Why do people in Egypt now believe in Allah instead of their Egyptian Gods?
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The short answer is that they were conquered in about 640AD, but that’s really oversimple. And not “like I’m five” simple but “missing out about a thousand years of history” oversimple. For one thing they’d already been conquered by Rome, and by the Assyrians, and by a whole bunch of other people.
But the big deal is that all of that, in egyptian terms, is recent, what we tend to lump together into “ancient egypt” really gets going about 3000BC. There were, depending on who you ask, at least 3 major ancient egyptian civilisations or kingdoms but even that’s skewed by the ridiculous amounts of time involved, there were large transient kingdoms and civilisations inbetween that we just sort of dismiss as “intermediate period stuff” between the big kingdoms because they’re small fry for egypt, but which if they were in, say, England would be a huge deal in their own right.
So the religious practices and pantheon changed over time, in the same way as you can hold 2 artifacts in your hands and say “these are ancient egyptian” but then realise there’s 3000 years between them and they’re effectively from different civilisations
So the gods also rose and fell even within ancient egypt, it was a really long time even for gods. Montu, frinstance, is so old that we have no idea how old he is, but he went largely out of fashion by 1300bc. Or Aten, sun god? It was the official state religion in about 1400bc then got pretty much deleted afterwards. Loads of egyptian gods were basically forgotten even in the time which we’d think of as when ancient egyptian gods were still the thing, or overwritten by other cooler gods. they had a LOT of sun gods, I mean a lot.
So when you’re thinking “why don’t they worship these old gods” remember that even in that time of those old gods some had already been forgotten for a thousand years, or had been huge and now aren’t.
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