ancient egypt
Life in Ancient Egypt was one that involved an ordered life. The Nile flooded and the sun dried the land on a regular basis every year. People lived their lives in a orderly fashion that has them following set routines from year to year. This routine was greatly integrated with the Egyptian belief in the spiritual world and the religion it soon became. Egyptian religion helped people to see definition in their lives and gave them something to live for. There was an afterlife to look forward to and a spiritual rule of law that would take care of them until then. Also there was a state that was created by the religion to lead the people correctly. Therefore, the most important role that religion played in Egypt was that gave people the spiritual definition and structure for the ordered life that they lived. Egyptian religion revolved around death and the afterlife because it was believed that an individual’s life would continue on a different plateau after their death, with life as merely a transitional stage. This was a strong belief that saw death as only a passage to another life that one would live; this life was actually more important than the one a person lived in the present life. “Thus there is an air of perm . . .
This idea of life gave Egyptians a structure and goal to their lives. This extended to give people the ability to structure their lives around the events. ”(Mckay 25) This can be seen in the flooding of the Nile every year and the re-growth of plants on a consistent basis. The Egyptian religion provided the people with days of celebration and large celebrations for the gods. This gave people an order in their life that could have been chaos if death had never been understood. Therefore, as can be seen, Egyptian religion helped fulfill this very important function of giving structure to their lives in terms of spiritual definition. It gave people something to live for and an event to build themselves towards. The Pharaoh was thus able to set up a strong centralized government with a delegation of responsibilities into society through a bureaucracy. It also eliminated fear and directed happiness towards death. This strong role of state structure also contributed to the important function of spiritual definition to an ordered Egyptian life that religion provided. Also involved with giving meaning and structure was the law and order aspect of the religion. Thus, he was able to set up his state and rule strongly. The afterlife was thus viewed simply as an extension of earthly existence with the rebirth in the afterlife comparable to the flooding of the Nile every year that brought new life to the crops of Egypt. ”(McKay 25) The Egyptian provided him with such as he was seen as the embodiment of one of the gods on Earth. This was provided by the Egyptian religion.
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