Before 3100 BCE: (Henotheism as the Original Religious System of Predynastic Egypt — The Gods of the Particular Nomes of Egypt Making Historical Sense as Rel…

Before 3100 BCE: (Henotheism as the Original Religious System of Predynastic Egypt — The Gods of the Particular Nomes of Egypt Making Historical Sense as Relics of a Pre-Old Kingdom Belief System in Which Each Locale Gave Primary Allegiance to Its Own Local God, the Founding Kings of the Old Kingdom Recognizing Local Gods as a Politic Tactic for Giving Each Nome a Stake in the New Political Order, National Gods Such as Osiris Isis and Horus Becoming Preeminent Alongside the Local Gods Giving Rise to the Polytheistic System That Tied Egyptian Society Together): It appears that the predynastic inhabitants of Egypt originally had this kind of henotheistic belief system as well. The gods of the particular nomes — the districts — of Egypt make historical sense if we understand them as the relics of a pre-Old Kingdom belief system in which each locale gave primary allegiance to its own local god. A recognition by the founding kings of the Old Kingdom of the local gods would have been a politic and surely necessary tactic for giving each nome and its inhabitants a stake in, and a sense of belonging to, the new political order. Along with those originally local gods, another category of deity became preeminent in the Old Kingdom: national gods such as Osiris, Isis, and Horus, associated with the kingship and with their powers acknowledged everywhere, giving rise to a polytheistic belief system that served to tie the society together as a whole. The structure of Egyptian religion, in other words, preserves within it the fossilized remains of the older Afrasian henotheism. Each nome’s god is the descendant of a clan deity from the pre-state era — the era when the communities of the Nile Valley were still organized along the kinship lines that henotheism presupposes. The Old Kingdom did not destroy this system. It overlaid it with a national pantheon, incorporating the local gods into a hierarchical structure that served the political needs of a unified state. Osiris and Isis and Horus did not replace the nome gods. They were layered on top of them, and the resulting composite — local henotheism overlaid with national polytheism — is precisely the religious architecture of pharaonic Egypt as we know it. The roots of that architecture reach back through proto-Erythraic to the Horn of Africa, where the concept of a community’s own god was born.