So, I’m still reading Egyptian Pagans Through Christian Eyes. And an element that Juliussen-Stevenson tries very hard to make clear is that Egyptian religious practice was still quite distinct from Greco-Roman practices, even during the period in which Egypt was subject to Roman rule. And this seems to be most clearly seen in the way that the Romans were utterly mystified by Egyptian animal veneration and sacrifice. In terms of sacrifice, the structure between Greco-Roman and Egyptian practices were quite different. Greco-Roman sacrifice was usually a public affair, with the meat being distributed among a city’s population after the animal was killed and butchered. When Egyptian priests performed sacrifices, meanwhile, it was a private affair, with the meat eaten by the priests alone (if the sacrifice was to a god), or by the family of a dead human (if it was a funerary sacrifice). This means that when Decius and Diocletian demanded public sacrifices throughout the empire in the third century, it wasn’t so much an attempt to assert the empire’s pagan identity against the rising Christian population, but an attempt to assert a homogenizing Roman identity throughout the empire; it was a policy targeting other pagan communities. Moving beyond that, and the utter confusion about what animal veneration meant in the Egyptian world also shows the difficulty of establishing a single Roman culture throughout the empire; it seems that different areas of Egypt treated different animals as sacred; all animals of a given species were consecrated to a god, with perhaps a single member of the species acting as the representative of that god on earth. Contrary to some Greco-Roman writers, this did not mean that the animals could not be harmed - “the members of a species identified with a deity were sometimes killed and mummified in large numbers for the dedication to the deity in question.” But some Roman writers preferred to hark on the apparent irrationality of Egyptian religious practice, with at least one writer claiming that Egyptians viewed all animals as divine, and thus not understanding how they could perform sacrifice.
