One God to rule them all: Garry Shaw on Faith After the Pharaohs at the British Museum

The exhibition beautifully captures how religion shaped the region

by GARRY SHAW  |  17 December 2015

In the British Museum's latest exhibition, Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs, there is a long fragment of papyrus, one of many on display, written in Greek and called the Gospel of Thomas. What is striking about this fragment is not its beauty or penmanship, but the era in which it was written. In Oxyrhynchus, an Egyptian city, the scroll’s Christian owner had copied the text less than 300 years after the death of Jesus, a time when the ancient Egyptian gods were still widely worshipped, before the acceptance of Christianity across the Roman Empire and before the appearance of Islam. To many of his contemporaries in Egypt, this ancient copyist—a man simply trying to preserve his messiah's sayings—would have been a rebel. He could not have predicted how Egypt, and the whole world, would change over the coming centuries, or that the church would forbid Christians from reading the very text he was copying once the contents of the New Testament had been agreed upon.

Religious development—its continuation and transformation—is at the heart of Egypt: Faith After the Pharaohs. It is what makes the show so fascinating and ambitious. Taking visitors from 30BC to AD1171, the exhibition is divided into three main sections, covering the Romans in Egypt and their interactions with the Jews and early Christians, the transition to Egypt as part of a Christian Empire and then, through the Byzantine Era, onwards into the Islamic Period. It is a millennium often ignored by museums in favour of Egypt's more ancient glories. Where most exhibitions end, this one begins.

Egyptian years and days

Many Egyptians continue to use several yearly calendars, the heritage of the country’s different religious traditions, writes Samia Abdennour

“The Egyptian calendar is certainly the only rational calendar that has ever been devised,” wrote the ancient Greek historian Herodotus after his visit to Egypt in the fifth century BCE.

The ancient Egyptians were one of the first nations to use a solar calendar, in around 3,000 BCE, and this shows their great regard for science and the high level of scientific knowledge they had attained. Their calendar was based on the phases of the River Nile and the associated activities in the fields of flooding, seedtime and harvesting, these making up three distinct seasons of four months each. 

These seasons shaped the lives and character of the Egyptian fellaheen (peasants) who were so engrossed in agriculture and the land that they left all other matters — social, political and economic — to outsiders. It was this that facilitated the foreign control of the country and that led to the peasants’ eventual oppression.

Egyptians today use three calendars, the Islamic, Coptic and Western calendar, the last being used by people of both faiths for most secular or official purposes. The Islamic calendar is used only for religious purposes, while the Coptic calendar is used to mark the events of the Christian year and the agricultural almanac by farmers of both faiths. 

The names given to the Islamic months were largely adopted from those of the jahiliya (the “time of ignorance” before the coming of Islam), while the names of the Coptic months are derived from the names of ancient Egyptian gods.