Wissenschafts-historische und kognitiv-archäologische Überlegungen zum Ursprung und zur Brauchbarkeit einiger theoretischer Betrachtungsweisen in der ägyptologischen Religionsforschung

Until recently it was widely accepted in Egyptology that the phenomenon of ‘Myth’ emerged at a relatively late date in the development of Egyptian religion, being preceded by a less developed ‘magical’ frame of mind. After giving an overview of the main proponents of this theory, which shows that the idea still has its adherents, the article turns to E. Otto’s study ‘An Ancient Egyptian Hunting Ritual’ (1950), which offers one of the clearest outlines of the hypothesis. Yet, neither this paper nor any other publication support the idea by a clear argumentation based on Egyptian evidence. The theoretical concept rather seems to project ideas developed between the two world wars in the History of Religions on the Egyptian evidence. The article traces the origins of these ideas to a number of mainly British social anthropologists of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In the second part, the author confronts these deterministic ideas that take for granted a development from a more primitive towards a more advanced mindset with the results of more recent study of the development of the human mind developed by prehistorians and developmental psychologists. These approaches, which have largely bypassed the Egyptological debate, suggest that the human intellect is unlikely to have followed a linear evolutionary development (from magic to myth). This forces us to rethink the idea of a gradual ‘disenchantment’ of the world, that some theorists posit as being a characteristic of the development of pharaonic religion between the Old and New Kingdoms.status: publishe