Before 3100 BCE · Africanapproximate
Every Egyptian district kept a god from before there was an Egypt
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Egypt was divided into districts, the nomes, and each nome had its own god. That arrangement is a leftover. Before the Old Kingdom, the people of the Nile valley held the henotheistic belief system common among early Afrasian speakers, in which a community gives its primary allegiance to a local god while accepting that other communities have theirs. When the first kings unified the valley they recognised those local gods rather than suppressing them, which gave every district a stake in the new order and cost the crown nothing. A second tier appeared alongside them: national gods such as Osiris, Isis and Horus, tied to the kingship and acknowledged everywhere. The result is the polytheism the textbooks describe, and it is a composite. Local henotheism from the pre-state era sits underneath a national pantheon installed on top of it. The lower layer traces back through proto-Erythraic to the Horn of Africa.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.