In “The Search for God in Ancient Egypt” written in 1984 by one of the most well-known Egyptologists Jan Assman, the author takes on a complex goal of researching the essence of what is known as Egyptian theology. The book is a classic historical work indeed. It was initially written and published in German, and consequently translated in English giving the non-German reading audience the chance to finally read Assmann’s revolutionary theories for themselves, – the one version we presently observe.

The book is split into two parts: the first one being “The Dimensions of Divine Presence: The Implicit Theology of Egyptian Polytheism” and the second one being “Explicit Theology: The Development of Theological Discourse”. First section is dealing with implicit theology which is notions and actions connected with gods. Implicit theology relates to the ideas, symbols and concepts rooted in the religious activities of a particular culture and its writings. The first section is arranged as the sequence of issues that the author believes to be three dimensions of Egyptian religion. These are the local or cultic dimension, the dimension of the cosmos (the visible elements), and the mythic dimension (related to speech and to divine names). Does not only Assmann analyze the ancient texts, but also suggests his own understanding of how religious beliefs and traditions are reflected by specific architectural details typical for Egyptian temples.

The second section refers to Egyptian explicit theology that is concerned about the notion of a single god. Tracing the alterations in the nature of explicit theology from its ancestors in the Middle Kingdom through the New Kingdom, Assmann makes his ‘historico-analytical perspective’ obvious. The author claims that explicit theology experienced a phased evolution during the New Kingdom. The phases suggested by Assmann are: the pre-Amarna ‘new solar theology’; Amarna period itself; the post-Amarna rise of ‘personal piety’. The examination offered here has strongly influenced more recent studies on Egyptian culture.

In the first chapter, “Religion: Divine Presence and Transcendence,” Assmann sets the topic of his research. He proposes the readers to familiarize with his frame of reference, sketches out the range of subjects that his research deals with, and names the technical terminology he is using in the book. The casual readers might be scared away by the complicatedness of the very introduction, yet the author has to lay the basis for further sections of the book, and to present conceptions necessary for appropriate understanding of the proposed investigation. The subjects he introduces and that are going to be dealt with through the whole of the book are: the distinctions between religious practice and theological conversation; the pressure between the beliefs in a god versus multiple gods; and the vital role performed by the Amarna period in altering Egyptian religion. The major subject of this section is “divine presence”. The author claims that religion is the narrower sense of getting in touch with the divine, for example satisfying the gods.

The second chapter presents the readers with local or cultic dimension, analyzing the influence that gods and temples had on ancient Egyptian religion. As Assmann shows, deities were not come across in everyday life. The divine presence was removed by the symbolic presence performed by the state. According to the author, there was no particular religious midpoint in Egypt. There were numerous temples instead that were operating as representations of cosmos, emphasizing its being too distant to reach. This chapter highlights the implicit nature of Egyptian polytheism.