The close relationship between the deceased king and the
Egyptian gods may be seen in the textual and representational
evidence associated with the royal mortuary cults from early
times. The Pyramid Texts clearly attempt to place the deceased
kin on the same level as the Egyptian gods - both by directly
asserting that he is a god, and by stating that he "is" Osiris,
Ra, or some other deity. In some cases the texts not only show
the deceased king's parity with the divine cohort, but they
also stress his ascendance over the other gods, showing that he
is certainly not viewed as a minor deity in the afterlife. We
do not know if these assertions of the deceased king's deity
were originally statements of formally held belief or whether
they represented a desired situation which was attempted
through the use of the maigical texts.
The idea of the king's deified afterlife was certainly
established by Old Kingdom times, however, and the same types
of textual evidence are found in royal mortuary contexts
throughout subsequent periods of Egyptian history.
Representations of the deceased king in the presence of deities
likewise indicate equailty between the two from early
times.
The very purpose of the royal mortuary cult seems to have been
the affirmation of the deceased monarch's divinity, yet the
specific nature of the divinity must not be overlooked. A
number of years ago, William Murnane showed, in a study of the
texts and representations of the great mortuary temple of
Ramesses III at Medinet Habu, that much of the focus of the
royal mortuary cult was as ongoing reaffirmation of the king's
divine kingship rather than eternal life per se. This
conclusion was expanded in later studied of other mortuary
temples dating back to the Old Kingdom, and it now seems clear
that in many, if not all, cases the stress of all these royal
mortuary establishments is on the continuation of the king's
reign on a divine level in the afterlife.
It must not be forgotten that even from a relatively early date
- perhaps by the end of the Old Kingdom - funerary spells for
the afterlife transformation to the divine became available to
other classes of society. Nobles, and later others, could also
aspire to become gods in the afterlife. It is unthinkable that
these individuals regarded their afterlife state to be
equivalent to that of the king or the great Egyptian gods. It
seems far more likely that what was envisaged for both commoner
and king alike was an afterlife which represent a king of
divinized state of their own social stations in life. In the
case of the deceased king, there were specific associations
which might be seen as elevating his position above that of his
earthly reign. This is seen particularly in the concepts of the
royal ancestors, and of the king as Osiris and Re.
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