Original subtitles

Downloaded from YTS.MX

(silence)

(ominous music)

Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX

(twinkly music)

- [Girl] Reality films.

(dramatic tones)

- [Narrator] Ancient and mysterious.

Powerful and deadly.

All knowing and generous.

The gods of Egypt were many things.

They originated many thousands of years ago

in a land faraway from Egypt.

Over time they evolved, changed, adapted and grew in mystery.

Their stories are filled with great battles and vengeance,

of cycles of nature and the balance of the very universe.

Their tales, a real game of thrones.

From the gods of the underworld such as Osiris and Anubis

to the gods of light such as Amun-Ra and Horus

the lives and actions of the gods of ancient Egypt

explain our very existence and our place in the universe.

(dramatic music)

The mysteries of all that is and ever shall be

were explored in their lives.

Their influence has traveled across continents

and across time.

Our own so called religions are full of them

under different names.

(dramatic music)

This is the fascinating story of the real gods of Egypt.

(dramatic music)

The ancient Egyptian religions were very complex.

Polytheistic beliefs and multiple rituals formed integral

parts of their society.

The gods were believed to be in control of and present

within the very forces which controlled nature itself.

(dramatic music)

The rituals and practices of the ancient Egyptians were

created to gain the favor of the various deities of the

various forces of nature in order to control the outcome.

(dramatic music)

Most of the formal practices centered around the Pharaoh

who was believed to be God on earth

and possess his divine power or force.

He was the man between them and the gods.

And it was his role to sustain the gods with rituals

and offerings so that they could maintain

order in the universe.

To make sure this worked huge efforts were made to provide

the Pharaoh with what he needed and the thousands of priests

did very well out of the deal.

(dramatic music)

Massive constructions across ancient Egypt were testament

to the importance placed upon appeasing and gaining

the favor of the gods of force.

(dramatic music)

An individual could pray to a particular deity

and ask for help, or he could compel them to do his bidding

through magic, one is asking, one is telling.

(dramatic music)

There is a direct correlation between the rise of religious

institutions in Egypt with the decline in power

of the Pharaoh.

Death was of major importance with Egyptians going to great

lengths to ensure a safe journey through the underworld

for their loved ones.

Funerary practices were expensive and often complicated.

Tombs, grave goods, mummification, offerings and more

all made it a rich man's game

but the poor did what they could.

(dramatic music)

Over time the battle of the gods evolved,

some rose high in prominence, others fell.

It was all about the battles between the priests

of the competing temples.

Ra, Amun and Isis were pushed aside when Akhenaten

decided that the temple system would be moved to a new

location and the Aten or sun disk

would now hold the greatest slot.

(dramatic music)

It did not last and his new temple city disappeared beneath

the sand, it would be some time before a truly monotheistic

religion would rise again.

The gods of Egypt arise in a collection of myths

from ancient Egypt which describe their actions as a method

of understanding the world around them.

Understanding the gods of Egypt and their myths is crucial

to understanding ancient Egypt itself.

There is no separation of church and state,

of life and religion because all are intertwined.

From farming to pharmacy, from politics to play

all things involve the gods for the gods are all things.

(dramatic music)

The myths are inspired by the cycles of nature itself.

(dramatic music)

Life is a series of patterns, repeating again and again.

This is the present age to them, before their time things

were linear and events unfolded to create the patterns.

Maat is the fundamental order of the universe

and the most important myths are those of creation itself.

(dramatic music)

Here the gods formed existence from chaos

creating the patterns.

(dramatic music)

The rise of the sun god Ra, the myths of Osiris,

Isis and Horus against this chaotic god, Set.

(dramatic music)

Ra rises in the sky and continues the pattern of existence.

(dramatic music)

He goes down each night into the underworld or duat.

The struggle is constant against chaos.

Life and death were simply part of this continued pattern

rising like Ra and setting.

(dramatic music)

Mythology inspired and influenced Egyptian culture,

religious rituals and royal leaders, life and death,

food, sex, education, art, culture and more

were all part and parcel of the greater living myth

of the life of the gods.

(dramatic music)

In a mirror of human dynasties,

the gods themselves altered in power,

the priests of each deity would use their influence

and there are hundreds of cases of one God usurping

a special location and claiming dominance over another.

A battle of the gods was truly at work.

(dramatic music)

And so we must begin our journey into the gods themselves.

(dramatic music)

We begin with Amun,

who has been around ever since the old kingdom

and the earliest days.

Known as Amun and Amen, by the 11th dynasty

he had become the patron deity of thieves,

the holiest of holy places for the gods.

Following a rebellion in the rise of Harmost the first

Amun became nationally important and was fused with the

sun god Ra to become Amun-Ra.

(dramatic music)

Across time Amun-Ra maintained his chief post,

the only time this slipped was under the king Akhenaten

who raised Aten to the highest position.

(dramatic music)

Amun-Ra was self created, champion of the poor and weary,

everybody loved and worshiped him,

he was the king of all gods and almost became monotheistic

when other gods were said to be mere manifestations of him.

His influence grew so large that nations outside of Egypt

began worshiping him and there are good reasons to suggest

that the Islamic, Jewish and Christian God

is based upon him and his myths.

(dramatic music)

In Greece, Amun-Ra became known as Zeus.

(dramatic music)

Originally Amun was the god of the wind until he merged with

Ra and also Min, the god of fertility or creation.

(dramatic music)

These newfound powers made him the greatest of the deitys

from the Nubian sun god he adopted the symbol of the ram.

(dramatic music)

He was the god people came to when they wanted mercy

for their own wrong doing or if they felt wrong done to.

He was the god who hears the prayers,

who comes at the cry of the poor and distressed

beware of him they said, the people were to repeat him

to their sons and daughters.

To speak his name far and wide,

he was big and small, he was all things yet to come,

fishes in the deep, birds in heaven.

He never spends an entire day angry and he was merciful.

(dramatic music)

For many years the priests of Amun at Thebes were so

powerful that they were effectively

the leaders of the nation and held power over the economy.

(dramatic music)

They owned two thirds of all the temples

and 90% of Egypt's ships.

The son of one high priest was actually manipulated

onto the throne itself,

and one high priest himself actually became Pharaoh

and ruler of the 21st dynasty.

(dramatic music)

By the 10th century BC this dominance began to decline

but his worship maintained.

(dramatic music)

His influence upon the wider world is actually massive,

he's even mentioned in the Bible.

In Greece he became Zeus-Amon,

after the battle of Issus Alexander the Great was declared

the son of Amun and considered himself divine.

(dramatic music)

The words ammonia and ammonite are derived from Amun

because certain properties were said to be from Amon.

We turn now to one of the most mysterious of Egyptian

deities seen in copious movies and works of fiction, Anubis.

(dramatic music)

In truth the word Anubis is the Greek name of an Egyptian

deity associated with mummification and the after life.

He was depicted as a canine or a man with a canine head

and was known at the time, as the golden jackal

or the African golden wolf.

Just like other Egyptian deities Anubis had many roles.

He was the protector of graves, embalmer and was later

replaced by Osiris as the lord of the underworld.

He ushered souls into the after life and attended the

weighing of their souls, this act would decide whether

the dead would be allowed to enter the realm of the dead.

(dramatic music)

His color is black which symbolized rebirth from the color

of fertile silt of the Nile and also the color of a corpse

which turns after embalming.

In the old kingdom Anubis was the most important god

of the dead, he was replaced in that role by Osiris

during the middle kingdom.

(dramatic music)

It is because of this association with the mysteries of

death and the afterlife that Anubis has crept strongly

into popular culture today, in a scary way.

(dramatic music)

In fact he was not at all scary and helped people who had

suffered the loss of life to go to a better place.

Our next deity is the Goddess of warfare in lower Egypt.

In Greece she's known as Aloros,

in Egypt she was known as Bastet and her worship began

in the second dynasty.

(dramatic music)

In upper Egypt they worship Sekhmet the lioness Goddess

in the same role.

And normally at the unification of upper and lower Egypt

deities were merged but in this case Sekhmet and Bastet

maintained their own identities.

(dramatic music)

During the 22nd dynasty Bastet transformed from lioness

warrior deity into a protector deity represented as a cat.

(dramatic music)

During later dynasty's the deity remained

but was assigned a lesser role in the pantheon

by bearing the name Bastet instead of the earlier Bast.

This happened after Thebes became the capital of ancient

Egypt during the 18th dynasty.

As they rose to great power the priests of the temple of

Amun shifted the other deities down the league

as their own Amun-Ra rose.

(dramatic music)

Bastet was originally a lioness warrior Goddess of the sun

throughout most of ancient Egyptian history.

But later she was changed into the cat Goddess

which is familiar today.

Greeks occupying ancient Egypt towards the end of it's

civilization changed her into a Goddess of the moon.

In lower Egypt she was defender of the Pharaoh

and the later deity Ra.

Her name was associated with the jars in which Egyptians

stored their ointment and used as perfume, Bastet thus

gradually became regarded as the Goddess of perfumes.

Because of this she was regarded as the wife of Anubis

the god of embalming.

Our next deity was the most important of all the sacred

animals in ancient Egypt.

He was worshiped in Memphis and served as a go between

for humans and Ptah, Osiris and Atum.

He is the bull god Apis.

(dramatic music)

His worship is there right at the start of Egyptian history

connected with fertility.

Archeology reveals burials of bulls indicating that the

bull was divine long before and possibly represented

the king himself.

His worship continued after the Egyptians with the Greeks

and even the Romans and lasted until the fifth century AD.

(dramatic music)

The bull was chosen because of its strength and virility.

It was the manifestation of the Pharaoh.

Apis was one of the Egyptian gods for which Alexander the

Great performed a sacrifice during his

seizure of the country from the Persians.

(dramatic music)

We turn now to one of the very earliest of Egyptian deities.

Khnum the god of the source of the Nile.

(dramatic music)

This was an important position for all life along the

river relied upon the annual flooding

to bring fertility to the land.

(dramatic music)

He was the god who created human children at his potter's

wheel and placed them within the mother's womb,

he was the divine potter.

In fact he was the third aspect of Ra,

the god of rebirth creation and the evening sun.

(dramatic music)

Now one of the most significant deities in Egyptian

mythology, the god Horus.

(dramatic music)

There are many depictions of Horus and Egyptologists

treat them all as separate deities although it is possible

they were all just different manifestations

of the same deity.

(dramatic music)

He is mostly depicted as a falcon or falcon headed man.

(dramatic music)

Commonly Horus is the son of Isis and Osiris and is a rival

to Set although in the earliest form he was their brother.

However, there is another tradition that Hathor was

his mother and wife.

He was the god of the sky, war and hunting.

Horus means falcon and also the distant one

and the one who is above.

In life the Pharaoh was Horus, in death he became Osiris,

two aspects of the same soul.

(dramatic music)

But new Horus appeared as a new Pharaoh appeared.

(dramatic music)

As the representation or embodiment of Horus

Pharaoh was divine, a god on earth

and because Horus was produced by Atum, the greatest,

he was part of Atum and so therefore was the Pharaoh.

Eventually this simply evolved into Pharaoh

becoming the son of Ra.

The myth of Horus is very interesting

and parallels the Christian myth.

He was born to the virgin Goddess Isis after she collected

the dismembered parts of her murdered husband Osiris, only

his penis was missing which had been thrown into the Nile.

(dramatic music)

The myths vary but she eventually managed to get herself

pregnant by magic.

She fled to escape her jealous brother Set,

then gave birth to Horus.

Horus as the sky had two eyes,

his right eye was the sun and his left the moon.

(dramatic music)

As a falcon he flew across the sky.

The moon was not as bright as the sun

because he had battled with Set who gouged out his left eye

and a new one created to replace it.

The eye of Horus is an ancient Egyptian symbol

of protection and royal power from deities

in this case from Horus or Ra.

(dramatic music)

The word for the symbol as wadjet.

It was the eye of the one of the earliest of Egyptian

deities, Wadjet who later became associated with Bast,

Mut and Hathor as well.

(dramatic music)

Wadjet was a solo deity and this symbol began as an eye,

an all seeing eye, it was adopted by Horus and Ra.

(dramatic music)

Horus was a god of war and hunting

thus he became a symbol of majesty and power

as well as the model of the Pharaohs.

(dramatic music)

The Pharaohs were said to be Horus in human form.

(dramatic music)

Horus was given the role of protecting humans from his

brother Set by his mother Isis.

(dramatic music)

Set was the god of the desert

who had killed his father Osiris.

(dramatic music)

Over time Horus battled many times with Set

to avenge his father and to choose the next Pharaoh.

(dramatic music)

The mother of Horus is the great Isis.

(dramatic music)

She was so widely worshiped that her influence spread

to Greece and Rome and indeed she is associated

with Mary the mother of Jesus.

(dramatic music)

She's seen as the ideal mother and wife,

she's the patron of nature and magic,

a friend of slaves, sinners, artists

and yet she also hears the prayers of the rich,

maidens and rulers.

She is the protector of the dead

and Goddess of children.

(dramatic music)

Her name means throne and her headdress

is often depicted as a throne.

She represented the Pharaohs power on earth

and he was her child, he was Horus on earth,

god on earth like Jesus.

(dramatic music)

Her parents were Geb, the god of the earth

and Nut, the Goddess of the sky.

She married her brother Osiris.

The Nile flooded each year from the tears of sorrow

issued forth from Isis.

(dramatic music)

She first appears in the fifth dynasty on a sun temple

although it is believed she was originally a separate

deity from predynastic Egypt.

She's often depicted as the wife or assistant of a

deceased Pharaoh and the mother of the four sons of Horus.

These four sons protected the canopic jars

that contained the organs of the deceased Pharaoh.

(dramatic music)

Her worship was carried out in a temple known as the Isium

with daily offerings from priests and priestesses.

These generally had a reputation of being wise

with great healing powers, they could also interpret dreams

and control the weather.

(dramatic music)

Isis was associated with the star Sirius

and its appearance was a sign of the new year.

She was therefore associated with rebirth and reincarnation.

One myth reveals a slightly darker side,

here she tricks Ra into revealing his secret name

by getting a snake to bite him.

(dramatic music)

Only she has the antidote and because she had his real name

she had power over him.

(dramatic music)

Having a secret name was important for magic spells.

Because of this she became highly important to magicians

and magic is central to the myth of Isis.

After the conquest of Egypt Isis became known

as the queen of Heaven and she merged with other mother

Goddesses, Demeter, Astarte and Aphrodite.

(dramatic music)

Isis spread throughout the Roman empire

and is one reason that the Christian Isis,

known as Mary was accepted so easily.

The Greek antiquarian Plutarch describes Isis as a Goddess,

exceptionally wise and a lover of wisdom

to who as her name at least seems to indicate

knowledge and understanding

are in the highest degree appropriate.

Of course her husband suffered a pretty bad fate.

Osiris was usually depicted as the god of the underworld.

(dramatic music)

He was also the god of transition,

resurrection and regeneration.

He is given green skin, a Pharaoh's beard,

mummy wrapped legs, a crown of two large ostrich feathers,

a crook and a flail.

(dramatic music)

He was once believed to be the eldest son of the earth god

Geb or the son god Ra and the earth Goddess Nut.

(dramatic music)

He was the brother and husband of Isis,

and his son was Horus.

Because he ruled over the dead

and because the dead were considered to be the ones

truly living he as called the King of the living.

He was the judge of the dead in the afterlife

and from his place in the underworld

he granted life to all those things

such as vegetation rising upwards.

(dramatic music)

He was the lord of love, permanently youthful,

lord of silence, and when a Pharaoh died he became Osiris

who rose from the dead himself.

In this way they inherited eternal life.

This was later mirrored in the Christian myths.

Eternal life through the slain god who rose from the dead

who was the son of Mary or Isis.

(dramatic music)

The three aspects of Isis are clearly laid out in the Bible

as the three Mary's and this is why she is the mother

and lover of Jesus.

(dramatic music)

His name probably means powerful one or God almighty

although nobody is certain.

(dramatic music)

His crook signifies his role as the shepherd god,

the flail is unknown but maybe a shepherd's whip,

pull and push.

(dramatic music)

His green color symbolizes rebirth.

The soul or ba of Osiris was sometimes worshiped as a

separate deity and was known as the soul of the lord

of the pillar of continuity.

This was the backbone of Osiris and the Nile itself

the backbone of Egypt.

(dramatic music)

It therefore supplied the water, fertile silt

and vegetation for survival.

He died only to be resurrected again each year.

This ba of Osiris was power and also part of the word

for ram and so he is depicted as a ram headed god.

(dramatic music)

The living sacred ram was in fact worshiped

and mummified as holy.

With the fall of Egypt to the Greeks

Osiris was merged with the Apis bull

and became Serapis and depicted as a standard Greek god.

(dramatic music)

His cult continued on the island of Philae in upper Egypt

until the sixth century AD until the Romans destroyed

the sanctuaries, arrested the priests

and seized the divine images.

(dramatic music)

And now for the deity who slew Osiris, Set.

(dramatic music)

He is the god of the desert, storms, disaster, violence,

chaos and foreigners.

(dramatic music)

Ra employs Set on his solar boat to repel

the serpent of chaos, Apep.

He was a balance to Horus as the lord of the Red Desert,

where as Horus was the lord

of the black land or fertile soil.

(dramatic music)

The opposites of barren and fertility.

He killed and mutilated his brother Osiris

Isis put him back together and had Horus as a child.

Horus and Set did battle many times.

(dramatic music)

Set is the father of Anubis and the meaning of his name

is unknown, it is likely that it gave rise to Satan

in later Christian myth.

He's often depicted as a strange and unknown beast.

In human form he has a distinctive head

and sometimes with the head of a donkey.

In the mythology of Heliopolis like Osiris and Isis

Set was born of the sky Goddess Nut and the earth god Geb.

Myths show Osiris was as wise and happy

Set as the jealous brother.

His cult continued for sometime

and influenced Christian and other religions.

We turn now to the wise god Thoth.

He is depicted with the head of an Ibis bird or a baboon.

He maintained the universe and stood beside the boat of Ra.

He would later arbitrate between the disputes of the gods.

He is associated with art,

writing,

magic,

science,

and the judgement of the dead.

His name simply means he who is like the Ibis.

In Greece Thoth was seen as their own god Hermes

and later his title became the thrice great Hermes

or Hermes Trismegistus.

For hundreds of years he was the wisest and greatest of gods

for magicians and alchemists.

As the Ibis headed human form he represents

the reckoner of time and season.

He did however have a great many roles in Egyptian society.

He was the mediator between the powers of good and evil

and ensured balance.

He was the scribe of the gods and is credited with

inventing writing and alphabets.

He reported on the weighing of the scales in the underworld.

He was self created and master of physical and moral law.

He calculated the mathematics for the structure

of the motions of the heavens.

(dramatic music)

The Egyptians believed that without his words

the gods themselves could not have existed.

Indeed, in the underworld his power was equal

to that of Ra and Osiris.

He was the author of all science, religion,

philosophy and magic.

And the Greeks said he invented astronomy, astrology,

mathematics, geometry, medicine, theology,

government and much more.

(dramatic music)

In fact to them he was the author

of all works of knowledge.

(dramatic music)

Originally Thoth was a moon god providing light

in the darkness and standing beside Ra the sun god.

The myths of Egypt serve to explain and justify

the observable world and its many cycles,

patterns and mysteries.

(dramatic music)

The nature of order and chaos.

The cycles of life and death or fertility

seasons, light in the sky, life under water,

the fate of the universe itself.

(dramatic music)

All of this and more was explained through the lives,

actions and statements of the gods.

From the Earth to the Sun.

From knowledge to imagination.

The actions of the gods governed them all.

All forces had divine inspiration behind them.

They did not believe their gods had animal heads

they simply used symbolism to explain aspects of the power

and nature of the gods.

As their own writing system of hieroglyphics was symbolic

and held multiple meanings

so did their concepts of the gods.

They did not think the sky was a cow

called Hathor supported by other gods,

this simply explained the power of that Goddess

and merged several ideas about existence together.

(dramatic music)

Even though there were temples and statues

depicting the gods,

the real realm of the gods cannot be known or imagined.

It is not accessible to humans.

(dramatic music)

The myths create stories to explain in human terms

what it all means.

It was in fact a very clever devise

and one used by later religions such as Christianity.

(dramatic music)

The myths are in fact never fully developed

we have to fill in many missing blanks.

(dramatic music)

There was a reason behind this, a philosophical statement

saying that we simply cannot know, as humans.

They only had general outlines and fragments

and the gods themselves would not pass the script test

for a Hollywood movie because their characters

are never fully developed.

(dramatic music)

The truth is that the meaning is the most important

part of the myth, not the detail.

(dramatic music)

As long as the meaning remained

what did it matter that a mere detail was altered?

(dramatic music)

Many of the myths came from earlier times

and other cultures,

they were adapted for their own environment and people.

The same thing would happen to the Egyptian gods

as Greece and Rome and then Christianity

stole the ideas and changed them.

(dramatic music)