The Egyptians had no word for ‘religion’. Religion was inseparable from daily life. They did, however, have a rich vocabulary referring to priests, deities, and worship. All aspects of state activity, everyday life, and material culture in ancient Egypt were coloured by religious beliefs and symbolism. Drama was religious in nature, tombs and temples were viewed as microcosms of a supernaturally animated universe and decorated accordingly, and mundane activities such as the netting of birds and the hunting of hippopotamuses symbolized the curbing of supernatural forces that threatened the cosmic order (Lustig 1997b). Analogous religious symbolism permeated the other early civilizations.

Marshall Sahlins (1976: 211–12) has argued that each stage in the development of society has a dominant source of symbolic production that supplies the major idioms that permit social relations to be understood and publicly discussed. He maintains that in early civilizations religion was this source. Once societies grew too large for kinship and other personal relations to provide the basic metaphors that guided thinking about social relations, religion supplied the concepts that were needed to consider and shape the moral order. Only much later, in increasingly commercial and industrial societies, did political and economic concepts supplant religious ones in this key role.

Clifford Geertz (1973: 90) has described religion as a symbolic system that establishes powerful, pervasive motivations by formulating a general order of existence and a model for perceiving the world.