Sodalitas Graeciae (Nova Roma)/Religion from the Papyri/Temple Decline

The decline of the Egyptian temples in late antiquity is one of the seminal events in late-antique Egypt. In terms of the history of the land, the phenomenon was sudden and precipitous. In a matter of four centuries a dramatic shift took place in the religious life of the population, not so much in terms of conversion to Christianity, which remained a challenge well into the sixth century, but in terms of the organizational foci for religious observance.

Contents 1 The Temple 2 Causes of Decline 2.1 Socio-economic Decline 2.2 Religious transformation? 3 Statistics of Temple Attestation 3.1 Graphs

The Temple

The temple was the center of the divine cult, where the sacred image was maintained by priests through daily rituals.^[1]

At specific times of the year, the public display of the sacred image would be realized in festival processions, allowing the divine power to become more accessible for those participating.[2]

On a more earthly level, these festivals were also occasions for contact between various government officials and the local communities they governed, as illustrated by the invitation of a strategos to a festival in the village of Seryphis in March 218(-25?) CE (P. Oxy. 3694). In short, the temple was the nexus point at which the peasant might contact both the divine and temporal powers that be.

Causes of Decline

An examination of the causes of this decline needs to address two interlocking forces affecting temple prosperity. The first is the general religious climate of Egypt, not only the rise of Christianity but also late-antique developments in religious preferences and sensibilities, and how this may have affected popular support for temples. The second is the impact of Roman administration on the economic privileges of the temples and to what extent the temples had been, in effect, financially starved out of existence. The current study will focus on one particularly important aspect of temple finance—Roman taxation, and to what extent it may have contributed to temple decline. Since most of the tax burden on Roman temples was, at least on paper, exacted in money and not in-kind, inflation in Egypt will be examined and compared against the nominal tax burden to determine the significance of the tax burden in real terms over the first three centuries CE.

Socio-economic Decline

Certainly, some of these temple abandonments had nothing to do with the temples themselves, per se, but with general local decline. A case in point is the Fayyum (Arsinoite nome), where Theadelphia and other villages began to be abandoned in the third century. As such, the above quotation says more about the individual's fanatic dedication to the temple than anything about temple decline in general. Likewise, the temples of Karanis may have suffered due to the town’s own waning vitality (eventually abandoned in the fifth century). In addition, some temples continued to function well after the third century. The cult of Isis at Philae conducted festivals into the sixth century and other temples and festivals continued into the fourth and fifth centuries.^[3]

In this connection one ought not to underestimate the significance of local patronage, especially for the smaller temples in the Roman period.[4]

Religious transformation?

One possible explanation for the decline is a change in worshipping preferences—one in favor of more private and personal worship versus communal temple meetings—a phenomenon which cannot at this point be attributed to Christianity since it had hardly made inroads in the first three centuries.^[5]

There, at any rate, does not seem to be a general decline in pagan religiosity.</ref>

But, more importantly, the changing religious climate moving in the direction of greater personal salvation-oriented religion,^[6]

whatever its multifaceted motivations and attractions, and however it may have laid some groundwork for Christianity, is not a likely direct cause in any temple decline. Firstly, the very place of the most eclectic religious atmosphere, Alexandria, expressed violently faithful commitment among its pagan minority at the end of the fourth century (391 CE) when the temple of Sarapis was fated to fall into Christian hands,[7]

a phenomenon unlikely to be simply the development of the fourth century.  Secondly, from the moment Christianity received sanction within the empire, churches began appearing everywhere, both new buildings and converted pagan temples, hardly a sign of dislike for social temple-oriented cults.[8]

Indeed, the earlier cults had exhibited flexibility in a changing religious climate, both responding to increased interest in fertility and healing cults, and evolving oracular sites.[9]

It is, thus, far from clear that changing religious sensibilities should result in the decline of Egyptian temples.

Statistics of Temple Attestation

With such conflicting evidence, one is presented with the question of whether there really was any significant temple decline prior to the triumph of Christianity. Here, Greek papyrus evidence may be adduced to add some clarity to the situation, with the frequency of references to Egyptian temples being a rough gauge of temple activity and interest.^[10]

One important caveat is that the frequency of cult attestation in the earlier Greek papyri does not accurately reflect temple popularity since much of this evidence would be restricted to Demotic papyri, a survey of which is, unfortunately, beyond the scope of this paper. However, keeping the above limitation in mind helps in interpreting the data. For instance, a relatively flat trend in Greek attestation for a temple may suggest, in reality, a decline in that particular temple since the replacement of Demotic with Greek should result in an upward slope (as the aggregated data indicates below).

An example of this would be references to βουβαστείον (temples of Bast) which show the same frequency in the second century BCE as in the second century CE, with the first century CE staying silent, more likely the result of variable papyrus survival than cult interruption. The interpretation here should be a net decline in the popularity of Bast temples. Similarly, most references to ἀνουβιείον (temples of Anubis) cluster in the second century BCE with only two references in the Common Era, which should indicate an even greater decline in ἀνουβιείον temples. On the other hand, references to ἐρμαῖον (temples of Hermes/Thoth) increase into the second century, only declining afterwards. This suggests at least a constant, if not increasing, popularity of temples of Hermes/Thoth into the second century. This is quite consistent with the popularity of Thoth during the Ptolemaic period^[11]

and his so-called transmutation into Hermes Trismegistus during the Roman period.[12]

Graphs

Despite individual temple variability (Graph 1), when the evidence for the above three temples is aggregated (Graph 2), along with three others (Ἀμμωνεῖον, Ἰσεῖον, Σαραπιεῖον), a downward trend becomes clearly evident. Graph 2 indicates a nearly linear decline from the beginning of the Roman period throughout the first century, but this is at least in part the result of the averaging effect of the curve. A closer look at the Roman period (Graph 3) indicates a cluster of temple references in the second century CE, resulting in a clearly parabolic distribution. This, however, does not mean that temple decline really began in the second century CE, but rather that the replacement of Demotic with Greek within documentary papyri had not yet come to completion. While the evidence as it is makes it difficult to pin down a specific moment in which decline begins, observing that the crest of the curve in Graph 3 begins towards the beginning of the second century, when Demotic had not yet been completely phased out, it is reasonable to infer that decline began no later than this point, and in light of the Graph 2, it may have begun in the first century or even slightly earlier.

Without statistics from Demotic papyri as a control, it is difficult to say anything more, except that if decline began in the last quarter of the first century BCE, it likely had much more to do with Cleopatra’s pillaging of temple treasuries (Dio Cassius LI 17.6) than anything related to the beginning of Roman administration of Egypt. While the very beginning of decline may be provisionally dated to some early point around the first century CE or even end of the first century BCE, the increasing negative slope beginning in the second century CE indicates that temple decline was unambiguously accelerating at this point, long before the more overt signs of decline in the third century.