Bibliography:
*Budge Wallis Ernest Alfred, The Book of the Dead. The Book of Going Forth by Day being The Papyrus of Ani,
*Daumas François, Od Narmera do Kleopatry. Cywilizacja starożytnego Egiptu, Warszawa 1973.
*Gozdawa-Gołębiowska Katarzyna, Wrota Zaświatów: na progu wieczności. Egipska „Księga Umarłych”, (w.) Antropologia Religii. Wybór esejów, Tom IV, (2010).
*Hassanein Fathy, Nelson Monique,
*Hornung Erik, Jeden czy wielu. Koncepcja boga w starożytnym Egipcie, Warszawa 1991.
*Lipińska Jadwiga, Historia rzeźby, reliefu i malarstwa starożytnego Egiptu, Warszawa 1978.
*Lipińska Jadwiga, Marciniak Marek, Mitologia starożytnego Egiptu, Warszawa 2002.
*Lipińska Jadwiga, Sztuka starożytnego Egiptu, Warszawa 2008.
*Niwiński Andrzej, Bóstwa, kulty i rytuały starożytnego Egiptu, Warszawa 2004
*Niwiński Andrzej, Mity i symbole starożytnego Egiptu, Warszawa 2001.
*Piankoff Alexandre, Les Chapelles de Tut-Ankh-Amon (w) MIFAO, nr 72, Paryż 1952.
Gods from the Egyptian World Map (2021) in full costume and, of course, with attributes. From the left: Thoth with the head of an Ibis, Isis with an image of the royal throne on her head, the goddess Toeris as an incarnation of the Ursa Major constellation and Nephthys with an image of the royal palace.
God Ptah from my new painting (2023). Ptah had a very interesting attribute: a scepter composed of three hieroglyphs/ symbols: ankh (life), uas (happiness) and djed (endurance).
The painting Egyptian World Map (2021), before end. The key figure here is the goddess Nut in the form of a cow, one of the examples of how the ancient Egyptians imagined heaven.
The Soul of Ba and the Eternal Atum from Journey of the Solar barge at Night (2021). Two interesting examples of the mixed form. Most often, mixanthropism was a combination of a human body with an animal head, as in the case of Anubis above. However, in the ba soul the order is reversed, i.e. we have a human head juxtaposed with the body of a bird. However, the eternal atum is a conglomerate of human legs, the head of an old man, the body of a snake and wings with the morning solar disk.
Anubis mummifying the deceased. This god, like the pharaoh, was depicted in the full canon. Fragment of a painting on the sarcophagus of Djedhorephankh. Wood covered with polychrome plaster and varnish (early 22nd dynasty, Egyptian Museum in Cairo).
Something about canon.
Throughout almost the entire dynastic era, Egyptian art was faithful to the established rules that had already been formed in the Predynastic Period. Departures from these conventions were rare and occurred more often in private art. However, in royal art, strict rules practically did not allow it.
This contributed to the monotony of the representations, which seemed deadly boring to many observers. On the walls of temples and royal tombs, in striped multi-figure compositions, there are long rows of almost identical figures, which differed, in the case of deities, only in their heads or attributes. With strict adherence to the rules, monotony was the artists' greatest pain and they tried to avoid it, for example by slightly changing the pose of the figures. Especially since the full canon was binding on the artist in his depictions of deities and kings.
Since kings (and at the same time gods) began to reveal almost the entire body, artists were obliged to follow the convention of idealizing the royal body. The canon of timeless youth has been established. Figures in the canon had perfectly captured proportions, which in painting and bas-relief could be achieved by using a proportion grid established in the Middle Kingdom. How were the figures depicted? Well, in the most characteristic shot - the head was always framed in profile, then the neck was turned and the transition to the frontal torso was taken, and then the legs were shown again from the side. Quite a mess, isn't it? ;)
Egyptian religious iconography.
How can unity be multiplicity and multiplicity be unity?
In this article, I will introduce you to the essential features of Egyptian iconography of deities. They may prove useful not so much for understanding my paintings, but also for Egyptian representations in general, built around different rules than european art.
Iconography of Egyptian deities and demons from the Underworld.
Few ancient cultures provided as many iconographic messages about their gods as the Egyptian one, because they appear in anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, mixed forms, as well as in the form of objects. Andrzej Niwiński, in his book titled Deities, Cults and Rituals of Ancient Egypt, placed these individual shapes chronologically. According to his concept, the first stage of the development of Egyptian religious iconography was inanimate elements (fetishes) and plants, the second was animals, the third was anthropomorphism, and the latest, fourth, was mixanthropism, i.e. a mixed form. The latter form was also characteristic of demons and guardians appearing in depictions of the underworld. And it is with this form that we best associate Egyptian gods.
These various shapes of gods were a logical consequence of the Egyptians' belief in the existence of a uniform primal matter before the creation of the world, from which all beings emerged, as a result of which they could worship specific content in various forms. For the Egyptians, all elements of the universe consisted of the same substance, including material and immaterial, organic and inorganic phenomena. Therefore, the sky could be depicted as water (part of the primeval ocean), a woman's body, a cow or a desert. They also resulted from the Egyptian tradition, which did not erase anything ancient and sacred, but added new forms to the old ones. Therefore, later mixanthropism or anthropomorphism did not replace earlier iconographic variants of deities. On the other hand, the multiformity of Egyptian gods resulted from the incomplete expressive power of a single image (i.e. information about the character of the deity). It was not enough to show god in all his richness.
To sum up
Thank you for reading this article to the end. I hope that now the iconography of Egyptian deities is more understandable to you. This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the enormity of the topic. However... with this introduction we can start to explore more specific topics later. And if you want to do it on your own and in depth, grab items from the bibliography ;)
Egyptian religious iconography contains many unstable and changing elements. The external form of the deities was not so important. The idea was not so much to give their images a pleasant form, but to convey certain information about important features of nature and function. However, the mixture of human and animal elements may rightly be perceived by us as strange. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the ancient Egyptian had a slightly different sense of aesthetics, which he never exceeded, because the image of god was not only a model, but also a specific reality that deserved respect.
Let us remember that each form of representing a deity was only an imperfect means to make a given god conceivable at all, to highlight his features and to distinguish him from other gods. The compulsory writing of names next to representations also contributed to the distinction.
Attributes of deities
It was only in Greek religious iconography that the principle that the identification of a deity depends on the attributes accompanying it was more consistently implemented. Since the Archaic Period, Egyptian gods have held in their hands very general attributes common to all of them, such as the sign of life ankh or the hieroglyph - the scepter uas, signifying happiness. Since the divine hands are largely occupied by these common attributes, the specific ones are placed elsewhere, for example on the head or in place of the head (Isis has on her head the image of a throne, Nephthys a palace). In turn, the figures of guards and demons appearing in the afterlife are usually equipped with knives, a basic attribute emphasizing how great a threat they pose to the ka (one of the aspects of the soul). Less often, these were reed bundles (brooms), wheat ears and palm leaves.
Attire
The clothing of Egyptian gods with human bodies is relatively uniform and rarely allows them to be distinguished, and was also resistant to changes in fashion. In all periods, goddesses wear a long, tight robe with straps, and gods wear a short loincloth (sendjot), sometimes combined with a tank top. Deceaseds wore similar clothing, although in their case the loincloth could reach down to the ankles.
Deities of both sexes were also equipped with a royal necklace on their chests, three-piece wigs (tied with a ribbon at the top for goddesses), and a hunter's emblem attached to the back: an animal tail. In some cases, we are dealing with complete anthropomorphization and unusual cuts of robes.
However, figures of guards and demons in mixed and anthropomorphic variants were most often dressed in a simple tunic with suspenders covering the body from the torso to the knees, a simple apron or armor. The tunic was usually yellow and, like the mummyophoric forms, it was decorated with a motif of fish scales with blue and yellow tips. In the second variant, the clothes had a pleated skirt, sometimes decorated with a ceremonial bull's tail (a symbol of power), which was an inherent element of the tunic.
Osiris wearing the white crown of Upper Egypt (Hedjet). Combining it with the red crown of Lower Egypt (decheret) created a composite pschent crown. The folded crowns symbolized the pharaoh's rule over "Both Countries".
Crowns
They provided more opportunities to distinguish deities than robes or attributes. Thanks to the motifs decorating them (feathers, horns, solar disk), they informed about the nature of their hosts, at the same time emphasizing their divinity. However, the crown was rarely associated with a specific god, and with the development of iconography there was a growing tendency to replace crowns and to use composite crowns, where the individual features of the deity disappear in the face of the multitude of accompanying symbols of divine power.
Divine bodies
The bodies of the pharaoh and Egyptian deities were idealized and, like the figures of ordinary mortals, were presented in accordance with the applicable proportions. The faces were styled by extending the eyebrows and the lines running parallel under them, painted with lipstick on the edges of the eyelids and reaching up to the temples. According to beliefs, Egyptian gods had bodies made of gold and other precious materials, and their bones were made of silver. This is where their common use in depictions of deities came from.
Goddess Maat from Egyptian Atlantis (2022). I painted her like a statue. It is not known whether she is made of metal or flesh and blood, like a purebred goddess.
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