Reply To: The Gods of Ancient Egypt

[Jessi Willeto]

Egyptian culture had a lot of focus on death and the afterlife, and heavy focus on the deities/becoming deified. While Mesopotamian had similar deity priorities, the goal there seems more focused to be to display power and hierarchy and organization. Egyptians spent a lot of their artistic time toward creating depictions or preparations for the afterlife, with less focus on daily life such as the Mesopotamians do. An example of this would be the stele of Naram-sin or the code of Hammurabi. Both of them are meant to legitimize the ruler and focus on their power as it was present at that time. We can compare this to the funerary steel of Egypt or the book of the dead. Each object in their respective culture are “written’ depictions of their perspective of that time, but with different goals in mind. Though, comparing the stele of Naram-sin with the pallet of Narmer, we can see similarities such as hierarchy of scale, leaders becoming deified or condoned by the deities, and displays of power.