The phenomenon of the ancient Egyptian kingdom, due to the extraordinary importance of this institution in ancient Egyptian culture and social life, has been attracting the attention of specialists for a century, being the subject of diverse research and discussion. The article is devoted to the religious aspects of this phenomenon, identifying the semantic horizons of the concepts of "king" and" kingdom " in the framework of the ancient Egyptian religious worldview. It is the study of the range of ideas that make up the semantic field of the phenomenon of royalty in Ancient Egypt, the search for new interpretations of already known facts, that seems most promising to the compilers of the collection of articles published in Leiden in 1995, offering a comprehensive analysis of this phenomenon [O'Connor, Silverman, 1995, p. XXVI-XXVII]. 1 The beginning of statehood dates back to ancient times - in the south of Mesopotamia and in the Nile Valley, the first state formations appeared already in the second half of the 4th millennium BC. The fact that the institution of royal power was not only a political institution in Ancient Egypt has long been beyond doubt. G. Frankfort's classic monograph, published in the middle of the last century (Frankfort, 1948), is devoted to the theological foundations of statehood in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. The problem of the genesis of the early state in ancient Egypt has long attracted the attention of researchers. In the current theories of the emergence of a state in the Nile Valley, which are certainly beyond the scope of this paper, the transition from the pre-dynastic era to statehood is explained by various "material" factors: overpopulation of the Nile Valley [Carneiro, 1970], changes in irrigation [Krzyzaniak, 1977] technology [Wolf, 1962], military conflicts [Bard, 1987], rivalry between proto-kingdoms of Upper Egypt [Kemp, 1989], etc. The Egyptians themselves regarded the institution of royalty as a divine institution, and ... Read more