고대 이집트 신왕국 참회석비의 실명 모티프를 통해 모색하는 고대 이집트의 개인신심 가능성

Abstract

At the high point of New Kingdom, the personal piety of ancient Egyptians can be defined as a spontaneous selection of a certain deity and direct devotion to him/her with no intervention of the state religion and temple cults performed by professional priests. The personal piety is formulated through the following idioms: (a) *rdj DN m jb "placing god into one''s heart" and/or (b) *jrj Hr mw DN "acting on god''s water," revealing the relationship between the deity and the individual as bAk-nb "servant-master" and/or zA-jt(j) "son-father." The religious feelings and faith of individuals are found, in most cases, in votive stelae built by the workers of Deir el-Medinah during the late Eighteenth Dynasty and the Nineteenth Dynasty. The present article aims to take a close look at the particular ancient Egyptian religious sentiments revolving around penitence and hope for atonement by delving into the penitentiary texts and related images carved on those votive stelae. In those texts, the individuals beg the deities of their choice to be merciful and restore their sight; they promise to declare the deity''s power to others as a pardonee. In this regard, the loss of sight can refer either to actual ophthalmological conditions or to pure religious experiences. The present article suggests that "seeing darkness," as an extremely intensive religious experience, can be as real as clinical blindness to those who had to go through the loss of sight in ancient Egypt.