A Tentative Study On The Theocracy Of Ancient Egypt

The Gods worship existed in all of the ancient civilizations, the religional spirits and criterions formed by worship and belief for gods deeply influenced the ideology of the ancient people. As the ideology of the ancient world, the religion theology deeply influenced the pattern of regime system of ancient people.In the ancient Egyptian society, the religion belief functioned as the theological base and theoretical instruction for pharaoh's kingship, government operation and social management. The inner part of this theocracy theory is to maintain the cosmological and social order established by gods at the very beginning of the world, which brings about the high efficient management of the ancient Egyptian society, and also gives Egyptian people easy environment and free time to create the most brilliant culture in the ancient world. So we can say that Egyptian theocracy contributed much to the ancient Egyptian civilization.Although the ancient Egyptian theocracy contributed much to the ancient Egyptian civilization, its own characteristics also supplied elements to impair the authority of Pharaoh's theocracy. The gods worship guided by the theocracy finally led Egyptian people to realise that the true divinity should only belongs to the god, and Pharaoh as a human is just a god in name, so he does not have the divinity of god. So the final result of Egyptian theocracy led to the authority's impairment of Pharaoh's divinity and kingship, and then the decline of whole civilization.As for another aspect, because of the divine charactersitic of the Pharaoh's theocracy, any rule and/or criterion established by government or/and the ancient sage should be divine and of sacrosanctity, so the ancient Egyptians'creativity is severely restricted; the glory of pyramid shows not only the mightiness of Pharaoh's kingship, but also the fallacious belief for the illusion of afterlife. The obedience to the authority and divinity of god and the belief for the fallacious afterlife gnaws away the realistic spirits of Egyptian people. So the Egyptian people was melting into the immigrant culture as other ancient people progressed into a new historic stage.So we can say that the Egyptian civilization was eliminated by history more than it was conquered by other civilization.