Oldtidens Ægyptiske religion og mytologi

Die Göttin Ma'at ist die wichtigste Göttin, wenn man das Weltbild der Ägypter zur Zeit der Pharaonen verstehen will. Sie ist ein Aspekt der Muttergöttin und zugleich die Verkörperung der Richtigkeit. Diese Richtigkeit ist die Grundlage der Effektivität und sie ist die Kausalität, die Analogien, die Weisheit, die Schönheit, die gegenseitige Hilfe, die Tradition, die Gerechtigkeit, die Grundlage der Magie usw. Der persönliche Anteil an der Ma'at ist die Seele im eigenen Herzchakra, die über die eigenen Entschlüsse und die eigenen Worte auch die Quelle der Magie und allgemein des Erfolges ist. Sie ist vor allem mit dem Sonnengott Re verbunden, aber auch noch mit einigen anderen Gottheiten wie Osiris, Ptah, Amun, Thot, Hathor usw. Sie ist auch die wichtigste Gottheit beim Jenseitsgericht. Der Blickwinkel, unter dem Ma'at die Welt betrachtet, ist heute wieder aktuell geworden - er findet sich unter neuen Namen z.B. als die "Eleganz" mathematischer Theorien und physikalischer Formeln, als die Notwendigkeit der Zusammenarbeit in einer globalisierten Welt und als die Solidarität mit unterdrückten Personen und Völkern.

Devotion to Artemis dominated the religious culture of ancient Ephesos. But she was not alone. The city of Ephesos and its environs offered a rich panoply of religious options, domestic and public. Structures, statutes, coins, inscriptions, and texts testify to the remarkable diversity of religious ideas and practices in Ephesos. Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Jewish religious traditions found loyal adherents among residents and visitors. Gods, goddesses, heroes, and emperors were worshipped. The contributions in this volume demonstrate that ancient Ephesos was a vibrant and competitive religious environment.

Der vorliegende Band legt den Fokus auf kosmologische und kosmogonische Vorstellungen im Corpus Hermeticum und in weiteren, der antiken Hermetik zugerechneten Schriften. Die Beiträge untersuchen den synkretistischen Entstehungsprozess der Schriften und deren Gegenstand und Wirkung im Kontext der antiken Religions- und Philosophiegeschichte. Der Band bündelt dazu in interdisziplinärer Perspektive Beiträge verschiedener Forschungsrichtungen und Wissenschaftsdisziplinen wie u.a. Altphilologie, Theologie, Philosophiegeschichte, Religionswissenschaft, Ägyptologie sowie Gnosisforschung und betritt auf diese Weise wissenschaftliches Neuland. Niclas Förster und Uwe-Karsten Plisch publizieren in erweiterter Form Vorträge einer im Februar 2018 an der Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen veranstalteten Tagung über "Kosmogonie und Kosmologie in hermetischen Schriften".

Alexandria was one of the main hubs of the Hellenistic world and a cultural and religious "kaleidoscope." Merchants and migrants, scientists and scholars, philosophers, and religious innovators from all over the world and from all social backgrounds came to this ancient metropolis and exchanged their goods, views, and dreams. Accordingly, Alexandria became a place where Hellenistic, Egyptian, Jewish, and early Christian identities all emerged, coexisted, influenced, and rivaled each other. In order to meet the diversity of Alexandria's urban life and to do justice to the variety of literary and non-literary documents that bear witness to this, the volume examines the processes of identity formation from a range of different academic perspectives. Thus, the present volume gathers together twenty-six contributions from the realm of archaeology, ancient history, classical philology, religious studies, philosophy, the Old Testament, narratology, Jewish studies, papyrology, and the New Testament.

Der vorliegende Sammelband untersucht die Konzepte, Methoden und Inhalte der Auslegung autoritativer religiöser Texte in Antike und Mittelalter. Diese Texte sind Ausgangs- und Ansatzpunkte in Unterweisungen, die zur Orientierung und Identitätsbildung dienen, dem Einzelnen ebenso wie Gemeinschaften und Gesellschaften. Fachvertreterinnen und Fachvertreter unterschiedlicher Disziplinen - aus Geschichte, Philologie, Orientalistik, Religionswissenschaft und Theologie - spüren der vielfältigen Bedeutung der oft "heilig" genannten Schriften für Bildung und Erziehung nach. Sie beleuchten die Rolle, die diese Texte für Lehre und Lernen in ihren Ursprungskulturen hatten und haben. Darüber hinaus zeigen sie interkulturelle Bezüge auf, die heute für Diskussionen um Bildung und Religion in den multikulturellen Demokratien Europas höchst relevant sind.

The present volume contains the proceedings of a conference held in October 2018 at Humboldt University Berlin. The articles reflect the different categories of describing Judaism of the Second Temple Period in view of their sustainability in characterising an ancient religious community in different historical situations and discuss relevant (re)constructions of ancient Judaism in the history of scholarship. Since the Persian period, ancient Judaism existed in a world which was in constant flux regarding its political, social, and religious contexts. Consequently, Judaism was subject to permanent processes of change in its self-perception as well as its external perception. In all complexity, however, the Torah, the Temple(s) as a place where heaven meets the earth, and the 'holy' or 'promised' land as the dwelling place of God's people can be regarded as institutions to which all kinds of Judaism in the Babylonian and Egyptian dispora as well in Israel/Palestine were related in some way or another.

In this study, Allison L. Gray analyzes three biographical narratives by the fourth-century Christian theologian Gregory of Nyssa (335-395 CE). When the Life of Moses, the Life of Macrina, and the Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus are examined in light of Greco-Roman rhetoric, biography, hagiography, and the history of education, it becomes evident that Gregory's attention to audience is critical to understanding the texts' form and function. Gregory recounts the lives of exemplary figures to inform his readers about lived virtue while simultaneously preparing them to be skilled readers and interpreters. He adopts and adapts familiar rhetorical and literary techniques to imagine, construct, and teach a new sort of ideal audience, training Christians to interpret Scripture. This study contributes to a more complete picture of how early Christian biographical writing shaped an emerging Christian paideia.

Research on the Book of Jeremiah has gained momentum in the past forty years and led to new results. The differences between the MT and the LXX have received more attention than ever. The extent of Deuteronomistic thinking and of redactions marks the debate on the composition of the book. It has become evident that the Book of Jeremiah intensively picks up earlier sources and offers a synthesis of them, comparable to a mosaic. It concentrates on the downfall of Jerusalem, conceives anew the prophet's role in the figure of Jeremiah and portrays the biblical God in a unique way. This collection of studies by Georg Fischer from the past ten years imparts insights into the recent discussions about the Book of Jeremiah.

The most important objects in the Hebrew Bible are a wooden box, styled in English "the ark" or "the ark of the covenant", and two statues of winged creatures, "the cherubim", that surmount it. Raanan Eichler attempts to understand these objects using the full gamut of data and tools available to the modern scholar. The study features an abundance of visual comparative material, much of it in colour, with a particularly close examination of the finds from the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. The author proposes solutions to a number of unsolved puzzles, such as the question of what cherubim looked like, and offers a new explanation of the nature of the ark and the cherubim, rejecting the prevailing scholarly view of them as having constituted an "empty throne" and footstool for the God of Israel. Rather, he argues, they constituted an empty frame, a unique cultic focus that surpassed all known systems in the ancient Near East in the extent of the efforts it represented to prevent an anthropomorphic conception of the deity in a cultic context.

Scholarly interest in intersections between Jews and Syriac Christians has experienced a boom in recent years. This is the result of a series of converging trends in the study of both groups and their cultural productions. The present volume contributes to this developing conversation by collecting sixteen studies that investigate a wide range of topics, from questions of origins to the development of communal boundaries, from social interactions to shared historical conditions, involving Jews and Syriac Christians over the first millennium CE. These studies not only reflect the current state of the question, but they also signal new ways forward for future work that crosses disciplinary boundaries between the fields of Jewish Studies and Syriac Studies, in some cases even dismantling those boundaries altogether.

Sixteen hundred years after her death (d. 415 CE), the legacy of Hypatia of Alexandria's life, teaching, and especially her violent demise, continue to influence modern culture. Through a series of focused articles, this volume takes a fresh look at the most well-known ancient female philosopher under three aspects: first, through the evidence provided by her most famous pupil, Synesius of Cyrene; next, by placing her in her late antique cultural context, and, finally, through analysis of her reception both ancient and modern. Though the sources are meager, Hypatia's influence on her students and wider culture guaranteed that she remained an important figure throughout the centuries, albeit one ranging from chaste Neoplatonist to conniving witch. Along with its eleven new essays, this volume also includes a new translation of all the principal ancient sources touching on Hypatia.

A constant re-evaluation of the new archaeological and textual material unearthed and edited in recent decades is a recurrent duty of ancient and modern scholars. Since the overwhelming amount of available data and the complexity of new methodologies can be competently handled only by specialized scholars, such a re-evaluation is no longer possible for a single scholar. For this reason, archaeologists, cuneiform and biblical scholars as well as classicists joined forces at an international conference in Rome in May 2017 to share their accumulated knowledge. The results of the proceedings are presented here in the oral stage along with the Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, and Greco-Roman periods.

In this study, Max Whitaker investigates the intriguing accounts of Jesus' resurrection appearances through the lens of Greco-Roman narratives. In both canonical and apocryphal accounts of Jesus' post-resurrection appearances, Jesus appears in an unrecognisable form to other characters, including people who knew him well just before his death. The motif of a character appearing in an unrecognisable form to people he or she knows well is one which exists in folk literature, and in Greco-Roman and Jewish literature from a range of genres. The author investigates a range of stories in which characters appear in an unrecognisable or metamorphic form, and summarises patterns and themes. This throws new light on how Jesus' post-resurrection stories would have been understood by their original audiences.

Conversations in the House of Life offers a new translation of a text first published as The Ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth (2005). The composition is a dialogue between a Master, perhaps the god Thoth himself, and a Disciple, named "The-one-who-loves-knowledge." Originally written in Demotic, the text dates to the Graeco-Roman Period (ca. 300 B.C. to 400 A.D.). The dialogue covers everything from how to hold the writing brush and the symbolic significance of scribal utensils to a long exposition on sacred geography. The work may be an initiation text dealing with sacred knowledge. It is closely associated with the House of Life, the temple scriptorium where the priests wrote their books. The 2005 publication was aimed at specialists, but Conversations in the House of Life is intended for the general reader. The revised translation reflects recent advances in our understanding of the text. The explanatory essays, commentary, and glossary help the reader explore the fascinating universe of the Book of Thoth. As a document of Late Period Egyptian thought it is of importance to all those interested in Graeco-Roman Period intellectual history; students of the Classical Hermetica will find the Book of Thoth especially intriguing. The express goal of Conversations in the House of Life is to make this challenging Ancient Egyptian composition accessible to the widest possible audience.

Det bærende Princip i den ægyptiske Religions Udvikling er Loyaliteten mod det overleverede, Traditionens uhyre Vægt. Den ægyptiske religiøse Bevidsthed kan ikke kaste noget overbord, den ser sig altid tilbage, ængstelig for at slippe en Tøddel af Fædrenes Visdom. Denne er hellig, ikke blot dens reale Indhold, men også dens Form. Da den ægyptiske Religion har sine Kilder i den mest forskelligartede Jordbund, dels i afrikansk Fetischdyrkelse og dels i en højere Forestillingskreds, der medbragtes ved en Indvandring fra Asien, er det forståeligt, at når intet måtte slippes, vil Resultatet af den teologiske Bearbejdelse af det overleverede Stof frembyde mange Modsigelser og Gåder, der forvirrer den moderne Betragter.