Materia sacra: The Materiality of Religion in Ancient Egypt from the Dynastic to the Byzantine Period

Dear Colleagues,

We are writing to you because we would be delighted and honored if you will consider writing a contribution for the Special Issue “Materia sacra: The Materiality of Religion in Ancient Egypt from the Dynastic to the Byzantine Period” of the journal Religions, which aims to investigate—in a diachronic perspective—how Egyptian religion materializes through symbolic, ritual and practical objects.

As is well known, in the past decades, the so-called “Material turn” has generated one of the most influential theoretical shifts in the field of the humanities and social sciences (Hicks 2010), and materiality and material culture have thus grown as a significant perspective for the study of religion in contemporary world as well as in ancient societies (Engelke 2012; Hutchings and McKenzie 2017; Morgan 2010; 2021; Raja and Rüpke 2015). 

As a matter of fact, exploring the relationship between materiality and religion might appear “à la fois évident et dissonant. Évident, car la matérialité est une dimension nécessaire de l’expérience humaine. Dissonant, car ces termes ont longtemps été tenus à distance”  (Cohen and Mottier 2016). In modern West, religion is usually understood as a system of beliefs—including theological predications about gods and other extra-human beings, cosmologies and mythical narratives, dogmas, ethical prescriptions, concerns about the afterlife—and rituals—sets of repeatable and symbolizable actions that epitomize those aspects that a tradition holds as crucial for establishing the normative human place in the cosmos. Beside these intangible implications, religion has a material dimension related to the presence and use of objects that are part of a cult, belong to a performing rite, are offered to god(s), or (re)present them. Yet, the value and the role played by “things”—objects, items, bodies, images, etc.—within such configurations has long been neglected or scarcely considered on behalf of an alleged priority of ideas and internal experience. This intellectual stance is rooted in a culturally specific tradition, developed from Classical Antiquity through the authoritative influence of Christian lore and European (especially Cartesian) philosophical thinking, which strongly emphasize the opposition between spirit and matter, mind and body (Nongbri 2013). The “material turn”, however, has shown that the material world is not a passive and inert recipient of human action; rather it actively shapes human behavior, cognition, and culture (Barrett 2016). 

The move to materiality, therefore, is a stimulus to redress the imbalance, to reconceptualize the very notion “religion” and reconsider our approach to the topic, acknowledging that “the materialities of religion are integral to its constitution” (Asad 2001; Engelke 2012). This constitutive role encompasses different aspects (Cohen and Mottier 2016): firstly, the material entails multiple entangled relationships, conjoining rather than keeping separate the subject and object, things and meanings; secondly, the material gives form and place to religious experience, in that its properties, assemblage, modification, qualification induce the presence of (and allows contact with) the sacred; finally, the material is embedded in social (also religious) practice, meaning that it is not a merely static support but can give sense and orientation to action and ritual performance. 

Taking the materiality of religion seriously means, in this perspective, not just reviewing religious equipment as such, but approaching religion in its dynamic qualities, as it is its vibrant material dimension—the presence of artifacts, idols, bodies, substances, spaces—what, de facto, makes it happen as a tangible, lived experience and allows thinking and acting religiously (Fabietti 2014; Morgan 2010). On one hand, addressing the material aspects of religions implies exploring the distribution of agency within human–things interaction (Gell 1998), focusing on how special objects are established as powerful social others as well as on how the material world shapes the development of religious traditions. This, in turn, invites us to re-consider cognition itself as intimately connected to objects and contexts, as “beliefs and other internal cognitive or emotional religious experiences are not truly separable from material culture, but are actually themselves constituted through human-thing interactions” (Barrett 2016). As Webb Keane (2008) puts it, ideas, beliefs, meanings “must be exteriorized in some way, for example, in words, gestures, objects, or practices, in order to be transmitted from one mind to another”.

The study of archaeologically recovered civilizations offers the opportunity to expand the investigation of material religion both diachronically and cross-culturally, by looking at how ancient religions engaged with materiality and made things matter in their practices and discourses (Barrett 2016; Insoll 2004; 2011; Raja and Rüpke 2015; Renfrew 1994; Rowan 2012). 

With its longstanding cultural tradition, ancient Egypt is one of such contexts and provides ample material to detailed analysis and critical reflection (Meskell 2004; Nyord 2020). Altars and offering tables, statues and figurines, vessels, ritual processional furniture, containers for balms and perfumes, incense burners, censers for fumigation, manuscripts (in their double nature of sacred texts and material artifacts), images, special clothes, and ornaments are only but a few examples of this materia sacra, a rich set of material correlates that is not an accessory nor neutral but part and parcel of the Egyptian religion, in its diachronic dimension. It is through the mediation of physical objects and contexts—whether they are believed to be the product of human or divine agency—that Egyptian religion takes form, place, and action within the material world, expressing its distinctive historical configurations. Thus, while Egyptian ritual practice “has a definite setting that allows for its performance and efficiency” (Patera 2012), it cannot be performed without material culture, which is neither entirely functional nor entirely symbolic, but “renders abstract thought and belief both tangible and efficacious” (Meskell 2005).

Assuming that the “material study of religion means studying what things do to make religions happen” (Morgan 2021)—in the conviction that there is no myth without rite and there is no rite without ritual objects—the volume aims to investigate how Egyptian religion materializes through symbolic, ritual and practical objects put at work in fitting spaces, and how materiality shapes religious experience and practice, discourse and narrative, cult and belief. Specific categories of cultic equipment and ritual paraphernalia—ad-hoc created objects or everyday settings, reused from their original context and redirected into ritual—and their specific use are analyzed not per se but as a magnifying lens useful to shed light on Egyptian lived religion and its historical development in the consciousness that if rituals are dynamic and transformative actions, over time their material supports are changing too.

How sacred and ritual objects do work in practice? How their religious quality is negotiated (established, negated, reinterpreted)? What kind of power do they embody? Do their form and material matter? How do they contribute to the ‘dialogue’ between the human and divine worlds? How do “religious acts and actors co-define material objects to suit changing times and audiences” (Nugteren 2019) in Egyptian religion? These are some of the key questions addressed in the volume, with focused attention to the cycle of religious media— production, classification, circulation (Morgan 2016)—as well as to their embeddedness within social practice and reality, including both official (temple) and private (personal, domestic) contexts of action.

In the end, it is worth remarking that, in scopes and aims, this project intersects and connects with the forthcoming Special Issue, “The Materiality of Religion in Ancient Near Eastern Art and Culture”, edited by Beate Pongratz-Leisten (also Pongratz-Leisten/Sonik 2015).

We look forward to hearing from you.

Our best regards,

Prof. Dr. Paola Buzi
Dr. Angelo Colonna
Guest Editors

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• agency
• archaeology
• context
• experience
• material culture
• materiality
• practice
• society