Talk:Decline of ancient Egyptian religion

Suggesting some more sources you can use

Hello, 옥타비아누스. I'm A. Parrot, and I work a lot on ancient Egyptian religion. I'm glad to see that you've created this article and given it a solid and well-referenced start. I hope this doesn't seem presumptuous, especially because you're still working on the article, but I'd like to suggest some more sources on the topic, on which I've read pretty extensively in the past few years. The terrain of the scholarly field has been shifting lately, which makes it tricky to write about. These are some of the best sources out there:

• Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993) by Roger Bagnall
• Philae and the End of Egyptian Religion (2008) by Jitse Dijkstra
• From Temple to Church: Destruction and Renewal of Local Cultic Topography in Late Antiquity (2008) edited by Johannes Hahn, Stephen Emmel, and Ulrich Gotter. This one is about the decline of pre-Christian religion all over the Roman Empire, but it's heavily weighted toward studies of Egypt.
• The Archaeology of Late Antique 'Paganism' (2011) edited by Luke Lavan and Michael Mulryan. This is another collection of studies about the Roman Empire in general, but its analysis of paganism's disappearance is very extensive.
• Following Osiris: Perspectives on the Osirian Afterlife from Four Millennia (2017) by Mark Smith. This one, obviously, is about Osiris and Egyptian afterlife beliefs, but its second-to-last chapter deals with the disappearance of those beliefs and of ancient Egyptian religion in general.

Some of these sources may prove hard for you to come by, but though I may not be able to help much in writing the article (I'm committed to a lot of writing and reviewing in the next few months), I have all these sources and can supply passages from them if you need me to.

Good luck, and thank you again for working on this subject. A. Parrot (talk) 04:52, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Thanks for the message. Anything would be appreciated in regards to material and sources; I'm not sure I can obtain these in a timely fashion, but if you want to provide passages or quotes that might be of interest to the article, I would be thrilled to add them. This is a personal field of interest for me; currently, I'm revising the article with Religion in Roman Egypt: Assimilation and Resistance by David Frankfurter, 1998 (it's also cited on a number of other articles, a great source) and The Twilight of Ancient Egypt: First Millennium B.C. by Karol Mysliwiec, 2000. I would be happy to include any other sources and information in the article. Feel free to leave those that you find useful here or my talk page. 옥타비아누스 / Octavian 05:43, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

I'll think about the best parts of these books to quote. I have to warn you, though: Frankfurter's book is a weird one. It was lauded after it came out, and for that reason it used to be my go-to source for the period, but Bagnall wrote of it (in the Hahn, Emmel, and Gotter volume) "Misuse of evidence is, regrettably, a pervasive feature of Frankfurter’s book." And he was being polite. Smith's remarks about Frankfurter are among the harshest that I've seen academics use about one another. The gist of it is that Frankfurter leans heavily on Coptic saints' lives, whose dramatic stories of saints' triumph over paganism are more or less fiction, in order to argue that there was more conflict between Christians and pagans than there actually was. At times he extrapolates too much from those sources, adding his own improbable claims to those of the hagiographers. I should go to bed, but to give you a little more detail on the subject, I can point you to some reviews I wrote on Amazon of several of these books: Bagnall, Frankfurter, Dijkstra, and the volume by Lavan and Mulryan. A. Parrot (talk) 06:28, 25 December 2017 (UTC)

Quotes from some sources

I'll put some of the most pertinent passages in my sources here. A. Parrot (talk) 02:38, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

• Dijkstra 2008, p. 22: "To describe the process of religious transformation in Late Antique Egypt, it therefore seems best to follow Bagnall in his ideas that Ancient Egyptian religion as an institution (with which temple cults, rituals, festivals and sacred scipts in regular use and an organized priesthood are thus meant) had mostly faded away in the fourth century and that institutionalized Christianity expanded considerably in that century, while at the same time allowing for Frankfurter's point that the process was much more dynamic and much could continue on a local level beyond that century, such as local religious practices or rituals. In other words, Christianity may be organized to a large extent in the fourth century but it took more time before the new religion was fully integrated in society."

Thank you very much! I've added it into the article, bibliography, and further reading sections. With respect to the reasoning behind why the religion faded, it's no doubt a very nuanced issue. The main qualm I have right now is that the "Decline of paganism in Egypt" section - under "History" - is not very well organised. My original plan was to integrate the history and reasoning behind the decline, with controversy over the issue (like with the contesting of Frankfurter's book), in the same section, which can definitely still be done, but I must say I'm wondering whether the history section should include a little bit of reasoning, just enough to be a TL;DR for readers that aren't profoundly interested in the controversy and all that, and include a section for the various proposed theories and rebuttals? Not sure right now, it's not something I'd want to do myself without hearing the opinions of others on how the article should be structured. 옥타비아누스 / Octavian 20:09, 26 December 2017 (UTC)

I'd say the ideal option would be to integrate the two. It can be tough to do that kind of thing in a readable way, but as long as you don't go into too much detail about the scholarly back-and-forth, it's doable. A. Parrot (talk) 03:48, 27 December 2017 (UTC)