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Outside Memphis, courtiers established households and built temples dedicated to the royal cult in the provinces. This was not a new phenomenon. Sneferu's reign saw the creation of six statues of the King for various shrines and the construction of a line of small pyramids along the lower valley of the Nile. One of the provincial monuments had a royal statue and a table of offerings nearby, while another stood next to a scribal office in charge of state contracts.
Those modest arrangements suggest that, during the era of the colossal pyramids, such provincial cults had served as points for the supply of provisions and materials to the pyramid makers and the living court at Memphis, as some rare surviving reliefs from the same period indicate that provinces maintained similar royal cults within the temples at Memphis.
Abusir and Saqqara's local temples and shrines were of a different order. Shrines and temples were dedicated to the royal cult, and some state gods continuously observed the royal cult throughout the kingdom. The King issued a decree for the inspector of priests of the God Min in Coptos, a modern town in Upper Egypt, and for all the dependents and possessions of Min's estate, his functionaries, and his entourage.
Today, we do not use our ancient cosmic orientation to relate to the natural world as we once did. It's no longer determined by where we are or what time it is by the Sun's daily motion across the sky. Our perception of the outside world has changed, and we have lost our sense of wholeness within a great system. Factors such as our work and play rhythms, clothing, diet, and travel are affected by climatic and seasonal factors. These factors affect our unconscious sense of timing and our ability to communicate with nature, which we often overlook.
Often we marvel at the apparent serenity and spiritual confidence of ancient people, forgetting that their tools were taught and used within an environment that encouraged them to recognize and embrace natural and divine forces. These tools enabled one to maintain a profound sense of cosmic orientation, keep it, and view one's role as actual spiritual work. In ancient Egypt, a man named Al was gifted with a sense of cosmic orientation.
As dams have been constructed in our era, the Nile no longer produces an annual flood, but understanding the rhythm of that event and others associated with it is essential to understanding Egyptian rituals and ceremonies. To restore cosmic orientation, we need to leave our temporal field of time and enter the visible universe of ancient Egypt, where cosmic rhythms sustained human life, nature, and even the gods.
The ancient Egyptians celebrated festivals (entirely or partially) in temples. These were sacred places where humans could approach the gods. Therefore, it is imperative to understand the character of the temples as separate entities from the world because they are in the lands that first appeared.' The number of temples built by other ancient cultures is unparalleled. They have been classified as mansions of the deities, models of Egypt and the cosmos, focal points of worship, portals to the divine, islands of order amid oceans of chaos, and spiritual engines. Despite the physical stone of these temples, 'we can still perceive much of their symbolic nature, the deeper reasons for their construction' beneath the surface.
The Egyptians were considered participants in the drama of sacred life as members of the natural cosmic order. In the Metaphysical and Funerary Treatises, the interaction between the Neteru and human beings is described without distinction of such conditions, emphasizing only the purity of the person’s life or intentions.
Since it was uncovered in the late nineteenth century, the Dynasty 12 papyrus A Dispute Between a Man and His Ba has intrigued translators. While the work raises issues about the social conditions of the time it was written, it is, without doubt, a reflection of Egyptian concepts about the spiritual aspects of One’s earthly life, just like the Ba, the Ka, and the transformation of the soul. In ancient Egypt, “sacred anatomy” has also been used to illustrate spiritual concepts and moral values, elements of great importance for the development of temple students.
The text of the remarkable Legend of the Creation which forms the first section of this volume is preserved in a well-written papyrus in the British Museum, where it bears the number 10,188. This papyrus was acquired by the late Mr. A. H. Rhind in 1861 or 1862, when he was excavating some tombs on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes. He did not himself find it in a tomb, but he received it from the British Consul at Luxor, Mustafa Agha, during an interchange of gifts when Mr. Rhind was leaving the country. Mustafa Agha obtained the papyrus from the famous hiding-place of the Royal Mummies at Der-al-Bahari, with the situation of which he was well acquainted for many years before it became known to the Egyptian Service of Antiquities. When Mr. Rhind came to England, the results of his excavations were examined by Dr. Birch, who, recognising the great value of the papyrus, arranged to publish it in a companion volume to Facsimiles of Two Papyri, but the death of Mr. Rhind in 1865 caused the project to fall through. Mr. Rhind's collection passed into the hands of Mr. David Bremner, and the papyrus, together with many other antiquities, was purchased by the Trustees of the British Museum. In 1880 Dr. Birch suggested the publication of the papyrus to Dr. Pleyte, the Director of the Egyptian Museum at Leyden.
