Abstract Book of the 1st Egyptological Conference of HIE

The omni-presence of the Divine was manifest in every ancient Egyptian activity, the Egyptians being characterized by Herodotos as «particularly pious» and Egypt as the «gift of River Nile». The piety of the Egyptians (who were perhaps the most ancient conceivers of Henotheism) was also both a direct and an indirect consequence of their unique environmental conditions, their living space being the theatre of a continuous battle between the river and the desert, between light and darkness, between life and death, the animals and the plants being also part of this very macro-sphere of existence, as well as the minerals and the stones. Interestingly, the heavenly bodies and their irresistible epiphanies and periodicities had also enraptured the minds of ancient Egyptian priests-philosophers, who saw in them the seal of Divine Wisdom and an allegoric model for their highly expected resurrection and life after death in a celestial Paradise of elation, the latter being conceived as a mega-sphere of cosmic dimensions. Finally, the lives of the Egyptians of Antiquity were also determined and infltguenced (in their personal and social micro-spheres) by religion (which showed distinctly two components: a solar, related to Ra and a stellar related to Osiris) and by the Environment per se. In this Conference we shall endeavour to study the Inter-Relations of Religion, Humans and Environment, based on inter-disciplinary approaches from several domains of Archæology, Egyptology, Theology, History and the Natural Sciences (e.g.: Archaeoastronomy, Geography, Archaeogeology, Archaeoanthropology, Zoology, Ornithology, Botany including Palynology, &c.).International conference jointly co-organized by the Hellenic Institute of Egyptology and the Writing & Scripts Centre of the Bibliotheca Alexandrin