The Egyptian temple was a place fundamentally set off from the outside, whose rituals of invoking gods, processing images, execrating the forces of chaos, making formal offerings to specific gods, and divining their will were conducted only by ‘‘pure’’ priests. Through their literacy and by their utterances ritual words assumed efficacy and - as villagers probably saw it - the world ran in an orderly and generative way, but the separation of main temple rituals did not mean that Egyptian religion, broadly conceived, was restricted to priesthoods. Ordinary people would approach the temples for the touch of (or sand from) the hieroglyphs and reliefs, to avail themselves of potent stelae and images accessible to the public, to leave votive expressions and appeals, to request written answers to questions, and to participate in festivals and processions, when the god in his image would emerge and, perhaps, respond publicly to questions of civic importance.
Many temples constructed during the Ptolemaic and early Roman Periods included features designed for non-priestly, popular devotion. At Kom Ombo, begun under Ptolemy VI and further developed under Domitian and Trajan, a cult relief of the gods surrounding a set ofdivine eyes and ears, which represented the divinities' ability to hear human appeals, was placed just on the outside of the inner shrines to the twin gods Sobek and Haroeris (Gutbub 1984; Bagnall and Rathbone 2004: 234). At the Dendera temple of Hathor, a project of the late Ptolemaic and early Roman Periods, an enormous relief of the goddess was built into the rear wall, adjacent to the site inside the temple where the goddess’s holiest image would have been stored. Covered by wooden doors, the image was a place of enthusiastic popular supplication, as we can infer from the vehemence of Christian monks’ mutilation of the image during the fifth century (Frankfurter 2008). An iconographic phenomenon that gained particular popularity in the Ptolemaic Period, the Horus cippus, also served as a way for temples to accommodate popular needs for healing substances. These stelae, ranging in size from several centimetres to a metre or more, portrayed Harpokrates standing frontally atop crocodiles, a selection of dangerous animals clutched in each hand, his head surmounted by a mask of Bes. It is an iconography of manifestly apotropaic meaning, collecting symbols of everything dangerous and submitting it all to images of protection: Horus, Bes, and various hieroglyphic spells that invoke Isis and other great gods to protect a person from scorpion venom. The larger cippi were erected on bases that allowed the collection of water poured over them. The water picked up the efficacy of the inscribed spells and could be preserved for healing and protection (Ritner 1989; 1992). Some temples seem to have expanded these popular features during the Ptolemaic and early Roman Periods. At the temple of Dendera, for example, a structure with numerous chambers was erected in the Roman Period that some archaeologists interpret as a kind of sanatorium, in which a hydraulic system evidently functioned to distribute magically charged water to the different rooms (Daumas 1957).
The appeal of certain temples and temple precincts as healing centers - not only Dendera but Menouthis and Canopus near Alexandria and Deir el-Bahri in Thebes - involved the institutionalization ofsuch archaic traditions ofthe temple as a source of magical power and the site of appeals for divine intervention. Many temples opened up or constructed spaces for visitors to sleep, dream, and have their dreams professionally interpreted (Dunand 1991; 2006; Frankfurter 1998: 46-52; hajtar 2006: 50-6; and below on dream incubation).
That central drama of temples in society, the procession of the shrine image beyond the temple doors to traverse village and countryside, had probably always been the occasion for popular festival. Viewing the image and its priests, celebrating the god’s radiation of generative powers to people and plants, and hearing sacred words altogether made the procession and festival the chief occasion in public religion. Festivals also had important social implications, bringing together people from the surrounding region, inviting personal appeals for the god’s attentions, reinforcing the popular sense of a religious landscape through the processional integration of shrines, and allowing various types of frivolity. (At one festival, for the god Min at Mendes, Herodotos claimed that a woman would ritually copulate with a goat - 2.46). Materials and witnesses from the Graeco-Roman Period indicate the preparation and enjoyment of special foods, the shouting of special slogans, the lighting of special lamps, and certainly the selling of religious images and souvenirs like those described at the beginning of this essay. Considering the obvious priestly influences on the terracotta workshops and the participants’ traditional investment in festival foods and collective feasting, we can see in the festival a rich and complex interchange between temple and village worlds, where populace accepts the performative authority of priests and their rituals while also asserting their own traditions, like dancing, and expectations, like fertility (Frankfurter 1998: 52-8). We also see this interchange in local temple traditions at Saqqara, Bubastis, and elswhere, in which devotees had animals associated with the god killed and mummified as emissaries and votive offerings - hence the large numbers of slaughtered ibises, cats, ichneumons, and other animals that have been excavated and placed in museums (Charron 1990; Ikram 2005b; Rutherford 2005: 144-6).
Even before Alexander’s arrival, Herodotos describes at least one festival receiving crowds of a size far exceeding what we would expect of the immediate regional population (2.58-60). It seems that, at some temples already in the Persian period the spectacle of the image procession and the accompanying festival was growing in extravagance, incorporating public theatre (at Edfu, for example), celebrations of civic patronage (like games), and a host of carnivalesque activities and markets. We should understand this development as the temples’ deft acknowledgment of patronage, whether royal (in the Ptolemaic Period) or that of local elites (in the Roman Period), and eventually the festivals’ reflection of Hellenistic identity and pride, beyond the purely religious element of the god’s appearance. (Frankfurter 1998: 58-65). Still, however, many local temples and shrines maintained smaller-scale processions with meaning specifically for the local landscape. One such procession is remembered in connection with a Christian holy man still in the fourth century ad. Apa Apollo magically halts the priests with their image, and they cannot move for a whole afternoon (Historia monachorum 8.25-6).
Clearly Hellenism brought changes in the ways that temples presented their powers to people and cultivated piety at temple precincts. At many temples Greek itself came to dictate the very formulation of people’s contact with temple traditions, both in the area of votive inscriptions (proskynemata) and in the priestly expropriation of temple rituals for domestic healing, protection, and personal success. Most of what we now call the ‘‘Greek Magical Papyri’’ are, in fact, Egyptian priests’ translations and reformulations of temple rites and traditions for healing and for inviting visions of gods, but now for a paying public. Spells that once referred back to Egyptian texts and esoteric temple traditions now presented gods as both cosmic and as directly available to the outsider. Thoth-Hermes of Hermopolis, for example, can be invoked for a shop’s prosperity simply by reciting his attributes and shaping his image out of wood {PGMVIII.1-63; see Betz 1986). Other spells mention the temple as the site to procure magical dirt {PGMIV.2129), keep an amulet hidden {PGMIV.3125-71), or steal the linen off a statue of Harpokrates {PGM IV.1071-75), but they shift the actual rites and their efficacy away from the temple, towards spaces that an entrepreneurial ritual expert designates himself. In this way Hellenism and the priests’ engagement with Hellenism led to a dislocation and mutation of temple rituals for the laity {See J. Smith 1995 and Assmann 1997; on the PGM/PDM see Ritner 1995 and Dielemann 2005) - and not just Egyptian laity. In their correspondence with novelistic portrayals of Egyptian priests as wizards current in the Mediterranean world, the magical papyri reflect Egyptian priests’ own appropriation of the exotic stereotypes Greeks and Romans held of them. By the third century ad this stereotype appropriation would have had quite lucrative possibilities for priests {Frankfurter 1998: 210-37; 2000: 166-83).
The inscribed Greek proskynemata on temples {and other pilgrimage and tourist sites) are remarkable for their abundance across Egypt and for their wording, which ranges from the simple name or earnest appeal to the lengthy metrical composition that celebrates the god’s cosmic character and salvific capacities {Bernand 1994). The dedicants comprise not only priests and others with Egyptian names but, quite often, visitors from elite, often non-Egyptian backgrounds. At the same temples we find appeals to gods in their Greek forms - Asklepios at Deir el-Bahri, Helios at Kalabsha - and in their Egyptian forms - Imouthes, Mandulis. Here again it would seem that many Egyptian cult centers - Abydos, Thebes, Philae, Saqqara - had become destinations for foreign visitors, not just regional folk, transforming sites of regional, priestly significance into what we might call pilgrimage centers {Bernand 1988; see also Elsner and Rutherford 2005).
In their individualized character, proskynemata reflect a personal desire to visit and behold a site and its god, not simply a village group’s arrival for a festival. One third-century ad visitor came to the frontier temple of Kalabsha to ‘‘venerate the Divine, sacrifice to all the gods, [and] visit every temple to make an act of devotion [prosky-nOn]’’ {Bernand 1969, no. 165). Here is an impulse surely more pious than the word ‘‘tourism’’ captures, while the sense that piety involves travel to a multitude of shrines suggests more sightseeing than we typically {if incorrectly) ascribe to ‘‘pilgrimage.’’ We see then a new phenomenon of the Hellenistic Period that revolves around individual experience of temple sites and their gods, whether or not the visitors travelled in groups, and a conceptualization of the entire land of Egypt as a network of important shrines, rather than the preeminence of those with which one is affiliated by local and family tradition. {Bernand 1988; Volokhine 1998). Of course, for most people the impulse to visit and to leave votive signs at the regional temple represented primarily family tradition.
Still, the very custom of inscribing, or paying a local professional to inscribe, proskynemata on temple buildings and other sites points also to a new kind of piety. From such traditional expressions of supplicatory presence as leaving some iconic token or some mark of one’s visit - often images of ears or feet - or simply taking sand or water from the temple site, the proskynema can communicate self-definition - as a Hellenized individual, even as cultured. It shows a mode of piety that is both individualized and public, where temple walls offer not only the physical proximity to a god or a source of healing sand but also a slate for self-memorialization. Hellenism becomes a mode of representing oneself before others and before gods (see Nock 1972).
The rise in devotees’ interest in healing shrines during this period also seems to reflect this construction and representation of the self according to Hellenistic mores. Whether in search of private dreams at Deir el-Bahri or secluded healing in the enclosures of the Dendera sanatorium, the supplicant comes to experience the temple deity through his members, even the lens of his own psyche in the case of incubation (Dunand 2006). Dream and personal health become the routes to defining a religious self separate from family and locale, and a piety of direct personal experience (see Stroumsa 2009: 23-46).
If these spiritual tendencies arose in Hellenistic culture through its encounter with Egyptian temple religion, they certainly influenced Egyptians in every way. Many of the names in proskynemata are Egyptian (although we cannot talk about a pure Greek ethnicity behind Greek names), and these inscriptions show that Egyptians too accepted the new vision of Egypt as a network of devotional sites, and of the individual self as bearer of piety and recipient of gods’ benefits. The occurrence of priestly names at, e. g., Philae (Rutherford 1998: 40-2), suggests that the Egyptian engagement with this Hellenistic piety may have arisen with priestly efforts to translate Egyptian gods and their manifestations into Hellenistic forms, whether as mobile spells or in priestly accounts of personalized theopha-nies. In one such account, preserved in a second-century Greek fragment, an author laments his inability to translate a book about Deir el-Bahri’s patron god Imouthes-Asklepios, but then he describes his ecstatic and transformative dream-vision of the god himself (P Oxy. XI.1381). Imouthes-Asklepios emerges as a god with whom the earnest priest can cultivate a pious relationship evocative of Hellenistic ideals.
The new Hellenistic ‘‘pilgrims’ economy’’ at Egyptian temples thus affected Egyptian religion in many ways. Workshops loosely affiliated with temples produced new, popular interpretations of the gods that certainly impacted the meaning of a local Horus, Bes, or Isis for visitors local and distant. At Saqqara, a thriving temple complex dedicated to Thoth, Serapis, and several other gods, a veritable arcade of shrines sprang up along the pilgrims’ way, one of which was apparently dedicated to Bes in an erotic manifestation - so we infer from the voluptuous reliefs discovered there (Quibell 1907, with Derchain 1981). In this case the pilgrims’ economy seems to have led to the regional centralization of a cult hitherto mostly domestic. So also the new spectacle culture that developed around temple festivals gave a ‘‘global’’ significance to local religion - a novel importance and exotic excitement, as local Egyptians and Greek tourists interacted around the same event, or simply visited the same shrine, some seeking ancestral gods and others Egyptian versions ofcosmic gods (see Bernand 1988: 53-4; Rutherford 1998). Religious specialties developed in temples to serve the individual hopes and fantasies ofvisitors from afar: here a healing cult; there a place to behold the god of the heavens; and there a place known to give true advice.
David Frankfurter
Figure 28.4 Saqqara Bes-room, photograph from Quibell, 1907.
World History
