life does become
In ancient pharaonic Egypt, at least in the earlier times of that civilization, it seems
that there was a certain skeptic attitude as to events to come, that seemed even
outside the reach of the gods themselves14.

This uncertainty as to the knowledgeability of future events agrees closely with the
skeptic attitude towards reality and was changed in the New Kingdom with the
gods being able to know the future15.

In predynastic Egypt when there was no writing yet and we can only guess at the
meaning of the images in the decorated pottery and other objects and the rock art,
the presence of skeptics can perhaps be detected by the widespred practice of
tomb robbing.

Already in the Badarian period, more than 6,000 years ago, archaeologists have
detected their depredations that continued largely unchecked for thousands of
years.

The mindset of such people in view of the severe punishments that most likely
existed both in this world and in the next one for grave robbing, that deprived the
deceased from an adequate afterlife according to their social status, must have
been one of indifference as to the religious beliefs of their community.

We can conceive that the first few times they engaged in their nefarious but
profitable occupation, they may have been somewhat afraid while violating the
dead person´s eternal abode, but after the impunity they enjoyed from the powers

emptied out, leaving the person merely going through the motions", J. Annas, Ancient scepticism
and ancient religion, in B. Morison and K. Ierodikonou, eds., Essays in honour of Jonathan Barnes,
Oxford, 2012, 83, 85.
14
"Thus, once a particular perception of nature is established, it can 'act back upon' religious
thought over a long period ......... To say this is not to deny that Egyptian culture changes over the
course of time (as Frankfort did). For example, during the First Intermediate Period, Egyptian
culture acquired in Voeglin's phrase 'a new dimension of skepticism'. Yet 'the cosmological culture
of Egypt never was broken effectively' and, one might add, neither was the Pharaonic institution", P.
Hordern, Religious conceptions and the world of nature in ancient Egypt, PhD Thesis, McMaster
University, 1972, 159.
15
"The traditional attitude towards history -this term always to be understood in the sense of Hprwt
'the flow of events' with regard rather to the future than to the past- was skeptic and pessimistic.
"You can not know what will happen", "there are no limits to what will happen", "You cannot know
what will happen so that you might recognize the morrow". According to the Instruction for Merikare,
god gave man magic as a weapon to shield off 'the blow of what will happen'. This concept of
Hprwt, 'what will happen' seems bare of any religious significance. It is not conceived of as a realm
of divine intention and manifestation. This is precisely what changes with the New Kingdom. Instead
of the traditional attitude of a somewhat fatalistic pessimism which is so prominent, e.g. in epistolary
style ("Today I am fine, but my condition of tomorrow I do not know"), we now find pious compliance
with god's plans ("Today I am fine; the morrow is in the hand of God"), J. Assmann, State and
Religion in the New Kingdom, in W. Simpson (ed.), Religion and Philosophy in Ancient Egypt, Yale
Egyptological Studies 3, 1989, 77-78.
they were defying, things must have become easier and their skepticism
reaffirmed.

They were greedy early skeptics that not by clear statement but by their behaviour
broke all rules of the respect and reverence that was due to those departed from
this earth, as they themselves would one day be and their own tombs be exposed
to the practices they knew so well.

The magnitude of the sacrilege for which they were responsible can be appreciated
by the confessions of royal tomb robbers in pharaonic Egypt in which they revealed
in all detail how they broke into the tomb, dragged the royal mummies from their
coffins depriving them from all their valuables and often burning the remains of
those who had been living gods, without any fear of divine retribution16.

A curious situation arises in the case of deliberate mutilation of bodies already from
predynastic times. That they were not criminals punished that way for their
transgressions is proved by the mere fact thay they received a decent burial17.

Here we find what appears to be a contradiction in terms, the perpetrators were

skeptic enough to dare violate the tomb without fear of retribution, but mutilated the
bodies in order to interfere with the afterlife of the deceased for some obscure
reason.

Perhaps being skeptic does not necessarily cancel superstitious beliefs in negative
actions beyond the grave provided the animosity towards the intended victim is
great enough.
16
"Egyptians were customarily buried alongside many valuable items, in order to ensure their
prosperity in the afterlife. As a result of this, the tombs – especially those of the upper class – were
constant targets of robbery. Tomb robbery was certainly considered to be a punishable crime.
Robbery of the royal tombs, however, was punished more severely; it was a capital offense. Cases
involving theft from the royal tombs were handled by the ‘Great Court’, presided over by the vizier,
for these exceeded the local court’s jurisdiction. Perhaps because they involved the state directly
or, alternatively, because they were considered capital offenses", A. Van Loon, Law and order in
ancient Egypt, The development of criminal justice from the pharaonic New Kingdom until the
Roman Dominate, MA Thesis, Leiden University, 2014, 14.
17
"In recent years Predynastic (ca. 4000 b.c.e.) bodies from Hierakonpolis were excavated showing
evidence of early forms of mummification: linen wrapping on the heads and upper bodies and organ
preservation with resins. Some eighteen bodies have been discovered with the heads severed from
the bodies -cut through cleanly and deliberately- and a century ago William Flinders Petrie found
dismembered and decapitated bodies at Gerzeh. Gerald A. Wainwright described the bodies from
Gerzeh and found that the most commonly removed body parts were feet, heads, and hands. He
discussed these types of dismemberment as part of ritual efforts to impede the movements of the
dead ....... The bodies at Hierakonpolis and Gerzeh were disturbed postdeposit and, as the
excavator noted, probably soon after burial, because only the head end of the graves was
disordered. The dismemberment was done by someone who knew well the placement of the body
in the ground. Perhaps the bodies were mistreated deliberately even before burial, a fact that would
also indicate animus toward the deceased. Wainwright noted that a valuable necklace was left in
grave despite being around the broken neck", B. Bryan, Episodes of Iconoclasm in the Egyptian
New Kingdom, in N. May, (ed.), iconoclasm and Text Destruction in the Ancient Near East,
Chicago, 2012, 364-365.
But skepticism about community values and beliefs was not confined to tomb
robbers alone since others higher up in society also had doubts as to the power of
the gods and an afterlife.

Ancient texts survived to express such doubts by means of songs by harpists or

dialogues like that of a desperate man eager to die a natural death or commit
suicide and leave the sufferings of this world whom his soul tries to convince
otherwise.

“Death is before me today

Like the fragrance of myrrh,
Like sitting under sail on breeze day.
Death is before me today
Like the fragrance of lotus,
Like sitting on the shore of drunkenness.
Death is before me today
Like a well-trodden way,
Like a man's coming home from warfare.
Death is before me today
Like the clearing of the sky,
As when a man discovers what he ignored.
Death is before me today
Like a man's longing to see his home
When he has spent many years in captivity.”

Then his soul replies:

"My ba opened its mouth to me, to answer what I had said: If you think of burial, it
is heartbreak. It is the gift of tears by aggrieving a man. It is taking a man from his
house, casting him on high ground. You will not go up to see the sun. Those who
built in granite, who erected halls in excellent tombs of excellent construction, when
the builders have become gods, their offering stones are desolate,as if they were
the dead who died on the riverbank for lack of a survivor"18.

It is rather surprising that it is his soul, supposedly better acquainted with the reality
of a happy afterlife, that strikes the skeptic tone warning him about what happens
after death and trying to convince him about the joys of life that should not be
ignored.

Also a song from the Tomb of King Antef admonishes us:

"The gods that were aforetime rest in their pyramids, and likewise the noble and
the glorified, buried in their pyramids. They that build houses, their habitations are

18
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume I, The Old and Middle Kingdoms, Los Angeles,
1975, The dispute between a man and his ba, Papyrus Berlin 3024, 163-169.
no more. What hath been done with them? I have heard the discourses of Imhotep
and Hardedef, with whose words men speak everywhere, what are their
habitations now? Their walls are destroyed, their habitations are no more, as if they
had never been. None cometh from thence that he may tell us how they fare, that
he may tell us what they need, that he may set our hearts at rest, until we also go
to the place whither they are gone"19.

In the Papyrus Chester Beatty IV the anonymous scribe tells us that all that
endures is the memory of people’s deeds and writings20:

If you would only accomplish this, becoming expert in writing:

Those writers of knowledge from the time of events after the gods,
those who foretold the future,
their names have become fixed for eternity,
though they are gone, they have completed their lifespan,
and all their kin are forgotten.
........

The doors of their chapels are undone,

Their ka-priests have gone.
Their tombstones are smeared with mud,
their tombs are forgotten,
but their names are read out on their scrolls,
written when they were young.
Being remembered makes them, to the limits of eternity21.

Other such songs elsewhere deny any idea of skepticism and reinforce the belief in
the immortality of the soul and the benefits to be achieved in the afterlife22.

These texts seem to have represented a very frequent wave of skepticism in the
Middle Kingdom that was extended not only to religious beliefs and the afterlife but
also to many other aspects of life on earth23.
19
R. David, ed., Voices of Ancient Egypt, Contemporary Accounts of Daily Life, Santa Barbara,
2014, 38.
20
M. Lichtheim, Ancient Egyptian Literature, Volume II, The New Kingdom, Los Angeles, 1976,
175-178.
21
"Yet the claim that only writers are immortal is astonishing on two counts. First the fact that the
vast majority of Egyptian literary works were produced anonymously. Second, the writer's disregard
for the belief in a transformed existence after death for which the buried corpse was merely the
point of departure. Thus, unless the author was indulging in hyperbole, he is voicing a rationalist
skepticism which surpasses that of the Harper' Song in boldness and radicalism", M. Lichtheim,
AEL II, 176.
22
"No other nation of the ancient world made so determined an effort to vanquish death and win
eternal life. Individual thinkers might increasingly lose faith in the promise of eternal life, and might
adopt attitudes of resignation and even skepticism. But the majority appear to have clung to the
hope of a bodily afterlife and to a reliance on magic as the means to achieve it", M. Lichtheim, AEL
II, 119.
23
"As is generally assumed, King Amenemhet I fell victim to a harem conspiracy, but the extreme
case of a murdered king cannot account for a general attitude which finds its expression not only on
Given the obvious lack of interest by the powers that be in ancient Egypt to allow
such examples of skepticism to survive we can only celebrate and assign their
existence to the uncertainties of fate that enabled us to discover those undesirable
texts and analyze their contents.

As to further examples of implied skepticism among priests, of all people, we can

dwell on certain behaviours in the temples.

A large source of revenue was the sale of animal mummies to people devoted to
gods to whom those animals were sacred.

They were bought and deposited in the temples and later stored away in large
underground sites. Hundreds of thousands piled up to the ceiling were found
piously stored away.

One would expect that such animals were bred in the temples and at the end of
their natural life, they were mummified.

But how such mummies were manufactured and sold in large quantities reveals a
picture quite different from what was to be expected.

In the case of cats, temples became breeding grounds for them with the specific
purpose to sacrifice them breaking their neck when they were barely two months
old so that they could be mummified and sold.

We only have to remember the ancient story of the Roman soldier who accidentally
killed a cat in the street and was lynched by a crowd of indignant Egyptians24.

What to say then of the priests that killed them on an industrial scale and had no
fear that the goddess would punish them.

Worse still, analyses carried out on many of such animal mummies revealed that a
large proportion of them contained other animal and even human bones, sticks and
other materials, although on the outside they all looked like the real thing25.

hundreds of royal portraits, but also, as will be shown below, on the faces of their contemporaries
as well. The specific wisdom of Amenemhet, stressing distrust, is just one element in a general
wave of pessimism and skepticism characteristic of the literature of this age", J. Assmann,
Preservation and Presentation of Self in Ancient Egyptian Portraiture, in P. Der Manuelian, ed.,
Studies in Honor of William Kelly Simpson 1, Boston 1996, 76.
24
Diodorus Siculus, Library of History, Book I, 83, Loeb Classical Library, Vol. I, 287, 1933.
25
"This early commercialization also resulted in the creation of fake mummies that consisted of
wrappings with either no animal remains or only loose bones, feathers, and tatters bundled up to
look like the requested animal .......... Because of the commercialization of mummification in ancient
Egypt, there was a market for fake mummies that contained no actual mummified animals. Because
the shape of a mummified bird bundle could easily be created with less 'expensive' content, it is
important to separate genuine mummified birds from false ones, especially in bird bundles", C.
How if not by means of a skeptic attitude by those priests involved in such
transactions can we explain those behaviours?26

Another widely popular practice among the lower classes in Egypt mainly in the
last centuries of pharaonic rule illustrates the lack of respect those people showed
for their beliefs in the afterlife27.

Every Egyptian dreamed while still alive of building a tomb as his house of eternity,
full of all the good things that would assure them a comfortable and happy afterlife.

Since this dream was hardly ever fulfilled due to the widespread practice of tomb
robbing, some time after they were ransacked and deprived of all that was of any
value, they started to be occupied by the mummies of intruders, who unable to
provide themselves with a tomb of their own, violated the intention and sacred
purpose of their legitimate owners so that their mummies could endure28.

Modern explorers like Belzoni at the beginning of the XIX century published
terrifying accounts of their experiences in those tombs when they entered them for
the first time in centuries and felt themselves sink into the pile of human bodies

Jackowski, S. Bolliger and M. Thali, Common and Unexpected Findings in Mummies from Ancient
Egypt and South America as Revealed by CT1, Radiographics, Vol. 28, No. 5, 2008, 1485, 1488.
26
"Offerings of cat statuettes and mummified cats, as shown here, were presented at temples.
Some of the cat-shaped statues were actually elaborate coffins designed to hold mummified cats.
Cat cemeteries filled with these mummies have been found throughout Egypt, for example at
Bubastis, Saqqara, Thebes, and Beni Hasan. In apparent contrast to the prohibition against killing
cats, it does not appear that these mummified cats were old house pets, preserved after their
natural deaths. Modern x-ray evidence shows cats were deliberately killed, often while still quite
young, suggesting that the cats were bred specifically for this purpose. At least in part, these
practices seem to have been encouraged by Egyptian rulers for economic reasons. The 'sacred
animal industry', supplied considerable employment and also provided tax income to the Pharaohs",
O. Douglas, Animals and beliefs, Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford, 2010, 4.
27
The word 'hope' entails a shade of uncertainty, which well suits the situation in pharaonic Egypt,
for the exceptional importance of funerary beliefs did not prevent the development of a skeptical
attitude toward them. Though this skepticism was overtly expressed by intellectuals, we have every
reason to believe that this attitude was not limited to them. Skepticism did not lead to rejection of
these beliefs but rather to a sort of compromise", P. Vernus, Affairs and scandals in ancient Egypt,
London, 2003, 159.
28
"The texts are formulae describing what the deceased, as ‘effective and well equipped spirits’,
would do against those who entered a tomb in an impure state or who damaged its reliefs and
inscriptions). The texts present them as attacking their assailants directly but probably
metaphorically -for example ‘wringing [someone’s] neck like a bird’' or indirectly by litigating with
them in an otherworldly court. The judgement the deceased obtained in that court could be effective
in the next world or could strike the victim in the form of an untoward destiny during life. Thus, a late
Old Kingdom text promises ‘the crocodile against him in the water, the snake against him on land,
who will do anything against this [tomb]’. Crocodiles and snakes, which were probably metonyms
for unexpected adverse fate, were agents of divine retribution, and would strike the vandal -
apparently in this world- as a consequence of the god’s judgement", J. Baines and P. Lacovara,
Burial and the Dead in Ancient Egyptian Society, Respect, Formalism, Neglect, Journal of Social
Archaeology, Vol. 2, 2002, 22.
becoming choked by the cloud of dust and other particles generated by the
crumbling mass of remains under them29.

The relatives of those who breached the eternal abode of others more prosperous
than themselves and usurped their tombs to bury their dear ones can hardly have
been imbued with any pious feelings of respect for the true owners or the religious
values and beliefs that protected their afterlife.

We can see therefore that an intuitive skepticism and a widespread skeptic attitude
among the ancient Egyptian population at different times and manifested in many
ways, breaks the apparent monolithic impression often transmitted about that
civilization, as populated by especially devoted, pious people, almost incapable of
dissent with the worldview that had been set up from time immemorial30.

However, at the same time, the relative stability of the ancient Egyptian
environment and the generosity of its soil that enabled a large population density
encouraged belief and seemed to disprove skepticism, a situation that was not that
of other regions where people felt at the mercy of continuous upheavals and thus
encouraged to doubt the efficacy of divine intervention on their behalf as well as
human ability to understand and explain reality31.

But even under favourable environmental conditions and a certain normality and
stability, like in ancient Egypt, we have seen that skepticism manifested itself in a
variety of ways which reveals that the human mind does not always readily accept
traditions and beliefs handed over from above no matter how ancient and revered
they could be.

29
On falling on a heap of mummies Belzoni wrote, "Fortunately, I am destitute of the sense of
smelling," but "I could taste that mummies were rather unpleasant to swallow...I sought a resting
place, found one, and contrived to sit; but when my weight bore on the body of an Egyptian, it
crushed it like a bandbox...so that I sunk altogether among the broken mummies with a crash of
bones, rags, and wooden cases, which raised such a dust as kept me motionless for a quarter of an
hour", C. Clair, Strong man egyptologist, Norwich, 1957, 83-84.
30
"In conclusion, a detailed review of evidence from the two Eastern Temples at Karnak and the
Eastern High Gate at Medinet Habu finds no textual, iconographic or archaeological evidence to
support the contention that any of these structures were meant to be places for the common people
to worship. What the evidence does show, instead, is that all three monuments commemorate
kingship ......... As immortalized in the monuments at Karnak and Medinet Habu, it is the king‘s
prayers that the god hears and not those of mere mortals", C. Ausec, Gods Who Hear Prayers:
Popular Piety or Kingship in Three Theban Monuments of New Kingdom Egypt, University of
California, Berkeley, 2010, 93.
31
"Hellenistic Philosophy proved to be very influential. Athens in the 3rd century BCE still
dominated Greek philosophical life. The school of Plato, the Academy, produced Scepticism, which
was shaped by the conviction that nothing can be known about the world for sure. The sceptic,
however, could form plausible impressions and could act as if those impressions were true. Thus he
was able to function in a world in spite of chaos around him", H. Loeffler and A. Enamorado III,
Introductory Guide to Ancient Civilizations, New York, 2015, 115.