Searching the Years Religion and Superstition in Ancient Egypt as Seen Through Horoscopes

Abstract

Ancient Egypt is often conceptualised as a hyperreligious, homogenous culture with a uniform devotion to the state religion among the population. However, this view has been definitively disproved within academia, with sites such as Deir el-Medina coming to be seen as outliers, rather than the norm. This thesis considers the idea that if, as Kemp (1995) suggests, ancient Egyptians were not uniformly religious, then were they superstitious? It looks to the example of Mythological Calendars of Good and Bad Days: prescriptors of good and bad luck, as potential evidence for ancient Egyptians engaging with superstitions. This thesis looks for references to the Calendars found in other texts to identify cases of calendrical adherence, to aid in determining if the use of these calendars was prevalent. This thesis examines Bakir’s 1966 translation of The Cairo Calendar, comparing its horoscopes and prognoses for Good and Bad Days with the actions of individuals in ancient Egypt to determine whether they were following the Mythological Calendars. It draws on the mythological and astronomical roots of the Mythological Calendar to extrapolate back to the 4th Dynasty actions recorded in the Journal of Merer, simultaneously extrapolating forward to consider whether work phyles in general could adhere to calendrical imperatives. It also looks to the 12th Dynasty and the earliest examples of Mythological Calendars, which it compares with the agricultural instructions of hm-k3 priest Heqanakht. Finally, it examines the Inscription of Tjaneni at Karnak for the wartime actions of Thutmose III, and the Chester Beatty Business Memoranda for the economic decisions made at a time when the priesthood of Amun and the “pr- 3” were coming into conflict. This thesis finds that, while there is some theoretical adherence present in these records, it is largely coincidental and the evidence is circumstantial. It concludes that most people were not regularly following the instructions given in the Mythological Calendars of Good and Bad Days, and identifies a key question for further study: if kings, businessmen, priest-farmers and corvée workers were not makinguse of the Calendars, then who was?