The inhabitants of Ancient Egypt believed that the god of Horus accompanied all the pharaohs. Initially, he was not associated with mere mortals at all. It was assumed that the pharaohs live forever, after the death of the earth they move to heaven - to their new home.
The word "Pharaoh", according to Egyptologists, is just a euphemism (neutral word) or, in modern language, is a synonym for the office of the rulers of Ancient Egypt - kings.
There the Pharaohs were called "I carry." Although not all kings had this secondary title. All ancient countries, including Egypt, went through the stage of the formation of religious beliefs based on myths. The God of Mountains in Ancient Egypt is the patron saint of the pharaohs.
God Horus
The path to religion and mythology
Religion has existed since the time of the primitive communal system. As soon as people began to unite in clan groups, beliefs arose. This stage was called protoreligion. Traditionally, protoreligion has three types of beliefs: animism, fetishism, and magic.
In ancient Egypt, fetishism was the most widespread - the cult of inanimate objects among primitive tribes. Four to five thousand years have passed before real religion - belief in one god. The geographical position of Ancient Egypt also left its mark. The influence of African culture and religion was great in the form of worship and sacrifices to idols (fetishes) in the form of animals. In other words, endowing people with the qualities of animals, or subordinating a person to the endurance of animals in the desert.
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God Horus. Statue, Louvre
Various local cults of zoo and anthropomorphic deities arose. Some disappeared, others were transformed into new ones. Monotheism grew into polytheism (polytheism).
As a rule, cult beliefs began with a lack of understanding of the meaning of social and natural phenomena. They frightened the people. For example, aggressive actions, earthquakes, eclipses of the Sun and Moon, floods of the Nile. The latter in reality brought trouble to the ancient Egyptians, washing away crops in the fields, and the villages themselves, dooming the peasants to starvation. And then they created a god for the Nile to tame the river when it floods.
What kind of god was Horus?
In his mythological life, the god of Mountains in Ancient Egypt (pictured) was at the very top of the pantheon. The mythical rulers of the entire Egyptian sky, animals, plants and people, there are more than a hundred of them, were at first cults in specific territories, right down to a small settlement. And for centuries passed the way to the general Egyptian values.
Only the three stood out, whose influence has always been undeniable - these are Amon, Ra and Hor.
Statue of the god Horus at the entrance to the temple in Edfu, Egypt
Their "portraits" on rock paintings, in the form of miniature figurines, statues in the sanctuaries of pharaohs, kings, priests, and other nobility have come down to us. Some figurines are exhibited in the Hermitage of the Russian Federation, including the god Horus. The Egyptians also worshiped a few so-called borrowed mythical gods: West Semitic and Assyro-Babylonian. When the territories were annexed, the gods remained revered.
The ancient reformer of Egypt, Pharaoh Akhenaten, tried to introduce monotheism. He created the cult of Aten, the sun god. The boy-pharaoh Tutankhamun ruined his plans, bringing back Amun and other mythical characters.
Horus family tree (Hora)
Horus mythologically always influenced all of Egypt and Nubia (annexed territory). He had many hypostases, let's name only one: he incarnated in the pharaohs. Ancient artists painted him in the form of a man with a falcon's head with green skin (a tribute to nature) and a body entwined with grape shoots. The figurines of the deity were cast in copper and gold.
Gods Isis and Osiris
Let's imagine the "family" of Horus. He is the son of the god Osiris and the goddess Isis (Isis), the husband of the goddess Hathor, the queen of Thebes, the ruler of the bowels, the goddess of the earth's generosity, the patroness of women and childbirth. Horus's father, the god Osiris, was depicted with a normal human face, his cult spread in Heliopolis, now a suburb of Cairo - Misr al-Jidida.
He reigned on the earth after several gods, helped the Egyptians in developing the cultivation of the land, cultivating cereals, grapes and making wine from it, mining copper and gold.
His fate is considered tragic. He was killed by an evil relative twice: first, he was thrown into the Nile in a sealed sarcophagus, and later he was cut into pieces with a knife.
Hathor and other Gods of Ancient Egypt
Osiris's wife and at the same time his sister, the goddess Isis, was depicted with an ankh (staff) in her left hand and with a special Egyptian cross with a ring at the top. There was a throne on top of the cape. Let us name only one of her good deeds, well described in the papyri, - conjugal fidelity. She successfully replaced Osiris when he traveled and ruled Egypt wisely. Isis revived her husband twice after two murders by relatives. And then the god of the sun and the blue space of the Mountains above the earth was born to them.
Statue of Horus during the reign of Aminhotep
But Osiris did not want to stay on earth and became an underground judge. Something like purgatory on the way to heaven or hell: weighed the heart of the deceased and decided on it who he would be in the afterlife.
The various incarnations of Horus were worshiped throughout Egypt. The largest temple dedicated to this deity was located in the city of Edfu. In ancient times, there was a tradition. A sculpture depicting the goddess of beauty and love Hathor was brought from Dendera to this temple for the "meeting" with Horus. This rite was performed before the beginning of the Byzantine period in the history of Greece.