Environment and Religion in Ancient and Coptic Egypt: Sensing the Cosmos through the Eyes of the Divine (eBook)

Environment and Religion in Ancient and Coptic Egypt: Sensing the Cosmos through the Eyes of the Divine presents the proceedings of a conference held in Athens between 1st-3rd February 2017. The Hellenic Institute of Egyptology, in close collaboration with the Writing & Scripts Centre of Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the University of Alexandria, organized the conference concerning the ancient Egyptian religion, Coptic Christianity and Environment. Thus, the endeavour was to sense the Cosmos, through a virtual Einfahlung, as a manifestation of the Divine and the manifestations of the Divine in the environmental, cosmic and societal spheres. Egyptians were particularly pious and they considered their surroundings and the Universe itself as a creation and a direct immanence of the Divine, being also convinced that they were congenital parts of the Cosmos and adoring their divinities, who were also personifications of environmental and/or cosmic aspects and forces. There are many examples (epigraphic, textual, monumental, & c.) corroborating these relations and that ancient Egyptian piety was rooted on the bi-faceted texture of the ancient Egyptian religion, containing a solar and an astral component: the former was related to Rec, while the latter was related to Osiris. The conference took place with participations of a pleiade of Egyptologists, archaeologists, archaeoastronomers, theologians, historians and other scholars from more than 15 countries all over the world. In this unique volume are published most of the contributions of the delegates who sent their papers for peer-reviewing, enriching the bibliographic resources with original and interesting articles. This publication of more than 580 pages containing 34 fresh and original papers (plus 2 abstracts) on the ancient Egyptian religion, Environment and the Cosmos, fruitfully connects many interdisciplinary approaches and Egyptology, archaeology, archaeoastronomy, geography, botany, zoology, ornithology, theology and history.