Ethnic and Universal Religions
The mythological approach to the discourse on religion and ritual was by no means favoured by the Romans alone. The discussion of religion by authors of literary works was unthinkable in ancient Egypt, too.
Where religious practice was to make part of the plots of novels, ancient Egyptian authors had to restrict themselves to mere descriptions. Lector priests - the most likely equivalent to philosophers in ancient Greece or Rome - were to recite religious texts from ritual handbooks but never allowed to change the wording of the texts they performed, let alone to interpret these texts. Sacred texts were thought to be speeches from ethnic gods; the term most often used in this context translates into ‘divine words' as well as ‘divine matters'. Human beings were indeed allowed to copy these words or occasionally update them by using a more recent lexicography, but sacred texts in ancient Egypt, written in the hieratic script, remained essentially unchanged over long periods of time, in some cases even for several thousands of years. Thus, in creating what can be described as an ethnic religion, restricted priestly knowledge about myth and rituals and their correct use in the divine cult never qualified as an export product (Bommas 2011). The abidance of ethnic religious in their lands of origin is first and foremost caused by language barriers. Outside Egypt, next to no speakers of Egyptian were available who also had enjoyed a clerical training of some sort. The process of inculturation, necessary to reach new followers of a religion within their own cultural setting through the use of their native tongues (Bommas 2012: 423), was therefore never aimed at. It would likewise be wrong to label Roman religion as ethnic religion due the influences of Greek religion that were formative in shaping what later became a universal religion within the then known world, for large parts identical with the Imperium Romanum. What helped to spread Roman religious thinking was certainly the lack of language barriers in an environment where Greek was regarded as the lingua franca. Cult religions base themselves on memorization (and recitation texts of various kinds certainly aided the memory in most cases), while book religions regard one book only as authoritative.
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