Encyclopaedia Aegyptiaca:About

From Encyclopaedia Aegyptiaca

Encyclopaedia Aegyptiaca (EA) is a wiki project focused upon developing an organised central library of information concerning Ancient Egyptian cultural and religious history to inform and help develop the religious knowledge and practice of recontructionist/revivalist Egyptian polytheism.

Contents 1 What EA is 2 What EA is Not 3 Who is AE For? 4 Is AE A Valid Academic Source? 5 Who Owns EA, and Why Was it Founded?

[edit] What EA is

• Specific: EA is focused specifically on Ancient Egyptian culture, religion and history, and only articles relevant to these subjects are found here. We actively encourage readers who wish to research a particular subject beyond it's relevance to Ancient Egypt to do so, but emphasise that it is beyond this scope of this project to emulate a resource as comprehensive as Wikipedia or even Archaeowiki.

• SPOV: EA is a product of religious devotion as well as academic. As such it accepts Egyptian religion as holding fundamental truths, and as providing valuable allegories and metaphors for the cosmos. It regards Egyptian religion, society and culture as leaving a positive impact on the world, and as representing the aspirations of a truly great civilization, to which the creators of this project pay the deepest and most heartfelt respect. This project is one small token of that respect, and so, to do it justice, the creators strive to imbue it with academic clarity, credibility and honest, in the spirit of truth that is so desired by the Gods. As a result, unlike Wikipedia, it has a Specific Point of View rather than a neutral point of view. Our point of view is in the tone and focus of subjects covered, rather than the facts presented.

[edit] What EA is Not

• New Age:EA does not provide information on modern religious institutions or practices. It is purely historical. If it happened after 30BCE (more often, 340BCE), look elsewhere.

• Temple:. EA is a library, not a temple. It does not espouse any particular theology or doctrine. It simply seeks to historical information on the religion, not spell out what beliefs modern adherents should adopt.

[edit] Who is AE For?

AE is intended first and foremost for modern adherents of Ancient Egyptian Polytheism (aka "Kemetic" religions), though anyone interested in Ancient Egyptian religion, culture, and wider Pharaonic history will likely find many of the articles here of interest.

[edit] Is AE A Valid Academic Source?

AE is not an academic journal, and if you use it for any kind of academic assignment you will in all likelyhood (and quite rightly) get "F IS FOR FAIL" written right through your finely crafted essay in big red letters. We are not peer reviewed, and cannot verify the academic credentials of any contributors.

However, our style manual does require editors to extensively cite and reference their work, and so whilst citing AE as a source is, quite frankly, academic suicide, using articles here as a guide for finding sources and relevent books/articles is, in most cases, not a bad idea at all. Our style manual does set standards concerning what sources are acceptable.

[edit] Who Owns EA, and Why Was it Founded?

No one "owns" the contents of the entire project as far as copyright is concerned (see Copyrights for more). The project was founded by Nebpehtira.

The motivation for founding Encyclopaedia Aegyptiaca stemmed from a discussion held on both Children of Kemet and Ecauldron that had led Neb to propose a shared pool of resources between all the revivalist/reconsturctionist modern temples that would focus on the development of a proper "library" of sound academic information on Egyptian religion, primarily compiled with the view of developing and informing modern Egyptian revival/recon religious practice.

Temple politics and lacks of funds guaranteed that a true "temple library" was unlikely to be founded within the medium term. But, the idea itself never died, and realising the educational and community building potential of wiki projects led to a revised form of the idea as Encyclopaedia Aegyptiaca, an independent project with no temple affiliation, that utilised the wiki and open source concepts to provide an organised, globally and freely accessible repository for information, as well as a secondary focus on building a "neutral territory", from where the Egyptian recon/revival community could develop and mature.