When Religion becomes Countable: The Case of Ancient Egypt

What did ‘religion’ mean for the Ancient Egyptians? Was the state involved in acting as a unifying and founding force for Egyptian religion or can we still identify some clashes between different religious practices? To what extent did different rituals, practices, and beliefs intersect and merge across time and space? Such questions have long preoccupied scholars working in the field, but they have often only been considered through the lens of official, ‘centralized’ texts. Yet increasingly, there is an acknowledgment that such texts require calibration from archaeological data in order to offer a more nuanced understanding of how people must have lived and worshipped.