The Past has published a review of Religion and the Invisible World: Sanctity and Spiritual Transformation in Egypt from Pharaonic Times to the Present, a book that traces religious ideas in Egypt across thousands of years, from the age of the pharaohs through the Christian and Islamic periods.
The review opens with a familiar observation from the Classical historian Herodotus, who described the Egyptians as the most religious of peoples. It is a characterisation that has stayed with the country in the popular imagination, and the book takes it as a starting point for a longer enquiry into how belief and religious practice have shaped life in Egypt over an unusually long span of time.
As The Past notes, many readers today find themselves wondering about the cross-overs between religious concepts in pharaonic, Christian and Islamic Egypt. Rather than treating these as separate chapters walled off from one another, the book sets out to explore the connections between them, looking at ideas of sanctity and spiritual transformation and how they carried forward, changed and were reinterpreted as the religious landscape shifted.
This is a broad remit. Egypt's religious history is usually studied in specialised pieces: Egyptologists concentrate on the temples and funerary beliefs of the pharaonic period, while later Christian and Islamic Egypt tend to fall to different scholars with different training. A book that attempts to hold all of this together, and to ask what threads run through it, is unusual, and the review presents it as an ambitious attempt to think about continuity as well as change.
For readers of Hierolyte, the pharaonic end of that story is the most familiar territory. It is the world of the great temple cults, of gods such as Osiris and Isis, and of the elaborate beliefs about death and the afterlife that fill Egyptian tombs and papyri. Much of what we know about those beliefs survives because the ancient Egyptians wrote them down in hieroglyphs, on temple walls, coffins and funerary texts. Learning to read even a handful of those signs, something you can begin with the Hierolyte app, brings that religious world a little closer.
The full review appears on The Past, which covers archaeology, ancient history and heritage for a general readership. It sets the book in the context of a long-standing fascination with Egypt as a deeply religious society, and considers how well the volume succeeds in connecting the country's pharaonic past with its Christian and Islamic present.