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Egyptian View of Death and Their Pyramids

The Egyptian view of death during the dynastic period involved elaborate mortuary rituals, including the careful preservation of bodies called mummification as well as immensely rich royal burials such as that of Seti I and Tutankhamun, and construction of the pyramids, the largest and most long-lived monumental architecture known in the world.

The Egyptian religion is described in the vast body of mortuary literature found and deciphered after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.

The primary texts are the Pyramid Texts—murals painted and carved onto walls of the pyramids dated to the Old Kingdom Dynasties 4 and 5; the Coffin Texts—decorations painted on elite individual coffins after the Old Kingdom; and the Book of the Dead.

All of that was part and parcel of the Egyptian religion, a polytheistic system, which included a number of different gods and goddesses each of whom was responsible for a specific aspect of life and the world. For example, Shu was the god of the air, Hathor the goddess of sexuality and love, Geb the god of the earth, and Nut the goddess of the sky.

However, unlike the classic Greek and Roman mythologies, the Egyptians gods didnt have much of a backstory. There was no specific dogma nor doctrine, there were no set of required beliefs. There was no standard of orthodoxy, in fact, the Egyptian religion may have lasted for 2,700 years because local cultures could adapt and create new traditions, all of which were considered valid and correct, even if they had internal contradictions.

There may have been no highly developed and intricate narratives about the actions and deeds of the gods, but there was a firm belief in a realm that existed beyond the visible one. Humans could not comprehend this other world intellectually but could experience it through mythic and cultic practices and rituals.

In the Egyptian religion, the world and the universe were part of a strict and unchanging order of stability called Maat. Maat was both an abstract idea, a concept of universal stability, and the

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