Welcome to the History of the World Podcast. My name is Chris Hasler.

And you're listening to volume 2, The Ancient World. This is episode 18, ancient Egypt, religion. Oh, Throughout our series of ancient Egyptian episodes we have continuously stumbled

across a strong spiritual undercurrent to the whole 2000 year experience. We constantly talk about deities and dayification. We see

ridiculous amounts of effort being put into the spiritual building work.

We see great efforts to preserve the bodies of the pharaohs

who are laid to rest within these structures and temples.

What was going on in these extremely pious

societies and where do we even start? What we ought to do is look back at what we do know and what we have already discovered.

Traditionally, the story of ancient Egypt starts at the formation of Egypt in around 3100 bc.C. by the first Pharaoh either named

Meeniz or Narma. The Nama palette, which is the silt stone shield discovered at Hieracompales, depicts a

Pharaoh smiting a subject. Overlooking the Smite is a falcon and we know that the head of a falcon was used when

depicting the tutelary deity of Hierachomposis.

Let's think about this for a moment.

Tutillary deities are the deities within the pantheon of deities that are responsible for the protection

of the particular city. So a man with a falcon's head represented the tutelary deity and therefore the god who would protect

the city of Hieracompales.

The deity is called Horace and we mentioned him way back in episode 12.

The fact that we have a man with an animal's head is typical in Egyptian

depictions of its deities. It is also interesting because this kind of thing

provides a link back to the subject matter of

volume one episode 13 on Paleolithic art and ritual where we discovered that

European humans had been depicting characters with animals heads for many, many

...