Civilization

The Egyptian Priesthood

The learned class of pharaonic Egypt — the temple staffs who fed the god in his shrine, kept the sacred writing, and became the world's enduring image of secret wisdom.

In the morning, before the city was awake, a shaven man in white linen broke the clay seal on the door of a small dark room. Inside, in a gilded shrine, stood the god — a statue a cubit or two high, dressed and asleep. The man washed himself, recited the words that announced his approach, drew back the bolt, and woke the god with incense and a lamp. He washed the image, anointed it, clothed it in fresh linen, set bread and beer and meat before it, and withdrew, sweeping away his own footprints as he went. That gesture, repeated at sunrise in hundreds of temples up and down the Nile for three thousand years, is the small daily act at the center of one of the longest-lived learned classes on earth.

The men who performed it were not a church. There was no single doctrine, no founding prophet, no creed to subscribe to, no congregation gathered to hear preaching. There were temples — the house of Ptah at Memphis, the house of Ra at Heliopolis, the immense estate of Amun at Thebes — and each was a household with a god as its master and a staff to keep his house. The Egyptian word for the building, hut-netjer, means “mansion of the god,” and the priest’s most basic title, hem-netjer, means “servant of the god.” The relationship was domestic before it was theological. A great lord in his estate is washed, dressed, and fed by his servants; the god in his temple was washed, dressed, and fed by his.

The house of the god and its servants

The staff was ranked, and the ranks were precise. At the head of each temple stood a high priest, whose title varied by city in a way that preserved the local theology: the chief priest of Ra at Heliopolis was the “Greatest of Seers,” the chief priest of Ptah at Memphis the “Greatest of the Directors of Craftsmen,” for Ptah was the patron of artisans. Beneath him the title hem-netjer, “god’s servant” — the Greeks rendered it prophētēs, prophet — named the men permitted into the inner rooms and into the presence of the cult image itself. They were the only people in Egypt who, in the ordinary run of things, ever saw the god’s face.

Below them, far more numerous, were the wab priests — the word means “pure one.” A wab priest kept himself ritually clean and performed the temple’s working life: he carried the sacred barque in procession, poured the libations, looked after the stores, but he did not enter the sanctuary or look upon the image. Purity, not ordination, divided the ranks. To pass deeper into the temple was to be cleaner, and to be cleaner was to come nearer the god.

Apart in function, and the most consequential rank for what follows, stood the kheri-heb, the lector-priest. The title is usually translated “he who carries the ritual scroll,” and that is exactly what the office was: the man who held the papyrus and spoke the words. In Egyptian thought the rite did not work because the gestures were correct alone; it worked because the right words were said, in the right order, in the right voice. The lector was the keeper and the speaker of those words. Where the hem-netjer tended the body of the god, the kheri-heb governed the language by which everything was done — and language, in Egypt, was power of a particular and dangerous kind.

The Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, the temple of Amun at Thebes Relief in the Great Hypostyle Hall of the temple of Amun at Karnak, Thebes. Photo by Olaf Tausch, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This whole structure was not, at the beginning, a profession at all. In the Old Kingdom (roughly 2686–2181 BCE), temple service was largely part-time. The men who staffed a god’s house were officials of the king and local notables who served the god in rotation and then went back to their fields and their administrative posts. Even at full development the staffs worked in shifts: the priesthood was “organized into four colleges who take turns each month in the service of the god,” so that a man might serve one month in four and live a layman’s life the rest of the year. These rotating groups, which the Greeks called phylai, “tribes,” spread the duties — and the temple’s income — among a large body of part-timers.

Over the long arc of the millennia the part-time office hardened into a hereditary professional class. Sons followed fathers into temple posts; offices were inherited, and sometimes bought. By the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069 BCE) the great temples were among the largest landholders in Egypt, the estate of Amun at Thebes most of all — owning fields, herds, ships, mines, and the labor of tens of thousands. The men who awoke the god each morning were also the managers of an economy. What had begun as the part-time piety of officials became a standing institution with its own wealth, its own schools, and its own interests, ranged sometimes against the throne it nominally served.

In the king’s name

The strangest thing about the daily ritual is whose ritual it was. In theory there was only one priest in Egypt: the king. He alone, as the living Horus and the son of the gods, stood between the human and the divine, and every rite in every temple was in principle performed by him. The reliefs on the temple walls show this literally — it is the king, and only the king, who is depicted offering to the gods, in shrine after shrine he could never physically have visited. The priesthood existed because the king could not be everywhere. Each hem-netjer was a stand-in, performing the king’s office in the king’s name in a temple the king would never enter. The cult was a vast machinery of delegation, and its theory of why it worked never quite acknowledged the men who actually did the work.

What they did was care for the god as one cares for a living person. The image was woken, purified, censed, anointed with sacred oils, clothed in fresh linen, presented with food and drink. The high priest, raising his hands at the shrine, would call out — in the words preserved in the ritual papyri — “Awaken in peace.” The offerings, once the god had taken their essence, were carried out and redistributed: passed first to the lesser gods of the temple, then to the dead in their tombs, and finally eaten by the priests themselves. Nothing was wasted. The same loaf fed the god, the ancestors, and the staff in turn. At midday and at evening the rite was repeated in lighter form, and at nightfall the shrine was closed and sealed again, the footprints swept away, the god left to sleep.

The purity this demanded was severe and visible. The Greek traveler Herodotus, writing in the fifth century BCE from what Egyptian priests and informants told him, recorded the discipline with a foreigner’s fascination: the priests shave their whole bodies every other day, “so that no lice or other foul thing may come to be upon them”; they wash in cold water twice each day and twice each night; they wear only linen and sandals of papyrus reed, never wool, for nothing taken from a living animal might be worn into a temple. The bald, white-robed, scrupulously clean priest was the image of Egyptian holiness that the classical world carried away, and it is the image that the later Hermetic literature would inherit and idealize.

The god’s words

What set the Egyptian priest apart from the priests of other ancient peoples was not the ritual but the writing. The Egyptians called their hieroglyphic script medu-netjer, “the god’s words,” and held that it had been given to humankind by Thoth, the ibis-headed lord of writing, reckoning, and knowledge. To write, in this understanding, was to handle a thing of divine origin, and the script was never a neutral tool. A name written could be a name made real; a name erased could be a person unmade. The hieroglyphs were beautiful, difficult, and reserved.

They were taught in an institution attached to the larger temples called the per ankh, the “House of Life.” It was the temple’s scriptorium and school at once: the place where sacred texts were copied and recopied so they would not perish, where new compositions were drafted, where the young were trained to read and write the god’s words. UCL’s survey of the institution describes the House of Life as the workshop in which the religious and learned texts of Egypt were composed and preserved — the rituals, the hymns, the funerary books, the medical and the magical papyri, the temple calendars. Mud bricks stamped per ankh have been excavated at Akhetaten, the short-lived capital of Akhenaten, from a building beside the royal record office — a real address for the keepers of the god’s words.

Because the script was taught only in these houses, the priesthood held a near-monopoly on literacy of the deepest kind. A scribe might learn the cursive hand for accounts and letters; the full hieroglyphic system, and the still more arcane forms used in the temples, belonged to the men trained inside the temple walls. This is the hidden hinge of the whole tradition. The wisdom of Egypt was not written in a holy book that anyone might one day translate. It was written in a script that lived only in the schools that taught it — and when, in the centuries after the temples closed under Christian Rome, the last man who could read the god’s words died, the words went silent. For some fourteen hundred years no one on earth could read a single line of hieroglyphic. The wisdom did not so much vanish as fall mute.

The Seated Scribe of Saqqara, fourth or fifth dynasty, painted limestone with inlaid eyes The Seated Scribe, painted limestone with inlaid eyes, from Saqqara, c. 2600–2350 BCE, now in the Louvre. Photo by Rama, CC BY-SA 2.0 FR, via Wikimedia Commons.

Masters of heka, healers, and keepers of the hours

The lector-priest, master of the words, was also the master of heka — the practical power that the Egyptian frame held to underlie all effective speech and rite. Heka was not sorcery set against religion; it was the force present at creation, by which the world was first spoken into order, and the same force a trained mouth could direct in the temple. The lector who knew the right formula could heal a sting, protect a birth, drive off a hostile spirit, or open the mouth of a statue so the god could inhabit it — the rite of the Opening of the Mouth, which animated cult images and the bodies of the dead.

In the storyteller’s imagination the lector became the wonder-worker. The Middle Kingdom tale on the Westcar Papyrus sets a series of marvels before King Khufu, the builder of the Great Pyramid, and the greatest of its magicians is an old commoner named Djedi who, when asked, can reattach a severed head. Summoned to court, Djedi is ordered to demonstrate on a condemned prisoner and refuses, for it is unlawful to do such a thing to a human being; he restores instead the head of a goose, a waterfowl, and an ox. The figure is the same one Herodotus met in the flesh and the Hermetic authors would meet again on the page: the priest whose knowledge of the god’s words gives him power over life. That the tale insists Djedi will not use his power on a man is itself the Egyptian point — heka served Maat, the right order of things, and was bounded by it.

The same learning had wholly practical branches. The medical papyri that survive — recipes, diagnoses, surgical observations, set down beside incantations as a matter of course — came out of the Houses of Life, and the priest-physician, the swnw, was a temple-trained man who treated the body with drugs and the spirit with words in a single practice that drew no line between them. The very figure of the wise physician-priest was crystallized, in Egyptian memory and then in Greek, around Imhotep, the architect of the first pyramid who was raised after his death to a god of healing and identified by the Greeks with their own Asclepius. Other priests watched the sky: the “hour-priests,” the astronomer-priests, observed the rising of stars to set the hours of the night and the dates of the festival calendar, and it was the heliacal rising of Sothis — the star Sirius — that the priests of Egypt awaited to herald the flood and the new year. And it was priests, working in the embalming workshops, who prepared the dead, the officiant wearing the jackal mask of Anubis as he tended the body for its journey.

The mummy of the scribe Hunefer attended by a priest in the mask of Anubis, with priests performing the Opening of the Mouth, c. 1275 BCE The Opening of the Mouth performed on the mummy of Hunefer, from his Book of the Dead, c. 1275 BCE; at right a priest wears the jackal mask of Anubis. British Museum; public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Women, too, served the gods. Through much of Egyptian history high-born women held priestly office, especially in the cults of goddesses such as Hathor; in the New Kingdom they served the cult of Amun in great numbers as “chantresses” and players of the sistrum, the sacred rattle, and the office of God’s Wife of Amun grew into one of the most powerful positions in the land. The temple was a man’s house in its inner rooms, but its music and a good share of its wealth and influence passed through women’s hands.

The wisdom the Greeks came to find

By the time outsiders began to write about them, the priests of Egypt were already ancient, and their antiquity was the source of their authority. When Herodotus traveled the Nile in the mid-fifth century BCE, the priests were his chief informants, leading him through their temples and their chronologies and showing him, he says, the wooden statues of the high priests stretching back generation upon generation — a depth of recorded time that left the Greek visitor humbled. Out of such encounters grew the lasting image of Egypt as the homeland of the oldest wisdom, and of its priests as that wisdom’s keepers.

The Greek philosophers were drawn into the same orbit, in tradition if not always in fact. (Attributed.) Later writers — Cicero, Diodorus of Sicily, Valerius Maximus among them — held that Pythagoras and Plato had traveled to Egypt to learn from its priests, and that Solon the Athenian lawgiver had done the same before them. The accounts are late and largely legendary; Plato never says in his own voice that he went to Egypt. What he does give us, in the Timaeus of the mid-fourth century BCE, is the scene that fixed the relationship in the Western imagination: Solon, visiting the priests of the goddess Neith at Sais in the Delta, is told by one aged priest that the Greeks preserve no ancient memory, that their records are young and their disasters have erased their past — “you Greeks are always children,” the priest says, “there is no such thing as an old Greek.” The Egyptian priest, keeper of records reaching back beyond the Greek horizon, became the type of the elder who remembers what the young have forgotten.

One priest answered the Greek fascination from inside it. Manetho, an Egyptian priest of the early third century BCE — born in the Delta, associated with the temple of Ra at Heliopolis — wrote the history of his own country in the Greek language, for the Macedonian kings who now ruled it. His Aegyptiaca, composed under Ptolemy I or his son Ptolemy II, ran from the reigns of the gods through the unification of the land and the long succession of human kings, and it was Manetho who divided that succession into the thirty dynasties that historians still use. His original work is lost; it survives only in fragments quoted by later authors — Josephus, Africanus, Eusebius — yet his dynastic frame remains the backbone of Egyptian chronology to this day. The priest who wrote his nation’s memory for its foreign masters preserved it, in translation, past the death of everything else.

The afterlife of the keeper of secrets

The temples did not close all at once. Through the Ptolemaic and Roman centuries the priesthoods continued, narrowing as the state withdrew its support and the old language slipped further from common use; the last dated hieroglyphic inscription was carved at Philae in 394 CE, and within a generation or two no one could read it. The priesthood as a living institution ended; the image of the priest did not. It outlived the script, the temples, and the gods themselves.

What survived was the figure — the keeper of an ancient, secret wisdom, written in a sacred script, handed down through a line of initiates. The Greeks had met that figure in the flesh and never forgot him. In the centuries after the temples fell silent, the Greek-speaking world of Roman Egypt produced a body of writings on cosmos, soul, and the divine and ascribed them to Hermes Trismegistus, “thrice-greatest Hermes” — the Greek name laid over Thoth, the very god the lector-priests had served as the lord of the god’s words. The Hermetica clothe their teaching in the dress of the Egyptian temple: a wisdom revealed by a divine scribe, kept by an initiated few, written down so that the worthy might one day read it. Whether any direct line of teaching runs from the Houses of Life to these texts is unprovable and, in the strict sense, unlikely; the resemblance is one of costume and posture rather than demonstrable descent. (Motif-tracing, not proven transmission.) But the costume was Egyptian, and it was tailored on the living priests the Greeks had watched at their morning work.

When the hieroglyphs were finally read again, the men who deciphered them in the nineteenth century found, behind the figure of the wise Egyptian magus, the daily reality the legend had grown from: not magicians of romance but the staffs of working temples, washing and feeding their gods at dawn, copying texts in the Houses of Life, watching the stars, keeping the calendar, tending the dead. The wonder of the thing is that the modest reality and the towering legend were both true — that the men who swept away their footprints each morning were also, in the long memory of the world, the founders of the very idea of secret wisdom. The footprints were gone by sunrise; the rumor of what had been done in the dark room behind the sealed door went out across the whole of the ancient world and never came home.

→ In the library: E. A. Wallis Budge, Egyptian Magic (1899)