WE HAVE MANY PICTURES OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN GODS, BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY LOOKED LIKE
WE HAVE MANY PICTURES OF ANCIENT EGYPTIAN GODS, BUT WE DON’T KNOW WHAT THEY LOOKED LIKE

Summary/Abstract: Vast numbers of ancient Egyptian images of deities are known, but it is uncertain how far they were intended to represent their essentially unknowable appearance. Relief decoration in temples and on royal monuments was organized around the interaction of figures of the king with gods and goddesses. The visual language developed for this context displayed the identity of deities, but it could not depict their divine essence and did not show the animals that were the prime manifestations of many of them. Regular temple cult was performed by priests and not accessible to others. Cult images often had different forms from those shown in temple reliefs. Literary texts provide important instances of encounters with deities, but they are works of imaginative fiction that hardly reveal ultimate forms. From around the Amarna period (14th century BCE), conventions and contexts of representation of deities changed in phases, leading finally to a vast proliferation in the Graeco-Roman period. Even then, however, connections between pictorial forms and what may have been understood to be the essence of deities are difficult to establish, as is the case for many religious traditions.

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